How to Draw Anime/Manga: Folds in Clothes

This tutorial was written by me. All images were all hand drawn by me. For more tutorials like this one, visit my site.

Folds, Creases, Wrinkles... Call them what you want, but if you're wearing clothes, you're gonna to have them. And if you're characters are wearing clothes too, you're gonna have to draw them (unless you want to dress them all in cardboard, thick plastic, metal or some other hard type of material).

Sometimes people stress about what to make their character wear. This is a hard thing to pinpoint, because fashions are always changing over the years, so the best way to give your character a cool looking outfit, is to look at some magazines, newspapers or even the television to see some of the latest trends and styles today.

The most important thing, however, is not to learn what to dress your character, but to learn how to draw the folds that will appear in the outfit you give your character.

To start off we're going to start off with the basic element. Gravity. Gravity affects your clothing because it constantly pulls it down. When you lean forwards, your clothes fall forward with you, and when you lean back, gravity does its job again. When wearing clothes, the material is mainly supported by two areas. One area is your left shoulder, and the other area is your right shoulder. So our first step is too see how gravity affects material that is supported by two areas.

We can see how the material sort of "sinks" when the force of gravity pulls down on it. This can directly be implemented (wow, that's a bit word!) into types of clothings such as shirts and dresses.

Another interesting thing to look at, is how the folds are different for the shirts that men and women wear. Men have flat chests, so the folds would appear like the ones above as there is nothing interfering with the shirt. Women, on the other hand, have breasts, and this greatly affects the way the shirt falls and creates folds. To demonstrate my point, please look at the comparison below. Note: You can also see how the shirt bunches over the belt when it is tucked in.