#tutuorial

Oh and I love your art. 💜

Hi,

First of all, thank you! I'm not that great at drawing skirts myself but I'll try.

Luckily I did do some skirts (more like dresses but ok) in the edits for the latest event, so I'll be explaining using them.

First, you do the cleaning or not depending on what kind of skirt you do. Then you add a new layer and sketch your skirt, guiding yourself after the body. Now, depending on what skirt you decide to do, it would be easy or not. Here I chose this bouffant dress that has all those... things going around.

While sitting down, the skirts tend to fold and go all over sometimes because it's not that stuck to the legs, at least in this case.

It's ok if your sketch is ugly, you will only use it just to help you line.

We have the tendency to follow the body one on one, but most of the time it's not like that. A skirt it's not made out of paper and it has a certain weight.

Here's another example with a different type of skirt:

It's always good to use references.

Ok, you sketch your skirt, now it's time to line it. Put your sketch layer on a low opacity and add a line one. For this skirt, I did 2 layers of linework and it was a nightmare. Let me explain. What I did Is line the dress/skirt, color it, shade it, add light and then I inserted another linework layer over it and did the same thing but turned the opacity to 60-80 just to look like there are more layers on the skirt. You can do that if you want or you can add some lines on the edge and some color over the original linework and then turn the opacity low.

But if it's a regular skirt... you don't have to do this.

Now, I bet you want to know how to make the end of the skirt. Well, here it is, kind of. Do you know all of those lines on the skirt? They all have an end. This end is something like this:

it's just like a squiggly line. Oh, and those 2 lines that come in and out of the skirt. Not all the lines but a good majority of the lines complete this squiggly line. If it's one of those Japanese high-school skirts all of them end on the top part of the squiggly line. If it's a short tight skirt, it's just a wavy line (or even straight, depends how tight it is):

Some other things you need to keep in mind:

When your character has their knees up or/and close to their chest the skirt goes like this:

and not straight. I have to admit that I also struggle with this sometimes. I usually draw some lines that come from the legs and knees and go down in reverse stairs.

If the skirt touches the ground, it goes the same but at some point, it goes to the side or it can even be hidden under the body.

After all of this, you can color it under the linework, insert another layer and shade it, add some light and you're done. The way you shade it's different depending on the skirt.

Now, you can say that "What if I don't want to draw? What do I do then?". Well, there it would be a bit complicated. If you saw my other tutorials you will see this thing where I broke the clothes into pieces and put them back together the way I want. This is what you can do.

Let's take this skirt for example:

It has a nice shape that we can take advantage of. So you cut pieces from the skirt and place them somehow to make sense:

Of course, I had to size and stretch them and erased inside a bit. After that, I erase some parts outside, drew a bit and add the part under:

Again, there is this shape that the skirt has when it falls. After that, I lined the skirt and add some extra shadows:

And that's it!

I was asked about how I made the sky in the Mistbreak cover, and I have no idea why I put it off for so long. It took like 10 minutes to get the screenshots XD.

End product:

Tutorial below the cut.

DIY Black Background Portraits

To get black backgrounds, I’ve done it the time consuming way in Photoshop - carefully outlining my subject, using the Refine Edge Tool, and then replacing the background with black. PAINFUL.

EPBOT has come out with a new portable way to take photos with a black background using the “Strobist Technique” or “Invisible Black Backdrop”.

EPBOT has a link to a fantastic tutorial, links for their gear, and lots of tips here.

You can also google “Invisible Black Backdrop” and “Strobist  Portraits” to get links to more tutorials,

Here is an example of the Strobist Technique from EPBOT’s post: same location and background, different Cons, different Belles.