Hello! I been making clothing for a very long time, originally since 2014 and for a good while ive wanted to make something to help other clothing designers improve their designs just in general! this will show you some advice on the following
- Outline + Basic Coloring
- Color usage in designs
- Shading + Highlights
- Textures!
- Advanced template
The Software I will be using mainly will be Clip Studio Paint.
I will give alternative steps for people that use paint.net, which could also work with most other picture editing programs like GIMP, paint sai, Photoshop and probably a few more programs on PC. You should also have some sort of understanding of the program.
Starting the design with an advanced template
Some designers that make skirts or anything that goes down to the legs will use a separate advanced template to design off of to make it easier to make the outfit and see what it looks like a bit better. I personally use an advanced template for my designs even which does make a pretty big difference on difficulty to make specific things, this is what the template looks like
template showing where i usually put everything, you don’t have to make your outfits this way but this is just the suggested way that i would use it.
what the template really looks like, includes a seperation that helps see increments easier
If you want the template I’m using I will have a file for it below in a Photoshop (Psd) file and a paintnet file (Pdn)
PhotoShop File My Advanced Template Psd.psd (362.7 KB)
PaintNet File My Advanced Template Pdn.pdn (81.2 KB)
Outlines and Solid Coloring
Most of the time, people will start with the outlines with just about anything, and this isn’t the wrong way of doing it, but sometimes it is more time efficient to not do the outlines first surprisingly! Things such as sweaters, crop tops, T-shirts, in some cases pants, and even sandals are easier done when you start with the coloring the silhouette of the part of the outfit first. In this case I’m going to use an over-sized sweater that I’m making.
The outlines for this sweater look pretty confusing to look at rightt?
This can make the time it takes to design something way longer than it should be! Now lets now show what the solid color of the design looks like alone. MUCH easier to see where everything is, in fact it looks even easier to create! Making the basic shape of the outfit first will also help out point out where to make the outlines of whatever you may be making that is more on less complex side of things.
Lets now see what it looks like all together!!
As you can see now, with the outlines and the shape of the sweater together, it looks like what it is supposed to be and is easy to process what the outfit is supposed to be as long as the outlines are in reasonable places.
Sometimes you may also want the outlines to look more like seams and there is an easy way to make them look slightly more realistic which is turning the outlines into dashed outlines. All you have to do is get an eraser with a size of between 1 to 3 pixels and start erasing off little, thin sections of the lines in a sideways direction, the bigger the eraser used, the further apart the dashes will be. You can also make some dashes be longer than others to have it appear to have some volume. Here’s a side to side comparison with dashes and without dashes:
Neck-holes
The outlines look pretty decent for now however we are forgetting one thing; a neckhole. This is just a preference but I have always preferred to have a neck-hole in my outfits, here’s how to make a neck-hole symmetrical.
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First, select half of the front and and the top section of the torso while being on the same layer as your main color layer like this, and then get your eraser out and make it the size of 20 to 40 and start erasing out half of a circle.
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After doing that, select the black border between the top and the front of the torso and move it down two pixels. This is so that the neck-hole Doesnt look like its clipping off when it is wrapped around a humanoid.
Next, copy and paste the side you made the neck-hole on and flip it to the other side. If you are using paint.net you can just continue selecting it and then copy + paste and use one of the small circles on the side that is away from the neck hole and drag it across to the other side. In this case I’m using clip studio paint so I’m going to also show you a different way of doing this that could also work for other programs.
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I’m going to first delete the other side of the front + top of the torso so i don’t have it overlapping when i paste and flip the other side. and then select the entire top + part of the front of the torso and copy and paste, for clip studio paint you can just press this button here:
- After you copy and pasted this the pasted side with some programs will have the pasted selection on another layer. Press the Scale/rotate button and press the flip horizontal button and it will automatically flip it for you without struggle so all you have to do is merge down the layer below to have just one solid color layer again.
For outlining the neck collar the only thing done different is instead of erasing a hole out you just make an outline that is going around the neck hole. For what I’m making I’m going to also add a seam around the neck-hole just for details sake.
This is the before and after of adding a Neck-hole to this design.
The right side looks like more effort was put in however it takes a few minutes max to improve the outlines of this and it looks like its starting to come together very nicely! Now for the next part I will show the basics of shading + Highlights and colors to choose!
Colors + Shading
Shading is something that really makes outfits look lively and gives it an illusion that it has some volume, despite the fact it is a flat surface on a blocky body… Some people will shade their clothing with black and overlay it, which can work in some situations
If you make the opacity of the shading layer in overlay about half in a mid/dark color it can work somewhat but the shading doesn’t look all that vibrant. lets change that.
- For shading I recommend you try to learn a bit more about color theory, It is very helpful to choosiing what colors to use and WILL make your designs look better if you shade your designs. For this since I am making this sweater brown.
For the shading I’m using a slightly darker color than the main color but also changing the hue a bit to make it appear almost purple.
Using a different color vs pitch black in both normal and overlay blending settings…
- A Pretty Big difference right off the bat is in a normal blending setting the other color is not clashing harshly unlike what using pitch black would do.
- For the overlay settings having the opacity adjusted to be slightly lower, the other color still appears to be matching the main color more than the side that is using just pitch black.
Shading
There is one shading method that some people use that is actually pretty common. This takes a little time but doesn’t look too great.
To mimic this, all you have to do to recreate this is make straight lines across each corner of the template and Gaussian Blur everything. This can be used for maybe slight minimal detail under the actual shading layer if you want, but using this as the only thing for shading appears very bland.
I like to start off my shading by using a hard brush and making strokes + filling in where shadows of the outfit will be; Don’t be afraid to use curves for the shading, you can go wild with this and find your own shading techniques with this and see what looks best to you.
If you don’t have a drawing tablet or a program that supports pen sensitivity there is a way to make your shading lines to look sharp and keep its curves.
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Start drawing your shading lines with whatever size you want, I recommend using something not too thin, but the thicker you make the brush the more you will have to erase. Best to use a brush between the size of 6 to 12. Make sure that the lines have some sense of direction that makes sense with what you are making, you can look at references of people wearing the kinds of clothing you are making as a reference of direction of putting your lines.
I’ll show a few examples of real life pictures to show you what i mean
This is something that is very loose throughout and doesn’t hug the body as much. There isnt as much wrinkles or creases however they are still there; and the curves are more-so vertical
This on the other hand is a shirt that is fit tightly. Theres not only more creases and wrinkles, but the lines are more so in a horizonal direction.
- Then Equip your eraser and make it slightly bigger than the size you used to make the lines and then erase the edges in a curved angle. This will take a bit of time to do for the entire template, however the results of this will be very much worth it!
You can of course get creative with your curves to stylize your outfit and create you own style with this, you can make it have swirls, thick lines, thin lines, go wild. 
After drawing out your shading it should look something like this.You can leave your shading like this if you are going for a harsh look, otherwise to make it appear softer, go over the edges of the lines a few times with an eraser with 0% Hardness and half of the opacity with a similar size you used to make the shading lines. You can leave a few parts of the lines out to give it a variety.
The Left side is without soft erasing the edges, the Right side is with some parts faded
But lets see an actual comparison between the common Gaussian Blur trick and manually shading everything
This is a pretty big difference, and shows how shading can make a massive change to your outfit in general!
Now the next thing is adding highlights to this, and luckily this wont take too much time to do compared to shading.
Highlights~
This sweater at the moment does have some good shading, but it still looks pretty flat. Adding highlights will give it an illusion that it has some volume and mass to it along with making the outfit ‘pop’.
For this, create a layer below the shading layer and make lines around the shading lines. The shading should help with guiding you where to put the highlights, I recommend making the highlights a color that is easy to look temporarily, you can change the color of it later.
*You won’t need to worry about sizing or if it looks messy when you do this too much.*After making strokes around the parts you want highlighted add a Gaussian Blur and then clean the blurred highlights with a soft eraser to smooth out the highlights, and a hard eraser (100% hardness) to erase any overlapping blobs thatch going over other creases, It should look something like this afterward cleaning up the blur.
Now, you only need to change its hue, saturation and lighting to something that works best with your outfit. Be free to also play with the blending settings to see what looks good.
I made my highlight color a beige with a lighten blending mode + low opacity. at this point I started to also play with the blending setting of the outlines, shading and highlights to make it blend in much better.
there is one last thing that you can do highlights wise that can make this even better, which is adding highlights around the outlines. Create a brand new layer and start going around the outlines with white.
This is what it should look like just plain, and what it should look like after adjusting its blending mode, For this sweater I used glow dodge, 46%
Noise Texture
If you are using paint.net, all you have to do is go to Effects → Noise → Add Noise and this will pop up. you’ll want to make the color saturation all the way down to 0 to 10 and you will want to lower the intensity around 10 to 20, it depends how harsh you want the texture to look.
this is what it should look like
…and you’re done pretty much in that department.
if you added grey noise on another layer, you can make it an overlay and make the opacity 10%, it helps with the outfit a little bit; just remember this when adding noise. Less is more. now…
Also the outfit is finished, so the only thing to do now is to put this on a roblox template if you worked on the outfit on an advanced template, if you did it all on a regular template you’re pretty much done.
Saving and moving it on a roblox template
If you are going to be using the same software to move it to a supporting roblox template, all you have to do is flatten the image and open your other roblox template and you’re good.
Otherwise, you will want to delete the layer that is under the clothing and save it as a png file to then open up your program.For this part I’m going to be using paint.net instead of clip studio paint since copying + pasting doesn’t create a new layer.
Arms
- The first part of the outfit that i move to the roblox template is the arms, since they are the easiest to do. all you have to do for this is first copy + paste the arm onto the other template
- Then you copy one side of the arm and paste the front arm and flip it to the back, and the outer arm to flip it to the inner side of the arm, then you just copy and paste that whole arm and move it to the other arm.
Torso
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Select the front, one side, the back, and the top and copy + paste it to the other template. For the other side you can just select that alone and paste that on the remaining side of the template.
You may now be wondering, “What about the bottom of the torso?”
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Select a few bit of pixels that go across the front or back of the torso and paste it on there, and stretch it to make it 32 pixels tall, the first half of the blue square on the sides will show that you hit 32 pixels
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Now, just copy + paste to flip it to the other side and you’re done with the torso part.
Legs
Legs are probably one of the hardest parts to move to a template, make a new layer and have the arms not be visible.For the tops of the legs you can copy half of the bottom of the torso and paste it on there like this
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Select the entire front of the legs, right side and right back side and paste it just right onto the template like this.
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For the other side of the leg you can go back to the other file and select the back and other side to paste + move to the right place, you can also go along and paste the bottoms of the feet onto the template as well as shown
Only part you need to do left is the inner side of the legs, for this specific outfit you only really need to copy half of the back side and flip it on both sides
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Now you just copy that side you just edited and paste + flip to the other side that is bare and you’re pretty much done.
*in some cases you will need to edit the outfit a bit more than mentioned, This of course heavily varies on what the outfit consist of and if there is anything intentionally asymmetrical.
You can now save the outfit with the leg + torso layer together and another file with the sleeves and the torso together. you can save the sleeves just by itself if you want but just be weary that you could get falsely moderated.
Final Results and conclusion
So now the outfit is all uploaded and finished!
This is actually my very first tutorial / resource and this took a good while to make, hopefully this helps you at least a little bit.
dont worry about the cheeto t shirt, This is the front + back view of this outfit.
I Usually just use this part for the hands at the time being but I should probably update the template and add the hands on the template
