Drawing a Garment with Sleeves

There are lots of ways to approach your fashion sketches in Adobe Illustrator and while there is no “correct way,” in this post I wanted to share a tip about how to approach garments with sleeves. When drawing a garment that has with sleeves, many times I like to draw the sleeves a separate shape, detached from the body of the garment. This allows for lots of flexibility with you sketch and will allow you to easily change or create new styles in a very short period of time.

In the example below you see a general overview of some of the different parts of this particular garment before all the pieces come together to make the final fashion cad.

Making the sleeves as separate shapes allows you to have the sleeves lay on top of the body or lay behind the body. You can also re-position the sleeves to show another part of the sleeve which can come in handy when you are using your sketches to create techpacks to send to your factory.

Another great reason to make your sleeves a separate shape is so you can easily delete them if you want to create a vest or add a different style of sleeve. Similarly, I like to draw my hoods as a separate piece to be able to remove it and add a collar or another type of neck opening. If you liked this post, check out a simple step by step guide on how to separate the parts of a collar when drawing your fashion cads in Adobe Illustrator.