How to draw skinny jeans - Draw Cartoon Style!

If you’ve been on this blog for a while, you’ll know that I love drawing cute cartoon characters.

At some point, you’ll have to draw a lot of clothes and one of the best pieces of clothing for your characters is jeans!

Jeans are super versatile, you can draw jeans shorts or baggy jeans.

But in this tutorial, I am going to draw skinny jeans – because it’s my favorite type of jeans.

Jeans make your anime or cartoon characters look edgy and cool.

In this post, I’m going to teach you how to draw skinny jeans or tight jeans in a step-by-step way so that you can draw jeans easily!

It doesn’t matter if you’re a drawing beginner who’s learning how to draw. The following steps are extremely easy to understand. As long as you follow the tutorial step by step, you should have no difficulty understanding it.

Just to recap, this is what I’ll be teaching you today:

Once you color the skin, you'll have learned how to draw skinny jeans!

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Please note that I use an iPad Pro and an Apple Pencil to create all my illustrations. But you can use any tool – a pen and paper, markers, or Photoshop because the drawing method remains the same.

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Let’s begin.

How to Draw Skinny Jeans or Tight Jeans (step by step)

One of the main challenges when drawing jeans is knowing how to draw the folds or the wrinkles in jeans.

For now, just pay attention to the human body – the jeans will mainly fold at the joints and the ends.

Meaning you have to draw folds:

Near the waistband
Around the knees
Near the ankles

This is where the jeans will wrinkle the most due to the fabric clinging and folding around these areas.

Okay?

Let’s begin. We’ll do this step by step so it’s super easy!

Step 1: Draw the legs

We cannot really draw jeans without drawing the legs first – the first step of drawing clothes or fashion, people!

Let’s start by drawing the legs first – I’m going to angle them a little and shift the weight of the body on the character’s right leg.

If you’re using pencils, please draw the legs very lightly because we will draw the pants over the leg and then erase the overlapping lines.

The legs are just used as a template to draw the jeans over.

I’m not going into detail about drawing legs because this post is about drawing clothes.

But you can get these books if you’re interested in getting better at drawing human bodies.

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I highly suggest getting that book because you’ll learn to draw human anatomy from scratch and it will make a huge difference to your art.

Next, let’s start with the waistband of the jeans.

Easy enough, right?

Next, we’ll start drawing the pant leg of the jeans.

Since we are drawing tight jeans or skinny jeans, the fabric is going to stick very closely to the body.

So the folds will appear near the starting of the thigh (where the hip meets the leg) and around the ankles due to the excess jeans fabric.

I’m going to indicate this with green arrows so you can see what I mean.

Start drawing 1 pant leg of the skinny jeans or the tight jeans

Let’s complete drawing the pant leg.

Notice how there will be more folds on the behind portion of the knees – that is because the fabric is loose and makes space for the knee to bend – so remember to add some folds here.

Draw the inner side of the tight jeans and the wrinkles on the jeans.

Now, we need to draw the crotch section,

Skinny tight jeans near the crotch will have some room for movement. So, you’ll have to add folds here as well!

And similarly, let’s draw the other pant leg.

Draw the other pant leg of the skinny jeans.

We can add some folds near the ankle again just to make the jeans look more realistic.

Note the green arrow.

We have officially learned how to draw skinny jeans.

But we can add more detail to make the jeans look more realistic.

So, let’s start by adding the zipper and adding belt loops to the jeans.

And lastly, we’ll add some pockets to the jeans.

These small details will give your jeans a very realistic look and make your cartoon or anime character really stand out!

I feel we can add more detail, so I’m going to really stress the folds some more.

Doesn’t it look more realistic?

We can now erase all the rough and overlapping lines and clean up the digital art a bit so we get something like this.

Erase the rough lines and clean up your digital art.

Now, it’s time to color the jeans!

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I’m going to color it a simple blue.

You can also color the character as well – I’m going to color the skin of the character just to finish my jeans drawing.

Read this post if you would like to learn how to color digital art.

And we’re done!

We’ve learned how to draw skinny jeans or tight jeans!

Conclusion + Resources

I hope this in-depth tutorial was helpful to you, and that you were able to learn how to draw jeans on your character easily.

Drawing clothes (especially the folds and wrinkles) can be a little daunting but with enough practice, you’ll get the hang of it.

If you are looking for books on drawing clothes, check these out:

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If you want to see more tutorials on drawing clothes, just leave a comment down below. You can check out my other Character Tutorials to learn how to draw people and clothes.

I will be adding more drawing tutorials to this blog, so keep a lookout!

Want to practice drawing beautiful characters?

If you’re looking to improve your drawings faster and want to really draw as a hobby or even pick up drawing professionally, I highly recommend picking up this beautiful online course that teaches you how to draw appealing characters with personality.

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