How to Draw Cute Cartoon Dresses

Collect reference photos to draw different types of dresses properly.

Drawing convincing cartoon dresses is important if you want to draw for the fashion industry or do cartooning. A sense of fashion and form will help you create custom styles. Research different types of dresses for visual reference, then draw a three-dimensional figure and shape your dresses to fit your cartoon model.

Things You'll Need

• Pencil
• Paper
• Figure reference
• Dress reference

Instructions

1. Draw a stick figure to represent the female form. This can be done by drawing an oval to represent the head and a vertical line to represent the torso. Hang two ovals on the torso line to represent the rib cage and pelvis. Refer to any figure photo reference you might have from magazines to give you an idea of where to locate the ovals. Draw lines to represent the arms and legs of your stick figure. Extend the arms from the upper sides of the rib cage oval, where shoulders would be, and the legs from the sides of the pelvis oval. Indicate hands and feet with simple lines that extend from the ends of the arm and legs.

2. Make the stick figure more feminine by drawing a flipped triangle over the rib cage oval. The two points at the top of the triangle should touch the shoulder area where the arms extend from the oval. The bottom point should be somewhere in the center of the figure, at the bottom of the rib cage oval. Draw an upright triangle below this, allowing its top point to meet the bottom point of the flipped triangle. Draw the upright triangle over the pelvis oval. The two triangles together create the idealized female hourglass shape.

3. Look through fashion magazines and find the type of dress you want to cartoon. Refer to the image and draw a simplified version over the hourglass shape. Keep things simple by drawing the dress in only a few lines. Many dresses can be simplified by drawing them as basic forms such as cones, half-spheres, and modified cylinders. Cones are good for depicting wider, full and flowing dresses, while modified cylinders better represent tight skirts. The cylinders are modified by rounding them off at the top to show the shape of the hips. Spheres can be used to draw hoop dresses that were used historically.

4. Add detail to your dresses by editing the outlines of your forms. Look at your reference, and draw what you see rather than what is in your imagination. Copy the unique characteristics of the dress outline with contour drawing. Contour drawing is done by drawing the parts of a form totally by sight, with no aid from the imagination. Make a dress contour drawing by drawing what you see there, not what you think is there. Draw only the most necessary folds, which can be done with contour drawing. Focus on drawing an outline of what you see and do not rely solely on memory if your goal is to make the dress look like a particular type.

References

• You Tube: How to Draw Women's Clothes in Cartoons
• Manga Tutorials: How to Draw Skirts and Dresses
• Dragoart: How to Draw a Red Dress, Anime Model