Sketching for Your Shape: How to Customize a Croquis for Accurate Garment Sketches

Are you ready to customize a croquis according to your perfect body shapes? 

This process helps you envision the styles according to your body shapes before you bring your styles to fruition. 

Now, what’s a croquis, you ask? It’s a template sketch of a body. It’s the blank canvas for your fashion masterpieces, allowing you have a solid foundation to draw clothing designs in a consistent way. 

To get started, make sure to download your free standard, midsize, and curvy/plus-size croquis below. You’ll use the croquis that you think is most similar to your shapes for this exercise. This fantastic resource not only provides a solid template but also includes marked lines with head height indicators for precise height measurement. 

To do this exercise accurately, you’ll need a helping hand for photos or a tripod along with a phone/camera. The key is to capture yourself in your natural form, so throw on your snug undergarments or tight-fitting knit clothes. And don’t wear shoes.

Pay attention to the background, too. Make sure there’s enough contrast to highlight your silhouette. Dark colors against dark backgrounds can make it trickier to showcase your body’s natural contours.

If your clothes are covering your belly button, add a safety pin through the fabric right at that location. It’s a simple but effective way to ensure it’s visible in your photos. And for those areas like bust, waist, or low hips that might need a little extra definition, strategically place pins for clarity.

Follow the video for all the steps to correctly take your photos. You need to have an upper portion and lower portion photo to get the best results.

Once your photoshoot is complete, take a moment to print out those snapshots. If you’re going digital, you can combine the two photos together in the software of your choice. 

Our first step is to analyze these photos and your proportions. We can then apply your proportions to the free croquis you downloaded below.

At this point, you could easily make an outline of your body. Then, you could resize it with a photocopier or on the computer to make it a similar height to The Fashion Design Book croquis. The resizing will just help you in case you choose to use the tracing/copy method with the book because the dimensions will be similar. 

Another option is outlined within the video, which shows step-by-step how to adjust the free download croquis to your specific shapes. I prefer this method because it helps you see the shapes of the body in another way. For this method, the key point is to make sure you don’t mix up your “head height tools” from one croquis to the other.

I hope you’ve found this process helpful! After you’re finished, cut/paste your custom croquis into your book!