Color Block I

You keep taking about color blocks. What do you mean?

By using clothes, we can fool the eye into thinking that an area behind cloth is flat (the tummy) and that an area encircled with a bright line (the waist) is very narrow. Naturally, underwear that lifts the bosom away from the torso, making the torso look narrower, and that pushes down on on the tummy to flatten it, can help us here. But using blocks of color to create these proportions is important, too. Remember that dark colors recede (because the absorb light) and light colors are more prominent, because they reflect.

The objective of clothing is to produce the illusion of a narrow hourglass, with a defined waist that's at the right distance from the bosom and the hips. The hips should look to be about the same width as the shoulders. The area directly below the bosom, the torso, should appear well defined, and as narrow as possible. The abdomen should look as flat as possible, and lengthening the legs is a plus. There are teleological reasons for these being the right proportions, but I won't go into them here. We'll just try to produce them with what we've got handy, our clothes.

The easiest way to carve out a narrow hourglass on any frame is to create a column of cloth to provide camouflage, and then superimpose the shape that we want over, by using colored pieces. The fabric for the underlayer should be matte, not shiny. Then, form-producing tops can be layered over. What we don't want is to add a gathered curtain of fabric below the bust, to give the illusion of a thick torso, and a protuberant tummy.

Sweater with Color Block

To be continued.