Sometimes when rendering parts of an illustration like fabrics, you can get lost when directly apply colour (or maybe you finish your drawing and then you decide you want to use a different colour!)

Luckily, by using gradient maps you can add colour to tonal greyscale rendering inorder to draw some beautiful clothes!

Let’s Get Started!

For this tutorial I’m going to focus on how we can use gradients to render a satin jacket.

 

Satin is soft and shiny - but most importantly it makes fancy jackets!

 

For a material that picks up a lot of light like satin, it’s important that you identify your light source, here the light will be coming in from the left, towards Jack’s face.

 

Begin to establish the lighting of the jacket with greys. To keep the drawing clean and save you having to worry about colouring inside the lines, click the little Lock Transparent Pixels button in the Layer Panel [fig.1], this will keep everything new you draw within the flats you have layed down.

 

For this sort of thing I like to use soft, preasure responsive brushes like the Colored Pencil brush [fig.2].

It can be helpful to plot out the folds and pulls in the fabric as a whole before you start rendering to help keep the folds consistent.

 

If you’re not sure where to place the folds on clothing, the best thing to do is look up references, or even take some photos off yourself in the clothing you want to draw!

 

Here I have mapped them out with the red lines, before setting them to black and blurring them a bit with Gaussian Blur to be merged with the main jacket layer (the blur will make it easier to render the lines in).

 

An easy way to change the lines to black is to, while on the layer you want to change, go to Edit > Change Colour of Line to Drawing [fig.3]. This will change the lines to the main colour you have selected.

 

You can also use the transparency lock from before.

With the guides for the folds worked out, you can go ahead and start shading in the rest of the fabric. I find it easiest to paint on the one layer, but if you’re not quite confident enought to do that yet you can work on separate layers that you combine later.

 

I’ve made the overall tone darker towards the back and shaded along the paths of the folds. One of my top tips overall for little things to elavate your drawing is to add in highlights along the shadow to capture atmospheric rim light - these highlights will be a bit duller than the main highlights.

Using the Blending Tool and the Textured Blender, smooth out your shading.

With the greyscale complete, you can add your colour with a gradient map!

 

You can do this either by going to Layer > New Correction Layer > Gradient Map [fig.5] OR click on the menu button in the Layer Panel (the three lines) and select Gradient Map from there [fig.6]

 

Now for the fun part! It can take some time playing around with the gradient colours until you get the colours you want, but the best method is to move from dark to light from left to right.

 

The bottom colours towards the left of the gradient will attach to the dark tones in the greyscale drawing, whilst the top colours to the right at the top of the gradient will attach to the lighter tones [fig.7].

 

All you have to do to add a new colour to the gradient is click the point you would like to add it in to.

If you want to get rid of a colour, you can just click hold the triangle marker for the colour you would like to remove and pull it off the gradient. You can also drag the markers up and down to determine how abruptly colours will fade into eachother.

 

My tip for picking interesting gradients is that they don’t have to progress from darkest to lightest, sometimes putting in small sections of contrasting brightnesses can create cool effects. especially when trying to replicate shiny fabrics.

 

If you’re going to be drawing the same fabric over and over (or maybe you just worked out a super good gradient!) be sure to save it by pressing the Create New Gradient button. You can also create specific sets aswell as share them with the community!

Refining through adjusting

Once you’ve worked out your gradient, you can start to adjust the greyscale layer until you get the colours you want.

 

And easy way to play around is to open up the Tone Curve [fig.8] and pull around the points on the curve to change the tones - a new point will be added when you click on a section of the curve. You can also use Level Correction to adjust the tones.

With the greyscale and gradient working together how I want I add in a few little extra details before finishing the drawing up.

 

Here I used pure white with a softer brush (the Colored Pencil brush again) to add streaks of light along where the highlights and shadows meet, this brings out sections in the fabrics that would be poking out further than others.

 

It is good to use a softer brush when doing this as the softer edges will pick up a different colour on the gradient, making the highlights look as if they are glowing!

Play around with your options!

Even if you get really good at picking colours for your gradients, sometimes it can be difficult to get the exact result you want. This is a great time to play around with setting the gradient map layer to different layer modes.

 

Here are some examples of the different results you can get without changing anything other than the layer mode of the gradient map.

 

If you’re liking how it looks with a new layer mode, you can return to adjusting the levels of the greyscale layer or the colours of the gradient until it’s perfect (make sure you have Preview selected when adjusting the gradient so you can see how it looks in real time!)

You can also get many different looks out of your greyscale layer with different gradients, here are a few examples where you can see what the gradient used looks like.

As you can see with the red and black examples in particular, the base for satin can also be used to look like velvet if you approach it with different colours.

If you want to have a go with these gradients (and the main purple one) I have uploaded the set to Assets for you to play around with!

Final touches

To finish off the lighting on the jacket I used a soft airbrush to apply an Overlay layer to the light areas and a Multiply layer to the dark areas.

 

I also coloured my lineart layer purple and set it as a Linear Burn layer so that it fits in more naturally with the rest of the jacket.

All that’s left is to finish off the rest of your drawing and TAA DAA!

 

Using gradients to colour your fabrics can have amazing results, but it can also help save a lot of time in the rendering process, especially if you’re using it for a comic.

I hope this tutorial was helpful and that you enjoy drawing some fancy clothes!