How do you come up with good outfits for Jude and Cardan? I want to draw those two, but i'm afraid of messing up the outfit design and giving them inaccurate costumes that doesn't match the setting. Should I just use tfota fanart as reference?
I use the book descriptions as reference! HB describes clothes a lot, and if you don't wanna draw those described, it gives you the jumping off point for making up your own outfits. Off the top of my head, Faerie clothes have lots of natural influences - everything described features decoration inspired by (or sometimes even made out of) vegetation, animals, or natural materials. There are two "levels" of clothes - the first is closer to human clothes and worn on an everyday basis, with some decoration (acorns sewn around hems, stitching in the shapes of birds and plants, pieces tailored to look like leaves stitched together, etc.), and the second is the dramatic magical Faerie court fashion (dresses entirely made out of petals, raven feather cloaks, Liriope's warderobe). Cardan belongs to the second category, while Jude starts the series out firmly in the first, and later sometimes slips into the second as she joins the court. From what I can tell, historically speaking the pieces are all over the place, some working as baroque crinolines, some being simple one-piece shifts, which makes sense since it's a place stuck in time. And finally, if you want some visual inspiration, I personally use historical fashion as well as other fairy depictions that lean towards the natural side by simply looking up fairies on the Internet. Happy drawing~
