Honestly, I used to sketch every single design idea in my Moleskine for like 5 years, but now I just take a quick video on my phone talking it out because I can capture the movement and drape way faster.

What changed was trying to design a draped jersey dress last fall and realizing my flat sketches totally missed how the fabric would actually flow, so now I only sketch final tech flats after the 3D idea is solid on video. Anyone else switched from paper to a faster method for initial concepts?

3 comments

3 Comments

tarak171mo ago

Oh totally, @cole_mitchell8 I felt the same way at first. I was a die-hard sketchbook person for years, thought videos were cheating. But then I started recording myself talking through draping on a dress form and realized it captures the weight and movement of fabric way better than my shaky pencil lines ever could. Now I use videos for the messy early ideas and save the paper for when I'm ready to do clean tech flats. Honestly, the video files are easier to search through than flipping through a notebook full of coffee stains and ripped pages.

cole_mitchell83mo ago

Wait, you just stopped sketching completely? I could never do that. My whole process is built on flipping through old notebooks and seeing ideas next to each other. If I only had videos, I'd forget half of them. The paper is like my brain's backup.

felix3853mo ago

My last sketchbook from 2019 has a coffee stain that smudged two ideas together and accidentally created my best logo. You can't get that from a clean video timeline. I started taking photos of every page and dumping them into a simple folder by date. Now I can scroll through it like a notebook but still search for "weird dog sketch" and actually find it. It's the only way I kept the feel of paper without carrying three books everywhere.