proportions

good idea, I will try to get on it when I get a moment!

Get some old lasts (ebay is a brilliant place to look - but do search for other terms, foot molds, foot forms shoemakers molds etc. as well as lasts because most people don’t know the correct terminology).

Set your own still life up and practise sketching them from different angles. Feet are a weird shape to get right - if you practise drawing the lasts,you will soon notice an improvement in your footwear renderings.

We had to do this in the first year of our footwear degree.

When I am in a hurry I have been known to trace over a jpg of an existing shoe in Adobe illustrator (I sometimes do this in the factory,with the last I’m going to use) Because I am so often pushed for time, it saves me the time of spending ages getting the proportions right before I sketch the design out.

Remember as a designer it is your ideas that count - use all that is available to you and all the tricks in the book to get your ideas on the page in an accurate manner. Cheating is completely and totally allowed. :stuck_out_tongue:

yo, my last design for the nanoglide shoe, it looks really triangulated, but so does my dads foot (drew it based on it) now for the brand beckham football sneaker i drew it over my foot, and i realised how much of a difference it makes- so my doubt. how does one shoe fit so many different people with so many different feet.

They fit multiple feet because shoes are made of soft materials.

Shoes are not built around anatomical foot forms (except for Birkenstocks), they are built around stylized foot forms that have their roots in traditional shoemaking that goes back hundreds of years. This is why if you draw over actual feet, it will not look right.

Nike tried to move to an anatomically based last in the 90’s with the Nike Footscape, it was rejected by the general public for not looking shoe like enough. The free products use a last that is much closer to an anatomical last but balance just enough of a shoe look.

much appreciate the proportion post yo.
i want to get some angles happening like these:

do you think these guys sketch each of these angles out themselves or have some proportion guidelines and then trace and repeat?

I gotta say, that perspective is pretty dead nuts on and the line quality is really tight in that sketch. (I ordered the book too)

When I do those 3/4’s, I usually start with a photo of a last as an underlay. It seems to work. If I don’t have a last, I just take a pick of a shoe that is a similar proportion, it might be cheating, but it works.

^^


and thats how the shoemaster software (developed by Clarks) works, (kind of).

First of all, you digitise your last and then you design directly onto it.

http://www.shoemaster.co.uk/
I had some training on this as a footwear student, that was years ago. But I’m about to undertake a freelance project with a company that uses it for orthopaedic footwear. I’ll let you know how Iget on.



Do any of you guys design directly onto vac forms out of interest? Some Factories I’v worked in love it because they can take the standard straight off your design without misinterpreting it

I’ve sketched on vac forms as well as tapped up lasts, especially for a tricky asymmetrical pattern, it can be hard to communicate it in 2d. With the tape up a pattern engineer can un-tape and flatten it to make the pattern as well.

Good stuff. Thanks a lot.

hey YO
How cool of you to link that page with your ideas/info. on perspective, etc. I know a lot of people really appreciate that. It’s nice to see someone sharing their knowledge and experience with their fellow peers.

cheers! :smiley:

Thanks B! I’ve been wanting to beef that section up with some more demo’s but I just haven’ had time…

hi!

Yeah proportions are so important.I think is the base.

When i was student the most important theme to learn in the 1st year was to get the best proportions drawing a lot of lasts.

And i know the Shoemaster program,when i was working for Pikolinos (spain) they used it,but just for pattern cutting,for design we used the typical markers.

regards from london.

Hey,
Could you put the link back on… reading through old threads…
Cheers
Bec.

Just go to Yo’s page → Tutorials->Proportions.

Not that hard …You can do it.

Thers is no frame where I can directly link you to.

B-art

Cheers :wink:

heres the direct link to Michael’s proportions tutorial.

http://michaeld2lo.spymac.com/Michael%20DiTullo/PROPORTIONS.html

R

what is the book in k.e’s post (bottom of page 1)???

I would really like to know.

Thanks

UPDATE, everything has been moved to michaelditullo.com

The proportions page is:
http://michaelditullo.com/Design/PROPORTIONS.html

any templates for a 3/4 front, 3/4 heel and top view out there? i usde existing pics as templates until i got it down, but i find it’s not as stylized as a sketch.

Find an online retailers website, one where you can rotate the shoe image. Rotate it to the angle you need then screengrab it and plonk it in photoshop. You can then trace it to make a template. Top views you can get on some other websites. Over the years I’ve built up quite a catalog of templates. I’ve also got quite a collection of ready-to-go traced zips, buckles etc.