Introduction

Hi, I’m Zoisette. This tutorial is about designing an outfit for your character.

A character’s outfit says a lot about them, showing their personality and activities, but also their position in their environment and the narrative you’ve put them in. There are many ways to design an outfit.

This tutorial has two sections: the first is some general tips to help you organize your process a bit, and the second is an example character design.

 

When you read the tips, these aren’t meant to limit your method of creating your character’s outfit. If you’re doing something that appears to go against the rules but still looks good, try to understand what it is about it that makes it work. In the end, these rules are just tools to make your art easier to communicate and faster to draw.

General tips

Shapes

So you have a character in mind. You have their general appearance down, and you draw them in a certain style. Looking at your character, you’ll notice they have an overall shape (their silhouette) that relies on the repitition of a pattern. This could be a geometrical shape, like triangles or circles, but it could also be a bit more vague, like sharp edges with sudden tapers, or S curves. A character with a sharp nose will likely have a sharp jaw and narrower fingers than a giant of a figure, who is more likely to have blunted, squared edges and forms throughout.

 

 

The greater the realism in your art style, the more subtle the shapes will be, but even a totally realistic character will have characteristics that follow a pattern.

 

 

Here I have a face drawn both very stylized and more realistic. You can see she has sharp features.

 

 

Applying shapes to the outfit

Above I have the same face with different hair. The first repeats the sharp shapes of the face. This generally intensifies the features, but it can also provide a sort of “background” for your character that makes them look homogenous and complete. The second uses rounded forms, which compliments the triangular corners of the nose and eyes. Use whatever method best suits the feel that you want to give your character.

 

 

Areas of focus

Pick an outfit with a form that compliments the most distinguishable features of your character, and draws attention to the little details that makes them special. A unique physique can be obscured or augmented.

 

 

Environmental context

If your character has an environment to live in, there will probably be a dress code of some kind. Either they’re existing in a historical context, or a fairy court, or climbing the corporate ladder, or trekking through a forest. Anyway, it usually isn’t crucial to capture every detail of that dress code (unless you want to). Instead, note the distinguishing features, like you did with your character, and build your outfit with those in mind.

 

 

This is still secondary to your character’s features. Archetypical outfits have many recognizable features that can be switched out for each other and still leave the costume as belonging to its context. A corporate environment’s hallmarks could be either suits or egregious pinstripes. A Victorian woman could be recognized by a boned bodice or just ruffled skirts.

 

 

The purpose of keeping the outfit to suit the character’s environment is to make them look and feel at home, and prevent your viewer from becoming confused. So, be careful when considering a clothing item that doesn’t really match your character’s station. Take a welder, for instance: you’d expect them to have heavy leather gloves, not velvet opera gloves…

Last note: it still isn’t impossible to give your character fashion items that don’t match their environment. But the viewer will want to know why :)

 

 

Colors

It’s common to pick just two main colors when designing an outfit. This is because, if you have several colors together the costume can look choppy. This is due more to the fact, however, that the colors are blocked out in large sections of the outfit, and don’t get a chance to “mix” nicely together. So, the more colors you want to use, the smaller the colored sections should be and more evenly mixed. Superhero costumes are a great example of using two colors, because they’re mapped in large sections over the clothes. A jester is the opposite of this, using many colors but making the sections smaller so they can mix better, giving an impression of homogeneity. More colors --> more mixing required.

Accessories

Accessories are usually rather small compared to the strictly necessary parts of your outfit, e.g. purses, hats and lace take up less visual space than pants. If the “accessory” is fairly large, treat it like an integral part of the outfit, because it has the same visual impact.

 

 

Accessories might not always be visually impactful, but that doesn’t mean they’re not important. They serve both to accent the major parts of your character’s appearance, provide narrative, draw the eye around the outfit, and provide detail and texture.

Example character rundown

I decided to draw Tybalt from Romeo and Juliet, in a style loosely emulating the fashion of the time. Ultimately, I wanted the costume to suit Tybalt’s description in the play. He gets called “prince of cats” because his name was/is a popular cat name (Tibs!) and is described as quick and wrathful.

 

I had a general idea of the shape I wanted him to have, but also various elements that I wanted to include in his outfit. I drew both a blocked out sketch of his general shape, and a human-like montage of the fashion items I wanted to include.

 

 

The picture to the left was the first sketch I put together to get some colors down. The Picasso-esque one on the right was a collage of elements with little regard to anatomical accuracy (and you can see here I briefly considered silver hair before discarding that idea). It’s to get a feel of the outfit and see how historically accurate I want it to be (answer: not too much). The one on the right is to get his physique down.

 

 

Ideas and shape sketches

Drawing your character is various poses, in a simple style, helped me test out the effect of the costume once I had started to settle on a look. The purpose of the cat sketches were to help me get a feel of a lithe, muscular shape.

 

 

Designing the outfit

I’ll use one of the outfit iterations I drew for Tibs:

1. First I drew out his basic form, in a pose I thought would come naturally to him. This is a fashion sketch so they dimensions don’t have to be perfectly accurate, but they shouldn’t be wildly off either. I was drawing with a gouache brush at 100 density.

 

2. I drew it out again in greater detail, because I knew I wanted to be precise about where the seams and so forth lay over the body. I also adjusted the leg so it made more sense.

 

(When you draw over another layer, lower the opacity of the lower layer to something like 20% or 30%, so the lines aren’t distracting.)

 

3. Then I drew the outfit over the form, again lowering the opacity of my reference sketch.

 

4. Last, I colored it in a bit. It doesn’t have to be exact, but color is important and you need it sometimes to understand how the color blocking is going to look on the finished costume.

Variations

I wasn’t sure about several parts of his clothes, so I drew him several times with some simple coloring (and got a little carried away!) to compare them. I wasn’t settled on the pants and skirt of the doublet, mainly. The pouldron was another issue because it affected the silhouette so much, as well as the cat pelt--I realized partway through that I cared what kind of cat it was (I settled on a lion with questionable coloring).

 

 

Details

Hair isn’t exactly part of an outfit, but it influences the silhouette.

The armor, on the other hand, was one of the main sources of detail, so drawing the pieces separately was important. It’s no use trying to add small linework when you don’t know exactly what design you’re trying to portray.

Below is a pattern I drew based on flora and fauna native to India. Because he’s wealthy, I figured he would have imported materials, and it gave me an excuse to put cats on his outfit.

Turnaround

A turnaround shows your character from the front and back, and sometimes the side. The pose isn’t complicated so that the outfit can be easily interpreted.

The step-by-step for the turnaround is mostly the same as the steps to draw the outfit variations. The difference lies in how neat your work is going to be, the coloring and layer management, and matching the back to the front.

 

Each color should have its own layer, sometimes even more,  if your clothes overlap in ways that make the same color be both under and over another color. Fill the colored layers in with a pen tool or some other tool that doesn’t have variable opacity, and has a hard edge; this makes shading and altering the layer easier later.

 

Very dark colors that are close to your line art color can be filled in as something contrasting or lighter, so you can see the lines. The same goes for light colors: if your character is sitting on a white canvas and you need part of his outfit white, fill it in as something else and change it afterwards with the opacity locked.

Here’s a closeup up drawing the back view:

Here is the final design. I gave him both an armored leg and a boot because I wanted both the extreme slimness of the armor, with its pointy accents, and the heavy tapering that the rather conical boot provides. The shape of the boot reminded me of the heavy upper arm of a cat tapering to a relatively small paw. The same principle applies to his sleeve.

I hope this was helpful to you and gave you some ideas. Remember that rules and guides exist to help you organize your method, so you can make full use of your creative arsenal, they’re not there to constrict you. Happy designing!