SE 2. EP 1. Fashion Design Leggings: Image Inspiration & Initial Fashion Sketches.
To celebrate the release of our latest made-to-measure pattern, the basic leggings block, we’ve decided to design a range of high-stretch leggings that we’ll eventually sample up and showcase with a photoshoot. Watch the video below to see the whole process and understand what ideas and concepts have inspired our designs.
Made-to-measure leggings patterns
Create a profile, add your measurements and design your basic leggings block. We’ll then draft it for you in seconds for you to download either as a multi-page PDF or a fully-editable SVG file – compatible in Adobe Illustrator.
Graded Leggings Block UK 4 – 24
Want a ready-to-wear set of editable leggings patterns that you can edit in Adobe Illustrator or any other SVG editing suite? Check out our sister site DesignLab and get the entire set of standard sizes in our Pattern Pack.
Imagery & Mood Boards
To start the design process, we collate inspiring imagery found on Pinterest into a series of mood boards that refine our ideas into more cohesive themes or concepts.
For this project, we have been inspired by design details such as hidden pockets, waistbands, leg hem styles and body panelling. A strong theme for modern leggings is the use of bold dramatic prints and colours. This concept has also inspired us to come up with three separate print concepts: neo tropical (large diagram below), hyper shapes and hyper-real.
Like our mood boards? Feel free to download the original PDF files straight to your desktop. Click here.
Fashion Illustrations/ Sketches
Using these mood boards as inspiration, we then sketched around 25 legging designs, using Pret-a-Template fashion templates as a drawing template. This speeds up the process of design considerably, allowing us to focus on the design, rather than redrawing the female form over and over again. From this collection we choose 9 of our favourite designs.
What’s next: digital fashion illustration?
In the next episode, we will turn our fashion illustrations, or hand-drawn sketches, into gorgeous digital illustrations or outlines using Adobe Illustrator. We’ll also start to add colours and experiment with the three print concepts. This will bring our designs to life and give us a better understanding of what they finished samples will look like.
“Hey Ralph,
I love your approach to the “”Fashion Design Leggings: Image Inspiration & Initial Fashion Sketches”” blog post. Your method of starting with mood boards based on Pinterest inspiration shows how patternmaking for fashion design can start with just a spark of an idea.
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Hey Bettie, Thank you for your lovely comment. That is how we were taught to design. I’m sure the tools used now a days have changed slightly and become more digital, but the process is exactly the same. Research, development, design! Good luck with you project and thanks again for your comment.
Can i ask some questions? My english not enough but i will try. So we designed this leggings and they are looking pretty. How we going to producuse this leggings? i mean if i want transparent shape in somewhere else, how they understand this? or how i show where they are? İ hope so you can understan me 😀 Thanx by!
You can always increase the size of your technical drawings to highlight certain areas and use a colour fill or texture fill to indicate areas that feature different fabrics. Possibly add a Key to your drawings? I hope this helps resolve your issue.