Safashiongirl: fashion storyboard

Storyboard for another 3rd year

CAD Fashion Storyboard Help

One of my popular posts is Fashion Storyboard Help and I decided it was time for a more in depth post on compiling a board. I just posted a mood board for this particular project so now you can see the outcome of the concept. The board I am focusing on is the American side of An American/In Paris This particular storyboard was a Computer Aided Design project which I prefer to conventional illustration because I find that Photoshop can really help amp things up quite a bit. Here’s a brief tutorial.

Step 1: Once you have a concept down, draw the fashion figure and if you intend to use Photoshop, go over it with a fineliner/thin sharpie and close all the lines so you can fill nicely after you scan it in.

Step 2: After scanning, open a new document in Photoshop that is sized to your liking then find a background and font suitable for your text and concept.

Step 3: Selecting layers, place your figure on top of your background and adjust her size using ctrl+t and shift. In this example you can see I’ve selected a white spot to delete with the magic wand tool, get rid of these if you have any.

Step 4: Now you can get to rendering the figure. Make sure you shade her using shades darker or lighter than her skin tone. Digital storyboards can look a bit flat without shading. I have old drawings of facial features pre-saved on my computer; this is a great way to keep your style cohesive and your storyboarding quick, I used to spend way too much time on faces!

Step 5: When you’re finished with her body, it’s time to get to the clothes, in this case I scanned in fabric, defined it as a pattern (you will find this option under the Edit tab) and filled her shorts and top, when filling, select the Pattern option from the drop down menu and click on the fabric you just defined as a pattern. It’s a great idea to do this with denim and patterned fabric but if your fabric is less defined, do use shading techniques to bring it to life. A problem you may come across is that the pattern will repeat and look segmented, this happened with her top so I had to use the clone stamp tool to fix it up.

Step 6: Scan in your technical drawings/flats and select them with the magic wand tool like you did with the figure. I sometimes will draw half of my technical drawings and flip them over to get perfect symmetry; in this case I drew them whole. Cut out your fabric samples and arrange them. In this case I did digital fabric swatches because I didn’t want to cut up the clothes I used but I recommend cutting physical samples and sticking them on after you have printed your boards.

All done! Remember that layout is key, fill up space evenly but don't clutter. Happy storyboarding!

fashion

Fashion Storyboard Help

Update: For a step by step look at arranging storyboard elements check out the CAD Fashion Storyboard Help post.

I get a lot of Google traffic searching for how to put together fashion storyboards, I'm currently in my final year of a BA degree in fashion design, if you have any questions or want any tips feel free to hit me up on twitter @safashiongirl or drop me a comment. I'd be happy to give fellow students any assistance. In fact I plan to dedicate more posts toward assembling storyboards as soon as I have time, theres a gap of information about it online and I only wish I could have found a few examples and ideas when I started out. For now here are some brief pointers:

A typical fashion storyboard consists of:

A fully rendered fashion figure (can be stylized to work for your theme)
Technical drawings also known as flats, these are essentially blueprints for the design depicted on the figure. I do my flats in fineliner and usually on white paper but you can jazz it up by copying them onto different paper
Fabric samples you would use in constructing the design, these can include embellishments like buttons, rhinestones etc.
A background suited to your theme to host all of the aforementioned elements. I like to go to Deviant Art and search for what kind of background complements my theme. If you're printing it out, make sure its sized right so it is not printed pixelated.
Headings and labels. I like to label my technical drawings but some girls at college leave it out. The heading should be in a font that parallels your theme so for example, an oriental font for something Asian inspired. Sometimes I'm briefed with headings so it is decided for me but sometimes you have the freedom to come up with your own.
Layout is important, I stick my fashion figures on the left or right of an A3 page, then I do a composite layout for my flats (back tech drawing just slightly on top of my front or vice versa). Not all storyboards have to be the size I do mine, it's just how my college briefs us. It all depends on the assignment but you can resize when necessary.

Here is an example, this storyboard was supposed to invoke an easy, airy, fresh, clean, whimsical theme. My fabric samples are huge though because I felt I had to fill up more space, I usually do much smaller squares because I usually use more fabric and have more than two technical drawings. If I had to redo this one, I would definitely stylize my figure, making her fit the theme more.