Fashion Illustration: Carnaval 2025 on ipad
PRIMER: download Adobe Fresco app on your ipad
Adobe Fresco app on my ipad pro brought me so much freedom to explore some of my favorite carnaval costume designs from Recife and Olinda this year, since I had to miss the festivities personally. (Last year I had my first Carnaval in Olinda, it was amazing. This year, I went in January for the previas..)
Adobe Fresco is a free app!
STEP 1: START WITH A 6B PENCIL tool
I go more into depth on these concepts in my Ipad Illustration course, but basically you want to use just one tool when you start, or you may get lost in the rabbit hole of 500 different brushes! (and that’s all fine on a lazy afternoon if you feel like it).
The black pencil too is my very best friend. You can adjust its size and it’s opacity, and the angle of your apple pencil also gives it variety, as well as the pressure of your stylus or finger.
Softly map out your sketch , figure, and garment details before you add skin tone.
Step 2: Choose an image to sketch from
Recife and Olinda have my favorite street carnaval style of carnaval de rua, which you can dig here on my Pinterest board to explore.
If you’re new to fashion illustration and want to sketch independently for design from your imagination, that’s fantastic, but a mistake so many of my students make in the beginning is force themselves to draw only from their imaganation because they don’t want to “copy” anything. For my fashion/costume illustration, I chose a design from AVOA, a Recife brand tha treally inspired me during this carnaval season.
While your STYLE is inevitable and is something that emerges and cannot be copied,...
I highly recommend drawing from things you are looking at as a practice that will build a rich vocabulary of experience within you that will inform every fashion illustration and design sketch that you will do over your career!
Step 3: Identify each key color in the fashion design
It’s so easy to make colors on the ipad! You just select them from the color picker , and no mixing is required!! This saves a lot of time and exploring compared to gouache, but mixing colors is an excellent way to learn to understand color– and gouache is a GORGEOUS medium for fashion illustrations! Faster isn’t always better.
Step 4: FILL FASHION COLORS
Depending which app you are using and what tool you prefer, you can either :
lay down shapes full of tone by outlining the area that you want to fill and then “filling it” with flat or textured tone,
OR
you can select an area and then paint or stroke over the selected area to create a textured fill
OR you can just grab your stylus and “color in” like you would normally do on a piece of paper.
Whatever you do, I recommend a “wet” tool like marker, gouache or watercolor for this.
PRO TIP: all fill colors shoiuld happen in a layer “behind” or “under” your pencil lines so that you don’t lose your pencil details that you already sketched
Step 5: ADD TEXTURES
While SOOOO much texture happens purely in the line you use to contour hemlines and edges of garments, Never underestimate the power of your edges, corners,and shapes of details and textured fabrics such as fringe and sequins.
BUT
On top of that, (literally) we can use highlight (white based) or shadow (black based) to create textures on the surface of our fabrics. The higher the contrast is, the shinier the fabric).
I SUGGEST YOU USE THE PENCIL FOR THIS because of the gritty texture that gives more of a fabric-like experience.
(That’s the same thing I would do if I was working on paper, by the way).
I also use the pencil tool in Adobe Fresco or any other app to do my freehand design sketching to work out my original ideas.
I only used flat tone and soft pencil to create this ipad fashion illustration (above).
I added black AND white over the base tone to create the metallic feeling on this carnaval costume look.
I added lighter versions of each base color on a superior layer with colore pencil to create the shine and texture of these sequins and feathers. Even the vans fabric i executed in colored pencil.
Step 6: (optional) add background details or color to your illustration
It’s not requred to add a background but i’d like you to consider the impact that architectural, abstract, or natural elements intersection with your illustration can bring to the composition of the illustration!
Even a simple horizon line can make a world of difference so that your fashion illustration isn’t just “FLOATING IN SPACE”.
Also, while i usually choose paper color or texture at the beginning, it can be really fun at this point to play with your color palette by putting a LAYER behind your illustration and testing out how different colored backgrounds or papers can impact your color story and mood!
Of course, it’s up to you how little or how much of elements from your background you include in your illustration.
I used a bit of shadow on the ground near their feet, and details from the mural painted in the background behind the models, plus a horizon line, in this illustration of carnaval fashion designs from Periodo Fertil in Olinda.
This image is different from all others on this page because I didn’t use a gritty pencil-like tool. Instead, I used a single VECTOR TOOL/ brush to create the whole illustration, can you see how smooth the strokes are, even the grey and black “pencil strokes”? Vector tools can be infinitely blown up into large images without losing quality, while conversely, the more realistic watercolor and pencil tooks are more like photshop images and get pixellated if you blow them up too big. Adobe Fresco offers Vector brushes as well as more textureal brushes.
Step 7: Shadows
When sketching from fashion photography for fashion illustration studies (something we do ALL THE TIME in Fashion Sketch Group every week)., you can look up and down this page and see how some of the images have shadows on the floor and / or wall around them, which creates depth and dynamics on the page..
You can choose to include or not to include these shadows.
Here you can feel the softness of pencils and brushes that aren’t vector brushes.
