- Drawing
Folds and Fabric-
The easiest way to get big folds also in flaggs done, is to catch the way of the folds at first. Draw a line with some "hills", which are our folds later, copy this line and put it behind your first a bit moved to one side. Then draw straight lines to the "hill tops" and "hill valleys" (the red lines in the picture) after that erase the covered lines (light gray in the picture) and we are done!
2.
"Y" and "X" Folds
The most common clothing folds over all are the Y and the X folds, I made
a photo of such one, which should explain the name of it. These folds
are going from two small folds into one big and build a Y, or two small
folds go into two other small folds and build a X, if you look at it from
the front. You can use them on shirts for the chest folds, on trousers
to build the folds on the crotch, or the folds over the shoes on long
pants, etc. I drew a few exapmles of fold-forms on this picture.
3.
More Folds...
Folds are everywhere on fabric and clothing, if your character doesn't
wear a diving-suit or similar stuff. Bigger folds are in thicker stuff,
small and many folds are in thin and light stuff, like satin and silk.
Folds always follow a movement line, or the wind, be sure that you drew
some helpful lines for the movement or the wind before you start with
the folds. I also drew some examples for combined fold-styles here.
4.
Folds in Action!
The more you do with your fabric the more folds zu will get. If you grab
a piece of stuff you will see that it builds a lot of folds, also in X-form
runing around the "grip-point". When you start drawing such
a scene draw the hand, claw or whatever at first and than add some lines
in Star or X-form like rays around this point, and add some "hills"
later. This technique is really helpful and your folds will look well
proportioned later.
6.
How to color folds
Here are a few steps how to create some realisitc comic folds using photoshop.
1. At first seperate your color and outline layers! You must have a own layer with your color!
2. Go inside this color layer and add some light and shading.
3. Be sure that you check that little quadratic symbol of this layer (fix all transparent pixels) and a little padlock will appear beside this layer.
4.Now go to Filters-GaussianBlur and play around with the setting until you are happy with the result!
5. Now we can start with our fold, a fold is like a little hill it has a dark and a light side. To get that effect, take the smudge tool and choose a good size (the brush size = the fold size) with 65-75% strenght. Now start to blur the folds, darker areas on the bottom, light areas on the top of each fold.
6. If you aren't happy with the result take a smaller smudge brush and overwork the edges of your fold unitl they look smooth.
7. To make the folds more realistic, add a new layer and name it Shine. Take a normal brush but with a soft edge, set it's mode to "lighten" and its opacity to 15-20% and paint some light on your folds, the more you cross your brush lines the more light you will get!
8. Now use the Gaussian Blur Filter again on this layer until you are happy with the result!
I also added two other
pieces done in the same way, just using smaller brushes!
