Learn Digital Fashion Illustration in Adobe Illustrator for FREE!

We’ve had so much love online and so many requests in response to our existing fashion illustration tutorials that we thought we’d expand the range! We’ve now created a whole series of in-depth video tutorials that showcase the various methods used to create detailed professional fashion illustrations using Adobe Illustrator. Like all our tutorials, they’re completely free to watch. We don’t ask you to subscribe or sign up-  just click the video to watch!

Fashion illustration is a highly subjective matter. There are hundreds of different illustration styles out there and most are based on a person’s experience and ability to draw freehand. With this in mind, we’ve attempted to take the pain out of digital fashion illustration by creating a series of tutorials that demonstrate fashion illustration techniques in Adobe Illustrator. You don’t need any prior experience of Adobe Illustrator and you certainly don’t need to be a talented free-hand or fashion specific illustrator. We source, copy/paste and trace face and body images found on the internet using the pen tool in Adobe Illustrator. When tracing real imagery, it produces fantastic realistic results in a fraction of the time, leaving you more time to perfect your actual garment designs.

First, we demonstrate how to illustrate the face, we then add skin tone, makeup, hairstyles and then illustrate a series of body poses. Finally, we show you how to piece all of these separate elements together, giving you the potential to create hundreds of different fashion templates, ready for your garment designs. Once again, you don’t need any prior experience using either Adobe Illustrator or freehand drawing and the course is completely free to watch.

This digital fashion illustration course is designed to fill in the blanks of our existing courses and answer some of the questions that our followers have asked over recent months. We hope you enjoy the content and learn something truly valuable.

We love hearing from you! If you enjoy our content, please share it with your friends and leave us a comment. Likewise, if you have any issues with the techniques taught or you have time-saving tricks that could help our followers then once again, please leave a comment- we can always create a new tutorial to showcase the concept and we’ll also tag you in to say thanks!

FREE Digital Fashion Illustration Tutorials

Part 1 – Face & Portrait Illustration

Create detailed illustrations of the face without any prior experience of free-hand drawing or Adobe Illustrator. Learn how to copy, paste and accurately trace the outline and details of the face from portrait imagery found online. Learn how to transform or mirror image the finished illustration to speed up the process and create symmetrical face illustrations. Finally, learn how to stylise the finished illustration using line widths, skin tones and colour fills.

Part 2 – Adding Makeup Concepts

Design and apply your own makeup concepts to your existing portrait illustrations. Learn how to add blocks or colour, experiment with transparency, and apply a range of filters to create soft subtle layers of colour that complement and enhance the skin tone. A compact, fun tutorial that showcases a very powerful and useful set of tools. It’s a firm favourite of ours!

Part 3 – Illustrating Hair Styles

Create hair templates from scratch to radically transform the look and identity of your portrait illustrations. Learn how to map the initial hair outline, add hair strands with stylised line art, create colour layers, and finally adapt each hairstyle to suit each portrait illustration or face shape. It’s a long process, but once you have a range of hairstyle it dramatically increases the number of different portrait styles that can be created.

Part 4 – Illustrating the Body

Learn how to create a range of beautiful body illustrations, poses or fashion templates to go with your portraits, makeup and hairstyles. This is the final piece in the puzzle when it comes to creating your own professional fashion templates. Similar to Part 1, we demonstrate how to copy/paste and accurately trace the outline and details of the body from high-resolution swimwear or lingerie imagery found online. Next, you will learn how to add depth and texture to the illustration using line widths, and skin tone. Finally, we demonstrate how to add a simple garment layer such as a swimsuit or activewear.

Part 5 – Creating Model Templates & Digitising Hand-Drawn Fashion Illustrations

In this tutorial, we demonstrate how to create and print transparent model templates from your existing face, hair and body illustrations. These model templates are then printed on to A4 and used as templates to sketch a range of designs. Once the designs are finalised, we scan them back into Adobe Illustrator and once more trace or transform them into beautiful digital fashion Illustrations.

Part 6 – Adding Colour, Print & Texture to your Digital Fashion Illustrations

The moment you’ve all been waiting for! In this tutorial, we demonstrate how bring your black and white digital fashion illustrations to life by adding colour, print and texture using the eyedropper, clipping mask and swatch tools. It’s possibly the most interesting and fun tutorial out of the whole range… Enjoy!

More FREE Fashion Illustration Courses & Tutorials

Why not check out our other FREE fashion illustration tutorials. We’ve got a whole series of courses that will help improve your skills and knowledge about digital fashion illustration in Adobe Illustrator. Take your pick from the course outlined below!

The Basics – Fashion Illustration

This course was one of the first we ever created and has since been updated by the master class but it still contains some great content and learning!