Continuing developments in digital graphics software has enabled
fashion illustration to be redefined alongside more traditional hand-
drawing techniques. Today many designers and fashion illustrators
combine both formats for a contemporary drawing style.
Digital colouring, rendering and collage describe a variety of bitmap
(raster) applications and vector graphics. These include scanning
and retouching hand-drawn illustrations as well as creating digital
freehand drawings using either a mouse or a graphics tablet and
pen. These processes can be applied to a fashion illustration or
used for creating colour-enhanced presentation flats.
Scanning a hand-drawn sketch or illustration is an effective means
of creating a digital fashion image for editing and retouching. You
may wish to resize or enhance the artwork for digital storage, using
a number of artwork effects from the software’s graphics toolbox,
which are represented by icons such as a pen tool, brush tool,
scale tool, eraser and stroke, and colour fill boxes.