i say a blessing to friendship, bicycles & meals

here are some some quick diagrams i drew up for a discord server a while back to illustrate how i think abt it that i hope will be helpful:

essentially what helps make it simple for me is staking out "landmarks" (the points of tension) on the body that will significantly impact how cloth hangs (pink), finding the path between two adjacent landmarks (yellow), then stepping a little to the left of the path to sniff out the little detours the fabric can take along the way (blue).

pink tends to be the joints of the body and the seams and hems of the clothes, but it can also be surfaces or props that the character is interacting with (like a chair a person in a skirt is sitting on). taking the first image for example, these points would be, for the jacket: the cuffs and shoulder seams and the bend of her elbow; then for the shirt: her right shoulder and her waistband where it's tucked in. then the yellow connections would be: the cuffs of the jacket to her elbow, the bend of her elbow to the shoulder seam of the jacket, and her raised right shoulder to the waistband of her pants. the blue bits follow from these two. you could probably do without 'em if you want something simpler, but i really like throwing in even just a couple of them in the places where the fabric tends to fold over itself and create little pockets, closest to the points of tension--like bent elbows and knees. they're represented by triangles in the diagrams but it really depends on the thickness and texture of the fabric; all that matters is that one side tapers to a point (the fabric meeting itself) and the other side makes a "well" of sorts. like making the ends of a strip of paper touch. i hope that makes sense! i'm not used to articulating the process, it's gotten pretty intuitive over the years.

some general tips:

try to avoid completely parallel lines! it's an old chestnut, but triangles (and similar shapes) really are your friend. you have to sell the illusion of depth and form to make your clothes a hit, and parallel lines flatten that impression. because clothes wrap around the body and catch in the joints and shift with movement, the lines you use for creases and folds at a certain area will tend to meet at a shared point of tension

study a lot. collect a ton of references of every style and article and material you could possibly find, so if a particular pose in a particular outfit stumps you you'll be able to find a jumping-off point

remember that you are your own best reference. what really helped me understand how fabric moves w the body were the hours i spent primping and preening in front of the mirror in various outfits, striking different poses, just following folds and seams from start to end

wrt anatomy, i tend to be more loosey-goosey abt it bc i'm usually a lot more excited to draw fabric than flesh, so unfortunately my system is less Build Strong Fundamentals and more Whatever This Looks Good. wc means general shapes (usually broken up at the joints/hinges), approximate recollections of where parts of the body are in relation to each other (elbow hits the waist, wrist hits the crotch, etc), and whatever rule-breaking makes it prettier. you can kind of see it in that figure i freeballed above; just boxes and cylinders for the torso and arms, and then for the legs just an outline i can more or less pass off as legs. when i'm not paying attention, i have a bad habit of defaulting to barbie feet bc i think characters stand more elegantly when they're in heels. so i'm probably not the best person to learn anatomy from（´∀｀'' )ゞ

but i will say once again that the power of reference images cannot be overstated. and yet ☝️they can be over-relied upon so as to render the figure more lifeless than if you had just wrought it off the dome in the first place. so to thread the needle i usually start w a tiny thumbnail, blow it up, then overtop very loosely reproduce my reference, keeping my strokes long and light and leaning on those general shapes. if it's a simpler drawing i can stop here (and if i'm feeling lucky i start here, too, no thumbnail required) and go right into lines and clothes, like i do here. but if it's a more challenging pose, i throw my ref on the canvas beside the preliminary sketch, lower the opacity, and trace it, breaking it down into simpler shapes and and marking points of orientation like the center of the chest or the tilt of the ribs. then i futz around with my sketch (either redrawing or using the lasso tool) to correct proportions/placements/what have yous. it's a little convoluted but it helps me keep the pose from looking too stiff while still giving it good bones!

here's smth i'm working on rn that might help illustrate what i mean ^^ in pink is the blown up thumbnail and in purple is the sketch after i'd futzed around w it some

i also may just be a little exam-brained rn bc of all the reviewing i've been doing, but i'm realizing as i type this that it also helps me the same way practice tests help me--i can check what i got right and what i got wrong, and the latter is especially valuable for the next time i attempt a similar pose. sometimes this is even how i figure out new shortcuts! score!

besides that, i think the last tip i have is to find smth abt the body to fall a little bit in love with. like, i like knuckles and collarbones and ears. i think it helps to have smth you pay a little more attention to, something that pushes you to keep working thru a piece to reach or a high point you can fall back to for some motivation when morale is low. i think we improve the most when we enjoy the process, y'know? i hope that makes sense. maybe

and lastly, for real this time: find an artist who's really good at something you want to improve in and absorb their essence by being a freak abt their work. i bought ryoko kui's daydream hour recently and the way she draws collarbones and ribs and uses so few lines to convey the way torsos are oriented in space drives me crazyyyy. i've also binged kamome shirahama's witch hat atelier in a matter of days and my friends can attest to how rabidly i foamed at the mouth for her clothing folds. christ alive i'll be seeing dagda's pooled-up cape in my dreams for the rest of time

(this isn't anatomy or clothes so this point is more tangential, but i also reread school zone girls last week and ningiyau's comedic timing and expression work are just SO. graghgrghaghrggha. ghrhgahg. okay i'm normal now)

i think that's about all i can say. i hope this helps and i wasn't just stringing you along for several hundred words of nonsense (^^ゞ