Character and Clothing: An Introduction to Drawing Expressive Outfits | Ira Marcks | Skillshare
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Character and Clothing: An Introduction to Drawing Expressive Outfits

teacher avatar Ira Marcks, Graphic Novelist

Watch this class and thousands more

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Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Introduction

      1:17

    • 2.

      Overview

      4:15

    • 3.

      Chapter 1: Tension & Fold

      4:31

    • 4.

      Chapter 2: T-Shirts

      9:32

    • 5.

      Chapter 3: Button-Ups

      4:07

    • 6.

      Chapter 4: The Hoodie

      4:49

    • 7.

      Chapter 5: Poncho & Skirt

      2:53

    • 8.

      Chapter 6: Pants & Shorts

      5:45

    • 9.

      Wrap It Up!

      0:53

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About This Class

Learn to draw clothing for stylized characters!

Through a series of bite size lessons you'll learn how two simple principles, TENSION and FOLD, can help create a wide variety of outfits. Grab a sketchbook (digital or traditional) and let award-winning graphic novelist Ira Marcks take you on a journey to become a more creative and confident illustrator. See you in class!

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Ira Marcks

Graphic Novelist

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Ira Marcks is an award-winning and New York Times recommended cartoonist. His love of strange fiction and scientific research has led to an unlikely list of collaborators including the Hugo Award-winning magazine Weird Tales, European Research Council, and a White House Fellowship Scientist. His online courses have inspired 100,000 students. iramarcks.com

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Transcripts

1. Introduction: When it comes to designing a character, a well drawn outfit can be just as expressive as well in expression. By learning a few simple ways to illustrate fools intention that make clothing come to life, an illustrator is able to bring more personality and motion to their characters. Hi. My name is Ira Mark. I'm a graphic novelist, and I spend a lot of my time drawing characters in the clothing that they wear. Today, I want to share with you six simple bite sized lessons on creating very common clothing items. By setting aside a little time each day to focus on one of these lessons, within a week, you'll be well on your way to drawing your own stylized clothing. As a top teacher here on skill share and creator of nearly 20 classes at this point, I know character design can be an overwhelming topic. That's why I think it's really helpful to focus on a single subject, like clothing design. It's a great way to build some technical skills and also level up your creative process. Alright, fellow illustrators, grab your sketch books, digital or traditional, and let's create some outfits that fit. 2. Overview: Thanks for joining me here today. Great to see you. I'm really excited to share with you these important principles on clothing design. Things I honestly wish I knew years and years ago. And I know clothing design can be a big, complicated topic, like anything in illustration. So I wanted to do my best to boil it down to a couple simple principles that we can recall every time we sit down to draw a garment. And those two principles are attention and fold. And we're going to look at those over and over again and apply them to different styles of effts. Once you understand these two ideas, you'll be well on your way to drawing outfits that improve your character illustrations visually and narratively. Now, like all my classes, each chapter is going to lead you line by line through my drawings. Together, we'll review the most common clothing items a character might have in their closet. Each chapter is not only a technical breakdown of a particular garment, but it's a lesson in utilizing tension enfold in visual storytelling. So how can you participate in this class? It's pretty simple. First, I recommend watching, listening, doodling, and taking notes along with the video lessons. Once you've watched the whole class and absorbed the basic information, I recommend going back, setting aside 15 to 30 minutes each day to focus on one of the six chapters. Use your sketch pad to practice your illustrations at your own pace. And once you practice all the different styles of garments, you'll have nearly a full week of creative routine on this one topic. And that amount of time is actually just enough to start to change your creative process in your mind, and therefore in your hand. You style will evolve as you absorb some of these techniques, they'll become second nature, and it won't be so hard to implement these new concepts. So a week with this topic is a great way to get a foothold on these big ideas. Since this class is all about building some technical skills and not creating a finished piece of art, when it comes to the class project, I want to make it super easy for you to post some work and get some constructive feedback from me if you're interested in that. So, all you have to do is create a simple drawing of a character wearing an outfit, inspired by the class. The illustration can be a full body portrait or just the upper part of the torso. You can work in color or in black and white. It's up to you. No class project is ever really set in stone. You're always welcome to go in and update the post, and I'll get a notification about it. So as you build on your project throughout the course of a week, a month, however long, you're able to set aside time to focus on clothing design. I'll be checking in regularly to C cheer you on, see how you're doing and offer some feedback, whatever you need from me. Now, let's talk about some resources that come along with the class. To help you stay focused on clothing design, I've created some templates of body types, and they play two roles in your class project. One, they're going to give you guidelines that help you track the shape and form of the human body, as well as points of tension for your garments. Things you might not necessarily know, even if you have a little understanding of human anatomy. And the second use for these templates is to draw right on top of them. You can print them out and draw over them or import them as a separate layer into your drawing app. Whatever lets you focus on clothing design. I know we're coming at this from all different artistic level. So if character, anatomy, and proportion and things like that, plus clothing design is too overwhelming, feel free to draw right on top of these templates. Posting your work, posting questions in the discussion tab right next to the Projects and Resources tab, these are the things that bring this class to life. My videos are just the starting off point. It needs to be a conversation. The things you make are going to inspire me to cover topics in my next class, other students to create their own work and share it, it becomes a community, right? And I think that's a pretty cool thing. So share away, and I'll be there to chat with you. Okay. All that said, Fellow illustrators, it's time to get drawing. 3. Chapter 1: Tension & Fold: The first step in learning to draw expressive clothing is to understand how fabric tension is created. Fabric tension leads to folds and folds express character. Pretty straightforward. Now let's start by looking at a single point of tension just to see how fabric interacts with the surface. Imagine you're standing in front of a clean white wall with a nail stuck in it. Now let's take a shoelace and drape it across that nail. See that peak that happens when the fabric stretches away from the nail. That's fabric tension. Fabric tension is the expression of an adaptable material interacting with a solid surface. Now let's add a second nail. Between these two points of tension, we see the shoelace starts to drape. This is an example of a very simple fold. Now our shoelace begins to feel capable of expression. Okay. Let's add a third nail. By adding a third point of tension, we start to understand the shoelace even better. We understand its weight and its structure by the way it interacts with the nail. And different shoe laces made of different materials, will respond to these three points of tension in different ways. This ability to react to environment, that's the essence of character. And if you're like me and believe that adding expressive character to even the simplest form is the ultimate goal of any illustration, we're already finding success in our process. Now, let's set aside this shoelace and move on to something with more surface area. How about a simple silk scarf? If I draw the scarf like this, it looks like it's laying flat on a table. There's not much opportunity for character here. So Let's hang it on the wall from a single nail. When we draw the scarf now, first, we want to illustrate the outer edge of the scarf. Then we draw some simple lines converging towards the nail. These lines represent the folds that happen when the scarf falls in on itself. The weight of the material responding to gravity. This expression is made much more clear by illustrating the other edges of the scarf with simple step like folds, and we can add even more depth with some shading on the innermost folds. Here we have the core of this creative process. This is the thing we're going to do over and over as this class goes on and gets a little more complicated. But it always comes back to this one basic idea. First, establish a point of tension. Second, show the folds that emerge from that point of tension. Let's bring in that second nail. Two points of tension have been established. The silk scarf is given a bit of slack between the two outer points, and this allows for folds to sweep across the surface, zig zagging from point of tension to point of tension. The zig zags become tighter, the closer they are to the points of tension, but they spread out and eventually dissipate as we move further down the scarf. To see these folds, it's often helpful to illustrate them as triangles. That way, the character of the scarf is very clear. But if you want to be more subtle with your line art, you can reduce this triangle shape to just a simple shading technique, like I'm doing here with this hatching. Now let's move these two points of tension closer together and see what happens. The scarf must respond. Again, we are evoking its character. Now, with more slack, the points of tension are more forceful and the zigzag more swoopy than sweeping. Now, this specific piece of fabric I'm illustrating has particular qualities about it. Silk is light and airy, but other kinds of fabric will respond differently to tension and create their own unique types of folds. To study different materials, I recommend looking at still life paintings as those reveal the nature of fabric and how it can play a very expressive role in any illustrative composition. Now, in this class, we're focusing on the subject of clothing. In these examples, we see that the character of clothing supports the identities of the characters who wear it. Creating a sense of story helps us create structure for our illustrative choices and narrow our options, thus making our job a little bit easier. 4. Chapter 2: T-Shirts: First piece of clothing we're going to study is the basic T shirt. So let's look at its parts. It's anatomy, if you will. And thanks to the help of these little pinkish dotted lines, we'll figure out how the parts of the shirt relate to the human form. Okay, shirt anatomy, begins with the collar. The collar set between the front and back panel of the shirt, and it tilts slightly forward, creating an oval shape for the neck. The shirt is made up of two panels, and along the top edge of the shoulder, you'll see these two symmetrical lines sit at the peak of the shoulder. And if the shirt fits right, these panels will terminate at the far edge of the shoulder itself. The sleeves are short because it's a T shirt, and these arc lines represent the seam of the sleeve. And now let's look at the parts of the body that fit below this shirt. Even though we can't see these things, they are very important to understand as we plan tension and fold in our shirt design. So let's know where the waist of our character is. It sits somewhere in the lower third of the shirt. The waist is a part of the torso that contracts and expands depending on your character's body type. And this line that represents the chest is kind of the outer point of the chest, and it sits right between the bottom seams of the sleeves. Again, this area, like the wait, can expand and contract, and the seams are two very important points of tension. The shoulders are also another point of tension, though it's not quite as strong. And often it's good to know the length of the shirt because it can affect the overall weight of the garment, and therefore change our tension points and our folds. So with this basic understanding of T shirt anatomy, let's grab our human templates and put some shirts on them. I'm going to work from left to right here, so we're going to start with a full front view of a T shirt on this figure, working from the collar, shoulder seams, sleeves to the front panel. When drawing the outer edge of a piece of clothing, it's important to convey the roundness of the form with this kind of edge of a cylinder type line that you see on the bottom of the collar, the sleeves, and the main panel of the shirt. This T shirt has a fitted cut, meaning it's designed to show off kind of subtly the curves of the body. Therefore, the sides of the panel, come in just a bit right at the waist. Now let's talk about the points of tension and the folds that come from them. Tension happens at two distinct spots creating two distinct types of folds. First, as I mentioned earlier, we have tension at the bottom seam of the sleeve. This is the strongest point of tension. And these folds spiral out from these points of tension. Thus the name a spiral fold. You'll notice just so slightly, they curve around the sleeve. And if you were to follow them up, they would curve kind of like a barbershop pole. It's important to remember that word spiral. If you just draw them as a single dashed line, you'll imply a flatter surface, and you don't want that if you're trying to convey the round form of the figure. Now, if your character has a larger chest, you can simply expand these spiral folds and stretch them out further. The next type of fold occurs due to tension points across the front of the chest. Now, above the chest line is smooth fabric that comes down from that top edge of the shoulder, straight across the chest, that's generally a smooth area. But once we come across the outermost point of the chest and go down, the fabric hangs in what's called a pipe fold. Unlike the zigzag folds, we saw in the scarf early on, the pipe fold is generally linear. They go straight down. Think of it a bit like a pole with a curtain hanging on it. Though there's a little bit more ebb and flow. The term pipe fold recalls a cylindrical form. And if you want to add shading that evokes that, you can go ahead and do that. But I'm just using some simple lines to evoke a sense of shadow. On the topic of line, it's important to consider your choice of line, and in fact, how many lines you choose to use to represent tension fold. As illustrators, we know that leaving out detail is as important as adding detail, and it's up to you to find the right formula for your own distinct style. I lean toward simplicity, as my work as a comic artist requires me to draw characters over and over again to complete a project. It's never just one drawing of a character. So instinctually, getting caught up in details is kind of against my nature because it can really slow down my process. Therefore, I have a practical reason for simplicity. But it's also true that when working with heavy line art, like I am here, these black heavy lines, implying just a few moments of tension unfold, make for a better composition overall because we don't want to draw focus too far away from the main story of the character, which is seen in the character's face. So while we're focusing on clothing design right now, you don't want to overdraw your clothing when applying this to an actual project. Now let's move on to the three quarter view of this character, and we're going to swap the shirt. Instead of the fitted shirt, let's try an oversized T shirt. The shirt is a lot longer, and therefore, a little heavier. And you'll see how it affects the tension and folds in the design. In this three quarter view, you want to notice the length of the sleeves are closer to our elbows, and also our shoulder seams drip down over the actual shoulder of the character. And I can represent these with some very simple lines. Sometimes it's useful to see where the seams of the fabric fall because they can kind of tell you a bit about the character and the fit of the clothing. When we have a garment with excessive fabric, we sometimes see what's called a half lock fold. So in that seam that goes underneath the arm, right at the edge of the chest there, instead of just some spiral folds, I've got this half lock fold, which curves back on itself. It's when a bit of fabric bunches up and an overhang happens on the bottom of the fold. And below the chest, on the main panels of the body, I exaggerate some of those pipe folds and make them almost more triangular in their shape, because I imagine this garment with all its excessive fabric kind of flowing outward a bit. I've also got a couple of my folds ebbing and flowing as if the shirt panels reacting to the character's hip line. You'll notice I'm adding stripes to the shirt here to show how anatomy affects all aspects of the fabric, how it stretches. Notice the curve of the stripes is dictated by this crossing over that horizontal chest line. Now, before we move on to another body type and try some other shirts, let's mark our folds and tension points. So we get a sense of where these elements are concentrated and how much of the shirt they do not affect. You see that most of the sleeve and that front panel are open. Back to a front view of another body type. So just for more variety and to try some new things, I'm going to change the style of shirt here. I'm going to add a tall collar that arcs up. You notice that arcs the opposite way of the bottom edge of the collar. And I'm going to tuck in the shirt at the waistline with a pretty aggressive tuck. This is a tight tuck, so it creates more tension and folds along the front of the shirt. You see some very subtle lines coming closer to the main front of the pants. And you also notice this character's wider chest creates more folds that pulled down towards the bottom of the shirt. Now, we'll bounce over here and try this three quarter view. I've added a couple extra lines up by the collar to just show a little bit more attention. Again, notice the weight of the lines for the folds is a lot lighter compared to the lines that represent the silhouette of the character. It's almost like you're just implying folds and tension points. And then our familiarity with those features fills in the blanks. The blue horizontal stripes will also remind you that creating a pattern across the fabric is another way to enhance a sense of form without adding a lot of black line art. So next time you put a T shirt on a character, here's some things to think about. The fit of the shirt. This can change the weight of the fabric. A bigger baggier shirt gives a looser, more casual feel than a fitted T shirt. Tucking a shirt in can imply a fashion sense or a bit of formality. It also could imply an era of clothing style. While any of these traits are not exclusive to one character type, it's a way to change someone's perception of your character. 5. Chapter 3: Button-Ups: T shirt covered a lot of the basics of tension and folds. So with the button up, we'll look at specifically what makes this garment distinct. First, the sleeves are longer. And just for the sake of understanding the design of the shirt, I've twisted the sleeves around just so you can see the button cuffs. Collar is different than on the T shirt. This is a raised collar, meaning it has a separate piece of fabric stitched on that makes it vertical, and then has a fold over the top. You've seen a collar shirt. I don't know why I am describing it so specifically. And also, don't forget the length of the shirt is extra long so it can be tucked into a nice pair of pants. And don't worry. We'll get to designing pants pretty soon. Our lovely models have returned, as you can see, and in this front view, I'll draw out the overall shape of the button up shirt. I'm looking at this as if it's kind of a workplace uniform style shirt. Therefore, this is my attempt to express the characteristics of the fabric. A T shirt is often made of soft cotton, but a button up is usually more formal and can have a stiff, starchy look. So the overall silhouette of this shirt is a lot more angular. The folds are a bit sharper, more abrupt, and the lines towards the points of tension are longer, straighter, and cleaner. Notice how I illustrate the sleeves. They crease at the elbow showing evidence of movement, and they have these new little points of tension right where the sleeve is stitched to the cuff. A fitted button up is likely to be an iron shirt. So it has an overall smooth look, but it gets wrinkled very easily. And any creases that come from movement stay with the fabric. We're seeing a return of the zig zag fold here at the front of the shirt where it meets the pants. This is evidence of a long day sitting at a desk hunched over a computer. And now in this three quarter view, let's say, Our character has moved into an after work setting. They're getting a little more casual. The top button of their shirt is undone. A sure sign. The things are relaxing, and the character's sleeves are rolled up. While softer fabrics, like a T shirt might have those spiral folds I talked about earlier, a starchy shirt is going to make some zigzags. Again, the hard angles of the folds show off the structure of the fabric. And while the area above the chest up to the shoulders, holds the shirt stiffness, the fabric below is showing off this day of motion and movement. It feels like a more bottom heavy design. You can see gravity at play in this three quarter turn. So for that character, we've seen the office space attire, so let's head out west with a more cowboy flavored shirt. Giving this shirt some similar stiffness, but we're going to add an extra design element. These pointed panels are called a yoke. A detail or two like this, a stitched panel, a row of buttons with seams on the sides. These elements can tell us a lot about a character without us having to say anything. So for every garment style you learn to draw, you enrich your visual vocabulary, and that's never a bad thing. Now, consider how different these two shirts look each time I've drawn them. In one version, they seem fresh and clean with a strong tuck. In another, that tuck might have been loosened. So this is a good time to point out something about clothing. It's capable of conveying the passage of time, an important aspect of character based storytelling. A character's workshirt at A at AM can look a lot different than a character's workshirt at 8:00 P.M. Folds tell a story. Now, do you need to always tell a story with your folds? No. It's a choice you have available to you as the illustrator. And I consider it part of the job to be able to know these choices are possible. 6. Chapter 4: The Hoodie: The more casual side of things, we have the iconic hoodie. The hood itself is a single panel, though some hoods can be two or three. I'm doing the single panel style hood. And the hood is sewn to a whitish collar, a little wider than you would have on a T shirt, definitely wider than the button up. And the hoodie is kind of a one size fits all item. It's oversized and structureless. The sleeves are long and roomy. The front panel is also extremely roomy with a nice pass through pocket on the front, and both the sleeves and front panels are pulled taut by cuffs. That make the main parts of the fabric mushroom out. Let's talk about materials again here. So I'm imagining this hoodie is made of a cotton fleece, and a fleece is a more rugged, outdoor, still cozy, but heavy duty type of fabric. Being a thicker material, the folds are going to be wider, less intense than the button up shirt, and it's going to show off more volume. With this first front view character, I'm going to start with the hood down look. The hoodie itself brings a lot of attention to the upper part of the garment. You've got the draw strings, the hood, the laying of the collars. Make sure the hoods fabric feels hefty. You want to create tall rolls behind the head that curve around the wide collar. And because the collar itself is wider, I like to show off whatever is being worn below, in this case, a T shirt. Now, as we place the rest of the hoodies panels and sleeves across the body, we first note that the seams of the shoulders fall way down the arm, showing off that one size fits all aspect of this garment. And that also means that the excessive fleece fabric is going to bunch up at the cuffs. And we see we've got half locked folds at the seams of the sleeves and kind of broad zigzag folds down at the cuffs by the wrist. Practicing drawing a hoodie is a good opportunity to address the role of weight in your character's clothing. The physicality of a subject says a lot about who or what it is. And the heft of the hoodie really can give it a cozy, weighty feeling. Your hoodie should feel soft and droopy. It's a completely different energy than what we saw in that fitted button up shirt. On this next model, I'm going to bend the character's arm to give you a better look at how the fabric interacts with motion. Notice the way the sleeve hangs on the arm creating new points of tension. We've got a very loose zig zag fold occurring on the top of the arm while the extra fabric drops below. This is a great reminder that it's important to be able to see through the fabric and understand the pose and structure of your character's body below. This can help you decide how the fabric reacts to the body language of your character. Let's go even further. I'm going to modify the pose of this other front view character to have them have their arms crossed. You're welcome to join along with these new poses, if you want, or you can keep your character's arms at the side if you're still trying to figure out the character of your sweatshirt. But again, I'm still going through the very simple set of rules of creating points of tension and showing how folds evolve from that. Here we have some points of tension at the elbows, some half lock folds, and the droopy sleeves. And I'm going to raise the hood of this character. The hood takes on a water droplet shape with kind of a blunt point of tension here at the top of the head. The fabric needs to frame the face, not obscure it too much, and it's going to pull downward around the face, and it almost starts to drape over the shoulders if it's one of those extra large hoodies. Again, we have a chance to play with learn. I'm going to draw the collar below the hoodie and even add some shadow behind the head to create a greater sense of depth. And in the three quarter view. The head actually starts to emerge from the hood a little bit. Again, my goal is always to make sure the face is very clear and present because that's the key to my storytelling. So I pull the hood back a little bit. In case you're going for a more mysterious type of feeling, then you're going to want to pull the hood down more over the face, obstructing some of the features. I'm a fan of drawing the hoodi. It's a fun challenge to work hard to create something that feels so loose and comfortable. Now, speaking of loose, we're going to get even looser in the next chapter. 7. Chapter 5: Poncho & Skirt: Now, I don't feel like we've given the pipe fold it's due, so we're going to look at two garments that show off the character of that particular fold in all its glory. We've got a poncho here to start, a simple garment, a single piece of fabric with a hole in the center, kind of like a doughut. Where a character can put their head through. We have two broad points of tension here at the shoulders, which will create long flowing pipe folds. How large is this poncho exactly? It's basically just a huge shirt without a lot of stitching. It covers down to the length of the torso. Feel free to make your poncho as big as you like. We've looked over a lot of upper body garments, so let's take a look at a lower body garment. A skirt is also a single piece of fabric with a hole in the middle, kind of like a bagel. But instead of shoulders, we have a fold at the waist that creates a bunch of points of tension, pleats, you could call them. This torso will give form to these draping pipe folds. The poncho, depending on its fabric, will be made up of different sizes and quantities of pipe folds. We use step like edges to show the border of the fabric, like we did with that scarf in the first chapter. But a poncho is a heavier fabric. So I'm only going to be illustrating six folds across the character's chest here. They're smaller in the back and layered up to form like a single broad roll across the chest area. Adding more would imply, like a thinner cape like material. It would be too much flexibility. I want this poncho to feel thick and a little more substantial. And like we talked about in the T shirt chapter, the upper part of the chest and the broad areas of the shoulder are smooth. The poncho hangs over the character without any restrictions on movement. So even a stationary pose implies a bit of motion as the fabric dangles below. Now, without having a pattern on this design, my poncho runs the risk of looking pretty flat. So notice I exaggerate the collar a bit to remind us of the curve of the chest below the material. Now let's look at a skirt. This garment really lends itself to form in motion due to the density of tension points around the waist. To create a round feeling, make the top parts of the fold denser around the edges and space them out towards the center. In this three quarter turn, let's have some fun. We'll show off some motion, and let the pipe folds almost become spiral folds as the character twists and turns. Notice the bottom edge of the fabric lags behind the upper part. Loose fabric and the pipe folds that emerge from it are a great way to characterize motion. 8. Chapter 6: Pants & Shorts: Okay, we're deep into the class at this point. So I feel like I can admit something to you all. I'm afraid of pants. I'm not afraid of pants in the way that little bear from the doctor Sue story is afraid of pants. I mean, I'm afraid to draw pants. In fact, the whole reason I wanted to make this class on clothing was so I could get over my fear of drawing pants. Every time I went to draw pants in my comics, they always felt totally flat. And I realized the problem was, I didn't have an understanding of the anatomy of the pants as a garment. That strip of fabric that sits right below the waist, the design of the four panels that go around the torso, down the legs, how to do pockets, the offsetness of the zipper flap belt loops. Pants. They are complicated. And here we are, finally figuring out what pants look like in overcoming that fear. Thank you for joining me. Okay, let's look at the tension points on pants. They exist here between the waist, hips, thighs, and knees. This is the reason I've saved pants for the end. There's just a lot going on in a very concentrated area. But if we focus on defining these points of tension, we're going to be all right. There's also some other subtle things going on in pants. There's either a taper or a flare in the leg. For this first character, I'm going to use a tapered style. Now, I did consider a topless look for this character, but we want to keep this all, you know, g rated, so I settled on a tank top or, like, a fitted, sleeveless cotton T shirt with a tight tuck. To show off some of the skills we've developed throughout this class. Hopefully, now you're capable of some variations that go beyond what I've shown you. Mix and match folds and tensions and fabric styles and different cuts. Have some fun with this. Alright, let's get into the pants. Let's assume these pants are a classic structured, skinny legged denim gene. They hold their shape, which is to say they're narrow at the waist, a little wider at the hip, and not too much wider, and then they taper down the thigh. To the narrowest point, which is at the cuff. Our uppermost points of tension are the outer edge of the hip. So that means here below the torso, where the fore panels of the legs of the fabric meet. We have folds that are kind of like spiral folds, but they stretch straighter. They emerge from between the legs and go out around the thigh. And you don't see them too far because the hips are pulling the fabric smooth. That said, we might see a bit of bunching below the hip depending on the thickness and musculature of the character's legs. If we follow the silhouette down the pants, things remain smooth across the thigh, but then we have tension points emerge again at the knee. And like when we talked about the chest area, There's a smoothness, and then right below, there's the folds. In this case, these are zigzag folds, that will appear much more zigzaggy on a bag ear type of pant. So let's show off some more of these zig zag folds in the three quarter turn. I'm going to keep these pants fitted at the waist. But instead of tapering, they're going to flare out and bunch up at the bottom, so they're extra long. And I'm showing the zigzags through those triangular fold lines that I've been using. Again, this represents the shading or shadows. See how the folds collect at the bottom of the pants, and they work their way up and thin out, and then they start it right below the knee and then work their way down. Folds are never spread evenly across the surface. Those are called wrinkles. Folds always gather in bunches. Well, we've solved the problem of pants, let's move these on over and draw some shorts. Like the pants, we have a waistband that's an independent piece of fabric, meaning there's potential for pleats right at the waist line. And these are going to be a retrofit type of short, and they end right below the hips. And to give them a bit of character, we'll add draw strings, pockets, and stripes down the legs. Alright, now, let's look at our athlete who is sporting a three quarter sleeve jersey. Very cool. Notice how I use elements of the shorts stitching and piping, which is the stripes down the side that curve around the bottom. To emphasize the form of the character's body, the stretch of the waistband, the curve of those draw strings. Every visual element of a piece of fabric has potential to explain something about the character. And I feel like the Oakleys this character is wearing, really say a lot about them. Let's pose these characters with bent legs so that way we can get a better sense of how fabric on pants moves. Notice the bent leg reveals something new about the form of the character's body. The point of the knee creates tension, and we see the folds emerge in two places. A half lock fold emerges behind the knee and a simple pipe fold forms down the front. And like the sleeves earlier, the fabric of the pants hangs below the leg. And if the fabric is flexible enough, it'll reveal the shape of the calf. Now, there are 1 million other ways we could continue this lesson on fabric and clothing. But I think it's time we take all the stuff we've learned and create a class project. 9. Wrap It Up!: All right, thanks again for taking my class. I hope you had a good time, hope you learned some things. And I encourage you to download those templates that I've been using throughout the class and post some work in the class project section. Share your thoughts and discussions, post some comments. I'll be there the whole time to have this conversation with you on what makes a good stylized outfit. Now, if you've enjoyed my teaching here today, you're in luck because my skill share channel features 20 odd classes on topics, similar to this one. Other aspects of character design, cartoon art, comics, like sequential art, narrative art, visual storytelling, and then just some basic illustration stuff. There's even a class on drawing maps because why not? Maps are cool. So all that said, I hope to see you in another course sometime soon. And remember, keep drawing.