Hi everyone! In this video I give tips and show you my design process for making a winter outfit for my Isekai webcomic! Hope it’s helpful! :)
Below will be written version of the video tutorial~
The Process 📈
1) Research/ Draft Phase ✍️
At this part I just gather references online and implement them in my design. Since my comic is in the is in the Isekai genre, I am going to use historical references for the winter outfit! (Specifically, Victorian)
Resources I recommend for good historical fashion references;
Historicalfashionblogs
Pinterest
HistoricalPaintings
FashionPlates
Periodfilms
StageCostuming
So after collecting all the elements and design inspiration, I open a draft layer and transfer the elements on to a human figure. The draft doesn’t need to be perfect, it’s just to get an idea of how it would look a very things will go. below is what I ended up with!
2) Sketching Phase📝
So during the drafting phase make sure to pose your character according to how you want the outfit to look like. I am doing a very long dress with a very long fur coat so the character will be standing and leaning against something to emphasise how long the dress is.
Then just draw out the elements that you drafted and see if they combine together well, if they don’t, that’s where the trial and error comes in. During this part I edited a lot of my initial idea of how the outfit would look.
I made the fur coat slightly bigger around her neck
I made the feathers on her hat smaller that I initially wanted.
During this part and onwards I exclusively use a bacteria vector layer, since it’s so much easier to sketch with it! The vector eraser can save a lot of time and make the drawing process much more efficient, because it deletes the whole brushstroke from the point where it touches another line. I recommend trying it out if you haven’t!
Below is my final sketch.
3) Refining Phase 🔎
Now this is where the detail and clean line work comes in. And so there is a few special things that I paid attention to since it is a Winter outfit. You can call these points as the focal points for this specific outfit.
a) The thickness of the material of the coat and dress.
b) The lightness of the fur coat and the fur hat.
a) Thickness of Coat and Dress 👗
To emphasise the thickness of a material one can show that by demonstrating how the material falls and folds. Below you can see that I made the sleeves have big chunky folds, to show that it is falling heavily. While for the coat that gathers and drips towards the ground, the folds crinkle and mash together with the same big chunky folding.
I find this to be a easy way of drawing and maintaining the same material throughout the clothing, by focusing on how does that material interacts with its surroundings. Which then, makes it easier, even without shading or colouring to show the material’s density and mass. What I particularly look for is whether it is hanging, gathering on the floor, pulling at the seams, scrunched between crevices.
b) Lightness Of Fur 🪶
In this outfit there is fur on the coat throughout and also on the hat. The type of fur that I wanted to do is a light airy fluffy type. So, I used method/technique from a lot of shōjo manga, which is to do light strokes one after the other following the direction of the fur. The direction of the fur would look something like this below.
If you see on the hat both sides of the firm is heading in opposite directions so, there is a general rule of thumb that I follow when doing services that meet each other at a certain point.
So after this, I just proceed with doing the rest of the outfit
adding seams and borders on the clothes on the dress wear seems usually are, I recommend looking at closing references (in this case historical clothing references ) to see where seems usually are.
Adding seams and borders is something I really recommend , as they had a sense of realness to your clothes on your characters.
During this part I like to zoom out and see the overall composition and how the image looks. Usually I would need to use the vector line thickening tool to thicken lines that are to light.
I noticed in this case the fur on her coat was way too faded, so I went over with the thickening line tool to fix that. I also use it for any two lines that meet each other.
Such as, between the neck and jaw, between the arm and the body. Anywhere where there is a corner, I tend to do that process to make it thicker. I find that it makes the image look more dimensional and adds depth!
Finished Design! ✅
After adding jewellery as well, the refined design is as below;
Since this art is for my art book that I want to be monochrome, I’m not intending to colour it. But to show you how it would look like to be coloured, I used the colourize tool. It’s really simple to use, just set your line-art as the reference layer, and click it to colourise, it in the edit drop down menu!
After tweaking it this is how it looks below;
Hopefully this is helpful for you all! ☺️ happy designing, and stay warm~~
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