Art Journal 020: Clothing Wrinkles

From the very beginning of my comic-making career I’ve experimented with how to draw clothing and I can freely report that it’s actually pretty tricky to master!  It’s a case of layers, where bones move flesh which is encased in fabric and different tightness, thickness and qualities of fabric react in different ways to being bent at rigid mechanical joints.  It’s like skin, but looser and less elastic, and over the years I’ve figured out a couple ways to help me draw it more easily, so today I’d like to share those thoughts with you.  To try and make things simple I’ve broken wrinkles down into three major types:  joints, loose ends and twists.

My early attempts at clothing wrinkles were a little messy- especially in the torso- but there was a rhyme and reason to what I did.  The foundation of all my clothing wrinkle philosophy lies in the ways and degrees in which our bodies can bend, since the way clothing wrinkles directly reflects the way the body underneath it is hinged.  To demonstrate, here is a basic construction of the human body as though it were made from metal pieces (A I).  Like a robot I imagine the body as large sections of rigid, unbendable chunks (the ribs, upper/lower arm/leg, pelvis) connected by short segments of bendable thin bands- if you imagine the old old old style of robot you can get a good idea of what I’m talking about.  

The areas where the body can bend are the places where clothing bunches up, to put it simply.  The specific logic behind the way it wrinkles is a bit more complicated, so to help illustrate how cloth works- to better inform the rest of the article- I have a couple illustrations describing conservation of matter.  Here we have a loose piece of cloth (A II).  It’s a square shape with no real tension being applied to it, its loose and simple and perpendicular lines across it show a basic grid shape.  This represents cloth in its neutral state without any force being applied to it, but it isn’t neutral when you wrap it around the body because the body imposes its own shape upon the cloth.  

Our next illustration shows the same cloth being pinched at one end (A III).  The pinched end looks rough and jagged and the opposite side is taut and straight.  The way I imagine cloth in this state is to consider the straight parallel lines running horizontally across it being drawn with the new shape.  All the lines would be the exact same length, and they are at the ends, but in the middle of this bunched-up new shape the distance from one side of the cloth to the other is shorter, so the full straight line can’t exist but it has to retain its same length because the matter between one side and the other doesn’t simply vanish, and this shortening of distance between two moving points manifests as wrinkles, where an infinite row of impossibly-thin lines fold in on each other to match the changing positions of an abstract beginning point and an end point.  We can see this in the blue lines in the above figure.  

The last illustration shows the way in which cloth deforms if you pull it around a hard bludgeon-shaped structure, like an elbow, knee or a skull (A IV).  Here our tension point isn’t on one edge or the other, but rather in the dead center of the cloth.  In the case of our imaginary square the folds and looseness tends towards the corners because the parallel lines that cross over the pinnacle of the tension point are themselves more rigidly-shaped so they don’t have as much room to fold in on themselves to compensate; in contrast, the parallel lines in the outside thirds of the cloth aren’t under direct influence from the rigid force and thus have more room to bend and fold.  This is why you see the more structured triangular elevated cloth shapes in the grid squares at North, South, East and West and why they don’t collapse on themselves the way the four corner squares do.  The point where the bone presses against the center of the cloth will always be the smoothest and the most taut- we’ll see how this all fits together shortly.

So we have an understanding of how cloth bends and folds when tension is applied to the outside edges or the center, but how does this translate into clothing?  Well if you imagine our squares, and you imagine a bunch of them stitched together with force applied to different areas in different ways, you can begin to see how clothing shifts to accommodate the changing position of our bodies!  The first of the three major ways our bodies move is a hinge joint, like how our doors swing open.  It’s a binary open-and-close joint so you’ll have one half which receives tension when it flexes and one side which bunches up.  In our sample illustration we have a shirt sleeve (B I).  I draw a lot of long-sleeved characters and when I draw an arm at rest I’ll add a little hint of the joint to the cloth, like it’s been bent and wrinkled so many times the cloth remembers the shape.  Instead of just drawing two curved lines to represent the arm I gave the inside of the elbow a bit of a disruption right at the inside of the elbow joint- this helps the reader understand that yes, this is a joint and this is the direction it moves in and the opposite side remains smooth by contrast, this is pretty simple.  The tricky part comes when the arm begins to bend a little bit (B II).  The way I tend to handle wrinkles is to pinpoint an “epicenter” and the closer something is to that epicenter the more extreme its distortion becomes.  Here we have one primary crease beginning to form in the pit of the elbow to show the joint and smaller “waves” of clothing folds taper away from it.  The shadow cast on the side of the cloth begins to get more jagged the closer it gets to the elbow line, and the elbow point itself becomes more taut and pronounced.  It’s subtle at first when it’s just a little bend to the elbow, but more extreme bends create much more extreme creases in the cloth (B III).  Here we can see the “epicenter” of the bend most clearly, since all the crease lines are pointing towards it.  The most intense wrinkling is around the elbow, and it tapers away as we draw further away from it.  When I’m doing this kind of tight bent wrinkle I’ve come up with a little system to paint the curves of the creases on the sides of the joint that aren’t the crunch point or the taut point- I used to just make straight starburst shapes radiating outward from my epicenter but I started adapting those radial shapes into I’s, U’s, V’s and Y’s.  You can see in the above figure how it isn’t the same shape over and over, I try to vary them and connect them where it makes sense so it looks like the cloth is soft and naturally folding.  The elbow eide is extremely taut and we can see the point of the elbow here.  While on the subject of elbows, it’s a good habit to not think of elbows or knees as single pointed angles but rather think of them as two bars pivoting around one another.  A fully-bent elbow or knee has a bit of a facet thickness to it due to the way our bones actually pivot so it’s a good habit to give the hinge of your joints a little thickness to reflect this- it’s much more prevalent in the knees than the elbows  but it’s good to keep in mind no matter what.  A good way to explore this concept is to look at the way a bendy-straw works when you bend or straighten it, since your clothing will pretty much do the same thing.

Not all cloth on our bodies is going to be caught in the middle of a hinge, however!  There are areas where clothing just hangs loose, and this creates its own lazier kinds of wrinkles.  The most common areas for these kinds of creases are the bottom hems of shirts, pants, skirts and dresses; sometimes it happens with sleeves as well but those are usually a bit more snug on modern clothing, but the principle still applies.  Loose hem cloth tends to bunch up around the next joint its hanging over- in my earliest comics I explored a lot of shirts draping and wrinkling over hips, which was inspired largely by the ideas illustrated in figure A I.  The way I like to think of it is if we broke our figure down into simple shapes (C I).  Here I’ve taken the bottom hem of a pant leg and rendered the foot underneath it in my usual mental image: a wedge, a thin block and a bigger block (this is a good way to think about feet, by the way).  It looks nice and sharp right now, but we don’t like that so let’s chop & screw it! (C II).  If we imagine the pant leg cut into thin circular stirps near its end we can get a rough idea for the way in which pants bunch up subtley- since they can’t keep going straight down through your foot one end gets lifted up and the imaginary parallel lines wrinkle up to compensate.  The way I like to imagine it is when the bottom ring of the pant leg falls around the shape of the boot, lifted at the bridge but falling lower at the heel (C III).  This would cause the second ring up the leg to fall unevenly into the first one since the tibia and fibula bones would not allow that part of your pants to follow the direction of the bottom rung.  The off-angled second rung would disrupt the third rung, which in our example is thinner than the one before it, and that too balances out by sitting on top of the other ring.  Just like in our hinge-joint creases our hanging cuff creases grow less pronounced the further away from their epicenter they get, in this case the further away from the foot they go the less extreme the folds of the cuff until the pant leg evens out into something smoothish (C IV).  Here I’ve drawn the leg as I would in the comic; you can see how the shifted rings in my demonstration reflect in the soft crumpling of the pant leg around the foot.  I like to add the side-seam of pants to my drawings because it’s a fun detail that really helps describe the shapes in the pant leg and accentuates the bend in the knee and hip.  Once you can connect a draped pant cuff to a hinged pant knee to the hinged hip joint, you can make yourself a proper pair of pants!  Yeah!

The last types of creases I’d like to talk about are twists!  I like to draw characters pulling and twisting and pivoting all around so I get a lot of mileage out of these creases, and they can really emphasize motion quite strongly!  There aren’t too many regions of your body that can twist and fewer still we usually cover in cloth, so for this example I’ll demonstrate with an ordinary t-shirt (D I).  Our shirt roughly connects at two solid points, the ribcage and the hips.  If we imagine our straight parallel lines running up the body we can better understand the way cloth wrinkles when we twist one of these two solid points perpendicular to the other.  If we follow our imaginary lines with the pivot of our torso we can see that they coincide with the wrinkles that form in our shirt, which also indicate the direction in which the body has physically turned (D II).  The way I like to think of it, the crease lines connect the points which would line up when the body is facing forward.  The creases of our shirt tend to have their epicenters under our armpits, since our shoulders act as the “knee” of that joint and the way we turn our body means the front of our shoulder will be pulling our shirt cloth forward, so it would naturally pull underneath the shoulder joint and back towards our hip.  As a rule of thumb if you’re twisting to face stage-right you’ll get wrinkles like //// and if you face stage-left they go like \\\\.  They’re not all straight, though, you’ll notice in the sample drawing that the lines curve with the curvature of your body.  Another simplified way to illustrate the twist is with a cylinder (D III).  Here is one with notches to indicate alignment and nice straight sides.  When we twist the top of the can to the side (D IV) we can see the direction of the creases match the direction we twisted the top in.  We can also see how the middle pinches inward, because the twist extends the distance between our two notches all the lines in between them have to maintain their same distance connecting points A and B, so they pinch inward at the center.  Our shirts do this as well, getting more snug around the ribs when we twist our bodies.

Clothing wrinkles are something I had a lot of trouble with when I was younger but I made a couple rules of thumb for myself to work with. It takes a lot of patience and practice, and like with all drawing you adapt what works best for YOU, and not necessarily what works best for someone else (me), but it can help sometimes to look at what works best for other people and see if that can’t help you find what works in your case.  Wrinkles are a fun way to make your characters’ outfits feel lived-in and I have a lot of fun painting them!

Thanks for reading!