How to add more detail to your historic fashion illustration, how to use shadows and highlights, how to draw fabric, and how to add color.

If you want to design your own historic fashions, you'll do well to learn how to make your own fashion sketches.

Jema Hewitt shows by example how to design fantastical Steampunk outfits without resorting to the same old clichés.

As a new costume enthusiast, you might be delighted with a particular Victorian pattern and sew it straight out of the envelope, just as it is. Experienced dressmakers might fall in love with an antique fashion plate,  and recreate it to make something genuinely special.

But what if you want to make a gown that is not a direct copy of a fashion plate, or a pattern that dozens of people have already made? Suppose you want to design an original Victorian costume—something that no one's seen before, and yet which would be right at home on the pages of La Mode Illustrée, Godey's Home Journal, or Harper's Bazar?

If you've "been there, done that" and now want to make a truly original Victorian costume, read on!

Right back at the genesis of YWU I wrote an article about what I called "Holy Grails".

I'm willing to bet that most of us reading this have such projects in mind. There's a book on your shelf that naturally falls open at a certain photograph; there's a bookmark in your web browser. But we never get around to trying - it's too impractical, too expensive, too difficult, just too much all around.

This year I've actually done one of these huge projects, when I recreated a vastly decorated Edwardian Worth gown (follow this link for a FREE slideshow of museum images), and I've got so much out of it that I'm going to use this article to pull you a little bit closer to tackling your own Grail. I'm going to tell you why it's worth trying such intimidating projects, and then show you how.

Here’s the setting: you’re sitting watching a great film or attending a wonderful play with incredible costumes, and a new character enters the scene.The moment you see them, before they open their mouth and utter a syllable, you know exactly who they are. Why?