Technical Skills of Fashion Design: The Flat Sketch

Fashion designers convey their fashion concept/idea often in the form of the fashion illustration or sketch. This type of sketch is useful to imply the style, fabric and overall feel of the design. However this sketch gives no clue about the parts or sections that make up each garment. For this reason the flat or technical sketch is needed.

What is a Flat Sketch?

A flat sketch is a line drawing of the fashion designers illustration. The technical sketch shows every seam and garment detail of the design. This sketch is used by the patternmaker as a guide for when it is time to draft the pattern for the design. It is also an integral part of the garment specification or style sheet that goes to the pattern maker and construction team (sewing team).

Flat Sketching by Hand

Typically a fashion illustration will either show a frontal view of the design or a 3/4 view of the design. Rarely the back of the garment is illustrated. When drafting a flat sketch the back of the garment must also be drawn along with the front. When drawing a flat sketch by it is useful to have a straight ruler and a set of French curves handy. These tools will enable you to make accurate straight and curved lines for the sketch.

Lightly Sketch the garment starting with the garment's silhouette first. Next lightly draw all seams and style elements that are within the body of the garment. Now take a medium to thick point sharpie and trace over the outline of the garment. Using a fine point pen, trace over the inner style lines of the garment. To render topstitching in a flat sketch, create dashed lines where the topstitching would appear on the garment.

CAD Flat Sketching

Computer-aided design or CAD has truly revolutionized the fashion design process. CAD has cut costs for line development, reduced production time and has allowed greater creative control for the fashion designer. Using CAD to create a flat sketch will be difficult if you have never used a drawing program before. Taking a line from straight to curved and back to straight again will be frustrating. However with practice it will become easy to create flat sketches using CAD.

You do not need an expensive CAD software package to create a flat sketch. Professional software from companies such as Gerber and Lectra are excellent to have, if you have the thousands of dollars to purchase the complete systems and hardware. Unfortunately, most aspiring designers do not have that type of money. A simple drawing program such as Adobe Illustrator, Corel Draw and the free Open Office Draw software will work just fine. In fact, it is best for beginners to download the free Open Office Suite and practice with Open Office's software before moving on to the big dogs.

Which Flat Sketch Method is Better?

The fashion industry of today relies heavily on CAD technology so knowing how to create a flat sketch using CAD is beneficial to your career. However, if you prefer the traditional hand flat sketch method you can still do this and create the sketch using CAD. Some designers are more accurate creating flat sketches by hand. What these designers will do is hand draw their flat sketch and either scan it into a CAD software program or trace over it using a drawing tablet and stylus. Tracing over the sketch is the better option because the drawing can be manipulated at a later date.

Even though creating flat sketches using CAD is preferred in the fashion industry a designer should know how to create a flat sketch by hand as well. If something should happen to the CAD software production still must go on. Being well versed in different methods or techniques to achieve a goal is beneficial regardless of what the goal is.

So now you have a brief introduction into flat sketching. Here is a list of books to help you develop this critical fashion design skill:

- The Snap Fashion Sketchbook by Sharon Lee Tate and Bill Glazer

- Fashion Computing: Design Techniques and CAD by Sandra Burke

- Fashion Designer's Handbook for Adobe Illustrator by Marianne Centner and Frances Vereker

- Fashion Design Drawing and Presentation by Patrick Jon Ireland

- Fashion Illustrator (Portfolio) by Bethan Morris

These books are sold in many bookstores and also on Amazon.com.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

Tools and Software

Fairgate French Curve Set (Author Recommended)

Free Fashion Flats from Designer's Nexus

Open Office

Adobe Illustrator

Tutorials

Flat Sketching Using Adobe Illustrator

Fashion Lessons.net

** Author's Note** The author has not received any compensation or use of product from any of the items/products listed in this article. Author has owned and used Fairgate's French Curve Set since February 1996, which is why this particular product is recommended by the author.