Business, Design & Style

Sketching Your Design

Laura Kim & Fernando Garcia

Lesson time 08:54 min

Fernando showcases his artistic mastery by demonstrating how he “looks” for a collection by sketching. Learn what inspires him and how he re-creates his inspirations on paper.

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Topics include: Sketching Your Design Make Your Sketches Work for Your Team

Preview

[MUSIC PLAYING] - I became interested in sketching because I needed to have an expression of art throughout my time in high school and even in college. I studied architecture. So I personally have never been to a fashion school, and I envy everybody who has. But what I was doing during some of the, you know, classes, like the structures class in college, is I was continuing to doodle all of my fashion ideas. What they did was create an ease in my hand that was very good at expressing an idea for a dress. And they do not need to be perfectly detailed. They just need to express an emotion so that the person that you're passing off this sketch to to make it a reality understand what you're trying to get to. I usually just start with the shape, a silhouette, something that is going to be where I place the dress or the blouse or the sweater. I always keep it very loose so that I could, you know, make mistakes and change my mind as I go. But I'll keep the dress silhouette simple because in this particular case, the idea is about the color combination. So I'll stick to the same shape of dress so that the pattern maker understands that it's a chiffon dress, and also my print designer understands that it is based off of that and a new iteration. So let's just say I change the drape a little bit from what we just saw and perhaps I had a slit. And when I know that I'm about to add color, I try to keep the details of the garment to a bare minimum because when you combine carbon or any kind of pencil with color, it sometimes can get muddled. So I keep it simple so that your pattern makers and your sewers and your print designers understand where the dress is going to lay on the person. If there's some transparency, you try to add a little bit of that into the sketch so that they know that this is meant to be translucent. So you kind of have to, like, give them those clues so that they understand what they're going to try to do for you. Now, because I am in a blushy mood because of something that we're going to do for the Met Gala that I'm really excited about, I thought combining the blush with the very electric yellow color that I still have in my mind from the Ugo Rondinone work. So I do not have the most perfect blush color. But what I do is I do a light layer of the pink. And because I'm going to combine the yellow at the bottom, I'm just keeping it very light so that I can blend the two colors together at the end. I'm taking the nude color and the pink to create a slight blush tone, something that feels sensual, sexy. And after I get a sort of combination of somewhere close of what I want to achieve in terms of the blush, I then dial in the yellow. And because I did it lightly around the middle part of it, it's easier to blend the two colors. And as I go down, because I do like an intensity of color at one point, I simply double down on the yellow with the weight of my hand. I think everybody is different as to ...

About the Instructor

As founders of fashion line MONSE and creative directors at Oscar de la Renta, Laura Kim and Fernando Garcia have transcended their industry with a partnership that’s more than the sum of its parts. Now they’re teaching you their secrets to creative collaboration. Learn to cultivate strong business relationships, navigate the creative process, and join forces with others to improve the workplace—and the work.

Featured MasterClass Instructor

Laura Kim & Fernando Garcia

Fashion luminaries and Oscar de la Renta creative directors Laura Kim and Fernando Garcia teach you how to bring ideas to life through collaboration.

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