How Masters Drew Inert Folds and Wrinkles
$125
Bundle discount Each additional course part in your cart adds 3% off all courses, up to 15% off.
Full course
Learn the basics for how to draw a variety of clothing and drapery. Master the 7 basic folds and understand how fabric interacts with the human figure.
$125
Give a gift
Give a gift card for art students to use on anything in the Proko store.
Or gift this course:
Educator, painter, and art historian. Author of Figure Drawing: Design and Invention and Gesture Drawing: Dynamic Movement and Form.
comments 3
My notes and draw along from today’s lesson. I like the function and design based approach to inert folds.
The work through the folds has made them so much more accessible to me as a framework for assessing what I’m seeing. I’ve ‘learned’ the 7 folds a couple of times before now but kind of as separate pieces and not with the framework and examples of how to think about applying them.
LESSON NOTES
What's in Premium?
Inert folds are lifeless piles of fabric that do not describe the action or form of the body. Think of a shirt tossed on the floor. Because they lack tension, they can be frustrating to draw and often distract from your main subject. In this lesson, I show you how to handle these tricky folds. We look at a master study of Degas to see how you can use inert folds and wrinkles to tell a story, show environmental conditions like humidity, and give your figures a sense of heavy weight. You will learn exactly when to omit these folds, how to use them to establish a ground plane, and the specific lighting conditions where you should draw texture.
Get this lesson and more in the premium course!
DOWNLOADS
how-masters-drew-inert-folds-and-wrinkles.mp4
539 MB
how-masters-drew-inert-folds-and-wrinkles-transcript-english.txt
17 kB
how-masters-drew-inert-folds-and-wrinkles-transcript-spanish.txt
18 kB
how-masters-drew-inert-folds-and-wrinkles-captions-english.srt
23 kB
how-masters-drew-inert-folds-and-wrinkles-captions-spanish.srt
25 kB
COMMENTS![]()
![Steven Michael Hampton]()
![]()
![Josh Fiddler]()
![]()
![Josh Fiddler]()
![]()
![Chazz President of Birds]()
Lifeless fabric can easily ruin your drawing.
Inert folds and wrinkles do not describe active form. You should only use them to ground the mannequin or tell a story about the environment before they become a messy distraction.
The reminder about textures being more meaningful to story was great. I remember doing the Draw a Box texture challenges and having to draw just the form shadows of the forms that make up the texture and the bit about half-tones levelled that up. Direct light washes out, the form shadows of larger forms obscures it, so where the larger forms move away from the light are where they'll show up. From there you can use them to soften and lose edges and create areas of contrast. Another great lesson!
Oh, and. regarding the use of 'terminator'. I'm also old but new-ish to lighting but have a science background. In my experience, "terminator" refers to the _boundary_ between light and shadow and so is neither. For instance, when you observe the moon at anything but full or new, the terminator is just the hard edge between what you can see in the light and what you can't see in the shadow : a line. On the moon it helps you see the shapes of craters and other things. So, using it to describe the core shadow therefore doesn't make sense so keep on using that. Not that you needed me to say so, just thought I'd bring some clarity.
My notes and draw along from today’s lesson. I like the function and design based approach to inert folds.
The work through the folds has made them so much more accessible to me as a framework for assessing what I’m seeing. I’ve ‘learned’ the 7 folds a couple of times before now but kind of as separate pieces and not with the framework and examples of how to think about applying them.
