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Clothing is weird, right?

I know when I first started drawing fabric felt very random and nonsensical. I’d just draw lots of random lines to give the idea of folds - and hope no one noticed that I was guessing.

But there is a secret to drawing clothing, and it’s devilishly simple.

The secret to clothing is you have to understand the nature of clothing. That’s right! To defeat your enemy you must UNDERSTAND your enemy!

And because I want to make your life easier, this week I’ll be focusing on a series of micro-tutorials to help you figure out fabric.

With that out of the way, today’s micro-tutorial is…

These are 4 typical ways that clothing tends to react to force. Force is when the fabric is pushed or pulled around by outside “forces”.

Nothing is pushing or pulling the fabric around. This one is easy. Please don’t struggle with drawing a square 😅

This is when something is PULLING the fabric. From the point that’s being pulled (like by a hand) bands of tension will radiate out from the point being pulled to wherever the clothing is attached or resisting (like a shoulder or belt).

This is when something is PUSHING the fabric. As the edges of the clothing get closer to each other you get a kind of zig zag/back n forth pattern.

It can get a little more complex than that. I’ll likely talk about compression more in a later tutorial, but that’s enough for now.

This is when the clothing is ROTATING, usually reacting to the upper edge of the fabric being spun. The lower edge of the fabric will lag behind the upper edge of the fabric - the folds of the fabric will radiate in gentle curves from the top edge to the lower edge (opposite the direction of the twist).

AND there ya go! That’s the basics of pushing and pulling fabric. In the next part I’ll talk about Gravity!

Peace,
Brosatsu