Illustrator is not exactly something unfamiliar to me but, you know, one can never stop learning. In that respect, I feel I learned something quite useful today, so that will be the theme of my next blog post – how to quickly create a CAD image of a jacket you just came up with – what I actually did.

So first of all I decided on my silhouette and found and image on WGSN, showing a jacket of similar shape, although not made of the same material, as the one I designed and that was my template for the basic sketch.

I started slowly tracing off the right part of the jacket and then reflected that shape to the left side of the canvas, using the Reflect Tool. After a while I chose a color palette and added color to the jacket, using the Live Paint Bucket. Adding a few stitches where needed made my jacket look much more complete so that is how it actually started taking a decent shape.

Working on the same file for over half an hour made me a bit tired of the colors I had used and I felt the baby blue made the jacket look really pale and soulless. That made me change my mind and I combined my indecisiveness with one of the techniques we studied in today’s lecture – creating a clipping mask to give some texture to the garment. Personally I thought that woolen sleeves would look pretty cool, and the changes I made look like that:

Having a finished jacket did not actually feel so finished which made me try to give it some life by adding shades and wrinkles. First of all, I went back to the image I had chosen at the beginning and copied it to the same layer I was currently working on.

I started tracing off the areas where the fabric was wrinkled and reflected them to the left half of the canvas – it actually looked quite nice.

Finally, after removing the template image, my illustration looked the following way:

Not bad,actually…