Do you want to draw your characters warm and bundled up in winter clothing? With the holidays right around the corner, I've been wanting to draw a winter scene. So for today, let's try to draw winter clothing, and I’ll also share an easy tip to make your character look more like they’re in a wintery and cold scene.

Planning Design

Base Sketch

Before drawing a full illustration. I usually first try to have a character design planned out. I usually like to have either references pre-prepared or have a quick sketch of the clothing before getting in into a big illustration. It's better to first plan out your character design before getting into the illustration because otherwise you'll be struggling to change detailed parts of the character design in the actual illustration.

Base Layers

Now that we’re done with the base sketch, we have a rough base for planning out the rest of the character design.

When planning winter clothing, we need to keep in mind layering. When wearing winter clothes, not many people just wear a thick jacket and go straight outside. There's usually layers involved. Usually people start by layering on a shirt, then maybe a sweater or a turtleneck, and then finally a more thick jacket.

For now, let's start by first drawing a light turtleneck sweater as a base of the character. Because the turtleneck is acting as the base layer, it should be a little bit thinner and hug the body a little bit more.

Now that I have the base of the turtleneck, it still doesn't give a wintry feeling like I really want it to. To change that, you can use pattern brushes from the Clip Studio Assets store to add a layer of depth and interest to your drawings.

Here I'm using the hand-painted Nordic patterned brushes from 27pt on the assets store.

With a single stroke, I can easily add a nice texture and pattern to the turtleneck. This really gives off a feeling of wintery vibes now. I'll adjust the colors little bit and move on to the next layer.

Knit Textures

Let's say it's really cold outside and just a single turtleneck probably won't be enough to shield you from the cold weather. Let’s add another layer! How about a thick knit sweater?

A quick tip: To make your clothing look more oversized, think of where the shoulder seams are. Tighter fitting clothing tends to have seams closer to where the shoulder actually is because it's more form fitting, while looser clothing are more baggy, and the shoulder seam ends up being further down the line.

The clothing is also a little bit further from where body actually is, and you should think about how gravity affects folds of clothing as it pulls the cloth down and away from the body. For the example character design, the turtleneck is more tight fitting to the body because it’s the bottom layer, whereas a sweater is more of a middle or top layer so it’s looser.

Now that we finished our base for our cardigan, it still doesn't look quite like a knit cardigan. We can fix that by using more Clip Studio Paint assets. This texture brush is also by 27pt!

Sometimes if a brush that you download from Clip Studio Assets doesn't particularly fit your style, you can just draw over it by separating what you did on a brush to another layer, lowering the opacity and then drawing over it.

When drawing over it, it doesn't have to be exact. Just generally doing these y-shaped patterns will give the effect of something being a knit texture.

A lot of times when drawing these details, it just matters what it looks like from a distance and not what it looks like up close. So while these y-shapes probably don't make a lot of sense individually, put in the context of being on a sweater with the other textures as visual hints, people will probably get the message that this is something like a knit sweater.

Pants & Shoes

Now that we figured out the base for the body, let's think about the pants and the shoes next.

In the winter if it gets really cold, people typically layer on multiple layers of pants. Depending on how cold the environment is, you could go with something thinner, like just a pair of jeans, or you go for something thicker.

For this, I'll go for a slightly thicker pants, maybe meant for snowier weather.

Going off the base, I'm imagining that there's some sort of layering underneath it and giving some space between where the body and the leg actually is, to where the pants are. Also, when wearing thicker pants, there tends to be more bundling of the cloth fabric, especially around the joints.

For winter shoes, there's lots of different types. Most people will probably like to wear boots in the winter, especially if they're going hiking or walking around in the rain or snow. There's lots of different types of boots as well.

For here, I'll just do simple black rubber boots with some squiggly lines across the bottom to show that there's some sort of grip under the shoe.

Outer Layer (Parkas)

There's a lot of different types of winter jackets out there, from padded jackets to fleece jackets to parkas… You could think about a jacket your character likes to wear or just draw whatever you like.

For this design, I’ll go with the parka. For the fur hood of the parka, I’ll be using the fluff brush by seizenS.

Depending on what kind of parka you want to draw, the fur can either be coming from inside of the parka or outside. With a lot of parkas,

If we wanted to express that the fur lining is only on the hood, we would draw the inner sides of the jacket first, as well as the inside of the hood before drawing the fur on the outside. This way it expresses that the fur lining is only on the outside of the hood and not on the inside.

You can also try drawing the fur on both the inside and outside…

…Or a really fluffy fur padding on the inside using more texture brushes.

Now let's quickly sketch a parka jacket. Parkas are typically thicker, so you should also pay attention to the thickness of the jacket based on the inside of the clothing.

With thicker clothing, clothes folds are less visible compared to thinner clothing. Earlier with the cardigan, more folds are visible. But here with the parka, because this is such a thick padded jacket, there's probably going to be less clothes folds.

However, if you want to express that this is a really thin and light jacket, then you could do that by adding more clothes folds and have it be more form fitting. So now with the extra clothing fold lines, this jacket looks a little bit thinner than it was earlier here. Now let’s color our parka jacket!

Here is the finished design! I also explained more on accessories and did an illustration with a speed painting in the YouTube video.

I hope this was helpful, thank you for looking!