Step by Step process of making croqui

Step 1: FINDING BODIES/POSES.

The first and easiest thing to do is start collecting magazine tears, runway photos, catalogs, ect that have poses you’d like to use. I have a whole folder devoted to this so if I ever get bored and want a new croquis, then I can dig though and find a pose I like. Some of my favorite places to look: Runway shows, Lucky magazine, Vogue, and the Delia’s catalog. Preferable you want a picture with tighter clothing so that you can actually see the shape of the body…but once you get better at drawing the shape of legs and arms, then you can start to use these tears just for a reference to the body position.

Step 2 : DRAW BASIC CROQUI.

I would suggest starting with a very basic straight croquis. This is the easiest to work out quick sketches on (You can see that Jay uses a basic “standing” croquis in the “where are they now” section on “Road to the Runway”). Once you have that croquis, it’s easier to start sketching complicated poses with that as a basic shape, size, ect.

Step 3: SKETCHING A FIGURE.

These are the steps I use while sketching a figure, you might find a better way or want to skip a step, but bottom line, it’s all about sketching, sketching and more sketching until you get it right. When I first started, I think it would take me a few hours to get one pose that I really liked, now I can usually finish them in 20-30 minutes. It’s all about learning the shapes and curves of the body.
1.I start by drawing a grid to keep the proportions and size of my drawing consistent. Start by drawing a vertical line, this is your plumb line (or gravity line). If you take a look, you’ll notice that you can draw a vertical line from the chin to at least one heel on almost every pose when they have an unequal balance on both legs. If they are standing balanced (as in my example), the plumb line will fall in between the feet. After this, I’ll draw a series of horizontal lines based on my straight croquis. These are at the top of head, chin, shoulders, bust, waist, hip, rise, knee and ankle.
2.The next step is to rough out the shape. I like to draw circles at all the joints and connect them with a series of lines for the legs and arms. The torso can usually be made of 2 triangle shapes pointing towards each other.
3.After that, I try to “flesh” out the sketch by tracing the pose underneath and start to round out the body. You might need to make your sketch a bit thinner than your photo in order to make it “fashion-y.” You can test it out and decide.
4.Once you have a pretty good body shape, pose and are happy with it, then I like to take one last piece of paper and sketch a cleaner version (since I do a lot of erasing!).

Step 4: MAKE A BOOK.

 Make a separate book of your own collection of different styles of croqui.And emblish your book with various types of designs.