Croquis drawing is quick and sketchy

drawing Drawing is a Visual arts, visual art that uses an instrument to mark paper or another two-dimensional surface, or a digital representation of such. Traditionally, the instruments used to make a drawing include pencils, crayons, and ink pens, some ...

, usually of a live nude

model A model is an informative representation of an object, person, or system. The term originally denoted the plans of a building in late 16th-century English, and derived via French and Italian ultimately from Latin , . Models can be divided in ...

. Croquis drawings are usually made in a few minutes, after which the model changes pose or leaves and another croquis is drawn. The word ''croquis'' comes from French and means simply "sketch". In clothing design, a croquis is an outline

silhouette A silhouette (, ) is the image of a person, animal, object or scene represented as a solid shape of a single colour, usually black, with its edges matching the outline of the subject. The interior of a silhouette is featureless, and the silhouett ...

, for use by a designer. After the initial sketch, a croquis drawing can be used as a foundation for another work of art such as a

painting Painting is a Visual arts, visual art, which is characterized by the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a solid surface (called "matrix" or "Support (art), support"). The medium is commonly applied to the base with ...

, or it may be used as a work of art itself.

Advantages

The short duration of the pose benefits models because they do not need to keep still for a long time; this also benefits the artists because it helps them concentrate on the essential elements of the pose, or the most important parts of the drawing. An artist does not have time to draw all the details, so they learn to concentrate on the important elements. Croquis is also a good method of drawing subjects that generally do not stand still and pose, such as insects,

animal Animals are multicellular, eukaryotic organisms in the Biology, biological Kingdom (biology), kingdom Animalia (). With few exceptions, animals heterotroph, consume organic material, Cellular respiration#Aerobic respiration, breathe oxygen, ...

s, and

child A child () is a human being between the stages of childbirth, birth and puberty, or between the Development of the human body, developmental period of infancy and puberty. The term may also refer to an unborn human being. In English-speaking ...

ren.

In fashion design

fashion Fashion is a term used interchangeably to describe the creation of clothing, footwear, Fashion accessory, accessories, cosmetics, and jewellery of different cultural aesthetics and their mix and match into Clothing, outfits that depict distinct ...

, the term refers to a quick sketch of a figure (typically nine heads tall as this is the accepted proportions for

fashion illustration Fashion illustration is the art of communicating fashion ideas in a visual form through the use of drawing tools or design-based software programs. It is mainly used by fashion designers to brainstorm their ideas on paper or digitally. Fashion ...

) with a loose drawing of the clothes that are being designed. Often a large number of croquis drawings will be created for one finished look, which is fully drawn and finished.

References

{{Authority control Drawing