How to draw a fishnet

In this step by step tutorial, you will learn how to draw a fishnet. You can apply this technique to draw fabulous sexy fishnet stockings or create your unique designs. One thing is for sure – your fashion illustrations and sketches will look even more phenomenal after you go through this tutorial and the fishnet you draw will look much more realistic.

4/10

8 min

drawing paper
pencil
eraser
black ink

Step 1: The base

Start your illustration by preparing a clean fashion figure and draw nice model legs. Since you will be erasing in the next steps it’s better to ink you figure now.

Step 2: Hot places

Mark the most bulged parts of the figure. Often times they are in the middle of all shapes. Bulged are the middle of the hips zone, the tights, the knee and the muscles of the calves.

To find easily which are the “hot places” try imagining that you were creating the figure out of clay. It helps if you close eyes and move your hand if you were really sculpting it. You will easily recognize the closest to you places.

Step 3: Cold places

In order to make sure the illustration will be really 3-dimensional you need to mark the “cold places” too. This is where the shapes are curving back. Usually, this is at the edges of all forms and in the places where you have an object partially covered by another one. The former will be a shaded, cold zone. Mark close to the outlines, under the knees and the top part of the back leg.

To help yourself you can imagine you are a sculptor again. Cold places are where you hand moves away from you and you curl your fingers.

Step 4: Draw a fishnet base

Keep the latter two steps in mind ( or make a separate cheat list to look at it later) and cover the legs with an ordinary mesh. Don’t transform the lines in any way – just straight, simple, non-dimensional fishnet. It’s important not to push too hard with the pencil, because we are about to change these lines!

Step 5: Add some volume

Open your cheat list or recall the “hot places” – the most bulged parts of the fashion figure. Now erase them from the fishnet base, leaving the space white. These are the places where, because of the volume underneath, the netting will be deformed.

Step 6: A realistic fishnet

Now fill the blank space with nettings again, but this time you will make the lines slightly curved up in the middle. Make sure that all lines are aligned and are connecting as they did before.

Step 7: Cold places volume

Now isolate the zones that you defined as “cold places”. This is where the shapes go further away from the viewer. Don’t erase anything- just recall where they were

Step 8: Finished illustration

Double the lines from the cold places. Everything that falls into a cold place should become darker, as it’s clearly visible in the example illustration. Ink your drawing and erase all the unnecessary pencil lines. To give your illustration a sexy and rebellious look you can match the mesh stockings with a leather jacket, a ruffle skirt and a pair of nice leather boots.

Hopefully, this ‘how to draw a fishnet’ tights tutorial was helpful for you not only to learn to draw stockings but also all kinds of netting clothes – the logic is the same.

Happy drawing!