As you may know I have recently started teaching on an Access to Art and Design HE course. What's so exciting and ineresting about teaching is the way that it encourages you to consider your subject from an objective standpoint; it isn't until you have to explain some of the skills of a designer, that you are forced to develop a "formalised" understanding of what they are. For example, many of the conventions of fashion drawing exist for quite understandable reasons, to quote some material that I prepared for the class...
Fashion designers often adopt a stylised, “graphic” approach to drawing using clean lines, and tracing figures from previous drawings. This is because designers need to be able to record and work through their ideas efficiently and to communicate these ideas clearly. It is important to understand that fashion drawings needn’t be illusionistic, academic drawings, but they do need to explain the detail and construction of garments, show an understanding of the human figure and evoke the mood of the collection being designed.
