How to add textures and prints to your drawing with Hanne

Today is the penultimate day of Draw All The Things 2015! We'll end all the goodness by learning how to add textures & prints to your drawings. After all, that's what nice about fabric: Textures! Prints! Glitter! Rolling around in it and covering yourself fully with everything in your stash! (sorry, I digress) We already learned how to draw humans and dress them in our own clothing, today we'll add textures & prints to those drawings!

Collage

Collage is my all time favorite when it comes to making new designs and explore outfit ideas and options. I hardly have an untouched magazine in my house! Most of them are completely in pieces. I tear out everything that I find interesting: textures, prints, silhouets... These come in handy when I make collages. What I love about collages is that you can manipulate exisiting elements into a brand new idea. My number one tip is this one: don't be afraid to change things up! Collages take a little bit more time than drawings, but I'm not a drawing-rockstar, so I'm usually more pleased with the results! Also: I really enjoy making collages! The good thing about collage is that you can use both fabric and paper. If you already have some fabric laying around, it's ideal to plan out outfits with this technique! Clockwise: paper collage, fabric collage, paper collage, paper collage.

Pastels

Pastels are great when you want to make broad strokes or want to blend colors but you aren't that much into paint. I love working with Panda Oil Pastels or with the Talens Oil Pastels. They both have very vibrant colors. At school we use Panda pastels, but I have Talens at home (a gift from my dad: thank you!) They aren't cheap, but with pastels a higher price point also means better quality. I suggest experimenting with pastels. Peel the paper of and use them flat, use the point to make fine lines, blend colors... If you blend colors and add white pastel, they blend together more smoothly. Below is an example of a collage/pastel mix. I used a copy of a magazine picture that I pasted onto cardboard. Afterwards I used pastels to draw the new outfit. This is similar to the technique where you paint over a picture of yourself as explained here.

Paint

Paint is an amazing tool, available in so much different options! Watercolour, gouache, acryl... I love all of those options! I usually don't work with oil paints, since those take a long time to dry and aren't easy to clean. And I like things being easy to clean :-) The cool thing about gouache and acrylic paints is that you can add layer upon layer to make textures. Try using different brushes & even palette knives to add textures to your work. Of course you can combine all of the techniques into your work. Below is an example of a costume drawing I did where I combined pencil, paint, fabric collage and pastel. So tell me, what's your favorite technique to add textures to a drawing? Any particular technique you want to try? If you have any more questions, let me know in the comments!