Site hosted by Angelfire.com: Build your free website today!
 
DRAPERY
CLOTHING THE FIGURE
Your rendition of clothing is a powerful tool for designing a portrait beautifully. It can add a great
deal to the feeling of reality you wish to achieve.
Clothing is just fabric lying flat until someone puts it on the body. For all of us, our clothing
means excess fabric, enough so we can move - bend, sit, crouch, walk. Since you will be painting
many types of fabric, it's important to understand the individual characteristics of each one.
There are thin, fine, clinging fabrics like chiffon, which is sheer enough to reveal the forms within;
silk; and satin, which is also shiny. There are medium-weight fabrics like cotton (crisp or soft);
taffeta (crisp and angular); knits (used for t-shirts and sweaters); and woolens for men's and
women's suits. There are heavy woolens for coats (soft but bulky); velvets (pile fabrics that absorb
light to the extent they show no highlight but rather a rim of light on the edges of the forms).
There is fur (another pile material that can be flat and glossy like broadtail or longhaired lynx).
The list goes on and on.
OBSERVING FOLDS IN FABRIC
It's important to really notice the fabric in the clothing of people you see around you and study
the differences. Mannequins in store windows and photographs in fashion and sports magazines
are good sources for study.
The weight and texture of the fabric controls the manner in which it drapes, wrinkles, or folds. The
condition of the fabric - whether it is wet or dry, old or new, rumpled or pressed - also affects it's
appearance.
FABRIC LYING ON A FORM
 
 
 
PRACTICE
 
A truly great way to practice drawing fabric hanging, is by hanging a sheet against the wall. Move the pins closer together and draw the folds. Finally, hang the material by one pin and draw the
folds. 
INTERPRETING DRAPERY
The Greek and Roman artists sculpted drapery as if it were wet fabric, in very vertical pipelike
forms. In the works of Albrecht Durer and other artists of the Middle Ages, the fabric appears
crisp, and the folds are squarish and angular.
Peter Paul Rubens painted drapery in large round forms and influenced the Baroque painters.
Two of the best to study for drapery are the eighteenth century artists Giovanni Battista Tiepolo
and Antoine Watteau. The sculptor and painter Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini, made marble look like
the airiest of fabrics billowing in the wind!
 
 
In the drawing above, after Lorenzo diCredi, a Renaissance artist, the figure appears to be nearly flying in the wind. The motion and emotion in this tiny study are created solely by the handling of the drapery. We know the drawing is fantasy from the artist's knowledge and imagination, for no one could ever see fabric moving this rapidly, let alone draw it. But the illusion is complete. 
 

BACK TO PORTRAIT PAGE
BACK TO ART SCHOOL