What can i do to improve fabric folds and shading in character drawings?

[Evelyn.W]

I’ve been trying to get better at drawing convincing fabric in my character illustrations, but I keep getting stuck on how to handle the folds and flow. My latest attempt at a cloak just looks stiff and unnatural, like it’s made of cardboard instead of cloth. I’m wondering if my problem is with the underlying form or my approach to the line weight and shadows.

[Ryan4]

I used to treat folds like a physics problem, then I realized my cloak looked stiff because I drew every edge as a sharp contour. Reducing edge rigidity and letting some behavior be implied by shading helped the fabric feel more like cloth, not cardboard.

[Ronald77]

I tried sketching underdrawn, then building the folds with light, broken lines and a couple of midtone shadows, and I did notice the cloak could tilt more with the character's pose, but I struggled keeping it consistent across panels.

[Zachary_W]

Maybe I'm chasing the wrong problem—the fold set in a quiet moment, but the silhouette still reads stiff in motion. Could the issue be the pose or the garment's weight rather than the folds themselves?

[JackB]

I skipped chasing perfection for a bit and tested with quick thumbnail silhouettes to check flow; it helped some frames read better, but the rest looked rushed or off.