How the heck does fabric work?
Different fabrics will work in different ways! One of the most important things to keep in mind though is how heavily or lightly gravity will affect a fabric. It’ll affect all fabrics, mind, but some fabric, like tulle, may be able to hold its shape and “defy” gravity, as it were.
In general though, the most important parts of drawing cloth are understanding gather points and where cloth hangs. Gather points being places pulling on the fabric, grasping it. So for example, let’s say you hold a strip of cloth between your hands.
Your hands are where the fabric gathers, where you resist gravity.
The rest are the parts that are currently subject to gravity. It bows in the middle, where there is the least support. Kind of like a rope! You hold a rope between your two hands and let it slack, you’ll see a dip in the middle too!
The ends of the cloth aren’t being supported by anything at all, so they’re falling toward the ground.
Now comes the part of adding the folds. And how many, how large, and how complicated those folds are is the part that’s going to depend on the fabric! In general though, thicker fabric is going to have fewer folds, thinner fabric will have more.
Thick fabric, like I don’t know a canvas or something:
Thin fabric, like linen:
Notice though, that regardless of fabric, the creases are radiating out from two main points!
Look what happens when we add a third grasping point.
The material in the center, where the fabric has less slack, has smoothed out. Meanwhile new folds have appeared.
It really does operate a lot like a rope sometimes!
But there is a TON of things to talk about with fabric, and this is just sorta skimming the surface to get the basic principles down. But hope that’s kinda helpful!
