Drawing Realistic Clothes

One of the things I’ve always found hard to do was painting clothes. Drawing clothes in general really and ever since I started digital painting and drawing realistically, I found myself avoiding clothes. For example I would draw portraits and focus more on the face rather then the body and clothes. Well my good people that has changed!

I found a free ebook online that shows you how to draw like the pros in photoshop. I have read over a few times and I think I’m getting better.  I read it a while back and I didn’t really understand it and when I read it this time around, I understood it a little better but I accidentally ventured away from it kind of haha

Here are my attempts!

Attempt #1:

This is the first time I ever tried drawing realistic clothing by following the directions. I just thought where the shadows and the highlights of the woman’s body would be and I just used that as a guide. I just drew in where her body was and her hair just to give her form, I really wanted to just concentrate on the dress.

Attempt #2:

I’ve realized that a problem I have with drawing realistically, I tend to zoom in on a certain spot and work on it so much to make it realistic that when I zoom out, it looks out of place. That’s what I think happened with the folds on the red dress around where her leg is pushing the fabric, in the middle of the train.  I know that all I have to do to fix it is just bring the rest of the drawing up to speed with that area but I find that challenging. I prefer to keep all my work on the same page but sometimes I get ahead of myself. That’s ok though; I’ll get better at this some day haha.

By the way, if you want to check out the ebook on how to draw clothes yourself, follow this link and download it for free. =)