Live Encore: Drawing Clothes for Comic Characters

1. Introduction: If there's one thing I want you to take away from this class is improving our observational skills to look at an interesting piece of clothing you find on the street and applying that on your artwork and understanding how silhouette is important to make clothes feel real and feel believable. Hi, I'm Gabriel Picolo, I am Brazilian Comic Artists. Right now. I'm working with the Teen Titans at DC Comics. I'm also well-known for my original graphic novel, Icarus and the Sun. Today's class is going to be about clothes for your comic characters. I'm going to go through what's important on a characters wardrobe. I'm going to talk about observation, fashion trends. I'm going to share with you guys like the resources I use when I'm looking into inspiration. I'm going to talk about the silhouette. As you can see from my work, I'm very interested in sneakers and street wear culture. Today I'm going to be doing two different character designs and I invite you to join me. You can draw with me or you can follow the assignments that I am going to leave at the end of the class. For this class, I'm going to be using Mobile Studio Pro, Wacom, [inaudible] software and also Photoshop. I created some templates that you can find at the class resource's section, and you can use them to follow along while you're watching the class. This class was recorded live and I was very happy to interact with the students while I was drawing in this class. All right, let's get to drawing. 2. Clothes Make the Character: Hi, I'm Becca. I'm a producer here at Skillshare and I'll be your host for today's session. Without further ado, let's get started. Hey everyone. Once you get started, I want to show you how a brief of a character design looks like. How I receive a character brief from my writer and I have to draw their wardrobe before even starting to draw the comic. Characters' wardrobe is this thing that I go through on my work before starting the project. Kami Garcia is the writer of the Teen Titans graphic novels, and we came up with that on the go. Because when we worked on Teen Titans: Raven, it was our first graphic novel together. It was her first time writing a graphic novel, it was my first time working on one. We had to connect our creative voices in a way. I had to understand what the characters looked like in her head, and she wanted me to draw the characters from scratch before actually going to the comic, because that will save us a lot of work on the long go. I picked, for you guys, a small description that's like what you would find if you worked with a writer on a graphic novel or a comic. This is what it looks like. This is one of the character descriptions that Kami sent to me before we even start the project. When she sends this, she wants to see maybe two or three sketches from me. So we get to see these characters, envisioning this character as a person. This is the description for Stella. She's a character on Teen Titans: Beast Boy, my most recent graphic novel. I wanted to show you how the description translates into the actual drawing. So matching the description. Stella is a petite girl, brown eyes, brown hair. She dyes her hair blue. She has this tomboy vibe, funky, athletic. She's shorter than Gar. I try to put all of this information into these four sketches. This is a wardrobe for Garfield, for Beast boy before I even start the book. I'm going for a regular guy not trying too hard. He's a vegan, so I tried to incorporate that on this T-shirt. He's into dinosaurs so I tried to incorporate that as well. You can see where all that goes. Of course, he loves sneakers, so I drew the signature sneakers that he never changes. This is a character concept for Raven. What we were going for here was like goth girl but not way too model or not way too dressed up. Because Raven had to feel like a teenager so we had to had a wardrobe that would be real to her budget. Kami asked me not to put too many accessories, not too many fancy clothing on her. So that's the importance of creating a wardrobe for a character before even starting the project. Because it saves us a lot of time, it makes us see these characters as people before even making the finals. Let's start. What I'm going for with these characters is, for the first one, I'm going for a grungy summary vibe. For the second one, I'm going for a jock vibe. I give myself these assignments before drawing characters so I know what references I should look into, what vibe I'm going for the characters. 3. Outlining: Sporty Character: For our first example, I'm going to start with the male character with a sporty look. One thing I love to do on characters is draw what's most trendy in fashion. Fashion is something that became important to me after I became a sneaker-head. It seeped in because I started collecting sneakers and at the same time I started getting into streetwear. I'm always following trends. One trend that I notice recently is baggy clothes are back, oversized clothes. I think it's a callback from the 2000s, maybe not, but that's definitely something that's back, the baggy clothes. That's the sort of clothing that I'm going to draw on this jock character. I'm not going for the varsity jacket style. I'm going more for a basketball jock. Baggy clothes. One thing that I've noticed working with a colorist on my graphic novels is I always try to make some interesting print [inaudible] t-shirts because it's boring to color plain t-shirts. I'm definitely going to add a print on this shirt. How do you think about how the fabric is supposed to drape and interact with the body as you're drawing? Do you think about what the fabric is? What type it is? How heavy it is? How do you make it look real? If there's an excess of fabric, like on this character, there's not going to be a lot of wrinkles on it. Let's say it is super tight t-shirt, it's going to add to the natural shape of the character's body, and it's going to have a lot of wrinkles. If the body bends, let's say shoulders, chest, division from chest to the torso, whenever there's connections you're going to see a little wrinkle if the shirt is super tight. Wrinkle here. This is super tight t-shirt. Can you see the difference? A baggy one is not going to have a lot of wrinkles in it, just like some main ones, so we can't see where it's attaching on the body. I feel like not only are these baggy 2000s callbacks coming on, also sporty wear is a trend right now. I'm talking about what I see on the streets. I'm in Brazil, I'm in San Paulo, but possibly can see something like that in New York and LA because most of the fashion influence that I follow are from these places. Gabriel, can you talk a little bit about how you decide where to put the folds in the clothes when they're a lot looser. Is it the same rules just different, or do the folds go in different places when the fabric is really loose? No, when it's loose, you just have to be careful because you just got to draw the main wrinkles. You don't have to draw all of them. We can see on this character, there's almost no wrinkles on this cloth. Just like this one because the body is bending over here, and that's it. I can even make the t-shirt even wider. We can see it's almost covering the entirety of his arm. That will be my tip for baggy clothing. Don't exaggerate on the wrinkles. They're going to be there but only on the main bends. Let's say this character is wearing a baggy sweater. There's a lot of wrinkles on the connection of his elbow because the weight is over there. Same rule for the t-shirt, not a lot of wrinkles, and then at the end where the weight is, you're going to see. What brush are you using right now to do your outlining? This is the default airbrush from Paint Tool SAI. I don't know if you guys know that, but I learned how to draw yesterday using Paint Tool SAI. I grew myself attached to this software because it's really beginner-friendly, I love it. The brush is super smooth. I do all my coloring on Photoshop. We're going to switch back to Photoshop at the end of the class. But as far as linework goes, I always use Paint Tool SAI. Now my favorite part, which is drawing sneakers. I can spend the rest of the class here, but I'll try to go as fast as I can. Going back to [inaudible] , everyone ask me how do I draw the sneakers. Well, the thing is, you have to try to capture the slew art of sneakers, so let's see. Of course, I'm drawing basketball sneaker on him. What I do is I try to capture the slew up before adding the details. One of the advice that I gave you when it comes to sneakers is you can always try to envision the soles of the shoes. Then you can build the sneakers from top, on top of it. It's another method I use sometimes. Do you ever use a particular skew or item of clothing that you see in real life and just translate that directly onto a character or do you always make up new pieces of clothing? All the time. I rely a lot on observation. Whenever I'm on the street, whenever I go for a walk to do anything and I always like looking at my surroundings and trying to capture what's going on, what people are wearing. I wouldn't say I create anything, I just save everything on a mental library. At some point it becomes second nature, you're just used to doing it. Which is why I think exercising observation is so important for clothing. I remember my first time in New York City which was when I recorded my first Skillshare class. I was amazed by people's style because it was so different from anything I've ever seen. I almost felt like sitting at a McDonald's and drawing people who were passing by because everyone's so stylish in a way or another. We've gotten some questions on shape language and how you think about shape language when you're drawing when you're creating your wardrobe, and how you connect it to your characters. Can you talk a little bit about that? Sure. I think shape language is the same thing that I meant with silhouette. It's like having elements play together on a character. One thing that I've noticed that is very much a trend is the chunky sneakers and I absolutely love them. Why are they a trend? Why the influencers and the fashion bloggers love them so much? Because it gives a very specific silhouette to our bodies. People wear shorts and they have their skin naked and then at the end they wear the sneakers which are super chunky. It creates this shape which I think is very cool. You can see here I increased the size of the shoes because it didn't felt right even it was way too connected to his feet but it didn't feel right as the sneaker I'm trying to portray. You can play around with that. Exaggerate on the clothing until it feels right. I think that adds up to the silhouette thing and to the shape language. Gabriel. Do you have any tips on specifically how you make your characters memorable? Yes. One thing that I try to do is, I try to create one or two points of interest. Going back to Goa. You can see with all these clothing, I'm focusing on one or two things tops. Because if there is too many points of attention if there's too many logos if there's too many accessories, I think it's overkill. It's way too much. It can be perceived as trying too hard to be a memorable character design and it can fall short. Instead of creating a memorable character, you create a very forgettable one. You can see here, he is wearing basically, regular clothes but he has a super cool print on his t-shirt that you can spend time looking at and his knickers are cool too. That's two point of interest at tops. On this one, he's wearing regular clothes and then he has a bomber jacket with some cool patches on it and that's where you'll spend time looking at, and that's it. That's one thing that I think it works for my characters. I wouldn't say it's a rule of thumb, it's a golden rule but I think it's something that you can try to incorporate, creating one or two main focus, main points of interests on your character and try not to overdo because that's the thing that I see a lot on character design. I'm doing this again on this character because he looks super basic but I'm going to do an interesting print on his t-shirt. I think there's only so much our eyes can perceive when we are looking at a character. You can either make a very interesting hairstyle or a very interesting piece of clothing but never too much. With my own characters curves in the sun which they are basically naked but I have the fact that the sun is made of fire. There's always her hair flowing around and Eclipse is mainly made of walks, so he's always dripping. I have this point of interest on these characters, so that rule still applies even if they're not wearing any clothes. Have another question for you. How do you find a balance between style and practicality? Especially for characters that have a lot of action and need to be able to move around a lot. Another very good question. One thing that I learned doing comics is, that I will never do a super complex t-shirt on a character because I know that I'll have to draw that same t-shirt over and over again. Looking at a t-shirt on a character sheet, on a character design looks awesome, it looks incredible but when you have to draw that character over and over, it can be tiresome. One rule of thumb is, whatever you're drawing has to look good from afar. Because let's say, I'm going to draw a character on a panel the character is like this size, the size of a nail head. You have to at least know who that character is. I'm not going to draw suns of small details on it because it won't be visible, I'll just be wasting time. That's a good rule of thumb. Imagine that character on a super tiny panel. Will that accessory, will that piece of garment be recognizable? Then you can draw it. If not, you're probably wasting time. That goes back to silhouette because whatever is showing up on the silhouette, let's say, the character has a cool piece of armor on one shoulder, that definitely is going to show when he's tiny on the screen, so it's worth putting there. Just an example. Let's go to character number one. 4. Outlining: Beachy Character: As I said, I'm going for a grown G summery vibe on this one. Imagine a girl who lives in California. That's the look I'm going for. Gabriel, we've gotten some questions about how to draw dresses. I don't know what your plan is with this character. But any advice you have around dresses, heels, sounds like those kinds of clothes have a lot of questions around them. Okay. Those are not clothes I usually like drawing. But the general advice I can give on dresses is study drapery. If you just type on Google drapery, you're going to see a lot of clothing flowing around. Just save any of those images and try to replicate it. That's going to give you the general look of how a dress should flow like. Let's see. She's wearing a dress, and it starts over here. It's usually not very interesting for me because you'll just be drawing drapery, folding over and over and over. That's why I don't draw dresses a lot, as you can see on my work. That's basically it, drawing clothing flowing with the shape of the character's body. Heels is a little bit more complicated because you have to change the shape of the character's foot because it's not going to be plain on the ground. Let's see. The shape of the feet will be like this before you start the silhouette of the heels, and that's why it's so complicated. We had a question about necklines and any advice about placing them correctly so they look realistic? On guys, usually, it's not going to go too far from the circumference of the neck. Usually, it doesn't show any of the trapezium unless it's a tank top. That's like a shirt and t-shirts, and then everything else is going to stop on the neckline. But if he's wearing a tank, it's going to show just a little bit of this bond over here. I don't know the name in English. That will be like a tank top. You can totally go wild like that. I've seen tank tops that go like this, showing almost the full shirts of the guy. Usually, Jim Burrows use shirts like that. With regard to the general rule of tank is stopping over here where the neck ends. With girls, you can go a little bit wider. They can stop on the neck, but the most that I've seen goes over this way. Make sure they're a little bit more of the neck and then this bone over here, the one that connect on the shoulder. I forgot the name of this bone. I'm super sorry for that. Collarbone. Thank you so much, Chloe. Collarbone. In Portuguese, it's called clavicula. Totally different. We had a few questions about layering clothing and how you deal with when clothes layer over each other. I usually don't do overlap layers. Or else, you can say the advice to avoid layering, then that's okay too. I think that the one advice I have for layering is, be considerate of what the clothing beneath what you're putting on top of is. Let's say if I added a jacket on this character over here and he's wearing a super baggy t-shirt, he's probably going to look super-large because he's already due with that over-sized t-shirt. Let's see. It will have to be an over-sized jacket or whatever because the shirt that he's wearing beneath it is super large. His [inaudible] is going to look gigantic. See, I can't pretend that he's not wearing a super over-sized t-shirt. I have to respect that first level of clothing that's already there. With the first character example, the clothing that she is wearing beneath the t-shirt is super tied to her body, so that's not a problem. That's also an advice when doing layering. If you're going to put something baggie on top, put something tight underneath. Here in Brazil, we use a lot of flip-flops because it's warm all the time, but I've noticed, as a fashion trend, that we are moving to slippers. At least here in San Paolo, I've seen much more slippers than I've seen flip-flops, which is insane because, we Brazilians, we wear flip-flops a lot. I think that's it for the first character. Now, we're going to color this. That's the fun part. 5. Coloring Your Clothes: After the linework is done, we're going to start coloring. What I usually do, I go from PaintTool SAI and I open Photoshop. Another thing I wanted to mention is, I know what color schemes I'm going for, but please save your reference. Feel free to use reference, I use it all the time and I know that this is a huge debate on the artistic community if you should or should not use reference, and I don't know where I would be without reference. You can see on my computer, that's a very common picture on my phone or on my computer. If I'm drawing a sneaker or anything, I just take a picture, and that goes for color palettes. I have an entire folder, just also like reference for clothing. That's something I usually recommend you all to do. Do you make a separate layer for each color that you add? Not really, I just create two or three layers just to separate elements that are close to one another. For this character, I'm probably creating three layers so that I can lock the layers and color on top of them. Even though I try to be as organized as I can with layers when I'm finishing out a full-on illustration, I tend to end with 100 or 150 layers, it's crazy, and that's because I don't merge them, I'm not organized at all. One layer for the skin, I'm opening a layer on top of it for the clothing. How do you think about the color palette that you're going to be using to pull together the clothing and the skin and everything, and decide on the colors that you're going to use? Going back for the theme that I'm going with these characters, the first girl is supposed to be a summerly vibe, so I am going for pastoral, pinks, probably, summerly happy colors. With the guy, I'm going for something not too fashion-forward, more with the basic colors because he's a jock, he's not super fashioning. I'm probably doing something interesting with his t-shirt, doing some interesting print so that he has this little cuff, not trying too hard but also not boring. If the jock looks too boring, I may try to change his hair color, make a blue or something. There's one thing that I always consider when drawing characters, is their hair color and how that's going to interfere with the rest of the clothing because I dyed my green blueish and it was awful because I was always wearing black because I didn't want to pick any other colors because there was always too much information over here. I always have that in mind. Let's say when I'm doing Starfire, Starfire is multiple colors on her hair, and you can see on my drawings that I'm always having her wear basic white t-shirts because there's already a lot of information over here. What brush are you using now, Abril? Default brushes will. I don't tend to use different brushes, I'm probably going to use one very specific brush when I add in final touches, but I'm not a guy who usually change brushes a lot because it's just too much information for me, not my style. I usually have one or two special brushes for textures and stuff like that, and I can share that with the class later. You talked a little bit about too much information, not enough information, how do you decide, this is too much or this is not enough? Is it just a judgment call looking at it or do you have a formula or a best practice that you tend to follow? It's totally judgment, but I go back to the rule of thumb to add one or two main points of attention. If I do two points of attention, I try to make them separate, let's say one point of attention is on the hair of the character, and there's a lot of detail, a lot of colors, and then the other point of attention is on their footwear, that usually works for me, or on their bag or stuff like that. Abril, we got a question about your hand glove, is it just so it doesn't interfere with the tablet? Yes, because this tablet specifically, I'm using a MobileStudio Pro and I don't know if you guys have this equipment, but if you do, you know that it gets super hot, because if I use my bare hand, it starts to get sweaty and it's gross. Why do you color in Photoshop instead of staying where you were at first of all? That's mainly because of Photoshop's resources. It's a really good software. It lags a lot, it has a lot of problems, but it has too many resources that PaintTool SAI simply doesn't have. You're going to see at the end of this illustration, the final touches, I do everything on Photoshop, and those things don't even exist on PaintTool SAI. So it's not even worth finishing my drawing there. That's my process of thinking. It's not even coloring itself, it's more like the final details. At the end of this, I'm going to add the noise effect that I always do on my drawings, and that's only on Photoshop. I know that you can probably do that on Procreate. I've heard that they have a lot of new resources, but I've never tried Procreate, so I can't comment on it. 6. Adjusting & Adding Details: Finally, we can make some final tweets, some final adjustments to make these characters come to life. Here's one thing that I use a lot, selective color. That's like my huge-made secret for coloring because I don't know shit about coloring, but I use selective color a lot. What's that? It's at the bottom over here, I think you can see it in Photoshop, it's this round ball thing. You can create an adjustment layer. I'm going to create an adjustment layer for coloring, which is selective color. With this, I can change the shade of blue on the character's head so that it matches a little bit better the rest of the color scheme. There you go. You can see the difference. Right now it's a little bit more related to the rest of it. By the way, the colors, I'm looking at my shared screen on my Mac, it's completely different from what I have on my mobile studio, so you probably better trust me at the end result of it. Because I just looked at it and it has nothing to do with what's it's on my screen right now. But that's okay. I know that happens. I think the advice still stands. Some people have asked if you ever use Procreate or if they don't know Photoshop, what should they use? Photoshop is the opposite of a beginner-friendly software because it has too many resources. Until you learn what's specific for artists, it can take a while, it can be intimidating. The one software that I recommend a lot is Clip Studio. I think you can see, I have it on my computer over here. It's really great, especially if you're doing comics because it has very specific tools that PaintTool SAI and Photoshop don't have, like creating panels, creating balloons, dialog, and it has almost the same color resources as Photoshop. I'm just too lazy to get used to Clip Studio. I'm just so used with Photoshop, that's why I don't finish my drawing there. But it's just as good as Photoshop if you're starting out, and it's less confusing. Because Photoshop was created for basically everything, and we artists, we are trying to use just a small portion of the software. There's been a lot of questions about how you do the detail on the shirt that you've been talking about, like how do you choose the color for the detail? If you're going to add detail to the shirt, how do you align it with the wrinkles? How do you make sure it's not too detailed? I think I'm going to try adding a tie-dye print on top of the guy's T-shirt. Let's see how that goes. I downloaded this template online. You can totally find it, just type tie-dye print. By the way, tie-dye is a thing that made a comeback on 2019. That's why I have this template saved on my computer. It's not even for this class, I just had it. I'm going to copy it. Control A, Control C, Control V. There are many ways that I can attach this template on his T-shirt. I'm doing like the easiest, laziest one. I'm just creating a clipping mask on top of it. See create clipping mask on the layer on top of where I colored his T-shirt. Now I'm just going to play around with the adjustment layers that I talked about before. That's my biggest secret to coloring. That's what I do all the time. I just play around with these until I find the result that I like. Right now it's too pink. I'm going to do pink on the other character. Hold on. I'm just going to select just the shirt so that I don't get any unexpected results. I'm doing this with the Lasso Tool on Photoshop. I just selected with the Lasso Tool and I'm going to Adjustment Layers. Let's adjust the saturation because I don't like the pink. I'm going with this turquoise kind of blue aqua. Reduce the saturation because it's too much. Now I'm adding another adjustment layer on the same shirt with the same selection. I'm doing curves. Curves is just like contrast. You change how dark and light things are. I'm making the print a little bit darker so it's more noticeable. Then again, the colors on the screen that I'm looking at on my Mac are completely different than the ones that I have. So just trust me on this. We've also got some questions about how if you're going to add text, do you draw it on, do you use a font, how do you deal with the wrinkles of the material when you went to add a text? That's a really, really nice question too because I add text all the time, especially in comics drawing. Let's say I want the shirt to say Nashville, which by the way is the shirt that I drew on this boy yesterday. I just typed it with the fonts that Photoshop has its feature. I am not sure if Clip Studio has it. It probably does. I'm just going to free transform the font on the T-shirt. Here's a pro tip. If you want to really deformed the font that you are using, you can Control T, which is free transform. It can Command T if you're using a Mac. Then you go to this icon over here on the screen and see that it's on custom. It can be any kind of deformation, but I usually do custom because it has like I have more freedom to transform it the way that I like. So take a look at the logo over here. Let's see. I wanted to make it more roundy. I can make it the shape that I want. I use these a lot. Apply, and that's it. I just did the selective colored thing again. I just change my brush too. Usually when I'm shading I use a soft brush. Are you shading onto a specific shading layer or straight onto your already colored layers? On the top of my skin layer. I just locked that layer that lock over here. You can see that square thing. You lock it, and then you are free to do whatever you want on top of it. For the text on the T-shirt, how come you didn't worry about the folds that goes through the word Nashville like it doesn't need to be distorted there at all? That's [inaudible] , actually. It can be distorted but people usually don't notice that. But it can totally be distorted if I wanted to. Hold on. There you go. But that like you do it if you want. But whoever noticed that has a very, very good eye. What brush are you using to shade now? It's still the same default brush, but now it's the soft one. Not the hard edges, it's the soft edges. How do you decide the shading color that you're going to use, Gabriel? On this case, the color palette for this character is going towards blue. So I'm just trying to make the shading cooler than the color does. That's actually happening, so I just added red and I went for the red shadow that was the coolest, so they attached so the color pattern makes more sense. Like I said, if I am not sure of what I'm doing, I just use selective color or curves or view saturation, those adjustment colors, the adjustment layers until I find something that I like. I'll show you how I do the noise texture that I like so much. I selected the whole area that I color my character. I'm going to create a new layer on top of it all and paint it with a middle gray. There you go. Then I come here in Filter, Noise, Add Noise. These are the configurations. It's Gaussian blur or Gaussian noise. The amount is 400 percent. The most you can put on. It's going to look fussy like this. Then the final touch is Filter, Gallery. You go to Brush Strokes, Spatter. The thing that spatter is going to do, it's going to make the noise less grainy and more like an effect. The green is not going to be as tiny, it's going to be a little bit bigger. There you go. Then you change that layer that you did all of this. You change this to overlay. That's it. I just used 30, 20 percent opacity and that's the effect that I get. 7. Final Thoughts: Thank you so much for joining today. I had so much fun. I hope to do more of this. I hope that today's class helped you just a little bit into creating characters clothing and understanding a bit more of my process too. I have a fun assignment for you all. You can find some templates that I created for you at the Class Resources section. You're going to use those to create a very specific look. I'm going for a skater. The character uses a skateboard and he's liking to skate culture. Well, that's one. The second one, I want to see any boy or any girl or it can be a non-binary character also, but it's like it has that new golf vibe that we're seeing. I would love to see your work. Whether you follow the class or you created your own characters, you're welcome to share them at the project gallery. If you want to dive deeper into character design, you can totally check out my other class at Skillshare that goes through the poses or how to create poses for your characters. Thanks again for watching this class. I had a ton of fun, and hope to see you around.