How to Draw Anime Socks, Stockings & Tights

This tutorial shows how to draw socks, stockings and tights in the anime and manga style with some simple examples and basic tips.

Anime socks stockings and tights drawing
Anime socks stockings and tights drawing

Socks, stockings and tights are all very commonly seen items in anime and manga, especially due to many of them featuring a high school setting where these are often worn with the school uniforms.

Once put on these items generally take on the shape legs. This means that drawing any of them will be very similar to drawing the legs but with a few additional steps.

As such you may want to look at the following tutorial (in addition to this one):

How to Draw Female Anime Legs Tutorial

If you don’t want to draw shoes you can pretty much draw the feet as shown in the leg drawing tutorial.

If you do wish to draw shoes as shown in this tutorial see the following:

How to Draw Anime Shoes Step by Step

For drawing skirts see:

How to Draw Anime Skirts Step by Step

How to Draw Anime Socks

Anime socks drawing step by step
Anime socks drawing step by step

Generally you can show socks on the legs with pretty much just a pair of curves a bit below the knees. You can also add a second curve below that one (with a slightly lighter line if possible) to show the cuffs.

Anime socks drawing
Anime socks drawing

The reason you want the curves is obviously due to the curve of the legs. However, what may not be so obvious is that these curves are actually determined by the eye level of the viewer.

Anime socks eye level drawing
Anime socks eye level drawing

For example if you had someone in front of you wearing socks and you were to place your eyes directly at the level the cuffs these curves would appear pretty much flat (as shown in the first drawing in the above example). If your eyes would be below the socks (for example looking at someone standing on top of something above you) then the curves would go in the opposite direction (as shown in the second example).

Generally though you tend you tend to be looking down at people’s feet you will usually see the curves of the socks around the leg as shown in the prior examples.

In this case the sock are drawn with a minimal amount of detail but in some scenes (such as close ups of the feet) more detailed drawings may be shown. Usually though you will tend to see something similar to the example.

Also in this drawing the socks are just plain white (as again is common in anime) but you can of course make them a different color if you prefer.

How to Draw Anime Stockings

Anime stockings drawing step by step
Anime stockings drawing step by step

The “thighs high” stockings are very common in both anime and manga (probably more so than in real life). Drawing them is not that much different from the socks.

Anime stockings drawing
Anime stockings drawing

Again you can usually indicate how far up the legs the stockings go by drawing a pair of curves but the “eye level” rules explained in the example with the socks still apply.

As the stockings go much higher up the legs in this case they will be closer to the “eye level”. This means that their curves can be drawn a bit flatter in comparison to those for the first example of the socks.

Quite often anime stockings also tend to have some sort of a design element near their top even it’s something as simple as a stripe (like in this example). You can of course also experiment with more complex designs.

How to Draw Anime Tights

Anime tights drawing step by step
Anime tights drawing step by step

This last examples is the simplest. As tights pretty much just hug the legs and go all the way up to the waist there is really no line drawing needed to show them, at least when the person wearing them is properly dressed. Instead you can show that they are being worn simply by coloring the legs whichever color you want the tights to have.

Quite often stockings in anime and manga tend to be black or dark grey in color, similar to what’s shown in the example.

Conclusion

This tutorial shows a few basic examples of socks, stockings and tights in the anime and manga style and provides some tips on drawing them. As the examples are done in a fairly realistic style a lot of the explanations (such as how things change based on the “eye level”) can also apply to drawing in general. Hopefully you’ve found this information helpful.

For more similar tutorial also see: