When you have your first art supplies and you are ready to progress with your work, you can start adding other useful materials to your fashion illustration kit.
1. Additional Drawing and Coloring Media
- Charcoals sticks and pencils- very useful for sketching practice, especially drawing from life. White and black charcoal pencil can be a great media for adding details.
- Rollerball Ink Pens in Silver, Gold and White- Great for highlights, metal accessories and drawing over dark colors.
- Pastels - You can find them in stick and pencil type and they are excellent for more artistic fashion expression.When working with these you will need a fixative to prevent chalky dust spreading and ruining your work.
2. Sketch books and Resources
- Pocket Sketch Book - very useful to have when you need a lot of practice and for sketching ideas on the go. It is ideal for shopping reports and capturing street fashion for inspiration.
- Resource Files - Any kind of folder for collecting your visual resources like magazine articles and clippings, photographs, fabric swatches and images, figure references, poses. You will benefit greatly from this as it will keep your visual resources in order and you will be able to quickly retrieve them when organized.
3. Additional Items
- Erasers - In the beginning you will make tons of mistakes which is normal as we are humans- we learn by making mistakes and redoing things until we find the right way. There are different kinds of erasers- plastic for graphite, putty for charcoal and pastels...Retractable skinny erasers are wonderful for fixing small details, such as face or patterns.
- Fixative - If you are working with pastels or charcoal, you will need it to prevent dust from spreading on the paper and smudging.
- Masking tape- holds paper in place, especially useful when tracing.
- Ruler - Important for measuring proportions on your croquis template and when you are doing more technical sketches and flats. You can use regular rulers like the ones for school, or special ones for dressmaking and sewing.
- Pinking scissors- If you are collecting fabric swatches for your resource folder, you will need to make a zigzag cut to prevent from fraying and pinking scissors are the tool for that.
- Electric sharpener-makes sharpening your pens a quick and easy task.
Adding these items to your fashion illustration art kit won't tap much into your budget but will make your sketching and drawing much easier. Now that you have all the materials set up and some basic practice, you are ready for some serious creative work:)