Introduction
It seems in real life we try very hard for our clothes to be wrinkle and fold free. But not in the virtual world my friend! Creating creases, folds, and wrinkles in your clothing garments only makes for more realistic clothing. But how to make them? Many new designers bang their hangs on the keyboard after hours of brushing, dodging, smudging, and burning only to render a party dress that was attacked by black and white spaghetti.
Hopefully this in-depth tutorial will help liberate the confusion and frustration of creating folds and perhaps even bring joy to fold making. One of the reasons clothing folds are so hard to make is because we take them for granted and we don’t really notice them at all in our real lives. In this tutorial we will be carefully looking at the anatomy of clothing folds and discovering a few methods for making folds and creases.
The Nature of the Crease
It is OK to not know exactly how to make creases or folds in fabric when you first start designing. Fabric is a very fluid medium, and it would be best for any new SL fashion designer to understand the nature of the crease.
Now you can buy expensive books or take drawing classes on how to draw folds on the body or you can start by looking at real life examples. Looking at real life pictures of models wearing garments to see how folds gather and flatten out on shirts, jeans, jackets, even undies is the best way to learn quickly and accurately.
Use google to find large photos of garments that are similar to the one you are designing and examine how the folds are created by that clothing. Notice where the fabric bunches up to create folds, where the fabric stretches out, the shape and color of the folds. Remember you have to look! Look. Look Look. Drawing is about seeing and that is why they put the “eye” in design. (Pauses for lame to joke to settle in…)
Find several images instead of just one so that you may have more information and ideas as to where to put the folds. Its even ok to just look at where the folds are placed on the photo and then draw them exactly in the same place on your template. Hey your not cheating your still drawing 
Light and Shadow
Basically a crease two dimensionally is just a highlight and a shadow next to each other. That’s it. Really? Can we go home now? Well not just yet. Lighting your garments is very important. Many designers create the shadows and highlights of their garments with a diffused light source directly above the subject. That means you should always know where the light is coming from and your highlights and shadows should be consistent with that light source. In a nut shell: If your light is shining down do not put the shadows on top of the highlights.
Knowing where to put the highlights and shadows is understanding where your light source is. Knowing where the folds, creases, and wrinkles are placed, comes from carefully examining real life photos.
The Paint and Smudge Technique
This technique uses the paint and smudge tools in GIMP, Photoshop, or Paint Shop Pro. It takes some practice but you can get some good results with it. So lets start!
Step 1:
Open GIMP if don’t have it open and make a new document. File>New. Make the dimensions of the document 512×512 or what ever the size you want, this is just practice. 
And click ok.
Step 2:
Lets select the Bucket Fill Tool
in the tool pallet. (The Tool pallet can be found under the File, Xtns, and Help menus, you will see a series of icons that look like tools). Next click on the Foreground Color chip to open the Change Foreground Color Dialog box. Select a dark rich color like red or blue. And Click Ok. I Chose red for this tutorial #880606. Now that you have your a color chosen click on the document with the Bucket Fill Tool to fill the document with that color.
Note: the #880606 is called a hexidecimal. It primarily uses to assign number to a color on the web. The color picker in GIMP and in Photshop as a text box to put these numbers in. Just don’t include the “#”,
Step 3:
Ok the easy part is over. The color you have chosen is the background and simulates the fabric of your garment.
And Now for the hard stuff. We are going to draw the shadow of the fold. Select the Paint Brush tool
in the tool pallet. Next select the Foreground Color Chip again and select a darker tone of the color of your fabric. I’m using #410000 for this demo.
Step 4:
Under the tool pallet are some settings we can attribute to our brush. The Scale setting will make our brush smaller or larger. Lets set the scale of the brush to 0.52. That should be big enough for what we want. Make sure that Opacity is set to 100.0. And the Mode at Normal.
With one stroke draw a smooth horizontal line that bends upwards just a little bit. This will be the shadow of our fold.
Step 5:
Select the Foreground color chip again and pick white as your color. Change the scale of the Brush to 0.26. Next draw a line above and next to the dark line.
Step 6:
Now that we have our highlight and shadow of our fold we need to blend them together.
This is accomplished by using the smudge tool 
. The smudge can be found at the bottom of the tool pallet.
How we smudge our lines will determine how rounded or flat the crease will be. The more we smudge the blurrier the lines will be and the fold we become more flat and smooth. The less we smudge the sharper the line will be and the result will be a more rounded crease.
Just like the brush tool the Smudge tool has some settings that we can attribute to it.
The Rate found towards the bottom of the settings pallet controls how powerful the smudge tool will be. The lower the rate the less it will smudge and the lines get more blurry, the higher the rate the more prominent the smudging will be and will create more sharper creases and folds.
You might want to duplicate the document and experiment on the lines and see how the smudge rate works at different settings. You can duplicate your document by holding down CRTL+D on a pc or apple+D on a mac. When your finished close the duplicate document and don’t save it.
Step 7:
With the smudge selected, set the rate to about 50. And the size of the brush to about 40. Now with one stroke, sweep across the lines, moving back and forth to blend the lines together. Notice how they are getting blurry? Stay focused on where the lines meet in the middle. You will also notice that the end of the lines are tapering.
You may need to practice a few times to get to get the folds just right. Smudging back and forth continuously will make the folds smoother and smoother. This is the basics for creating folds with this technique. The additional steps are variations of using the smudge tool to create more interesting folds.
VARIATIONS
Making Fold Branches
You can use the smudge tool to shape lines into interesting fold patterns. This process can be fun and spontaneous.
Step A
Create a new document. File > New. You can make the dimensions what ever you want but for this demo I will use 512×512 and click ok.
Select the Bucket Fill tool and select a dark rich color from the foreground color chip. For this demo I selected #10106f. After selecting a color, fill the document with that color by clicking on the document.
Step B
Select the Paint Brush tool . And select a darker color tone than the color of the background. For this tutorial I selected #060647.
Next draw a short horizontal line.
Step C
Select the smudge tool . Make sure that the Rate is set to 80.0.
Brush the smudge tool along the line then quickly move upwards or downwards to create a branch from the original line.
You can strengthen the color of the branch by repeating the brushing to push more color into the branch.
Continue to create more branches starting from left side of the main line and brush upwards. After having a few branches you can create branches from those branches by smudging from the left side of the branch and moving upwards.
Your dark lines maybe be getting too light from smudging you can add more dark color by just selecting the Brush Tool . Set the Scale down a ways to maybe .10 or .20. Lightly trace the branch you just created. Make sure the color you have selected is the darker tone and not the color of the background.
Select smudge tool from the tool pallet and set the Rate down to 50 and continue to blend in the lines. You may need to repeat this process to have visible lines. Just make sure that your branches are not pitch black.
Step D
Not its time to add some highlights. Now remember the light is shining down on our cloth and our cloths is hanging vertically on the body. So the highlights need to be on the top of the fold and the shadows need to be on the bottom.
Make sure you have the brush tool selected and click on the Foreground color chip
and select white.
Next have the Paint Brush tool selected and the Scale of the brush is set to about 20.0.
Draw your highlights adjacent and above the branches. Its ok to overlap the branches but be careful not to cover the them.
Select the smudge tool making sure the Rate is still set to 50, and blend the highlights with the darker branches.
Step E
You can also shape the folds in different ways. To have the ends of the folds flatten out. use the smudge tool to smudge horizontally on the very end of the branch to smudge it out. Then starting from the section of the branch that did not get smudged, brush outwards to create a fan. See illustration below. Try to do this to only a few branches.
Conclusion
The pattern may not be what exactly what you wanted, however you have a working knowledge of how to render folds and creases. You can adjust the pattern of branching to fit any type of clothing fold pattern. Be sure to look to look at real life pictures of clothing being worn so that you know exactly where to place the fold. This demo was to get you familiar with blending highlights and shadows together and creating the shape the folds.
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