The Shape of Me

I was inspired by Polka Dot Overload to make my own digital croquis. A croquis (I'm not sure if it rhymes with "hockey" or "hokey") is basically the drawing of a figure on which fashion designers draw their designs. BurdaStyle recently had a post about making your own hand-drawn one, and I also found this tutorial, to make the classic fashion 9-head-high croquis, the proportions of which are quite different than that of an actual human (most humans, including me, are approximately 7.5 heads high). I made a 9-head croquis and then drew an outfit to put on it.



You can only tell the drawing is supposed to be me because it has glasses on. The croquis, like the size zero model, is not a reliable way to tell how a given piece of clothing will look on my particular proportions.

Here's what I did to make my croquis useful: I got my boyfriend (to whom I shall refer hereafter as Shawn) to take a picture of me in my underwear. Then I put on my robe and imported the photo to a drawing program (I use Inkscape, which was free, but would love to be given Illustrator) and traced my outline using the straight line/bezier curve tool. I added my underwear, for modesty, and drew some squiggles in the approximate locations of my facial features. I put in some blurred and slightly transparent lines for my cleavage, knees, belly button and elbow pits (is there a better word for the inside of one's elbow?). I colored the whole thing in. I had to move around some layers, too, and then, ta-dah! Realistic croquis:



I wanted to draw things onto the croquis in the drawing program, but a) it's not very easy to draw precisely with a mouse and b) Inkscape is Linux-based, and I've got the Mac OS running on a PC (Shawn's a computer guy; he does stuff like that), and it's all too much work for my poor little Dell. Everything started going slow, so I had to put it to sleep so it could cool down for a while. I ended up printing a copy of the drawing (which only partially printed for some reason) and used my tracing paper to draw a couple of outfits on top it.




So far I have learned from my croquis experiments that I probably shouldn't wear loose-fitting pants that end just below my knee. It's croquis magic!

(I just discovered, while getting all the links for this post, that Mikhaela, the doyenne of Polka Dot Overload is working on a digital croquis tutorial for Burdastyle, according to her BurdaStyle status. OMG, my croquis is going to be so rad after that tutorial is done!)