Drawn to Life: 20 Golden Years of Disney Master Classes Volume 1

33 Drapery — Its Role in Drawing

Drawing from a model with clothing or costume can be a real challenge. Wrinkles, folds, seams, belts, pleats, ruffles, and shirring all seem so important and at times, downright overwhelming. Their importance cannot be denied, but their reason for being there and looking the way they do must be carefully considered lest we find ourselves drawing lines, lumps, pieces of cloth, and incidental paraphernalia rather than a human presenting us with a gesture to draw, who is incidentally wearing some clothes or a costume.

For our purposes, the clothed figure suits our needs — forces us to the brink of our drawing capabilities. Our job as animators (layout, story, etc.) is to be surrogate actors for our cartoon characters ...