5 Tips for Creating a Fashion Design in Adobe Illustrator

To make a fashion illustration in Adobe Illustrator begin by opening Adobe Illustrator on your computer. Next, you will want to start a new file to bring up your artboard. Then, utilizing the plethora of tools available to you, you will be able to make your fashion illustration.

An example of creating an illustration in Illustrator is to create a button. In  Sew Heidi’s tutorial, she shows us how to open our artboard by going to file and then clicking on “new file.” You will see many new settings once it loads.

The artboard appears white. This is the workspace where your creations will be printable. The gray area behind the artboard can still be used and you can keep separate ideas and sketches in the space outside of the artboard until you are ready to use them or delete them.

You will be zooming in and out of your artboard often so you can apply detail and see the entire work in progress. To use zoom, go to view and scroll to zoom in or zoom out and click on the one you desire. This process can be sped up by using a shortcut by pressing the command or CTRL button on your computer while pressing the plus or minus buttons.

To navigate around your artboard you will need to go to the window toggle and scroll to navigate. By clicking on this, the navigator panel appears on your screen. It will give you a mirrored image of your workspace. You can zoom in and out as well as hide it as you need.

By clicking and dragging the navigator you are able to move your artboard around. This provides you with the ability to focus quickly on any part of your design. If you need to move the navigation panel, click the top part of the panel and drag it where you need it.

On the left side of your adobe illustrator screen, you have a toolbar. It has a variety of tools for drawing and illustrating. Many of these are stacked on top of each other. To see the tools underneath, just hover over the desired tool icon, then click and hold. This will display the rest of the tools available under that icon.

To begin drawing your button, you will:

• Go to the rectangle icon and hover over it.
• Select the ellipse tool. Your cursor will show a cross icon showing it is on.
• Draw your circle by holding and dragging.

Your circle will appear and it will show a cross in the center when it is a perfect circle. To make this step easier, depress the shift key while drawing. When done, release your mouse and then the shift key. This will automatically make a perfect circle, and the technique can be used for other shapes as well.

You have your basic circle. Now, you can decide what background and foreground colors you want to use. On your screen, the circle will default to white with a black circle around it. You can select new colors by going to the bottom of the toolbar on the left.

• Click on the solid rectangle with the rectangular frame
• Go to Window at the top of your screen and click on it.
• Scroll down and click on swatches.
• Select the color you want for the fill. This will color your white circle.
• Click on the rectangle to the left again.
• Choose another color. This is your stroke color or background color.
• Change your stroke weight by going to “window” and scrolling to “stroke.” You can manually adjust how thick or thin the stroke weight is from the panel that pops up.

Once you have decided on the swatch colors you will use for your button, you will draw the buttonholes.

For the button, you will want to make four buttonholes. The buttonholes will be perfect circles and will sit within the center of the button you drew. This is a simple process when you know how to use the illustrator program. It is even faster when you learn the shortcuts.

• Draw the first buttonhole by clicking on the upper left part of your large circle. Next, hold down the shift key while dragging the cursor. Release the mouse and then the shift key to make a perfect circle. Adjust the stroke thickness for the buttonhole as desired.
• Change the fill color of the buttonhole to white.
• Copy and paste the next buttonhole by going to edit at the top of your screen, selecting copy, and then selecting paste in front. This will paste the new buttonhole directly over the first buttonhole.
• Drag the new buttonhole over with the arrow key on your keyboard until it is where you want it to be. You can hold the shift key while doing this to speed it up.
• Go to the black arrow selection tool on the left side toolbar. Hold the shift key and select both buttonholes. The blue rectangle that shows what is selected will encompass both buttonholes.
• Copy the two buttonholes at the same time by returning to edit and selecting copy and then selecting paste in front.
• Drag the two buttonholes down by pressing the shift key and the down arrow key until they are in the proper place.

To see the finished button you drew, click anywhere off of your artboard. Now that you have some basic instructions, you can play with the program to create more fashion objects.