Fashion Sketches: Fernando Garcia’s Tips for Sketching

Fernando Garcia is a Dominican fashion designer who launched the label Monse with collaborator Laura Kim. While he grew up researching designers like Nicolas Ghesquière, Alber Elbaz, and Tom Ford in hopes of understanding their techniques and inspirations, he didn’t think he could work in fashion.

After high school, he went to architecture school, graduating from the University of Notre Dame in 2009. But his dressmaking dreams never faded. When a family friend connected Fernando with Oscar de la Renta, he leaped at the opportunity to intern with the Dominican-born designer at his eponymous brand, where he initially worked as Laura’s aide.

His childhood in the Caribbean has inspired many of Fernando’s designs. He recommends approaching the design process like an ever-unfurling story. “The collection is going to tell you where it wants to go as you develop it,” he says.

Fashion design begins with a sketch. Fashion drawings—drawn on a piece of paper, a sketchbook, or a sketch pad—are the blueprint for a design and can vary in style and amount of detail. Designers usually use a flat sketch to outline the shape and silhouette of a garment. A sketch—sometimes called “croquis,” the French word for “sketch”—does not typically include detailed faces, feet, or hands, but they may include three-dimensional fashion figures with texture, shading, and movement lines for fabric draping. If you feel your drawing skills aren’t up to par, you can also find sketch templates online.

Unlike a sketch, a fashion illustration is a more detailed type of fashion drawing that might include color and accessories. Additionally, the fashion figure might have a detailed face or hairstyle to showcase a head-to-toe look. Designers may use color pencils, crayons, or watercolors for their illustrations.

Fernando Garcia started sketching because he needed a creative outlet. “I needed to have an expression of art throughout my time in high school and even in college,” he says. “I [studied] architecture. What I was doing during some of the classes, like the structures class in college, [was] continuing to doodle all of my fashion ideas.”

For years, Fernando drew fashion sketches. And while he said the drawings weren’t anything you’d want “hanging [in] your parents’ living room,” his sketches helped him get his foot in the door at Oscar de la Renta. Here are Fernando’s tips for creating your own fashion design sketches:

• Keep your sketch simple. It’s more important to convey a message with your sketch than to include little details. “They just need to express an emotion so that the person that you’re passing off this sketch to… understands what you’re trying to get to,” he says.
• Give the patternmaker clear direction. You want a patternmaker to understand the type of fabric and how it should move on the fashion model or client. “Patternmakers really need to feel the fluidity in the fabric—if in this case, it’s chiffon—or the intensity of the hand,” Fernando says.
  
• Add color to your sketch. Adding a skin tone color to your fashion figure is a necessary step in sketching because it gives patternmakers, sewers, and print designers insight into how you want the garment to look. “[They] can understand where the dress is gonna lay on the person,” he says. “If there’s transparency, you try to add a little bit of that into the sketch so that they know that this is meant to be translucent. You kinda have to give them those clues so that they understand what they’re gonna try to do for you.”
• Find the tools that work best for you. Not all designers use the same art and drawing tools, so use those that fit your own style and help you get your design ideas down on paper. “Some people love pastels; some people love acrylic,” Fernando says. “Some people love actually just ballpoint pens. So [use] whatever allows your brain to transfer through your fingers.”

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