Tutorials - Long Dress
First you have to choose a base and a pallette. If you have a very small base, you would only need a pallette of three or four colours. This base is fairly large so I used five colours. I labelled these A, B, C, D and E for easy reference. Also make sure that your shades are not too far apart, and that they are not too bright.
Start by drawing the ouline of the dress with color A up to the largest part of the hips.
Using the curve tool, draw the sides of the dress (from the widest past of the hips to the ground) and the waist band.
Now we have to draw the bottom part of the dress. For this, I usually use the curve tool and some random colour (in the image it's pink) to draw some sort of guideline. Then I take my outline colour to draw in the folds (which are more or less wavy lines)
It is now time to get your eraser (and the right button of the pencil tool. . .) and erase all unwanted pixels: Clean up the folds and erase the guidelines, also erase the legs up to the waist band.
Flood fill the dress with color D. Then, with the curve tool and color B, draw the dresses folds at the bottom. Also draw in smaller folds near the waistline with the line tool.
Still with the same color, flood-fill the folds and add some shading to the sides of the dress (about 1 pixel or two)
Around everywhere that you put some of color B, (except the top fold which we will do in the next step) draw about two pixels thick of color C. You might want to use the smallest squared brush of the brush tool for this, It goes a bit faster.
Fill in three or four pixels of the under-waist area with color C. Draw lines one pixel thick around the original fold lines, and extend the folds downwards.
Now for the highlights, which are done with color E. There is no specific way to draw them in or specific place to draw them in. Just put them wherever you feel it is right, but keeping in mind that no pixel of color C should touch a pixel of color E. It also helps to use the line tool to draw them in.
Draw and shade in the belt, using the waist-line you've already drawn as the bottom outline of it.
Flood-fill the top using color D.
Add some shadows with colors B and C. You might want to use the shadows that are already on the base as guidelines.
. . . And the highlights with color E. (Again, keep in mind that pixels of color C should never touch pixels of color E)
Final Result:
I've added here some sleeves and some trimming. Use your imagination to customize the dress to your own unique style.