Tips and Tricks for Fashion Design

Hey everyone!

My name is Chevistey and since a few years, I focus on drawing outfit and costume designs.

Today I'd like to show you some tips and tricks for outfit designs using Clip Studio Paint. I will focus on the following aspects:

 

1. References

2. Tension and Gravity

3. Bases and 3D Models

4. How to Mix and Match

4.1 Frills and Ruffles

4.2 Accessories

5. Step-by-Step Timelapses

6. Patterns

7. Border Tool

8. Basic Color Theory

 

 

1. References

References are very important for they show you how things look in real life. There are beautiful pictures of outfits and outfit designs on Google and Pinterest which can serve as an inspiration for your own designs. You'll find many various types of cuffs, collars, belts, jewelry, shapes and cuts, styles, and much more. Go ahead and use them! It makes designing a lot easier.

 

When I draw designs I love to include objects or animals and plants into them, so if you go outside and look at how e.g. leaves and petals of flowers are shaped or what kind of shapes feathers have, you can then incorporate these into your designs. You can also add these things as accessories later on. Feel free to experiment! If you take a look at my thumbnail image at the beginning of the tutorial you will see that the left design is heavily inspired by peacocks.

2. Tension and Gravity

Before we go ahead to create our own outfits I'd like to show you how fabrics behave on a body.

 

Fabric is affected by gravity. whenever you wear something, the fabric gets pulled down by it. This is very important for it affects the look of everything you put on your designs, e.g. frills or ribbons.

As you can see on the picture, fabric behaves in two ways. On the one hand it gets pulled down by gravity, as you can see on the pants or the skirt. However, fabric also wraps around the body, and there are a few body parts where it wraps around more often than on others.

 

As you can see here, the fabric falls loosely down the legs.

On the knees, ankles or in the crotch, it tends to wrap around the body, which creates folds.

But because the fabric sits loosely on the body, these folds tend to follow gravity and fall downwards.

 

This is different with fabrics that are a tighter. Even though it wraps around the knees, crotch and ankles too, the folds don't fall downwards as much as on loose fabric. Instead, the folds are almost horizontally.

Parts like the knees, ankles or elbows are called points of tension. When you move your body, these parts create tension on the fabric which leads to folds. The folds then always fall downwards from these points of tension, as you can see in the example.

3. Bases

When I draw my designs I like to use so-called bases. These are pre-drawn bodies and poses. When you use them, you can focus entirely on designing without having to spend time on drawing a new body each time.

 

There are lots of poses that I created on my own, but if you dont feel comfortable to design your own bases, you can also use the Clip Studi Paint 3D models.

 

To do this, you go to your [Assets], then click on [3D] and select one of the models that you'd like to use.

These models can then be adjusted and posed to your liking. You can then either draw your designs directly on top of the model, or you use it as a help to create a base first.

4. How to Mix and Match

I see fashion design as a kind of jigsaw puzzle. You can mix and match so many different parts that you can create something new each time by only using one different accessorie.

The first thing I do is deciding on a rough shape. There are many different shapes you can use for outfits, and each shape has a different effect. Picking the right shape can also help in showing the personality of your character. To start with I always focus on simple shapes. Adding details will follow in the next steps after all shapes have been chosen.

 

You can either focus on the basic shapes such as triangles, squares or circles, or you take a look around in nature. When I draw designs I love to include objects or animals and plants into them, so if you go outside and look at how e.g. leaves and petals of flowers are shaped or what kind of shapes feathers have, you can then incorporate these into your designs. You can also add these things as accessories later on. Feel free to experiment! If you take a look at my thumbnail image at the beginning of the tutorial you will see that the left design is heavily inspired by peacocks.

After Ive decided on a shape, I start by picking a neckline. There are many different necklines, no matter if you draw outfits for men or women.

For men's suits for example there exists a large variety of cuts for the neckline!

 

I then decide on how I'd like the sleeves to look. They can be short or long, and they can also be ruffled. Keep in mind that now we will keep it simple! We will add more details later on.

There are so many different ways of drawing ruffled sleeves and I always find it very exciting to mix and match these different types of ruffles. Also, you can not only use ruffles for the sleeves, but also put them on the neckline or on seams.

 

This also goes for skirts. You can not only use different shapes and e.g. make them asymmetrical, but you can also use small and big ruffles to create a more exciting skirt.

 

 

4.1 Frills and Ruffles

Now that I've talked so much about frills and ruffles, I'll shortly introduce you some ways to draw them.

 

Drawing frills is really easy, even though there are so many different kinds of frills and ways of drawing them. Frills tend to occur when fabric folds over itself. It then stacks in layers and creates a frill.

 

In general, soft frills look like a line made out of m and w that alternate. As you will see in a second, frills can also look like u and v, but let's focus on these one first.

When you've drawn a line similar to this one, you then start at the corners of the upper m shaped lines and draw vertical lines that go upwards.

 

After that, you repeat this step, but this time you start at the lower corners of the w shaped lines and draw the vertical lines upwards until they touch the m shaped lines.

 

 

And as you can see here, frills can also have the shape of us and vs. By mixing these shapes, you can create many different types of frills.

 

4.2 Accessories

The best thing you can do to add details to your designs is adding various types of accessories.

As you can see here, I've put many small and big extras on the outfits to prevent them from looking to plain and boring.

 

Things that you can add are clasps, lacing, buttons or ribbons, but also many other things like bands, lace, seams or darts, belts, bags, cut-outs, gems, flowers and so much more! You can add anything you can imagine.

 

When it comes to ribbons, there are almost endless ways to draw them. They can have all different kinds of shapes and sizes and they can be put almost everywhere on an outfit.

 

You can also use Clip Studio Paints symmetrical ruler to make the process faster and easier

Another thing I love to put on my designs is lacing. Lacing cannot only be used for shoes or corsets, but also for tying the neckline together or to create cutouts on the legs and sleeves.

 

For this example I made various kinds of lacing for you to try out

5. Step-by Step Timelapses

Now that you know how I puzzle my designs together, I'd like to show you two timelapses of this process for some designs I've prepared. (Timelapse videos are in the YouTube tutorial)

As you can see I first decided for a rough shape )on the left). ThenI go ahead and put details and accessories on it. You can put anything on it, as long as it fits to your aesthetic!

 

First I drew some ruffles on the neckline and the sleeves and also on the skirt. Then I added some ruffles to the shoes and added some lacing and ribbons.

 

By adding only three types of accessories: the ruffles, ribbons and lacing, I transformed the basic shape on the left into a detailed and exciting outfit.

To show you this process once more, I created another timelapse with a different basic dress shape. However, here I also added some buttons, belts and pearls.

 

 

6. Patterns

Even though you can add many details with accessories already, it is also important to sometimes rely on patterns. As you can see here, I barely used accessories and the design only relies on patterns. Without the patterns, it looks rather boring and lifeless.

 

 

By using patterns, even the most basic outfits can become exciting. These shirts all have a very basic shape, but with the patterns they all look a lot more interesting.

 

I usually create my patterns myself. If you'd like to do this too, then there are many tutorials on the ClipStudio Paints website about how to do this. However, you can also download tons of beautiful patterns from the Clip Studio Assets store!

7. Border Tool

Now that we are talking about patterns, I'd like to show you a tool that I love using in Clip Studio Paint. It's the so-called border tool and you can draw many fashion related things with it. It's a bit like a life-hack if you know what you can do with it.

 

I especially like to use it for patterns and some accessories.

But first let me show you how to activate the border tool:

 

1. When you have selected a brush, you go to the layer properties and select the circle

 

2. There you can also change the color of the border by clicking on the white square and selecting a color you like.

 

3. You can also adjust the thickness of the border

 

When you now draw something, you see that there is a border automatically around everything you draw. And when you change your brush color, the border will stay the same.

 

This is especially handy when you like to draw jewelry or lace and you can use it directly with your selected pattern brushes.

 

As you can see here, you can draw many accessories with the border tool. If you pick the right patterns, you can also create lace. That way you can use filigrane patterns without having to draw the outlines yourself.

 

 

And if you use the border tool in combination with the symmetrical ruler that Clip Studio provides, you can draw beautiful clasps, lacing and ribbons very quickly. It saves a lot of time using both tools in combination!

8. Basic Color Theory

Last but not least we are going to talk about the colors. Colors are very important for they can change how your design is being perceived entirely.

 

I dont want to go into detail in color theory too much, but I think if you know these four different ways of creating color schemes, you can already create lots of beautiful color palettes.

 

Complementary: The first one are complementary, which means you pick two colors that lay on the opposite site of the color wheel.

 

Triadic: The triadic picks colors that lay in a triangle to each other.

 

Split Complementary: The split complementary is similar to the complementary, but instead of picking the opposite colors, you pick two colors that are on the left and right hand side of it.

 

Analogous: And the last one is called analogous, where you pick three or four colors that lay directly next to each other on the color wheel.

 

If you try to puzzle your designs out of different parts and then add accessories and patterns while keeping a bit of color theory in mind, I am sure you'll be able to create beautiful outfit designs in no time!

 

We are now at the end and I really hope that you enjoyed my tutorial! Thank you very much for reading and/or watching my tutorial video!