Firstly, the top of the dress. There are so many variations you can have for this bit. Here's five different ideas, and these are only standard ideas,
once you get into sleeves and frills and non-symmetrical designs there's idea after idea after idea. I know I say this too often in tutorials, but you
really can go nuts with this bit.
As you can see, I've put some little creases at her waist. Unless this bit of a dress is really stiff, it's likely to crease a little (unless your doll
has her clothes made perfectly to size and doesn't move in them. At all. Ever.).
I'm going to go with the third top. And now we get to design the skirt.
Likewise, there are zillions of ways to design the skirt part. These are all for long dress, try going shorter, or adding a ridiculously long train, or having
heaps of folds around her feet. Add frills, lace, patterns, patches, whatever. As for the curve of the skirt, that just takes a bit of practice. I draw it
freehand and zoom out a lot then edit bits that look awkward or jagged, but you can also experiment with curve tools which (so I hear) tend to give good
results. Don't be disheartened if it doesn't work out the first few times, it gets easier.
I'm going to go on to shade the first design, because I like the shape of the skirt and it's the easiest way to show the shading of a basic dress.
Right, now we have our outline. Hooray! Choose a palette, don't worry too much about the contrast, you can change that later if you think it needs it. I like six colours, one for the outline, two for shading, two for highlights and one in the middle. If you're working on a bigger base you might find you need more colours so it doesn't look too blocky.
Start with the shading. I find it helps to not fill in the outline quite yet so you can see the base underneath, that'll help you shape your shading. I've given her a few creases across her torso and started the folds at the bottom. You want the folds to go mostly straight up at the front, then lean in to the middle as you get out to either side, if that makes any sense. Just look at the picture, that helps more.
And now I fill with colour number 4.
Now build up the shading using colour 3. If you think some of the shading in 2 was too dark you can colour over it here. While I'm not a massive fan of dithering, you can see I've used it at the top of the folds on the skirt. It helps them blend a bit more and I think it gives it a nicer effect at the end, just don't go overboard on the whole dress where it doesn't need blending (this is, of course, a matter of opinion).
And now start highlighting. I've always found one of the hardest parts of dresses to do is the gap between the creases on the top and the folds at the bottom, so just add a few looser creases around her waist and hips then don't add too much detailed shading or highlighting there. As you can see, I've also done some dithering with the highlights. Not too much, just as much as I thought it needed when I zoomed out (which you should do a lot to make sure it's coming on okay).
Using 6 add some selective highlights on the folds of the skirt and the boobs. I've also added a little to the creases on the torso, but you don't have to if you think they stand out enough already.
At this point I decided I didn't like the colour that much, so I changed it to a lighter softer silvery colour. I also built up the shading under her boobs and on the folds of the skirt using the outline colour. The colouring of the dress is now done.
