$125
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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
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Educator, painter, and art historian. Author of Figure Drawing: Design and Invention and Gesture Drawing: Dynamic Movement and Form.
LESSON NOTES
What's in Premium?
In this lesson, I show you how to draw complex drapery by assessing the whole figure instead of isolating individual limbs. We tackle historical clothing to see how different styles and waistlines actually change the proportions of your character. I walk you through building a solid mannequin underneath so you have a reliable base to place your fabric on. You will learn how to map out tension points and identify specific folds like spirals, pipes, half locks, and diapers based on the body's mechanics. By treating fabric just like anatomy, you will understand how to wrap these shapes around forms in perspective without getting lost in unnecessary details.
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DOWNLOADS
half-lock-and-spiral-folds-in-action.mp4
441 MB
half-lock-and-spiral-folds-in-action-transcript-english.txt
15 kB
half-lock-and-spiral-folds-in-action-transcript-spanish.txt
17 kB
half-lock-and-spiral-folds-in-action-captions-english.srt
21 kB
half-lock-and-spiral-folds-in-action-captions-spanish.srt
23 kB
COMMENTS![]()
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Drawing convincing drapery is easier when you stop copying random wrinkles.
Building a solid mannequin lets you map tension points and use pipe folds to describe the volume underneath. This keeps you from slogging through endless rendering.
I feel like I'm doing a little better. I still get overwhelmed with the number of lines when adding the drapery lines over the figure (so I traced over form lines with orange and used green for the dress). I made some tweaks to her figure, too, before doing my final sketch.
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5d
Nice work.
I have a question regarding the folds from the forward coming knee:
Do you think of it like an big pipe like form that just follows the surface of the lower leg and then left and right two big diaper folds left and right connecting back to the hip?
Tangential question What is the etymology of a 'diaper' fold? Is a baby diaper called after this fold classification or the other way round?
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5d
Sure. I think it could be broken down like that for sure.
Haha. I'm not too sure. I picked up the term from Hogarth's "Dynamic Wrinkles and Drapery" book.
