Creating clothes is always my favorite part because it is a huge challenge. Their details influence an image in a huge way. I think well created, detailed clothes are half the success of any image.

In a close up view I don't advise using normal maps to create wrinkles – I don’t think it looks very good when we see the shadow of a gap without a fabric hill. My wrinkle technique is very simple. Most artists want to avoid triangular surfaces but I dare to state they are necessary for creating realistic looking clothes. I don't like clothes with surfaces that are too smooth and where the wrinkles are only made of normal maps, but that’s just my personal taste.

Of course, in some cases, I will also add tangent normal map textures to the materials of the cloth to enhance the wrinkle effect, but not in this case. My model technique is the following: I created - in this case - a simple female dress along the body surface. I then divided her cloth and jester king hat into different parts with different materials and I used multiple materials on each object. After that I unwrapped the parts of the clothes for creating UV maps. I didn't use only one huge baked/drawn texture map for the coat and hat. Instead of that I used small 512*512px, tileable, color and bump textures. I set their repeats to 25-30 and the map input to UV/flat. In this way it’s much easier to set the right size for the weave of the fabric and in a close view the weave is much clearer and will follow the wrinkles of the cloth, making it much more realistic.

The last step was to give a bit of shine to some of the fabrics, for example: edges. I did this with the integrated textures blend option; I selected sphere blend and set its map input to reflection - it uses reflection vectors as the coordinates of the texture - and the 2D projections to Z,Z,off (Fig.04).

I basically chose a daydreamer pose for the character. I think this pose is expressive enough and I was trying to convey a believer who lives in her dreams.

The lights are very important to make details visible and besides that they also add to the ambience of an image. In this image I used four spotlights: two light yellow and two blue. Only one of the light yellow lamps cast a shadow and it had the most energy (1.200). I set the edges of the spotlights to very soft, just like the edge of the cast shadow. Beside the lights I turned on the ambient occlusion option.

After I set the lights, I moved onto the camera setting. I moved the camera far from the character and then zoomed in. The lens was set to 160 units (Fig.06).

All post work was done in Photoshop, naturally. In general, I rendered the character with an alpha mask so that I could easily match the background behind the character in Photoshop.

The background was a pre-created, hand painted image and it was set behind the character.

The last step was to give lights to homogenize the whole image. For this I used the gradient ramp option; this step gives the main ambience to the image. As can be seen, I chose warm colors (Fig.07).

And that's all I can write about how I made this image.
Very Best Wishes!