Not sure how to light fabric in this style

[Boxlord]

Hi everyone! I just learned about this forum from Mohammed Agbadi's youtube channel. I want to know how I can better light the glowing boy's clothes. And pretty much all clothes in general in Mohamad's style. He gives lots of tuts on lighting but I would like a 1 on 1 crit. I think whats stumping me is the light source for the glowing boy, since light is coming from seemingly all around him. Plus the fact that I don't know how to light fabric. Im better at lighting other objects and faces. Especially faces because the planes of the face are consistent. Fabrick tends to be very dynamic.


Heres his Channel
https://www.youtube.com/user/demohaful/featured
Here's his work
https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/agbadi.awwal/
Thanks!

[Pubic Enemy]

The usual solution for dealing with this sort of situation (glowing person) is either have them lit by a 1-2 light sources (usually from below to make them look ~spooky~, or with 1 light source on either side of their body), or have them light all over with no shadows. Right now it looks like you have the face lit from a slightly different angle than the rest of the body. If you must change it, try making the light more consistent.

Regarding how to light fabric: There is no One Weird Trick for this. Fabric changes all the time and it can even take different forms in the exact same position depending on what the previous position was. All you can do is study it until you have a good enough sense of it to fake it, and/or use references. I wouldn't be surprised if Mohammed himself makes heavy use of references all the time when he wants to draw believable drapery.

You didn't do a bad job with the clothing folds. The only thing that I thought could be objectively improved is that his outstretched arm would typically show folds running from the top plane of his arm to his armpit (See this ref. I couldn't find an image with the right kind of sleeve or angle in a pinch, so I apologize: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/c...berace.jpg), and the folds at the hems/cuffs of his sleeves look rather abrupt, unless they're supposed to be bunched up. It looks like he has a cuff on one sleeve and a plain hem on the other, you gotta make a decision man. I could hem and haw about where to put the rest of the folds, but I'd probably be wrong about most of it.

If you'd like a book on drawing clothing folds, you could try Drawing Drapery from Head to Toe by Cliff Young. It's very short and simple, but that's probably ideal if you feel totally lost with this subject.

[Boxlord]

Thanks a lot! the Liberace pic gave me a good idea of how the arm should look. I will check out that book definitely. It's only $6 on kindle.