Creating a body form

Hello everyone, 

So today in class we have been using illustrator to create a body form from a barbie doll. Body forms are used in industry to see how clothes would fall on the body and how they would look. We have just created this form a picture of a barbie doll which if you were to blow up to real life size it wouldn’t be proportionate, if you were to create a body form properly you would want to use a photo of someone or a photo of a body mannequin. 

To start with I used the internet to find a picture of a barbie doll. To do this I had to find a high-quality image and to do this I have used google images and used the tool bar to select a large file size, to larger than 2MP. With this image I saved it and then placed it into an art board in adobe illustrator. 

I then took the layer I had placed the image in and locked the layer. now I created a new layer which I will use to create my body form on using the pen tool. I used the pen tool to trace over the body of the barbie doll, following the contour lines of the body. I made each limb a separate shape by connecting the pen tool lines. this is what my body form looked like once I had traced around the whole body of the barbie doll.

Here I selected all the limbs and used the fill tool to add colour to the body form. I had to rearrange which of the pieces were on top and behind.  

This is the end result of what my body form has turned out like. I am quite impressed with how this turned out for my first attempt, to improve this I would have used a different image so that I can see the contour lines of the body more and I can get a better shape. 

Thank you for reading and i hope you have enjoyed looking at my work. 

Amy xxx