If you've taken any form of fashion design class or fashion illustration course you'll know the difference right away. So, you can continue scrolling onto another article or head back to google). For those of you that haven't, today I'm giving you the 411. Why? Because this is an important piece of information you need when you starting your own fashion brand. A technical sketch is one of the key factors you need to get a sample produced.
Fashion Sketch
Looks something like the above. There's not a lot of detail to it, but colour is used and you can see how the garment will hang, and move with the body. I did this using illustrator, but they are often hand sketched first. Depending on the artist they have face detail or they don't. I draw with no face detail often hence why my sketch looks like the above.
A fashion sketch is usually what is drawn first, if at all. High fashion brands or couture brands will always have fashion sketches for every collection. It is part of their branding process. While fast fashion brands or smaller boutique brands probably won't because they serve no real purpose to them, and will go straight into drawing their technical sketches to get samples made and production runs organised. However they might be used for merchandising and marketing. They are great for inspiration, building the collection story, color scheme and theme. Which helps create methods to generate sales.
Technical Sketch
Looks something like the above. This is the type of sketch that is sent to the manufacturer and the used to generate samples. You use a technical sketch in your tech paks, and mark it throughout the tech pak pages to construct your garment. I have a tech pak checklist in my resource library you can access here. That will tell you what you need to include in your tech pak. To find out how to use a technical sketch correctly in your tech pak for producing samples sign up for my course here. Note the above sketch has a drop shadow - I added that for the purpose of this article. In day to day use of tech paks, you don't need to drop shadow your sketches.
So, that was nice and simple. Got further questions message me!
Note these are sketches of a product I designed for 30fifteen. This Sue dress is available now via the website.