The Creative Process Pt 2: That Will Never Scale!

Well, given today's post will mostly be about drawing, again, seems like a good enough time for an unveiling of a new logo:

Probably not worth the wait.  Oops.

Before I get started with today's leg of the journey, I feel the strong need to make a disclaimer.  I've said this in the past, and I'll do it again.  I am not, not, not, not, NOT a professional clothing designer by any stretch of the imagination.  Erté is probably rolling in his grave as we speak.  A lot of the things I do will possibly seem redundant, out of order, overly complicated, and downright pointless (making my engineering brethren proud, all day, every day).

That having been said, I shall now attempt to walk you down the tortuous road that is my designing process.

I mentioned yesterday that I always start with a mannequin.  I should have said model***.  Whatever.  What I mean is something like this:

That's actually a lot more detailed than what I need for my purposes, but sometimes I go overboard.  I could easily start sketching on the dress design over this, but I usually prefer to soften out the lines to make it a little more human, if I want to consider maybe a full look, not just a dress.

Or sometimes I go a little nuts and just do this instead for the lulz:

Before we get to the design bit, we first have to consider our deliverables.  In my case, I need three things -

1. Lightweight and breathable material/design, as I intend to perspire quite a lot while wearing it
2. A relatively modest length and cut
3. Mobility

I pull a lot of my ideas from various sources - films, girls on the street, Pinterest, or my favorite - ModCloth.  Short tangent - I fracking LOVE ModCloth.  In a sea of flirty little skater dresses and silhouettes for girls without my punkin' booty, ModCloth is my safe haven.  I could sit on that site for hours and be endlessly entertained.  Unfortunately, I am not fabulously wealthy, so it's usually just looking and sighing.  However, I get a good amount of inspiration, so it's not a total loss.

Ultimately, I want something like this:  

Now, this is the part where it can get a little hectic, and the Leaky Faucet comes into play.  I have a general idea, but not a tangible design.  Generally, I just go to town on the model.

Aaaaaaaaand, fuck.  If I were at home with my pencils and good erasers, it wouldn't be as big a deal, but I'm not, and so I'm scribbling lines on top of lines.  What a mess.

I eventually get tired of that and start cheating off to the side, sketching out different ideas and elements that I could try.  This one is much tamer.  Usually, the page would be covered in different possibly layers, skirt/top combos, waist belts, etc. etc.  Ultimately, I probably redraw the model with the "final" look:

In my last year of college, I had a design professor who would joke, "If you don't want to deal with your chemist, take a look at his proposal and tell him, 'That will never scale [from lab bench to full manufacturing].  Go back and look at it again.'"  It... admittedly doesn't make a lot of sense out of context, but the idea was, you can take a design and make it as pretty as you like, but a picture does not a product make.  So, an idea and a drawing are well and good, but now to make it work.

Normally, I'd dive headlong in and not look back, but since I'm making something completely from scratch as opposed to just upcycling an old dress into a new one, it'd probably behoove me to at least plan a basic pattern.  

Pinterest is my best friend in this regard.  Type "___design idea____ + pattern" into the search bar and bam - free patterns galore.  "Handkerchief skirt" yields a metric pork billion, but the third one in the list is pretty much all I need (link here for the curious, or those of you following along at home.)

With a waist of 28", and pretty short legs, I should be able to whip up measurements for a decent enough skirt.  Easy peasy, pudding pie - right?

Tomorrow:  Sewing for dummies, by which I mean, how you sew only if you're an idiot.

Until the next.

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*** Edit:  The word, as C has just informed me, is "croquis".  And now you know.