Thanks to @Kxxsie for suggesting this tutorial!
Credit to @R0syTeq as well! She’s the main person who taught me how to shade clothing, and I honestly suggest you should check out her tutorials. Some concepts in this tutorial may seem similar to her’s since I learned from her, but I also use material I’ve learned from being a clothing designer, and go more in depth with certain concepts.
While MediBang and Ibis Paint X are almost identical programs, I have included both programs as, some things are in different places than the other. You are open to use any program you please, but for the sake of this tutorial I’ve chosen to stick to the 2 most popular programs amongst clothing design, which are MediBang and Ibis Paint X. Most digital art programs work fine with this tutorial!
My intention for this tutorial was to make a beginner friendly tutorial, but this tutorial does take a lot of time (30 minutes max for me). Although, I am going to be using the regular template, and I will do my best to explain things in a way that’s easy to understand. This tutorial was made for people who’d like to understand the full idea of shading, I’ve included explanations to core shading information, whether your preferred shading method, and included my own method of shading.
Click to Start Tutorial
Ibis Paint X Tutorial
Box Shading
As you know the Roblox character is of course, a box! If you look at the Roblox clothing mannequin in the Avatar Shop, you’ll notice that there is very faint shadows around the edges of the body.
This means, that the clothing should also, have a boxy shadow. This is what we’re doing right now!
Create a new layer, and select overlay as the blending mode.
On the color picker, make sure your color is black. You could make it a gray color if you want a lighter color, but I tend to use black.
For this step I recommend the digital brush (anti-aliasing off). Keep note, if you’re shading curvy lines do not use this brush. Since, we’re doing a regular shirt, I use the digital brush, because we’re only doing vertical lines.
Turn on your ruler and make sure it’s in a vertical position.
Begin drawing vertical lines on the sides of the template. You could go over them more if you want to thicken them, or you could change the brush size too! Personally, I like my box shading to have a thick look to it.
Select filter, then go to blur. Select gaussian blur, and adjust the settings to your liking. I like my box shading to have a light amount of blur, so it doesn’t get lost in the rest of the process.
Wrinkle Shading
When you look at clothing, of course, there’s always wrinkles! Even if you try to iron them out, clothing will always have wrinkles. This means, Roblox clothing should have wrinkles, too. If you don’t have a full understanding of wrinkle placement I recommend watching this video, I plan on making a wrinkle placement tutorial soon, too. The video isn’t necessarily about Roblox clothing wrinkle placement, but it’s about art in general, and clothing design is basically an art.
Create a new layer, make sure the blending mode is overlay.
Use the brush, felt tip (soft). Something I see with other designers is that, they use pen (fade) for wrinkles. You could do that if you want, but I think they both work fine.
Now, you can draw your wrinkles as you normally would. Again, if you don’t have a full grasp on wrinkle placement yet, I suggest watching this video.
Highlights
If you look at wrinkles, they have a highlight and a shadow.
This means, when drawing wrinkles we must highlight our shadows which we’ve already drawn in the previous step.
Create a new layer, this time, make sure the blending mode is set as add.
Use the eyedropper tool to select the color of your clothing. Try your best to not accidentally select the color of your wrinkles or box shading.
Raise the brightness of your color up a bit until you’re satisfied. Don’t go too high, or else you’ll be shading with pure white.
Change your brush to airbrush (normal). You could use any airbrush you want, but I like the lightness of the normal airbrush.
Trace the top the wrinkles. It should look something like this. Try your best to not shade the actual wrinkles, but above the wrinkles.
Highlights Pt. 2
Now that we have our main highlights, it’s time to add our secondary highlight. Create a new layer, select the blending mode as add.
For this step, I suggest watching me do it. Basically, what you’re doing is following the flow of the wrinkles and fabric. You can see i’m going in a zig-zag motion, too. You have to do this otherwise the highlights would look one sided. Also, for each stroke you should try to vary the length. You could also leave gaps if you’d like, lighting can be random sometimes. Remember, try to make sure you’re not highlighting the wrinkles.
(I couldn’t get the video to work, so just click on this link to view this step)
Devforums shading tutorial video ibis paint x - YouTube
Cleaning Up
So, you’re probably looking at your work and saying, “What the heck is this??” That’s because we haven’t cleaned up our work!
First thing we should do is, go back to the layer you created your wrinkles on.
Now, we blur the layer just a little bit. This’ll give off the illusion that they are shadows not lines.
Next, you should play around with the opacity. Here are my layer settings and what it looks like at the end. For this step, you have to play it by eye mostly.
Extra: Adding Noise/Texturing
A lot of popular clothing designers use noise for texturing. Noise is a pretty handy tool, too. I always forget this step, but you should instill this as a habit.
Save this image below, or you could use your own image of noise, if you want.
Import it onto your canvas, and select repeat. From there on, you could scale it as much as you’d like and it’ll repeat the image that many times.
Now, select the blending mode as overlay, and change the opacity to your liking.
End Results
Now we’re finished! Let’s take a look at what we made.
We started with this:
And ended with this:
Give yourself a pat on the back! You now have a good understanding of shading clothes on Roblox. If you’d like more tutorials please let me know! Also, if you have any feedback or questions I’d be happy to answer them in the comments.
MediBang Paint Tutorial
Box Shading
As you know the Roblox character is of course, a box! If you look at the Roblox clothing mannequin in the Avatar Shop, you’ll notice that there is very faint shadows around the edges of the body.
This means, that the clothing should also, have a boxy shadow. This is what we’re doing right now!
Create a new layer, and select overlay as the blending mode.
On the color picker, make sure your color is black. You could make it a gray color if you want a lighter color, but I tend to use black.
For this step I recommend the pencil brush.
Turn on your ruler.
Begin drawing vertical lines on the sides of the template. You could go over them more if you want to thicken them, or you could change the brush size too! Personally, I like my box shading to have a thick look to it.
Select filter, then go to blur. Select gaussian blur, and adjust the settings to your liking. I like my box shading to have a light amount of blur, so it doesn’t get lost in the rest of the process.
Wrinkle Shading
When you look at clothing, of course, there’s always wrinkles! Even if you try to iron them out, clothing will always have wrinkles. This means, Roblox clothing should have wrinkles, too. If you don’t have a full understanding of wrinkle placement I recommend watching this video, I plan on making a wrinkle placement tutorial soon, too. The video isn’t necessarily about Roblox clothing wrinkle placement, but it’s about art in general, and clothing design is basically an art.
Create a new layer, make sure the blending mode is overlay.
Now, you can draw your wrinkles as you normally would. Again, if you don’t have a full grasp on wrinkle placement yet, I suggest watching this video.
Highlights
If you look at wrinkles, they have a highlight and a shadow.
This means, when drawing wrinkles we must highlight our shadows which we’ve already drawn in the previous step.
Create a new layer, this time, make sure the blending mode is set as add.
Use the eyedropper tool to select the color of your clothing. Try your best to not accidentally select the color of your wrinkles or box shading.
Raise the brightness of your color up a bit until you’re satisfied. Don’t go too high, or else you’ll be shading with pure white.
Change your brush to airbrush. You could also, use the watercolor (wet) brush. For the sake of the tutorial, though I’m using airbrush.
Trace the top the wrinkles. It should look something like this. Try your best to not shade the actual wrinkles, but above the wrinkles.
Highlights Pt. 2
Now that we have our main highlights, it’s time to add our secondary highlight. Create a new layer, select the blending mode as add.
For this step, I suggest watching me do it. Basically, what you’re doing is following the flow of the wrinkles and fabric. You can see i’m going in a zig-zag motion, too. You have to do this otherwise the highlights would look one sided. Also, for each stroke you should try to vary the length. You could also leave gaps if you’d like, lighting has gaps sometimes. Remember, try to make sure you’re not highlighting the wrinkles.
(I couldn’t get the video to work, so just click on this link to view this step)
Devforums shading tutorial medibang - YouTube
Cleaning Up
So, you’re probably looking at your work and saying, “What the heck is this??” That’s because we haven’t cleaned up our work!
Now, we blur the layer just a little bit. This’ll give off the illusion that they are shadows, not lines.
Next, you should play around with the opacity. Here are my layer settings and what it looks like at the end. For this step, you have to play it by eye mostly.
Extra: Adding Noise/Texturing
A lot of popular clothing designers use noise for texturing. Noise is a pretty handy tool, too. I always forget this step, but you should instill this as a habit.
Save this image below, or you could use your own image of noise, if you want.
Import it onto your canvas.
Now, select the blending mode as overlay, and change the opacity to your liking.
End Results
Now we’re finished! Let’s take a look at what we made.
We started with this:
And ended with this:
Give yourself a pat on the back! You now have a good understanding of shading clothes on Roblox. If you’d like more tutorials please let me know! Also, if you have any feedback or questions I’d be happy to answer them in the comments.