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Cartoon Clothes Formulas

We’ve learned formulas for every body part, however, people don’t tend to walk around naked. We’re usually wearing something. That something often wrinkle up and fold around us as we move.

In this lesson, we’ll be dealing with how to handle drawing cartoon clothes.  Specifically how to draw wrinkles and folds.

Here you will find:

Simple Cartoon Folds

The Four Most Common Cartoon Folds: Pipe Fold, Half Lock Fold, Spiral folds, Zig Zag Fold

Fold Thickness and Fold Origin Points: Fabric Types, Support Points and Pinch Points

Using Fold to Describe Form

Costume and Clothes Ideas

Applying The Folds to Cartoon Styles

There’s a lot to this topic and I’m not even telling you all of it.  Just enough to get your cartoons to look right.  So let’s get to it.

Simple Cartoon Folds

The simples folds in cartoons can be done with bumps in just the right spots.  It’s not too difficult and early comic strip cartoons used them all the time.  If you don’t want to get into anything complicated, this is the way to go:

However, when these types of simple folds are no longer enough and you want to have something that feels more natural, then it’s time roll up your sleeves and get to know a bit more about how folds work…

The Four Most Common Cartoon Folds

For the sake of this lesson, I decided to distill the information into the folds most used in cartoons.  These are not all the folds there are. There are a few other fold types I won’t be covering here.

I’ll explain the folds from what I think, are the easiest folds to understand to the trickiest.

Pipe Fold

When cloth hangs off a support point and simply gets pulled down by gravity, we get pipe folds.  Pipe folds are cylindrically shaped folds, similar to a pipe.

From beneath, they often create multiple half pipes attached together.  They look like this:

This is the easiest fold to wrap your head around. These fold are commonly seen in skirts, capes, and most articles of clothing that loosely hangs off a person.

Spiral folds

Spiral folds are simple to understand as well.  In fact, the bumps used to create simple cartoon folds as explained above are more often than not, spiral folds.

Spiral folds are simply small cylinders that wrap around a body part like a spiral.  They occur, mostly,  when tight or form fitting cloth bunches up.

They’re ideal for defining the direction of the body part underneath the cloth.

Half Lock Fold

This is when things start getting a tad tricky.  Half locks are folds that are created when two sections of the same piece of cloth interlock.  There are two types.  A single half lock and a double half lock.

The single half occurs when one part of the cloth goes into another.

The double occurs when to parts of the cloth come together and the cloth inverts and pushes out against itself:

  This is extremely common. It happens in pant legs and shirt sleeves anytime they bend.

This means this type of fold comes up a lot. So learn to draw it.  It will immediately make your clothed cartoons look more natural.

Zig Zag Fold

I find zig zag folds to the the trickiest of all the folds. They’re sometimes made up of Pipe folds that are bunched up:

Bottom of pants legs and shirt sleeves are where you tend to see them.

Fold Thickness and Fold Origin Points

Now that you know some fold types to use, the tricky part is finding out how thick they should be and where best to put them.  The answer comes when you think about  gravity, material of the fabric and points of origin.

Fabric Types

It’s important to know what material makes up the clothes.

Thinner fabric will have thinner folds and more of them.

Thicker fabric will have bigger folds and less of them.

But you can still simplify the amount.  Less is often more.

The origin of the fold is extremely important.  They tell you where the folds ought to be placed. Pinch points and support points tell you what you need to know.

Support Points

Support points or anchor points have to do with gravity.  Any loose cloth is draped, supported or anchored up from somewhere. Once you pin point those places you can then create the folds which are created from those  points:

  Pinch Points

However, people tend to move around. We bend and twist. This causes our clothes to pinch up in places. These pinch points cause folds to happen, BUT they almost always point to a support, or anchor point:

Using Folds to Describe Form

Yeah, so far, that’s a lot to keep track of. Well, there’s one more very important thing that you need to be aware of as well when doing folds on clothes.  They work best when the folds reinforce the form they are covering or are draped over.

Remember how I talked about the arm and leg direction and keeping it consistent and clear? Part of the way you do it is with folds:

This is in spite of the fact that, in reality, folds sometimes go AGAINST the direction of the form beneath. This is where we take artistic license and h adjust things so that we don’t confuse anyone looking at our drawing.

Costume and Clothes Ideas

If you’re saying to yourself, “okay, that’s a lot but I think I understand, but my problem is, when I draw clothes on my characters, they look generic and often uninspired. How do I know what clothes to give my characters?”

It’s simple, look around you. People are wearing clothes all around.  Look online, search for the type of clothes you may want to have your characters wear.

If it’s historical, fantasy or science fiction, then you look online for reference for that as well.  Anything fantastical or from a science fiction background should be some amalgam of contemporary and historical clothing anyway.

That way, it has an element of truth to it.  That’s what designer for movie and tv show do.

Do some research. It’s that simple.

Applying The Folds to Cartoon Styles

When speaking of folds in cartoons, simplicity is the name of the game. The overarching theme in all these styles is how they simplify the folds.

Freddy Moore

Freddy Moore style, out of these three styles has the most balanced amount of simple folds.  Not too much so that it’s representational but not so simple that the folds are still there.

This makes it so that balancing the amount of folds can be tricky but they also look just right when you nail it:

Turnarounds

  Bruce Timm

Bruce Timm Style folds fluctuate a lot. Sometimes they’re so minimal that they practically don’t exist, while other times they can be quite elaborate.  It really depends on the type of drawing you’re making and how simple you want to go with it.

In the examples below, I show you how folds can be drawn in the style in case you actually want to see them:

The turnarounds below, basically have no folds at all.  This is, more often than not, the default folds of this style…

Turnarounds

Takahiro Kimura Anime Style

Kimura style is by far the most elaborate.   It really tries as best as it can to be representational when it comes to folds. Still, there is some level of simplification to this style:

Turnarounds

written by Cartoon Clothes Formulas

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Cartoon Feet Formula

Feet are often one of the most neglected parts of the body when it come to drawing. It’s not that they aren’t important, it’s just that they aren’t very “glamours.” Also, most of the time they’re covered up completely by shoes so we don’t even get to draw them as much as everything else.

Still, we should know what’s going on inside the shoes. And women often were shoes that expose their feet so, we still need to know how to draw them.

In this lesson, we’ll do just that.  I’ll share with you the three part formula that helps me draw feet, plus more. In this lesson we’ll go over:

Very basic cartoon Feet

Three Part Foot Breakdown (include ankles)

Toes  (Stairs and pointing in)

Applying The Formulas to Different Styles (Freddy Moore Style, Bruce Timm Style, Takahiro Kimura Anime Style) with Turnarounds

Very Basic Cartoon Feet

For the most part, in it’s simples form, as long a your cartoon feet drawings are made from shapes with a flat bottom surface and some sort of incline leading down to the toes, you should be okay. For example:

That’s all there is too it. However, if you want to get a little bit more naturalistic, then you may want to try this formula…

Three Part Foot Breakdown

The first thing you need to do when drawing the foot is to have a base shape to create the rest of the foot on.  A foot can be broken down into two simple flat graphic shapes.

The foot from the side can be drawn as a triangle, and the foot from the from can be drawn as a modified box with a connecting bottom triangle.

The triangle favors one side more than the other.  The inside part of the foot will have the shorter angle.

Once you’ve got that down, you’ve got a foundation on which to create your more solid forms, of which there are five parts.

The main body of the foot.

The heel.

The toe area.

Ankles

Toe Breakdown

The main body of the foot

Main larges form that take up most of the foot is an oddly shaped tube. It look something like this:

It’s like half an arch.  Or even half a cave, because one side has the arch while the other goes down to the floor.

The Heel

When you add the heel, it goes right into the cave as if it’s a pillar of support. But there’s an area of space still left:

The Toe Areas

The area where you will put in the toes is shaped like half a disk that wraps around the front of the main cylinder.  It assumes the a softer version of shape of the triangular lay in. One side is a little shallower than the rest.

Ankles

Although this is essential the main foot formula, there’s on thing I should bring and that’s how you connect the leg to the foot, namely the ankles.

You can think of the ankles as a hinge with really large bolts sticking out from either side. You attach the curve of the main body of the foot to the ankles.

However, there’s something you need to be aware of with this “ankle hinge.” when looking at it from the front or back you will see that it doesn’t line up.  One side is higher than the other.  The inner “bolt,” is higher than the outer.

Making sure to draw the ankles that way, will make your feet look more natural.

Toes

Once you have the general foot forms drawn out, you can start adding toes. A helpful way to draw toes is not just to draw them like balls or boxes but to draw them like steps.

Step like this. First you step is a shape like this.  Kinda like wienie shape with a flat top.:

Then you create a step. It’s not a perfect step, there’s a slant to it and it’s shallow:

From here you can add the toes nails  the details:

You can do this with all the toes, just making each toe small as you go.

Now there’s something I should note.  (1) Say you’re looking a the foot from the top:

(2) just like drawing fingers on the hand, you should place them in an arch.

(3) The other thing to keep in mind is that the toes look best then they turn inward toward each other. So the big toe slants toward the little toes, and the little toes slant toward the big toe.

Keeping these things in mind as you draw feet will really help make your feet drawing “feel” right.

So when you’re all done you end up with something that looks like this:

Applying The Formulas to Different Styles

Now it’s time to show you how this formula can be applied to our three goto styles.

When doing my homework on most of these styles, I found that feet where almost afterthoughts.  Very rarely where feet more than just a shape with some lines for toes.  Sometimes they didn’t even bother with the lines for toes.

That said, there are a few exceptions, like moments where the feet are the focus of a shot, or when a character is barefoot as part of his design, like Disney’s Tarzan. And speaking of Disney characters lets start with…

Freddy Moore Style

In the cases where a Disney and Looney Tunes character’s feet are more than just a graphic shape, the design of the feet tend to be very simple.  Except for Disney’s Tarzan, as I mentioned before. His feet are extremely well designed, anatomically accurate but still cartoony and exaggerated.

So I’ll show you four examples of Freddy Moore Style feet:

The simple shape foot with not details:

The foot with toes:

Caricatured foot. This version of the foot has the most anatomy:

and Looney Tunes foot.

Turnaround

Male

Female

  Bruce Timm Style

The Bruce Timm style feet are even more simple. Hardly any detail at all:

Turnarounds

Male

  Female

  Takahiro Kimura Anime Style

In Takahiro Kimura anime feet, toes are extremely simplified. Almost like Bruce Timm feet.  Just a tad more definition in the foot shape:

Turnarounds

Male

Female

And that’s it for the feet.  I hope you can see that feet aren’t too difficult to draw in cartoons. However, just because they can be drawn simply doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t give them some thought and structure.

written by Cartoon Feet Formula

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