The Ultimate Guide on How to Draw Anime Clothes

When you’re learning how to draw anime, you also have to learn how to draw anime clothes. Otherwise, you’ll end up with naked or incomplete sketches that you can’t share.

Besides, clothes will bring out your character’s personality and make them fit into different settings as well. For instance, you can dress them up in uniform if you’re going for a schoolgirl or schoolboy look. You can even go for pajamas, formal wear, or ninja clothes depending on the background stories you create for your characters.

This tutorial will show you how to draw anime clothes for both male and female characters.

Anime Girl Clothes Drawing

When drawing girl clothes, you have to account for the shape of the female body. For this tutorial, we’re going to sketch an anime skirt and blouse.

  1. Sketch the blouse and the skirt. Use light lines and simple shapes to outline the main contours.
  2. Add more details to the sketch. The skirt should have some pleats at the bottom, and the shirt should have a collar and some cuffs. You can also add a necktie or scarf if you want.
  3. Trace the shirt and the skirt with dark lines. Add some folds to make them look realistic. You can also include some additional details in this stage.
  4. To complete the drawing, add shadows to the clothing. Start by outlining the contours of the shadows, then fill the contours using hatching.
Anime Girl Clothes Drawing

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Anime Boy Clothes Drawing

You’re still going to go through some of the steps we covered when drawing anime clothes for female characters.

Anime Boy Clothes Drawing
  1. If we were to draw formal or office wear, the first thing you’ll need to do is create a rough sketch of the clothes. Use light lines to sketch the shirt and the trousers.
  2. Add noticeable details to the sketch using light lines. At this stage, you’re going to draw the collar, necktie, and add a belt to the outfit.
  3. Afterward, use dark lines to trace the sketch while adding other important details. You can add the cuffs, seams, pockets, and pleats. Remember to add some folds as well.
  4. If you opted to use guidelines during the first stage, make sure you get rid of them before you add some shadows to the clothing. However, you can proceed to the next step if you didn’t use any guidelines.
  5. Now that you’ve cleaned up the drawing, you’ll need to outline the contours inside the collar, the shirt, the inner part of the sleeves, a little around the pockets, and slightly around the middle area of the pants.
  6. In this final stage, you’re going to use uniform hatching to fill in the contours and add shadows to the outfit.

Always keep these two things in mind when drawing anime clothing:

  • Male bodies are straight and angular, while female bodies have an hourglass type of shape.
  • The clothes you draw will have different folds and wrinkles depending on the body shape of the character.

Conclusion

Going through pictures of real clothes will give you an idea of how you should be drawing anime clothes. So make sure you study photos of the outfits you plan to draw. With some practice, you’ll be able to switch up your character’s look whenever you want.

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