'Foundation Design', by WWISFD Faculty Zenish Mehta

Drawing can best be best described as a written language that helps us flawlessly convey ideas even words cannot represent. A designer has to tackle with many such difficult ideas and concepts and this makes it paramount for him to learn how to draw and paint.

The basic of design is to first starts with drawing a simple strait line. Learning how to control ones arm and the pressure of their pencil will have on the paper. It’s important to understand the concepts of simple shapes and rendering, slowly moving towards more complex shapes and fractals. Once this is done we move on to visualization.

The next step is to understanding space. Visualization is incomplete if the artist doesn’t understand the space around it, artists in and around history have strived to make art which can show spaces like the ones we have in real life. There are many books, many theories and styles to do so, we explore some of these theories and understand how to visualize and illustrate spaces.

After space comes human form, being a fashion artist means to understand a human form in and out. Where each muscle is situated, how would it budge and form and with what movement will what part of the body crease. We understand all of the basics of human form, from proportions to how an animated human reacts to different parts of the body. And then we apply it to the human form.

Next we start with colour, the principles of colour, the theory, the history and the application. Understanding the art of abstraction and form colour patterns such that we can find the best combinations within colours and light. Finally understanding how to form correlations with colour and form or with colour and space.

Once the principles of colour theory is establish, we learn the craft of colouring. Learning the techniques of using various colouring materials. What would be the best way of using them and where would any of these materials be best used, finally making the foundation strong for a better technique of drawing and colouring.

Constant practice and repetition will help become better at visualization and representation in turn making a better artist and designers.

Design Process:

Designing something is usually more than decorating or making it look good. We understand the aesthetics and functionality of that product and design it accordingly. Because of this, we need to approach every product differently. Learning every approach would be tedious and time consuming and so we learn the design process such that we can handle every approach intuitively.

As said before, Design process is a process to learn different approaches to designing. The first step is to learn what types of designs are there in the industry, to understand what constitutes a design and what types of designs can be considered good designs from bad designs. Once aided with this information we can move to learn about different approaches of this process.

Starting with a simple process we take simple forms and create patterns, tessellations and structures with them. We use different materials and use them to create designs. We then move on to more complex exercises where we tackle products that require more detailed process and better approaches.

Lastly we take these techniques of design process and we apply it to different aspects of character design and costume design. We take stories and characters from these stories and we design the look of these characters. We learn how to design according to their social and emotional situation, their story and scenario and their physical and psychological traits.