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Winter is approaching fast. Now is the best time to master drawing those challenging fur and wool patterns you've been struggling with, so your characters won't freeze to death!

Using certain techniques, brushes and assets in Clip Studio Paint can make your life a whole lot easier while wrapping up your OCs in warm clothing. Here are some tips and tricks to help you slay drawing chic winter outfits!

1. Setting Up the Base

The first thing to be mindful about while drawing winter apparel is the shape and folds of the clothes. The material for these clothes is usually thick. In fact, sometimes, we wear several layers of fabrics for more warmth. That's why, the clothes should not snugly hug the body of your OC.

1.1. Clothing shape

The clothes should be loose and oversized, hiding the major body curves; remember, the more layers of clothing, the cozier your character should look.

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1.2. Wrinkles and Folds

In addition, since the fabric is thicker than regular clothes, there will be less wrinkles on the clothing. The wrinkles will follow the tension points that pull the fabric but they will be larger and bulkier than the wrinkles on thin fabric. Also, thick materials have more weight. So, the gravitational pull works stronger on them. As a result, the folds will hang lower than usual as well.

2. Details and texture

Now that we've got the base shape of the clothing down, let's move onto adding the details. In this tutorial, I will cover two different ways of drawing faux fur clothing - one for simple line art with cell shading, another for more detailed illustration; and then I will demonstrate how to use Clip Studio Assets to draw different wool knitting textures. So, open CSP on your device and follow right along!

2.1. The "Comics" Way of Drawing Faux Fur

The first method of drawing faux fur clothing discussed in this post is simple and quick. This method is more useful for art styles that heavily rely on line art and cell-shading; like comics, cartoon and vector art.

 

We'll start with drawing the base shape of the clothing item.

The most important thing to remember is that we should avoid drawing every individual strand of fur. Too many thin lines can make the drawing look congested. For stylized art, the best results come with as much simplification as possible. In short, less is more.

 

 

For a more effective and cleaner look, imagine the fur in groups and bunches, not as individual strands. This is similar to drawing hair where the hair is drawn in divided sections.

Fur is always denser at the base and its density lessens at the edges. So, while drawing the groups of fur, make the line art thinner at the edges. In addition, avoid straight lines and instead, use curves to indicate the flow of the fur. Direct the curves in different directions for a more natural effect.

Now that we have our line art ready, let's move onto the coloring part!

For the base color, I prefer choosing the lightest color of the fur. Before we start shading, it's essential to detect the direction of the light source. The darkest shadows will be applied at the parts where the light can't reach. In the above example, the light is coming from the top right direction.

Now, select a darker color for the shading. It should be noted that shading with black or greyish colors usually make the drawing look dull. So, choosing colors of other values is better. In this case, question what the prominent color of the surrounding environment is. The color of the shadows is usually affected by the environment hues.

 

 

Here, for the fur, the hue of the shadow should be close to the purplish color of the rest of the coat where there's no fur. So, I'm using a desaturated pink-purplish color to add shadows to the floral-white color.

The first step should be clean cell-shading where the shadowed area is defined. At this point, remember to have the purple color and the white color on different layers. After putting down the general shadows, we’ll take the shading to the next level by imitating the fur texture.

At this point, choose a brush with graphite pencil-like texture. I like to use the “Design pencil” brush from CSP’s default brushes. Now, create a new layer and pick the pink-purplish color we used for the shadow. Make strokes that go into the floral-white, fading at the edges. Then, pick the white and do the same in the opposite direction, pulling the white into the shadows.

After continuing this throughout all the needed areas, we’ll have our cozy winter faux fur outfit completely ready!

2.2. Faux Fur for Detailed Illustration

Everything we discussed so far about the thickness of the fur, the light source and the color selection; all of it applies for the more illustrative art style as well. However, the technique of coloring will be different in this case.

Firstly, there’s no need for line art in this method. After sketching the base shape of the clothing, we’ll jump right into coloring by putting down the base colors in the major shapes of the garment. We can easily achieve this by using the lasso tool. However, it is still advised to use two different layers for the purple and white colors since they represent different materials.

Once the base colors are in place, we will select a brush with good pressure sensitivity. I like using CSP’s default “Real G-pen” brush for this process. With this brush, we will now make several strokes along the edges of the fur material. The strokes should curve towards different directions; varying in shape, size, length and thickness to make the fur look more natural. Make sure that you’re doing this on the same layer where the white base color was previously filled.

Now we will select the purple base layer and lock its pixels. Using the sketch layer as a guide, we will shade the purple material using a range of colors. This process is similar to how we ususally shade clothes. Remember to keep the light source in mind to determine which shadows will be darker than the others.

Let’s move onto rendering the fur now. Selecting the base layer of the white fur, we will put down the major shadows in 3 different colors - light dull pink, dark dull pink and a light bluish color. We will alternate between these colors to create soft harmonious shadows on the fur material.

After that, it's time to color pick the different colors from the shadows and the base; and draw strokes that overlap each other. This technique is similar to the one we did in the simple cell-shading method.

Notice that despite using only 3 colors to put down the shadows, the varying opacity creates more than three shades. So, pick the different shades on the fur and make strokes drawing fur-like extensions, pulling the different shades into one another. This time, I'm using the "Real G-pen" brush here instead of the "Design pencil" one used in the previous method.

After repeating this throughout all the shadowed areas, we will be almost done painting the fur coat. However, we need one last step to put it all together nicely. Take a dark (almost black) color and then use it to draw little lines around the edges where line art would've been in the "Comics method". These lines don't need to match the size and direction of the fur accurately. The slightly messy look gives the drawing a more charming quality.

Once we've made some necessary adjustments with gradient filter to make the colors pop, we finally have the finished, more detailed version of a fur outfit!

Let’s put both versions side by side and compare. Can you see the difference?

2.3. Drawing Wool Clothing with CSP Assets

Wool is a tricky material. Since clothes made of wool can have different patterns due to various knitting techniques, drawing everything by hand can be very tiresome and time consuming.

So, in this case, we need to work smarter, not harder. Clip Studio Assets have many pre-made brushes by other artists which we can use in our drawings. I'll be using some free brushes here since everyone can easily access them.

Before bringing out the custom brushes, preparing the base is necessary. First of all, we need to have our sketch or line art ready; add the base colors of the clothes on different layers. Then abiding by our usual shading techniques for clothes, we need to put down the shadows and blend them. I will not be explaining my clothes shading process here and will instead focus on the patterns.

Now the clothes are ready for the knitting patterns.

- Brush 1

Finally, let’s go to Clip Studio Assets and search for knitting brushes. The first brush pack I’ll be using in this tutorial is the “Alan Pattern Knit brush”. It comes with a few numbers of knit-patterned brushes which are perfect for art styles that resemble manga/webcomics or anime.

After importing the chosen brush, we will set the size of the brush according to the thickness of the wool thread the clothes are made of. The thicker the wool, the larger the brush size. Now, let’s choose a very dark color, create a new layer and clip it to the layer below. And finally, make a long stroke from one end of the clothes to another.

Keep in mind that while making the strokes, we should follow the direction of the folds. This way, the patterns don’t look flat and instead look more believable. You can correct the directions with ‘mesh transform’ later as well.

Since the brush pack comes with brushes of many patterns, experiment with them by using different brushes side by side for a variety of knitting textures. This way all your clothes don’t have to look exactly the same!

After making several strokes with the knit brush to cover the entire surface of the clothes, change the blending mode of the layer to ‘linear light’. Look how naturally the pattern blends with the colors of the clothes now! And we’re done!

- Brush 2

The other brush I’m going to recommend in this tutorial is the free “Knitted Texture Brush” from Clip Studio Assets. This brush works wonders if you’re trying to achieve a more realistic look to your art.

Once imported, create a new clipping layer over your base color layer. Now brush over the whole area of your clothing item. Once done, change the blending mode of the texture layer and play around with the opacity.  I like best the results I get with the ‘overlay’ and ‘soft light’ blending modes for this brush.

Alright! Look at you! You now know not only one, but several ways to draw and incorporate winter-specific clothing in your drawing. If you want more variety, you can pair the different textures together and experiment with them. Have fun and see what works best for you!

Now get to work and make more art. The winter won’t wait and your characters need your assistance. Don’t hesitate to bring your chic inner fashionista out!

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Links to Assets Used in This Tutorial

Brush Used for Shading Clothes

Alan Pattern Knit Brush

Knitted Texture Brush