Like many other bloggers who are inspired by The Colette Sewing Handbook, I f0llowed suit in the croquis bandwagon. Here is my mini-me!
I didn’t feel like setting up my camera today, so I browsed around my photos and picked one that is close enough. After making a rough tracing in CorelDraw, I looked at my croquis and felt so uninspired. I mean, they looked… stubby. I guess the slender yet unproportional fashion drawing everywhere has distorted how I look at real human body.
But this is how my body really looks like. I draw a face and some little details and slowly I began to like this drawing. I put her in a bathing suit so she won’t be naked.
I tried using them to plan some projects using Butterick 5672 and Colette Pastille dress patterns. The picture of the fabric was taken using iPhone and then applied to the dress on the croquis. The proportion of the floral pattern is still not quite right though.
If I would make it again, I think it is better if I use a photo of me standing straight facing the camera, so the shape of the body can be seen more clearly. For now, I still wasn’t sure if this will be useful in my sewing journey, but I think it looks really cute!
Have you made your personalized croquis and use them in planning your projects? Do you find them useful?
[…] really feeling it. An alternative to this would be to make a croquis based on your own body, see Novita’s cute croquis here. This has the added advantage of seeing how the garments you are planning to make might look on […]
I use Croquis all the time to plan my designs. Recently I’ve been using a sketching software on my IPad, but the Croquis I’ve been using, is not of me! What a neat idea! I’m going to recreate my own personal body style Croquis for use on my IPad sketching software! Thanks for the tip and I love yours…it’s absolutely adorable just as is! Glad I saw your green dress on Pinterest! It brought me to your great blog!
They look cute. I think the first ones I saw were made by Audrey to decide which dresses would suit her out of the ones she liked and it worked a treat as it really showed up what suited her body and made her look fabulous and which would not suit her even though she liked the design. I haven’t made one though… I don’t know how!
So cute! you are a great designer. I have never attempted making a croquis because I can’t really draw.
These are such professional looking drawings. I have seen a few around and I am wondering how useful they will be. I quite often stare at my stash wondering which if any of the fabrics would suit a particular style on me. So I guess the proof is in the doing! I have a copy of Illustrator so I have no excuse. Thank you so much for your lovely inspiration
This looks great! I’ve finally got the book last weekend, and saw the croquis for the first time. I think it is a cute idea, not sure whether it will be very useful, but still being a keen illustrator, I can’t wait to do my own.
They’re great – looks very useful, especially to visualise how a printed fabric and colours might look with the contours of a body.
Oh, I think it’s so perfect. And, I actually like the pose! Still straight-on enough to see the details, but just enough asymmetry to look very life-like.
So adorable. You have the cutest figure. It really helps to visualize future projects. Well done. I use them once in a great while. I kind of a figured out what looks good on me and what never ever to where even if I go bling. LOL.
That is really cool! I don’t have any fancy graphics software with which to do this, so I was just going to do it by hand …but it’s so darn cold in my apartment I never want to stand in my underwear that long!
These are so cute! I love them.
Those are the cutest croquis ever!
I have used the concept the old-fashioned way. I enlisted my husband to take photos of me in my skivvies. Then I traced my outline onto paper.
Maybe I wasn’t skilled enough, but I cannot lie – it was not a useful tool for me.
My biggest challenge was fitting, so I needed to spend time on that.
Now that I have figured out my personal fit issues, maybe I
will try using croquis again. Yours are certainly inspiring.
Awww – Mini you is so cute!!! Your Corel Draw version of a croqui is excellent, and I’m sure it will be really useful for visualising future makes. I need to make one myself…but I think mine will just be hand-drawn as I wouldn’t know how to start to draw this on the computer!
Oh my goodness these are precious! As someone who’s never used the program before, did you just take your picture and the program replicated it into a drawing? What about the dress – were you able to replicate that based on the picture you already had, or did you somhow draw the dress on your form?
Regardless, these croquis (pl?) are so adorable! It’s always interesting to find out what a dress looks like on your body shape after you spend all that time making it, and I totally agree it’s worth the effort in making these ahead of time.
You’ve left me inspired this morning.
CorelDraw is a vector-based drawing program, what I did was tracing the photo and drawing the croquis. The dress was drawn over the croquis on different layer. You need to be familiar with the drawing programs to be able to use them.
But you don’t have to use computer to make the croquis! Just put a sheet of paper over your picture and trace around. Actually the Colette Sewing Handbook uses this way
These look great! I’ve used them to draw things I want to sew or pattern make, but I haven’t gotten around to working out how to use Corel Draw/Illustrator to do them – I must though because I love how you’ve rendered the fabrics!