Drawing Hair and Clothing | 06 |How to Draw Tight Clothing

how to draw tight clothing bikini sketch

How to Draw Tight Clothing: Creases and Folds

Want to learn how to draw tight clothing for your pin up or cartoon characters? You’re in the right place!

This is an enlarged sketch of our earlier drawing where we focused on surface direction and drew a bathing suit.

The right leg is coming forward and we can see the crease where her leg meets the groin. The left leg is behind her, resulting in a different surface direction when the leg meets the groin.

Building Your Subject

When building your subject and learning how to draw tight clothing, keep in mind how the skin stretches and folds based on the pose. In this instance, the woman has larger hips and a small waist.

drawing tight clothing waistlline

The skin stretches as it goes into and comes out of the waist. This same idea will come into play if you start drawing tight clothing on her.

draw pin up art mini skirt

Tighter Fabrics

When it is time to add clothes to your subject, the fabric will play with the surface direction of your person. In this part of our tutorial on how to draw tight clothing, we’re adding a mini skirt.Look at how the skirt, as it crosses the top of the forward thigh, begins to change direction. The “top” of the thigh is the high point of the leg and the skirt begins to change direction.

Likewise on the other leg, the top of the thigh is where the skirt will change direction again as it begins to make the turn around to the rear of the subject.

High Points

If we are drawing a little black dress, then the nipples will be the high point on the bust line.

how to draw pin ups nipple placement

You should keep all of this in mind as you construct your subject, and once you begin drawing the dress you will see how the dress should fit properly.

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Stretching

Once you have established high points, then you can see where the fabric will stretch on your character as you learn how to draw tight clothing.In this example, two areas of note are on the bust line and on the front of the skirt at the bottom as the legs pull in opposite directions.

We hope this article on how to draw tight clothing will help you create awesome costumes for your pin up art and cartoon characters.

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