Getting Hired as an Illustrator: Fundamentals to Make You More Adaptable

1. Introduction: Hello, everyone, and welcome to my skill share class. Becoming a good or professional artist takes dedication and time. You know, I think it's pretty easy and common to come across little tips and tricks videos online. But what is the path you need to take if you truly want to become a versatile and hirable artist in the entertainment industry? I'm Marco Bucci. I've been a professional artist for over 20 years. I've done work for things like films, games, movies, TV, books, you name it. I've also fulfilled many roles in my career, ranging from character design to concept art, finished illustration, and kind of everything in between. I have also been teaching now for over a decade. I've helped people of all ages and all skill levels reach their potential. Many have gone on to become professional artists themselves, while others were content to stay serious hobbyists. In my teaching time, I've been able to catalog so many of those aha moments. Those moments that are so precious to us as learners that help us ensure we're on the right path and making good progress. As I teach those concepts, I also am able to refine how I use them in my own work, which then feeds right back into my teaching. This skill share class is hyper concentrated. It focuses on the build up to those aha moments. Those moments I want you to have to encourage the fastest and most effective growth in your learning. Everything in this class revolves around hier ability, finding a job as an artist in different avenues and different skill sets, things ranging from character design to concept art and backgrounds and environments. The nice part about these skill sets is they apply across different mediums. You could totally use them to work in film, TV, books, games, whatever you want. Being hirable means having solid fundamentals that you can call upon, no matter what the task may be. On that note, we'll be learning through real life jobs that I actually had as an artist, jobs that required me to wear many different hats. I might be doing character development one day and then plugging that character into an environment the next day. The material in this class is very actionable. We will learn fundamentals individually, but we'll also learn how to juggle them because that's exactly what you'll be expected to do as a professional. Through the class, you'll be presented with lectures and skill building exercises and demonstrations, and you'll also be encouraged to complete one or two class projects. One of those projects will be character based and one will be environment based. The nice part about splitting it up into two projects is you can decide which subject matter you're most comfortable or interested in. Or if you're super enthusiastic, you can do both projects. It's totally up to you. Lastly, this class is appropriate for a wide range of skill levels. If you're new to this, this class will act as a solid base. Or if you're coming in with a bit more experience, this class will help you sharpen your skills and show you the path of continued improvement. My goal in either case, is to meet you where you are and get you noticing that progress in your work. I want you to start seeing progress in as short a timeline as weeks or even days. This class has lots of information packed into it, so block off some time on your calendar, give it your full attention, and let's get learning. 2. Workspace Meets Mindset: Okay, before we get into the nitty gritty of drawing and painting, I'd like to talk about a broader theme of what we're doing here. What we're doing is we are being creative. That's probably the whole driving force that brings you to this class and to your workstation or to your sketchbook is you want to create things. I don't know about you, but I was born not with any skill or talent, but I was born wanting to create things. I've been creating things as long as I can remember. Be it terrible drawings in my sketchbook when I was a kid. That's right. I could not draw as a kid, but that's another story. Terrible sketch books. I'd play a lot of music. I would read a lot, and I still do all those things. But it's some innate drive in me, I don't know where it came from, but I was born to create things for better or for worse. When I say for worse, I mean, if I am not creative, if I can't be creative for a week or two, I go a little stir crazy. I think a lot of you out there can probably relate. Now, when it comes to being creative, this may sound a little strange, but I kind of treat it like work, but not work in the negative sense, but work as in, you have to show up to do a task. I remember when I was younger, I would kind of just be creative when I felt like it. You know, I'd play some music one day, I would draw something another day. I treated it totally casually, and that's fine. But when I decided to take it seriously and maybe one day become a professional, I suddenly needed to bring forth that creative urge kind of on demand. I couldn't wait for inspiration to strike. I mean, if you do that, you'll probably create something once every two or three months. Inspiration is not that common. You need to create an environment for yourself where if inspiration strikes or if it does not, you can still be creative and do the work. And one of the best ways I found to do that. It's kind of a mind hack, let's call it, is to the best of your ability, control and design the space you work in, or maybe I should say, make it so that you come to one space to be creative. In my case, it's the studio room that I'm in right now. This is where I come when I do anything creative, be it drawing and painting, like I do professionally, or I have other hobbies. I like to sculpt. I like to do some three D printing. I have some electronic stuff behind the camera there. But all of it is contained in this room. This is my room. My kids don't come in here or if they do, they're heavily supervised, not even my wife really comes in here. This is my space. I remember I was reading this book by Steven Pressfield called The War of Art. It's a fantastic book, highly recommended very quick read. I think it's 100 pages. It's about the psychology or mentality of being a creative person. One of the lines in that book that has always stuck with me was he said Steven Pressfield Make your space a shrine, not to you, but a shrine to the concept of creativity. Make it so that when you enter your creative space, it makes you want to create something. I mean, that sounds trivial now that I've just heard it come out of my mouth like that, but it's true. When I come in this space, I feel good. I feel inspired. I like this room. I want to sit in this chair and look at those screens and bring out a sketchbook or whatever it is I'm doing that day, and I want to create something. I will give you a little video walk through of this space in just a moment. There's a few concepts that come to mind that helped me design this space. Believe me, I'm no interior designer. I mean, I should probably take some skill share classes on interior design. What I did, though, is I just thought about the things that I like to see, the things that make me feel comfortable. For example, this wood paneling here. That is old pallet wood that I found on the side of the street, that I chopped up with a saw and I cut it to size, and I stapled it onto the wall. Why old pallet wood? I don't know. There's something about rustic old wood that I like. I find it comforting. Woodworking is another hobby of mine, and there's just something about old reclaimed wood that I like. So I put this wood paneling on my wall. Now, this wood paneling is specific to this corner of my room. You know, where I draw and paint. You can't see behind the camera, but the rest of this room is plain old drywall that I've painted, just like a regular room, but here is special. This paneling wraps around my whole creative corner space here. And I don't know. It's just an environment that I like. I've seen other artist spaces that are populated with a lot of plants. Now, I'm not really a plant person. I mean, I like plants, but I'm terrible at keeping them alive, so no plants for me. Did try and keep a plant once, but it died in a week, so no more plants for me. I like things to be tidy, but not necessarily everything put away. I like to have things in their place but available to me. If I need a pencil, it's right there. I don't have to go digging in a drawer, even though it might be neater if pencils were in a drawer, I like to have my stuff within arm's reach. I'm never breaking my mentality away from the creative process. I can just grab the tools I need. You'll see how that comes into play when I do the little video walk through. But the theme of the whole thing is understanding what it is that makes you feel comfortable or happy or creative, because especially if your goal is to take this to a professional level, or even if your goal is to make this a very serious hobby, something that you can do daily or semi daily. You cannot afford to wait for inspiration. You have to be able to show up and do something. Yes, when inspiration strikes, you might create something just a little bit better because inspiration is like a mental stimulant that just feels good. But speaking from experience, I mean, I've been doing this for more than 20 years or 20 years as a professional anyway. I can honestly tell you that inspiration is only there like 10% of the time for me. Most of the time when I wake up in the morning, I almost feel like I don't want to do it, but this is the space that helps me feel like I can settle in, maybe put on some ambient music or drink a coffee, whatever I'm in the mood for that day, and I can shut out the world and do my thing. And then once I'm half hour or maybe an hour into it, I find that I have a hard time stopping myself. The time just blows right by. And that's all a testament to mindset, and mindset, I think, starts with your personal space. So here's a little video walk through of what I've got going on here. So here's the space you've just seen, but from a different angle, this simulates me kind of walking into the room. Now, this happens to be a room above my garage, so it's pretty sizable. In fact, that's a seven foot desk that I built. It's just built with a sheet of plywood that I cut the size. I copied my old ICA desk from my student days and cut this little nook in here. It helps me kind of nestle in and helps my posture. I don't have to lean over so much. So yeah, this is where I work every single day, well, weekdays anyway. And sometimes I sneak in here on the weekends, too. Remember, this is my shrine to creativity. The pieces of art I have on my wall, and these are all originals from other artists, remind me of that raw creative drive. Notice that these are all sketches, no finished work. That Batman sketch is mine, but there's some special reasons behind that. Anyway, I chose pieces not for their finished beauty, but for their raw emotional drive. I can see the literal fingerprints in these clay sculptures here. I really like the poses and gestures of the Disney sculpts there, and I can see the graphite in all those pencil sketches. So equipment wise, I'm running a pretty standard dual monitor setup, just a cheap LCD on the left there for e mails and web browsing and such. Then on the right, I have a big old walk home cynic. It's the most professional, largest model they make. Ironically, I actually don't really use it except for as a monitor. I much prefer my regular walkm tablet, which is right here. This is the Intuos P, which is the largest tablet they make, but I started digital painting in 2002. Back then, there were no syntic or screen tablets, and I simply got used to this regular tablet and old habits die hard, I guess. Now, there are times when I do use a syntic, like when I'm working on animation, for example. I've got it on a mounting arm that I can easily pull out. And when I'm not drawing with it, I can push it back into the wall just to get it further away from my eyes. Here's a simulation of what I see when I sit down in my chair. I keep that space to the left of my tablet open for any traditional media or sculpting or sketching that I might want to do. Sometimes I do little gauche sketches there or just pencil sketches or just taking notes or something. Of course, I have that art surrounding me and you can really get the sense of that from this view. I've got my keyboard and mouse in a place below the desk. Again, I had an old ICA desk that did this and I really like it ergonomically. It helps my posture. Just over here, I have my microphone that I used to record educational videos like this one and my YouTube stuff. Again, it's within arm's reach. I just turn my head and I can say the lines, which is exactly what I'm doing right now. The mic is tucked away. It never has to move. It's always there when I need it. I've got my little audio interface right here. I can dial in the gain of the mic or whatever I need to do. That never moves either. This microphone is just a toy. It's a sculpture that I like. Looks like it's getting dusty. Hopefully, that proves to you that I have not staged this. Anyway, it just so happens that three D printing interfaces with all my hobbies. So I have the three D printer right here and it's printing away. Anyway, that's why my desk is seven feet long. So I can fit all this stuff and again, have it all within arm's reach. Now, before I did all this, this used to be a nice little reading nook. There was a couch here, a little coffee table type thing, but I knew that this was the space that spoke to me the most, so I got rid of all that stuff and replaced it with my studio. Over on the right here, I have a nice window. I've read somewhere that it's helpful to refocus your eyes on different distances. When I take breaks that don't involve me actually leaving the room, which I actually do try and do, I try and leave the room as much as possible when I work just for breaks. But whenever I don't have time for that, I'd like to just look out the window. There's some beautiful greens out there, and I've ensured that no birds shall die at the hands of this window. Back to my hardware for a second. This is not running on a laptop or anything like that. It's running on a PC desktop. It's not a supercomputer though. My specs are on the screen there. The place to spend your money though is on RAM, in my opinion. A lot of RAM helps ensure your software doesn't bog down. Anyway, because I produce a lot of files, I've got some portable hard drives down here. Over here, just a couple of drawers, my sculpture supplies are in here. Now I don't sculpt that much, so these supplies are tucked away, and when I do sculpt, I simply use the area to the left of my tablet. On the other side of the room is my traditional art desk. Now, this is strictly for personal work. I don't use traditional media professionally. Here's a personal piece I just finished in acrylics. As you can see here, this is a much more chaotic mess. I assure you though, it's a controlled mess. I've got my brushes here. I've got some paints tucked away in these mini drawers, and they are organized by color temperature. I've got a different type of paint here and a different type of paint there. I've got a bunch of colored pencils here and just above that is my trusty airbrush. Once again, it's the same philosophy. Everything is within arm's reach. I personally don't need everything to be spick and span. I do have a limited tolerance for a bit of a mess, but what you're seeing here is the extent of that tolerance. When things inevitably do cross that line of tolerance, I spend whatever time I need to like half hour usually, just to get things back to a baseline. Again, the mental payoff of just doing that is huge. Now, before I go any further, I remember what it was like to be a young student. I was renting a single room in a house, and if that's your situation, then you literally can't have a dedicated room for creative tasks. While I do recommend the second you have different rooms to access, you should decouple your sleeping quarters from your creative quarters. But if you can't do that yet, I still think you can put the principles of this to use. Try and carve yourself out a little corner of your room for the creative stuff. If you're just renting one room, maybe your beds over there, creative stuff over there as far away as possible. Make it so you can't literally roll over on your chair and fall into your bed, which is exactly what I was doing 20 years ago. There is actual research to support that that kind of situation is just not helpful long term for your mindset. If you've got just one room, try and create as much space as possible between where you're creative and the rest of your life in that room. Okay, we're ready to dive in here. Before we do though, one last thing, you are going to be presented with a lot of information in this class, information that is heavily condensed and concentrated. Please do not expect yourself to get it all and put it all to use right away. I almost guarantee that won't happen, simply because everything is concentrated, you're going to need to sort through it and give yourself time not only to understand the concepts, but then see how you can put them to use. Now, some of this, yes, it will happen right away. Just don't expect everything in the course to happen right away. But that's the nice thing about skill share and on demand classes like this. You have so many options. You don't even have to watch the whole class front to back right away. You could start with just say the first quarter or maybe the first few lessons. Those first few lessons in this class can certainly support your drawing practice for weeks or even months. We're going to start this class with gesture drawing. When I first learned gesture drawing, I did not move on for about three months. You can do the same with this class. Or maybe another way to watch it is, yeah, watch it front to back. Don't even draw or anything, just watch it all, which you could probably do in a few sittings, and then go back, rewatch sections and put those to practice, giving yourself enough time to digest that before then moving on once again to the rest of the class. Think of it like having a bag of cookies in front of you. You can eat just one or two cookies and savor the experience. But if you eat the whole bag, you will have ironically robbed yourself of all that pleasure. Feel like learning is like that. It generally works best when you take in little bits at a time, digestible sections, digest them, and then move on to the next step. Remember, even when you have moved on in your three quarters of the way through the class, it's totally viable to go back to the beginning, shore up some fundamentals there. After all, these classes all build on each other. If you do find yourself going back and patching something up from the first part of the class, that is actually helping what comes way later. It's like repairing poor foundations of a house. It's going to help the roof stay on if you have good foundations. Really think that's one of the most common downfalls I see with students today. Just because of things like Tick Talk and YouTube shorts and Instagram Reels, everyone is just used to scroll scroll scroll and getting instant gratification. Drawing is not like that, unfortunately. You need to give yourself time. So I'll make you a deal. I'll do my best to present you the material as entertainingly and as efficiently paced as possible, but you have to slow down and give yourself time to take it all in. All right. So here we go. 3. Adaptable = Hireable: In this chapter, we'll take a look at what might be expected of you as an illustrator. A theme I've noticed in my work is that clients vary widely. And because I want to do this professionally and make a living off it, it behooves me to be able to adapt to all kinds of different styles. Now, I do have a natural drawing style. Like if I'm drawing and painting for myself, I tend to work in a specific style. The one I feel most comfortable in, but that can go out the window when working for clients. Being adaptable like this with your art is something that students struggle with very commonly. It doesn't come naturally. Typically, maybe only one style comes naturally to someone and something else can feel completely alien at first. But with our roots in the fundamentals of art, we should be able to adapt to really any style. Because this is the core skill that makes you hirable, we need to put adaptability as a priority in our learning. In this lesson, I'll show you first how I've had to adapt to various styles over the years, and I'll also try and explain how they are all rooted in the same set of fundamentals. I'll follow that up with a little demonstration where I paint the same basic picture twice, using the same fundamentals and the same subject matter, but I'll approach those paintings completely differently. This will give you a good understanding as to how the same core fundamentals of art can drive completely different styles. Let's get to it. All right. The first thing I'd like to show you. What I have on screen here are four different paintings, all of which I did, and they're all done in different styles. You can probably see that right away. This piece with the monster here is done in a cartoony style, whereas this one is more realistic. But also, if you look at the application of paint, this one here is very sharp with a lot of cut out edges and straight lines. There are very few curves in it. The shapes appear very sharp and hard edged versus say this one here where the shapes are very soft and airbrushed. It feels less like a razor blade and more like a soft pillow, let's say. This painting here might also feel like a soft pillow, but in this one, the brushwork is a little bit more pronounced. You can see the individual strokes almost. Compared to say this one where things are airbrushed and quite soft. If you look at the turning of form on Pete's muzzle there, it's very soft edged. Whereas if you look at the turning of form in the monster, you can almost count the brush strokes that are responsible for doing that. The same is true around the whole painting. The bridge, again, you can count brush strokes here. In this area here, I can see the scribbly strokes I made there. There's no effort to disguise. A similar philosophy is true on this bottom one here, except instead of brush strokes, you have cut out shapes. It looks like things were carved out with a template and then applied to the painting. There's really no brush strokes here at all. It's this concept of cut out hard edged shapes. This painting here on the right is somewhere in between those things. It's definitely more similar to say this one here. The brushtrokes are visible. But overall, the effect I'm going for here is more realism. Now, not photo realism. I don't want to trick anyone to thinking this is a photograph. It still should be a painting. But if you zoom in here, you can see that there are still very noticeable brush strokes. For the most part, I'm not trying to disguise the brushes that I'm using. If we go to the main character, Clara here, she is the most rendered out, meaning she has the widest range of edges from hard to soft. There's also a wide range of brush types used. You can see little sparkles and dots there. Mixed in here with some broader brushwork where the brush strokes are disguised more, blended, let's say. If we go up to her head here, it's the same thing. There's a very soft look to the form. I'm not trying to show off the strokes quite as much as I was in this piece. But at the same time, I don't want to disguise the fact that this is a painting done by hand. In fact, the further back in the distance you get in this piece, Zoom out, so you can see some context, see all those people in the very background there. If we zoom into them, I mean, look at this. It's kind of full disclosure that this is a painting or a digital painting, where I'm using all kinds of digital brushes to achieve a certain effect. Then, of course, when you zoom out, all those brush strokes kind of amalgamate together, and you get the illusion of this being a crowd of people. The same is true in this crowd of people, sure, I've picked out a few details here and there, you can kind of see the structure of this guy's head. There are certainly no eyes or really no mouth in there. You can see this person here, it almost looks like a skull, just the basic structure of a skull. But when you zoom out, they all again, they amalgamate together and those strokes start making sense. Sometimes I'll opt to do paintings that are a little bit more rendered. The cathedral in this piece just has a little bit more let's call it tightness in the brushwork. Now, not fully, you can see bare strokes like that, that I do enjoy leaving stuff like that behind. A lot of the same dotty brushes here that I used on this character here. It's the exact same brushes because I generally do use the same brush sets. But in other areas like the structures up here, there's just a bit more attention to the rendering. Again, not to the level of photo realism because that's generally not my interest in art. But you can see that there is specific attention to say, making sure that this cylindrical form is very, very believably round, with very soft transitions, and I probably used an airbrush at least to block that in to make sure I had a smooth transition before adding detail. In other areas, like say the clouds up here, it's fully abstract with the brush strokes completely showing, and it's only when you zoom out that they all make sense together. And yes, those are zombies, by the way. Here's another piece with the very hard edged aesthetic. It's from the same project as this one. As you can see, they both appear to live together. If this were a book, you could absolutely imagine them being side by side on the same spread. That is all to do with style. The stylistic approach I'm taking between these two images is fully consistent. I've established the rules of these pictures. Namely, it's made of, like I said before, hard edge shapes and shapes that are not hidden. You could get out your penil here in photoshop and trace this light shape that's falling onto the floor here, something like that. There's a very clear, simple shape there. Even tiny little shapes. I could do the same thing with this. See this, what is this a trapezoid. See this shape here. It's like a warped box. One of the rules I had for myself in these pictures is to make the shapes very simple and geometric. We can zoom into this piece here and see the same type of application. If you look at the light and shadow falling on the grass, I'm trying to imitate dappled light falling from a tree, but they're triangles and trapezoids and squares and rectangles, there's really nothing subtle about the shapes. They're graphic and in your face, and that is the number one rule of this style that I established for myself when I did this project. Here's another example of a project that we'll be looking at even more throughout this class. But it's a series of character concepts for the same project. The project only wants one character. It's this character named Jake, but they had no idea what Jake should look like. Here's at least here's 13 designs, and I think I had a whole other page that I submitted. But you can see that just like this project here, I made sure that all of my Jake drawings are done with the same aesthetic. If I had to put into words, it's kind of round shapes. There's nothing really sharp about this, although sometimes there are, his shirt is kind of a squash a rectangle shape. There are straight lines here. You could trace a straight line going down his full body there. But for the most part, it's round. His head is a round shape. This head, same thing, it's a round shape. But even where I do use straights, if you look at his arm here, I mean, yes, that lower line is kind of straight, but you notice it feeds into a graceful curve. That is true even of the lines in his body. That's a pretty straight line there, but you notice it feeds into a shoe that's rounded. I'm trying to whenever I do use straights, I'm complimenting them with their round counterparts, just to make sure it feels nice and friendly and smooth. Round shapes tend to feel a bit more friendly with a lot of these sketches. You can even see my rough ins. See this area right in here, you can see my roughed in sketch marks. If you notice those sketch marks show that I'm thinking about roundness by going like this. It's only after I do some sketch strokes that I find the final shape that I want to go with. Of course, these are all examples of how I have to be adaptable as an artist. If this client comes to me from this project and wants a certain cut out look, well, if I submitted to that client these drawings, he would be like, that's not going to work. Or if I had this client here who is obviously Disney, these are Disney characters, they wanted that nice almost air brushy look where you're calling less attention to the approach of the painting, and it becomes a lot more about just reading the characters and having them feel just nice and soft and easy on the eyes. Whereas with this painting here, this is one of my own personal pieces. I'm going for a combination where I want it to feel friendly and soft and easy on the eyes, but I also want to draw you into the specific type of brushwork that I'm using. I almost want you to feel like the energy of my arm as I painted this. You can see and feel what it may have felt like to paint these strokes. That's what I'm going for here. That is often what I do go for in my own personal style. This project here required a slight adaptation. I still want you to feel the energy of the strokes, but I had to be mindful of the focal points, these areas here where this has to feel a little closer to this, where you just notice the rendering of the character and less the brushwork. But again, as I showed you before, as you go to the background, it's more like this, where yes, you can tell what the subject matter is, this is a giant moose statue, but there's a lot more attention called to the physical brushwork that it goes into it. Here's one done for the same project as this. These are part of the same book. This is another Disney project. I got to illustrate the book version of their nut cracker movie from 2017, 2016 2017, and these are my illustrations from that movie. Again, this one here is more rendered. We can zoom in and we can see how I'm using more soft edges to really show just the roundness of form. But like I almost always try and do. I still am finding areas to leave behind evidence of the brushtrokes. But in areas where the focal point like her face, I'm trying to be very soft and very rendery in that area. And same with the hand, this is also a big part of the focus. I'm trying to be a little bit more rendery with the hand. If we zoom in, you can see I'm blending and kind of blurring my edges between strokes. I used a lot of smudge tool for this and airbrush on here. Can still see evidence of my block in here, which I use my dotty brush for, which I do love using it. It just makes me feel like I'm free to paint whatever I want before locking into final strokes. But anyway, hopefully, this gives you a bit of an overview as to what it looks like, at least in the context of my own career, of how I've had to be adaptable to different projects and talking about different styles. You might have the question, well, how do you do that? How do you jump and be a chameleon between different styles? The answer to that, as I alluded to in the intro to this class, it's all about knowing your fundamentals. If you know what you are fundamentally doing to a picture. For example, adding light versus shadow, that can be done in 1 million different styles. But to do that, you first have to know, what is light? What does it do? What is shadow? What does that do? How do they relate to each other in a picture? Those are not stylistic questions. Those go beneath style, like the foundations of a house, and they are fundamental questions. To further solidify that concept for you. I want to do a little demo where I paint the same thing twice, but in two different styles with different approaches. Here we go. I've got two canvases here and I'll paint them concurrently. I'll follow the same approach on each and they're relatively in sync, so you can compare each step of the way. You'll get a clear view of how the fundamentals are the same on both, but the approach, and therefore, the resulting visual aesthetic or style are different between the two. Already, you can see on the left, I'm using much more brushwork and on the right, I'm only using those cutout shapes, similar to the projects I showed you just previously. In both cases, though, I'm going for a dark upper background and a light lower background. I'm going to imagine that the lower part of the image is like the floor, and there will be a ball sitting on that floor, which I'm blocking in here. Of course, on the left, I'm using a brush to block in that ball and on the right, I'm using that jagged selection. And already that illustrates the basic principle at play here. The fundamental is we are portraying a ball in this picture. But the way we approach that ball completely differs from one picture to the next. For example, on the left, I'm adding shadows just with a round brush, painting it in, and now on the right, I'll add those same shadows, but with a selection tool, and instead of painting it with a brush, I'll use basic color fills. Each of those color fills on the right can be adjusted, which I'm doing right now. Look at the shadow on the ball on the left. Notice how it's very brushy. Now look at what's happening on the right picture. I'm blocking in that same shadow, but again, with a pixel precision hard edged fill. I'll use that same technique now to build up the lights on the ball. Notice I'm doing the same thing on the painting on the left, but I've built up those lights just again with a brush. On the left, I am pressing very lightly on my tablet to blend these tones and colors. Whereas on the right painting, that's not possible. I am restricting myself to hard edged color fills. There is no soft blending. Blending is another one of those fundamentals. I can imitate blending on the right. I just have to do it with shapes that are very close together in tone, not huge changes from one shape to the next. Just look at the shadow regions of the two spheres, the left and the right, and notice how they both have the fundamental of soft blending, but they're achieved in two completely different ways. It almost looks like two different artists painted these. Of course, that's the power of being adaptable. You can imitate the look of very different artists. That is what makes you intrinsically hirable or desirable to accompany or client. There's way more versatility there than if you just specialized in one thing. And yes, there are many artists out there who do just specialize in one thing. But I also think the market has vastly shifted in the last, let's say, decade or more, where artists are more successful when they can adapt. After all, that's the nature of the business. Different clients have different needs, different needs require different aesthetics and styles, it's always attractive to a company if you can straddle that. Practically speaking, a company or client would rather just work with one artist, someone who they know and trust, that have to find a different artist every time. For example, I've done quite a bit of work for Walt Disney Publishing. You just saw a few examples of that in the previous section. The art director always e mails me and says, Hey, Marco, here's the style of this upcoming book. Do you feel comfortable working this way? Because I've always been able to say, yes, I do feel comfortable working that way, I can literally count the number of jobs that I've gotten that I would not have gotten if I only worked in one style. I have probably procured years of work that way. Again, it's all thanks to the fundamentals. 4. Getting Hired: Industry Advice: One of the larger debates you will have to solve for yourself revolves around the question, should I be a generalist or a specialist? A generalist is someone who has skills kind of everywhere, character design, which involves posing and turnarounds, expression sheets, all the way through to say, concept art, being able to visualize something in a painting very quickly, to environments, putting characters in a background or just backgrounds themselves without characters, and perhaps all the way to finished illustration. Which can combine characters and background, as well as heavy art directing tools like lighting and composition, things like that. A generalist is someone whose aptitude spans all that material. A specialist, on the other hand, is someone who is hyper hyper focused on just one thing. You see it all over the place in the industry. A very common one, for example, would be someone is a character designer, and that's all they do. They don't even try to do environments. You will commonly see these things reflected in artists portfolios. If someone is a generalist, then you might see character here environment here, or if someone is a specialist, when you see their portfolio, you should expect to see only characters. Now, when it comes to style, I think there's a very clear answer, you should be a generalist. Style wise. You should be able to draw and paint in several different styles. Of course, we just talked about that in the previous discussion. In my opinion, you are only shooting yourself right in the foot if you can only do one style. If art is your hobby, then that's fine. One style is all you need. But this class has a theme of being hirable, and one of the best and most obvious things you can do for yourself in that arena is being able to adapt to different styles. But back to subject matter for a second. There's no easy answer. There's also no right and wrong answer. Everyone's different. Everyone's got different aptitudes and interests, and skill sets. While you can expand your skill set, which is what I hope to be doing in this class here with you, it's probably reasonable to assume you're most comfortable with one thing. This is where I can start talking personally. I have noticed my own focus, kind of changed through my years in art. I started mostly interested in characters. Actually, I wanted to be a character animator, so all I did was draw and try and animate characters. It was only several years later, about four years later, actually, that I discovered that I loved painting and not just painting characters, but actually painting backgrounds and environments. It totally caught me off guard, but I just followed my heart on that one. I replaced characters with environments, and I really made that my focus again for the next several years. Now, I did eventually come full circle and marry the two. Of course, I never fully forgot about characters. I was able to bring the two together. Remember, this is over the course of several years. But I found that for me, it just felt natural to be a generalist, meaning I had skills in different areas and I would combine them. Not only that, but I really wanted to create finished illustrations, too, things that had characters and backgrounds where you don't get a sense that one is done better than the other. They feel like they live together. For the longest time now, that's been my drive as an artist, to be a generalist. That has done wonders for me on a freelance level, because, of course, clients can come to me for all kinds of things. The con I found about being a generalist is that the big studios, your Pixars or Dreamworks, or Sonys, they have a much harder time looking at you and deciding where you would fit in their pipeline. Because you can do a little bit of everything, the psychology, I think with a big studio is they would probably rather look at a specialist because they fit neatly in that box. Now, while I have worked at big studios before on a freelance level, most of my work has actually not been for like the AA Pixars of the world, or if it has, for example, I've worked for Disney for almost ten years now. A lot of my Disney work has been in their publishing department, where they can use a generalist skill set to do complete illustrations. But someone like a Pixar or a Sony, they're not really looking for that, except for the concept art stage, but that tends to be kind of a brief stage in the production pipeline. Most of the artists employed at those studios are specialists. Remember that bigger studios can afford to employ people based on their specialties, and a job description in those studios will be very clear. We want to fulfill a role of character design. Because they're huge studios, if you're a generalist, you might be competing with the world's top character designers who have spent their whole artistic life focusing on that one skill, and because you've broadened your skill set, you may have a harder time competing in that area. So if your goal is specifically to work at the world's biggest studios, again, your Pixars and Sonys, you should probably be a specialist. I, however, have found that for my career, I've been able to work for all kinds of studios, again, sometimes big studios, but oftentimes like studios like Haspro, which is a pretty large toy company, but they have a film division. They had the budget to spend about a year putting together a feature film. It's still not made yet. I think it's in production right now, though I'm not sure. They were hiring mostly generalists to do all kinds of work. The work I did was, I took some character ideas that someone else had done, and I put them in two illustrations. And in those illustrations, one of my jobs as kind of a conceptual artist was not only to put the characters in illustrations, but to invent and design the environments that those characters were in. And with that came a lot of like lighting design. I would have to integrate the characters in an environment that was lit the way I would see it lit. And it was a good kind of test to see if their character designs could live in this kind of environment. I've done many jobs like that. Jobs that required me to run the gamut from characters to environments, combining them most of the time. Another example would be children's books. You absolutely need to be a generalist if you want to work in any kind of publishing. Be typically with publishing, you don't really have a character design section and an environment design section. It's just one artist in the case of most children's books, or if it's a small team, which can sometimeshappen. I've done books where there's two of us, but both artists tend to be generalists kind of working together and pooling your art together. From my experience, publishers largely prefer to work with just one artist, and that artist can ideally do everything. Now, remember that a generalist, which is what I am, doesn't mean that you are okay at everything. You should be good at everything. Now, it takes time. I've been doing this for about 20 years now, but at some point, I feel you can build the skill to get to the point where you could compete with a specialist character designer, although you probably couldn't compete with their reputation and experience, because a specialist will be able to rack up many character design jobs where you might not be able to do that as a generalist. But it's not to say that your skills are lower than someone else's, who's a specialist. The more you work at things, the more your skills will build. To tie that concept to the coming chapters of this class, the chapters you are just about to see right after this, we are about to work on all our fundamentals. The nice thing about art fundamentals is art fundamentals are by nature general. You can apply them to anything. Let's pretend you want to be a specialist. Not say to yourself, Oh, I want to do characters. That means I don't have to learn about color. No, don't do that because you will limit yourself. The nature of art fundamentals is that they all intertwine. They all go hand in hand. There is nothing that is off on its own island. Even something like color, you might think that color is not related to drawing. It's true, there is a bit of a chasm there, but over many, many paintings, you'd be amazed at how color can influence your shapes and your drawing. That brings me to my next point about working for studios. Remember that most of the studios that exists in the world are not your Pixars and Soonys and Dreamworks. There's smaller studios. In my experience, it benefits you to be a generalist in a smaller studio because smaller studios generally don't have the super high budgets to hire specialists in each area. Also, if it's a small studio, they are not going to attract the attention of those specialists like a Pixar. So being a generalist has led me to do a lot of my work in smaller studios. Sometimes even very small studios, that can still pay, of course. But all the way up to larger studios that maybe just fall one step short of the Pixars. Just a quick note on that. When I was younger, when I was like 20-years-old, I thought that an art career was worthless if you weren't working for the big dogs, I do not feel that way anymore. This is my job. This is how I make money. I have a family now. If someone wants to pay me for my work Whether it's a mom and pop publishing agency who I've worked for before, all the way up to a Dreamworks. It really doesn't matter to me. I no longer feel the need to see my name in a Dreamworks credit sequence. This is coming from someone who's had his name in a lot of credit sequences. To me, they are all the same after 20 years of doing this. I truly no longer care if it's a big studio everyone's heard of or a small studio that no one's heard of. If they pay you, that's the important thing. Remember, your goal here is to be hired for your work. If your goal is eventually to work at Pixar, please give yourself time to climb that mountain and reach that pinnacle. It probably won't happen right out of college. Speaking of studios and being hired by studios. It really behooves you to look at the studios you might want to apply to and see what their projects are and tailor your portfolio accordingly. I'll talk a bit more about portfolio, and I'll show you some of my portfolios at the end of this class. Consider this part one of the discussion, which we'll pick up later. But it's really smart to look at what a studio produces and try and do work along that line. Whether you're a specialist or generalist, doesn't matter. Take some weeks or days or months, whatever it is, to put together a collection of work that looks like it could come out of that studio. The other quick tip I have about designing your portfolio and putting together a body of work that looks cohesive is try to reduce the amount of one offs that you show. One offs meaning like, Oh, today, I did a picture of a dog character. Oh, and now I'm doing a Greek god scene. Oh, and tomorrow, I'm going to do a cartoony sponge bob square pant scene. Don't get me wrong. It's great to do all those things. But if your portfolio is constantly coming out of left field, even as a generalist, it's hard for people to really know what you're good at. Try and put together a collection of work that is general, but it feels like it's a cohesive vision, or put together a project where you're designing an environment of a singular film or game, for example. You know, here's a page of Mayan temple designs. Now, here's a page of characters that would fit in that Mayan temple. And look on the next page, here's an example of those characters actually in the Mayan temple environment. So you have three or four pages of a cohesive project or IP that you can develop, that you can then show your potential employer. 5. Getting Hired: Industry Advice cont'd: Remember that when people look at your work, they are seeing it probably for the very first time unless they already know you, which is something I'll talk about in the next section as well, that form of networking. But you should consider the idea that a client will be seeing your work for the first time and no one has the patience to really sit and study your work. They're going to flip through it. Or probably these days, they're going to scroll through it. Scrolling is even worse because scrolling on a phone or a computer is way faster than flipping the pages of a book. If you can hit someone with several images that are cohesive together, it almost becomes one statement in your potential employer's brain, and that just puts you more at the forefront of their mind. When it comes to portfolio curation and portfolio building, it's probably a bit easier to be a specialist. For example, if you're doing characters, you're just going to fill that portfolio with characters. Of course, different styles, like we mentioned, but one page might be several characters collaged together. Then the next page might be detailed explorations of one character. Another page would be three dimensional turnarounds of that character. It flows pretty logically. If you're doing environments, you might have thumbnails, one page. And maybe larger compositions, the next page, then maybe isolated studies of each elements in the environment on another page. And then maybe on the next page, after that, a nice, beautiful full rendering of that environment. And then after that, you go to the next environment. So, you know, being a specialist, it's pretty cut and dried, what you'll want to focus on in your portfolio and how to arrange it. But the same principle holds true. Don't just have everything coming out of left field. For example, every page, I don't think should be different characters all over the place. Pick one and explore it. Different outfits, different poses, different turnarounds, different angles. Spend a few pages on that one character before moving on to the next one. Just in general, don't fall into that left field trap. Remember that when a studio or a production team hires an artist, it's very different than an individual hiring you for a commission. For a commission, it's a one off, and I'm not really talking about commissions in this class. Commissions are great, but they are not a reliable way to make a living. I would recommend that you build your career on project work. Either with teams of artists like on a film or game or like a book project, where you might be the only artist on it, but it's a book that's 32 pages long, for example. Those projects demand more of you as an artist because if say if you're a character designer, you're going to need to put a character in different poses, different angles, different shots, different compositions, different facial expressions. If you're an environment artist, you'll need to do the same thing, but with different lighting in that environment, different angles, different compositions, different moods and feels. If you're a generalist, who knows what they're going to throw at you, but they're going to expect you to play ball every step of the way. You have to have the skills to accommodate that. Of course, show up to work every day or in your studio at home every day freelancing, ready for any kind of challenge they might throw at you. I find that type of project work to be much more valuable experience because it rounds out your skill set. You get a nice little thing to write in your CV or your resume. If it's a project, especially a bigger project, chances are people will have heard of that project when they're hiring you a year down the road. Whereas if all you're focusing on is individual commissions, say for someone's dungeons and dragons campaign, it's not going to pack the same punch when it comes to your CV or anything like that. It doesn't quite look the same on paper when you say, I designed the orc character from my friend Breeze DND campaign. But I'll jokes aside. That type of work is great. It's just not really the building blocks of a career. And in this class, we are looking at art as an ongoing career, something you can build upon in the years and years you'll be doing this. I suppose in that context, commissions are great. Just do them on the side. While you focus the bulk of your time on landing like project work. That's what I recommend anyway. Again, I'm just one person, speaking from my own experience. But after doing this for 20 years, I hope that experience carries some weight with you. Okay, the dirty topic. Should you use AI? I don't recommend it. I do not want to turn this class into a debate over the ethics of AI. I know enough to know that everyone kind of has their stance on it. I personally don't use it. And part of that is I do have ethical problems with it. But also, I find that with good fundamentals and good skills, you're better than AI. You don't need it. You know, if I need reference for something, I'll just do a good old Google search. I don't need to use AI to give me the answers to a problem. I want to solve the answers to my problem with my own artistic brain. Feel like tools like AI circumvent that and give you ready made answers that well, they'll never be personal because you're not the one solving it. In that vein, I feel like AI platforms try and give you too much. I just feel like, slow down. I want to solve the problems every step of the way, not some algorithm. Because AI has really reduced to the barrier to entry, which was low already, but AI has plummeted it to the floor, you are now going to be competing with artificial intelligence users. But I say that as a good news thing, it's that AI is usually pretty easy to spot, and I know a bunch of people in the industry and artists generally reject it. I actively know people who if they see AI in someone's portfolio, they're not getting hired because the use of AI, especially the overuse of it or the obvious use of it, it projects the message that you're a lazy artist. I mean, if you're going to let a computer do the work for you, why am I going to hire you? Now, obviously, I can't control, nor do I want to control your compass? If you are ethically okay with using AI, I would recommend doing yourself a favor and not using it for any finished work, maybe generate reference with it. Again, I'm not going to do that, but if you are, make sure the bulk of the problems you're solving come from you. After all, that's what's going to make one artist different from another. Their unique solutions to a problem, which is all wrapped up and tied in with your own personality and your own character. To close out this section before we pick it up at the end of the class, we're about to get into the fundamentals talk here. But to close out this section, there's one more thing I want to talk about. That is, should you do an unpaid test for a studio to get hired? This was extremely common practice in the 90s and early 2000s, I started as a professional in the early 2000s, and doing unpaid tests was almost an expected thing. It's like, of course, you do an unpaid test. That has changed now because people see it as exploitative, which it is. But I'm of two minds of the unpaid test thing. First of all, if you have a strong portfolio and you get a good reaction from a potential employer, They ask you, would you do this test for us to prove that you're good for the project. It's obviously up to you whether you say yes or no, but I highly recommend asking a few questions. The first question is, do you have any kind of budget for this? Even if it's not what you'll ultimately pay me for the job, do you have any kind of budget allocated for your tests? Also, make sure they are not asking you to do production work as a test, especially if it's unpaid. If it's a paid test, that's kind of different. Then it's not really a test, it's a job, just a smaller job that may lead to more. That's how I see it. If it's a paid test, you should be able to do production work, no problem. If it's unpaid though, make sure that you are not doing work for their project, or if you are, make sure you have something in writing, very important for it to be in writing that says they may not use this. Perhaps unless you are hired then to be that artist, maybe then you can work out a compensation model, which is something I've done before. I have done an unpaid test where when they hired me, I allowed them to use it, but they paid for it. I generally think the more experience you have, the less willing you should be to do a test, because your experience and your portfolio should be all the evidence someone needs to hire you. I was actually asked to do a test last year, and I was annoyed and I kind of laughed like a test, I have all this work I've done. Why do what possible information do you not have yet? But they wanted a test and I was able to negotiate a small budget for it. I think I negotiated 250 bucks. I did the test in about two days, so it worked out. However, if you are new to the field and you don't have experience, I think, and this is just my opinion, you can toss it right out the window, I think you should be more amenable to doing a test, even if it's unpaid, but make sure they are not giving you a whole huge assignment. You know, like no full character turnarounds, maybe just a character sketch or a piece of concept art that might take you a couple hours. Nothing that is going to put you through the stages of production, all of which to be unpaid for, and with no guarantee that you're going to get the job at the end anyway. But I'm speaking to you from experience here, a lot of the biggest jobs I've landed I've done tests for. Now, once again, I have not done a test minus that one I was paid for a year ago. I've not really done a test in a decade because with experience, people know what you're all about. But if you're new, you might want to consider it as part of the cost of doing business and breaking in. Again, just my opinion, please feel free to throw it right out the window if you don't like that. The unfortunate reality is, though for every test you decline to do, There's going to be other artists who will do it. It's one of those catch 22 things. I suppose this little segment here is just a warning about that. You have to weigh practicalities against personal ethics, against business. I think if it leads to a good paying job, it's worth it to do an unpaid test, but never do an unpaid test unless you ask if there's a budget first, because oftentimes there will be. Or if someone is asking you to do a test and they're looking for a specific vein of work, maybe you already have it, but it wasn't in your portfolio. You could say, Oh, here, I have something just like that. Take a look at this. Does this satisfy your requirements? Just take it as a sign of them not quite being sure, maybe how to talk to an artist or how to evaluate an artist's work. Because remember, a lot of your clients probably won't be artists themselves, and someone who is not an artist has a hard time kind of evaluating an artist's work. They know they like it, but they don't know exactly if you can do what they want you to do. In the end, of course, make your own decision. None of this is even relevant if you don't have good art fundamentals. When it comes to getting hired as an artist or an illustrator or a character designer or whoever it is you want to be, you need good fundamentals. Let's shift gears in this class now. Go over a bunch of fundamentals. Everything from characters, gestures, form, shapes, color, and light, studies, environments, illustration. Let's go through all that, and then right after that, we'll circle back to the hier ability stuff, portfolios, and how to approach people, stuff like that, and we'll end the class with that. Here we go. Let's shift gears and get into some art fundamentals. 6. Characters: Gesture Drawing: Because we are intimately familiar with how people look act and behave, drawing people is a great place to start forming your fundamentals. Whether it's you looking at your own art or other people looking at your art, with drawing people, it'll become very obvious if something just doesn't feel right. Because again, everyone has that interpersonal experience. So drawing people is a great barometer with which you can gauge your progress. Of course, it's also super helpful because you'll probably be drawing people or characters an awful lot. When it comes to drawing people, the first aspect to understand is the concept of pose. Posing relates to how people move or behave, their body language. Body language is one of those universal things that everybody in the world understands. It crosses countries and cultures. Whether someone is running to catch a train or just waiting for their coffee, the way they pose can tell us a lot about that person. Even me sitting here right now, I could be sitting like this, projecting a certain image, or I could be sitting like this, which projects a whole different image. What was the change there? Well, one, the shoulders are back, the chest is out, and the other, the shoulders are up, the arms are in, everything's tighter. There is a whole world of body language difference there without a whole lot of physical movement, though, and you would be drawing conclusions as to my character based on my posture. This is what we're interested in in this lesson, how to observe and ultimately capture those things. The best part of all this is capturing poses can be done quickly with the concept of gesture drawing. Gesture drawing is where I started as a young student. Actually, I wasn't that young, I was 19-years-old, but gesture is the first concept I was introduced to as a professional skill. We will not be drawing finished lines in a gesture. A gesture drawing aims to capture the movement or feel of a pose, using very broad, I call them rhythmic lines, and we'll get into what that means right away. In this lesson, it's all about analyzing what's important, separating that from what's not important in a pose, and getting it down on the page quickly and with energy and attitude. This gesture pass is what captures the life on the page, and we hope to preserve that life all the way to the final product. This lesson also kicks off our first official class project, so let's get started. The first thing I'd like to establish here is what I mean by rhythm lines. Well, let's first take a look at what isn't a rhythm line. Stuff like this. You might be used to drawing where your lines are all very short and hatched out like this and you are trying to arrive at a finished contour. For example, if you were drawing someone's head, you might draw them like this. Here's the shape of the head like this, and here's the nose and here's the eyes. You might think of drawing in this way where you are trying to arrive at these finished contours right away. This is not rhythmic drawing and it's not gesture drawing. You can draw this way, but I highly recommend shifting your focus to something else. Rhythm lines look more like this. They capture broad movements through the page or not only through the page, but through the pose or through the form, through the subject, through the composition, whatever it is you may be applying it to. I think if you look at the strokes that I just made on the page there, you can feel their energy. What I mean by energy is that you can hopefully feel the way my hand is moving when I make these strokes, just by looking at this. Think of it almost like a roller coaster, where you are tracing the path or trajectory of the thing. Any one given spot in the line is not important. What's important is that this goes up, like a roller coaster, stops at the top and plummets down. And as though you are riding this roller coaster, you can feel the pushes and pulls that you are propelled along with that rhythmic line. With gesture drawing or really any type of drawing, there are three basic lines you need to be aware of. They are commonly referred to as C curves, which looks like the letter C, S curves, which looks like the letter S, or straights, which are just straight. Now, it's important you don't take these letters literally. For example, a C curve doesn't have to look exactly like the letter C. This here is also a C curve, or how about we invert it like this? That's also a C curve. A C curve could have its hook more at the top and then come down more gracefully like this. I would also call that a C curve. They are very free form things. An S curve could look like that. It could look like say this. That's a combination of two S curves, but you get the idea. It can be wide and tight like this, or it can be broad and graceful like this. Or anything in between. A straight doesn't have to be perfectly straight like that. It can be straight like this. I would say this has a subtle s curve to it, but I would classify this as a straight. Of course, straights can go in any direction. They can also be any length. You notice when I draw these rhythmic lines, I make several strokes to establish That has everything to do with that concept of feeling. I am trying to feel these rhythms in my body. For example, I equate straights to carrying a lot of weight or containing very pointed energy. We'll talk about that in the upcoming section. But when I draw a straight, I'm really intent on strongly putting that down, being confident with my hand. Whereas, say when I draw an S curve, it's a more flowy experience, a bit slower. I'm drawing this a bit slower, like I'm on a lazy river, a bit more graceful, trying to feel it out. If I don't like where this one went, I don't have to erase it, I can just draw over it, and maybe getting a bit darker or maybe a bit thicker as I arrive at something that is more like what I had in my mind, or just something that feels right as I put it down. And a C curve to me is also like an S curve. It has that more graceful feel. But I do think of a C curve as in between an S curve and a straight and that it can have a little bit more of that pointed energy. Sometimes I'll make C curves with two straights even like this. You can see as I draw these how a sense of energy can be captured based on your own physicality, the way you physically draw these lines. Here's a drawing I worked with on one of my Disney projects. This is quite fitting because animators helped popularize the idea of these rhythmic lines and gesture drawing. Because animators have to draw so many pictures, they've developed tools to get through these drawings as quickly and effectively as possible. One of those tools is commonly called the line of action. Take a look at this pose. If I asked you to imagine this pose boiled down to a single line, well, which rhythmic line would you choose? An S curve, C curve, or straight? To me, the answer is a C curve. It's a C curve that looks like this, something that travels through the entire pose. I generally think of lines of action as being in the middle of the body. It's not defining any one contour or side of the body, it's down the middle. Notice this line of action connects everything in the pose from the top of the hat to the bottom of the feet. Everything in the pose is themed off this curve. You can also start looking at the actual limbs of the pose. For example, this arm here. Let's imagine a line of action for that arm. Well, it's also a C curve, but it goes like this. It's a very steep curve with a very harsh angle right there. In fact, this arm has a bit of tension to it. It feels like it's cocked back a little bit. You could almost draw this with two straights. Remember how I said earlier that straights tend to have a little bit more pointed energy to them. This is an example of what I'm talking about. I think you could consider the gesture of that arm to be constructed with two straights or a C curve with a very steep sharp angle to it. Let's look at his left leg here. There's a very graceful pose to that. It's not carrying a lot of weight, if any, I would say this limb conforms to an S curve like this. It's a very graceful type of rhythm. How about his right leg? Well, that leg is bearing some weight, and actually, the rhythm of that leg is very similar to the arm. I would say it's a C curve that has likewise a very steep angle right there, also very similar to two straights. Again, the closer you are to straight, in my opinion, the more weight or active energy the part has to it. Of course, we'll develop this with several drawings in this section. Let's go ahead now and gesture out this pose together. I'll start with the line of action. This is also helpful to me in a practical sense. I know where the top and bottom of the body is. But what I can do from here is I can place the head with just a basic lay and. I'm not trying to draw the character. I'm just trying to get a sense that, he's got a round head, it goes there. That's the top of the head and maybe this is the bottom of the head here. From there, I can say, where is the shoulder? The shoulder is beneath the head. I'm going to say it's about here. We gesture down from there. I can maybe start getting the arm gesture in there. Again, that steep C curve I talked about, and I can continue that rhythm to figure out where the hand might go. I'm certainly not trying to draw a hand, remember. I'm just trying to get that again, similar C curvy rhythm of the hand, like this. Because I now have the shoulder and the arm, I can get a sense of where the bottom of his jacket might be. Somewhere here. I'll just put this in with a indicator line. This is not a contour line. I'm not trying to draw the finished contour of his jacket. I'm just trying to say, hey, the bottom of the jacket is right there. Now, why am I using a C curve? Well, that actually gets into a little bit of form, which we cover in the next lesson. You could easily just put a straight line there to indicate where it is. But I like to ballpark or landmark where that is just with a little line there. Notice I get into the habit of using multiple strokes to draw my gestures with. Again, that helps you get into the feel or rhythm that you're drawing. It is helpful to get the whole pose down as quickly as you can. I'll go to his right leg now, which is the weight bearing leg. Noticing two things here. I've already talked about the C curve gesture that it has, but I'm also looking at the relationship between where the foot is and I'll use the front of the foot and the front of the hand. It's got this angle. I want to replicate that angle in my drawing. Sometimes it's even helpful to landmark, put a little circle or an x as to where you think that foot would land, and then gesture toward it like this. Because that foot has a lot of weight on it, I'll keep the foot as a straight. It's a C curve into a straight. There's that leg and you notice I'm preserving that angle. Now, whenever possible, when I draw his back leg, for example, I like to Feel that rhythm that I've already got in the body and extend it down for the leg. Remember I said that leg is like an S curve that goes like that. Well, that's what I'm trying to establish here that S curve. It's also helpful to landmark or plot where the foot is in the drawing. It's like there's the bottom of the foot where it impacts the ground and maybe here's the top of the foot, which is also a graceful C curve type thing here. I'll look at maybe where the top of his leg here and where his butt is, this area here. I'll rough that in maybe two. It's an obvious C curve there. That allows me to maybe lop around and find maybe where the side of it is like where the side contour is. I don't literally want to draw this line, but I'm noticing that that's a C curve, that's a C curve, that's a C curve, and I'm picking up on those rhythms as well. This is my bridge to get into my first suggestion of where the contour lines will eventually be. This line here, it's broken by the sleeve, but it's also a C curve. This is the beauty of studying animation drawings. They are kept just down to the essentials of the pose. His back arm comes out like this in another C curve. I'll apply the same idea now to his beak. I'm feeling like this C curvy action here to it. Here's the top of his jacket, C curve. Even the top of his hat is like a C curve there, and his whole hat itself has an action to it. It goes down the body. The brim of his hat might be an S curvy thing. I'm feeling out the things that are going to give this drawing a sense of energy in life. You notice it has nothing to do with the final contours, but it's got an awful lot to do with the character itself. The sense that this character is moving or thinking or being. Now, when I drew in, say the line of action for his arm, I went down the middle of the arm like this. That's what I've drawn here, the middle line of action. Again, when I draw lines of actions, I go down the middle of whatever it is, I'm line of actioning. But just like I showed you with the body contours here, it is also very useful to get a sense of what the opposing contours are doing rhythmically. For example, these contours are opposing C curves. I'll put it in my gesture. It's like one C curve going down this way and the other one picking up where it left off going this way. I'm expanding out even to the contours of the thing. The cuff of his sleeve is like another C curve. The nice part is having that initial gesture laid in, like for example, I know where the end of his hand might be versus the end of his foot. I therefore know where the cuff might land. A gesture is a way of also mapping out proportions. For example, I might look at this and say, h, these two elbows are a little bit too close together. This is where maybe you do erase a little bit. Maybe bring the elbow up, just redraw that rhythm so that elbow is a bit higher, and that alters the action, it alters the body language. But if I now hide the original line drawing, we still have a very definitive pose here. It's something that I can feel as the artist behind this. I know where this is going, and I'm able to gauge like, Hey, is that the type of pose I want? Is that the type of feel I want? In this case, it feels like he's moving forward, but in a sneaky or wary way, he's not quite sure what he's going to find, but he's moving forward anyway. This is certainly not a confident strut. I can gauge all that just off of this gesture, a gesture that can take you one to 2 minutes to draw, if not even shorter. Let's move on now to look at this page of Jake character designs that you've seen before. Now that you have an intro and a basic grasp of what gesture is, I want you to take a look at these drawings now through that lens. Notice that all of them have a dynamic gesture. The word dynamic means that you generally are avoiding straight up and down poses, where nothing is moving in the body. And to show you exactly what I mean, let's pick the most up and down pose you might find in this one, like say this one here. The body is not very acrobatic here. At first glance, it does appear to be straight up and down. But just in terms of the line of action, look what I'm doing to offset that. I've tilted the head, giving the pose still a nice s curve running down it. The idea behind this is that a normal human being rarely ever poses straight up and down. I mean, yes, it does happen, I guess. Usually we are in movement. Anyway, you want to portray movement because that tells you way more about the character. Movement implies that things are rarely in the same place. You legs will not be in the same place, your shoulders, one may be up, one may be down, your head might tilt. In drawing number three there, it looks like he's in the middle of saying hi to you, so I've raised one hand. Your hips might be off axis like this guy here. This side of his hips being the weight carrying side as his foot is planted on the ground, carrying that weight, and the high side of his hips allows this foot to be raised and not carrying much weight. This pose here, drawing number seven. This is pretty close to being a straight up and down pose as well. But even here, there's a few things that are offset. For example, if I drew a line connecting his shoulders, it's raised high into his head, like he's raising his shoulders, giving the pose a bit of action. Also, if I did a similar plumb line connecting the feet, you notice it's off axis as well. Those two lines are key parts of the drawing and they're not parallel. And that little bit of offset helps make it interesting. Sometimes I'll try poses that are based on a straight line. It doesn't always have to be an S curve or C curve. But notice what I'm doing. I'm simply skewing that line, so it's on an angle. Even this version of the character here, that line is skewed, skewed away from the vertical. That's something I do quite often like this guy here, that line is skewed. I would say it's straight here, but then it does a little C curve action right at the bottom. I would say is somewhere in between a C curve and a straight. I mean, it's a C curve, but it airs toward straight. Remember that C curves can harness the power of both S curves and straights. Let's look at this one here. I would actually call this an S curve. If we think about going down the middle of the form, well, the middle of the head starts going down this way, in a C curve action, but then it switches. This is an S curve. This one here is also an S curve. Remember, traversing the middle of the forms. This one here is also an S curve. You can see how this is not like a formula. Within the concept of an S curve, you still have infinite possibilities. It's not like you're tied down to one pose just because it's based on an S curve. This pose here is a C curve. But it's a C curve that has the apex of the curve right there, in the lower third of the C. It's not like a perfect letter C that you would get in a font, for example. It's also skewed. Again, the outermost part of that C curve is right there, which of course is where his hips are. The hips being a pivot point in the body. Let's go ahead and take that pose and gesture it out together. Just to show you the kind of mindset I was in when I first started to work on this job. Real quick though, I just want to talk about my digital interface. I'm using Photoshop here, but you definitely don't have to use photoshop. There are tons of apps out there, many of which are free, like Creta, for example, is free, and it's very much like Photoshop. If you're using an iPad, you'll probably want to use something like Procreate or brushes. Those are both very cheap and still professional. There are also other great apps like Clip Studio Paint, for example. I think the only reason I use photoshop is because I've been using it since the late 90s and I just know it so well. Anyway, no matter which app I'm using, I have my layers window open up here, my color picker over here, and I have my basic tool set over here. That's it. Now, as you know from my studio tour, I do also have dual monitors. On my other monitor, I have my brush list here. Sometimes I do put my brushes here, although right now it's colliding with my canvases. I put my brush window off screen, which you can't see, but it's just on the monitor to my left. I'm only going to use one brush for this anyway. Then I sometimes have this navigator window open, which just gives you a thumbnail view of the picture you have and you can navigate around with it. But that's it. Those are the windows I have open. Now, when I draw gestures, I typically start with this calligraphy brush. It's got a nice thick to thin aspect to it. To me, it feeds into the concept of rhythm because it's got such nice thickness control to it, the harder I press, the thicker it is. But I just find the nature of the taper from thick to thin on this calligraphy brush really, really nice. It ties in with my own philosophy and feeling of gesture drawing. Okay, let's go ahead and gesture out drawing number nine there. Typically, I do start out with the head. Now, I don't draw the head. I just indicate, again, if the head were boiled down to a curve, it'd be in this case, a C curve, and I'll just indicate where that head is and the general gestural shape of it. I do often start with the head because then I can get straight to the relationship of the shoulders. The relationship between the head and shoulders, I find to be your first critical point, as we draw here and as you practice this, you'll see how amazing it is, how much attitude you can immediately start feeling when you get the head and shoulder relationship in there. Then from here, I'll gesture out that C curve. Making sure that the apex of it is at the hip area here. I suppose the leg does come down and make an S curve, if I'm following it right down to the outer limb there, and then this other leg is over here, making sure I've got a bit of perspective in there. We'll talk about perspective in the next section. But for now, just keep in mind that it's pretty rare for the feet to be on the same plane. Linear perspective will cause 1 ft to be behind and the other foot to be in front. But again, we'll go over that in the next section. His arms continue that C curve rhythm or at least the upper part of the C curve of the body. It's a bit straighter. Like to branch my gesture off to indicate fingers. Again, I'm not trying to draw a hand, I'm just indicating where fingers might be, just thinking of them as rhythmic extensions of the arm. Of course, I'll do the same thing with the back arm here. Fingers tapering off that C curve to give it a little special hook at the end. Sometimes I'll just further explore these rhythms and get indications of where the outer contours might be. Again, these are not final attempts at the outer contours. It's just that idea like, the knee is going to be here. I want to get an idea of how the outer contour of that leg interfaces with the rest of the gesture. I can do that in the back leg as well. If we just look at this area right here, you notice what I have not drawn. I have not drawn two parallel lines like that. Parallel lines tend to be a little bit of a boring choice. I recommend avoiding parallel lines. Notice what I did in my gesture, I first had my initial curve for the leg like this, and then the outer one tapered out and came in. It became this much more interesting kind of rhythm. I really recommend going that way. Think of it like the ebbs and flows of a river. Nature will rarely make the two banks of a river completely parallel. It's organic. It'll have a nice offset flow to it. Back to our gesture drawing here, there's a hood that he's wearing, and that hood is also a branch off of that thematic s curve. I was like this. His hair might come out, also making a s curve. I'm deciding so much of my design choices are based on gestural relationships. Specifically, relationships of rhythms. This is his ear. Looks like a drawing of an ear, at least a cartoony one. But what I'm concerned with is the rhythm that's driving it. Even the nose, like the bottom of the nose is also a C curve. This little tiny C curve of the nose being like an extension of the C curves of the body, a continuation of the theme. I'm just choosing to really take that to the M degree, dialing it up, having it be rooted in almost every part. Now that's not a rule. You don't have to have your thematic C curve and line of action be echoed in every part. You do not have to do that. If you can do that, you're almost guaranteed that the drawing will have a nice appeal to it. It's like a story being neatly tied to a theme, and you get the sense of it being a very tightly woven story in that sense. A drawing is the same way. Once again, for the shoes, he's got this nice sea curve thing. When there's weight placed on something, both of his feet are planted on the ground, holding weight, I like to indicate that with a straight. Put a straight there where his shoe might impact the ground and a straight here where this shoe might impact the ground. Can you see how it feels like he's really planted on the ground? Here, let me get rid of these things because I think they're a bit confusing there now. Yeah, Can you see how shoes because of these straights, really feel like they're planted. It is really nice having a little bit of breakup of your rhythm. I've talked about thematic rhythms, everything being based on C curves. But when you can have a C curve like this, abruptly stopping at a straight. There's something nice about that. It starts feeling like these parts of the body are giving and taking in terms of how they're distributing weight. Breaking up a rhythm like that is almost like adding pepper to something. Just a little bit here and there. We'll give it a bit of a zing. The thing to understand about gesture drawing is there are no rules. The ideas presented here make up a series of tools that you can use at your own disposal. So he's got his little strings hanging off of his hoodie there and even those strings. There's C curves. It's overkill to put these in a gesture drawing by the way. This is a detail I would say for the end. But just because we're analyzing a finished piece of work, I just want you to see how I'm thinking about it. I see what I did here. I made the same C curve twice. Try not to do that. That's similar to parallel lines. It's much better and more close to nature if you can offset it. I'll just make one C curve just different than the other. This one's wider, this one's narrower. This one ends at a straight almost and this one has more of a taper. Can you see how that's much more interesting? I'll just erase out the one I don't like there. You can see here, we have a very solid lay in. Now, it took me several minutes to draw that because I'm explaining every step of the way. But if I were just drawing this, I could probably arrive at that drawing in 2 minutes or 1 minute. It's also very editable. Anything here I feel can change because I have not really committed to anything. These rhythm lines are abstract enough that everything is pliable at this stage. But yet the magic is you still totally get the feeling of what you might produce from here. It's like a valuable crystal ball in that sense. For this one, I recorded it without speaking, so you can see how I actually go about this. The process is the same. It's just going to be faster. I started with the head and I like to line of action my way down the body. Then I like to do a quick proportion check. I get the hips and shoulders in just as lines for now. Then I try and pinpoint exactly where the shoulders branch out from the head. In this case, the shoulders are raised, so they intersect the head. Now, rhythmically, look at the straight responsible for his arm that's extended, his right arm there. That straight really helps communicate thrust. Again, straights are very good at a acute type of pointed energy, like a thrust or weight being held. Notice his left arm, which is the arm on the right, is a C curve, which gives that arm a little bit more of a relaxed feel. Having a difference between the two helps the dynamicism of the pose. For the legs here, I'm just trying to play off the theme that's going with the bit of a curvature to the body or the curvature to the line of action. To give a hint of perspective, I do always like to make sure the feet are not touching the floor at the same vertical point on the page. From here, the pose is laid in. I've been drawing for about a minute now. Now, I couldn't always get an entire pose laid in in 1 minute. That is something that happens with practice and experience. But what I do at this stage is I try and enhance some of the rhythms and relationships that are there. For example, I don't want the shoulders and hips to be parallel. As you can see, they basically are now. Just using a couple of different colors, I'll just offset that angle just a little bit. It's totally valid to make lines like this in gesture drawing. Remember gesture is an abstract mode of drawing. It's the foundations. Those lines help remind me that as I add forms and detail to this to respect these underlying relationships and not forget them as I move ahead. Right Let's take a look at drawing number eight here. For this one, I'll get back to narrating it live so I can relay my thoughts as I go. Again, start with the head. Sometimes it's useful to do a little cross hairs to mark where the eyes are and where it's pointing. We'll look at this process a bit more in the next chapter. But if you have a cross hair here that represents the middle of the eyes, then sometimes you can just plot a nose with a simple curve, keeping your lines nice and light to begin with, and you immediately develop a sense of where the character is looking, the rotation and angle of his head. Then maybe from here, I could even build out gesture for hair, for example. Coming down this way, and maybe some ears. Again, with these gestural rhythmic flowy lines, you can get a sense for even perspective and the beginnings of hints of form as well. I wanted to skew this vertical line so it's off at an angle. Already, can you see the amount of attitude that happens just with that? Now, watch this. Here comes some more attitude. I'm going to place the shoulder line. It's a bit off axis as well. It makes the letter T with my body line of action. But again, it's not a perfect T that crosses a perfect 90 degree angles. It's skewed. It's like this. Those angles are a bit wonky. They're not 90 degrees. I like to use the word offset a lot. From here, I can place one shoulder high and one shoulder low. No extremely high or extremely low, but higher and lower. Those are critical words you can think about higher, lower, offset. Maybe for the hips, I'll offset that a little bit from the shoulder line. This line goes like this, this line goes like that. They're close to parallel, but not quite parallel. Then sometimes you can even figure out where the feet are in this process. I don't always do that. But in this case, because I am looking at a finish drawing, I will ballpark where the feet are about there. I often don't know enough about my design to place where the feet are, but you can try it. You can always move these things. Now watch this. Sometimes it's nice to gesture down from the arm, a line of action for the arm. But instead of committing to it, just put a circle to where you think the hand might be and then put another circle where the other hand is. It's almost like he's wearing boxing gloves or something. But immediately, I can get a sense for that action. Then from here, I might want to gesture toward that hand. Gesture toward this hand. Maybe I'm like, No, the arms shouldn't go like that, it should maybe go out this way. If you place the hands first and then gesture toward them, you might find that a bit easier to build more natural or believable poses. It's gesturing C curves for the fingers here. Now, sometimes it does help to know exactly what the character is doing. For example, in drawing number three here, this character is saying, hello. That's the action I pictured in my brain when I was drawing him. This guy was telling you about a crazy sight he just saw. This guy is looking at some dirt on his foot or something like that. This guy is explaining something, but with a little bit of trepidation, he's puzzled or maybe fascinated by something, and he's moving his body maybe toward the person that he's talking to perhaps or maybe moving his body away from the thing he's explaining. I'm not sure. But the more you can internalize about what the character is actually thinking and feeling, the more that will inform your gesture on how his body is physically positioned. I mean, you'll be able to internalize those thoughts and your body will move accordingly. Here, I'll hint at some of the outside contours, but thinking rhythmically, this is a C curve, wider C curve and his foot is going to be planted. Again, you already know this. I like to use straights, whenever something is bearing weight. Whenever I do 1 ft, I pivot and do the other foot. You notice they are on two different planes. Planes, meaning, if I drew a horizontal line from this point, crossing that point, This point is just a little bit higher. It's very subtle, but I do recommend playing with that relationship. I can even make this a bit higher and this may be a bit lower. I recommend playing with that relationship in your work. It's just another one of those elements that helps bring life to what you're drawing. Here's another C curve for his shoes. Maybe this aspect of the gesture on the outside has more of an S curve to it. This one's more of a C curve, and then his shorts maybe has a C curve like that. There we go. With a few minutes, just a few minutes into this, we have a working pose, certainly something that can support being fleshed out into a fully drawn character design. You might even apply C curves to indicate a general shape of the eyes, for example, general shape of the mouth. Hopefully, you can see by now that it's all based on these thematic rhythmic lines of action and rhythmic explorations. What that does is it curates the pose. It ties it together. I've been using the word theme, but that's what a theme does. A theme ties it together. If you're at a party that's Hawaiian themed. The Hawaiian shirts and the Hawaiian food ties it all together, and nobody is left in the dark as to what this is all about. That's the power of theme. That's it. You don't have to go any further than that. We could alter this if we wanted to. For example, maybe I don't like the way that arm is positioned. I'll just delete it. Something you can try and do is follow the rhythm from one arm through the shoulders into the other arm, and maybe I want to put this hand up here. And gesture toward it. Now I'm not worried about the perspective of the hand. I don't necessarily need to know exactly what that hand is doing, but I'll just indicate a few C curves for where the fingers might be. Instantly, I've got a different iteration of this gesture, but one that still is very flowy. This is great because I do often recommend following rhythms through the body, traversing multiple parts, thinking abstractly as if these rhythms are like rivers flowing through different parts of the body. Much like this C curve line here. It flows through the chest, the hips, the leg, and ultimately into the foot. That's like four different things. Once again, that's where these rhythm lines are so powerful. They connect different elements of the body, different elements of the pose, and make them feel like a cohesive whole. This is how you avoid that all too common beginner look. This drawing was donated to the class by a friend of mine. He drew this in high school. You can see that it looks flat. It is perfectly vertical, which is a very common problem, yes, the arms are posed, but it feels more like a mannequin posing and not a human. A question you might have is, well, does this gesture stuff work on humans too? Yes, it does. In fact, because this is an applied course, I'm working backwards. I'm going from a starting point of illustration and how we're working backwards to humans. In reality, though, especially if you're a beginner, you want to go the opposite way, start your studies with human models and then work your way toward characters. Here's the line of action. Look how light I'm being on the page. Having a light touch allows me to change my mind later. Times I use different colors to indicate the angle of the shoulders versus the angle of the hips. Once I'm confident with that, I state the shoulders a little more confidently, and I'll state that other shoulder as well. Somewhere over here. I think the head needs to be pushed out more, so I can just quickly scribble it out, push the head out more, that feels better. Again, just using C 7. Characters: 3D Form: If gesture drawing represented the emotional part of drawing where you capture feeling and attitude and mood, Drawing form is the opposite end of that spectrum where we're thinking very literally. We're still not thinking about the final final lines, but we are thinking about the solid three dimensionality of what it is we're looking at. We're going to be using a lot of basic forms, things like cylinders, boxes, spheres, and building characters out of those elements. But more importantly, it's not really about building characters at this point. A character is just one of the many applications you can use this for. This is more of a development of a mode of thinking and seeing where we are able to visualize things not in two D space on the page, but in three D space going in and out of space. That is the tool that allows you to depict things from different angles from your imagination. Drawing form is the ideal next step from a gesture drawing. So let's take the same character we just worked with and apply form to it. What I'd like to do here is dive right in and apply some tools of building form, and then we'll back up and fill in some theoretical gaps. I want to keep this class as applied as possible. Let's start off here and we'll build right off the gesture that I just finished off with in the previous lesson. What I've got here is the drawing on the background layer, and then what I've done is just put a layer over top of it that I will draw on. All the stuff I'm doing here is on a separate layer. Okay Let's start again with the head. I still use the same order of progression, and the head is laid in from our gesture is this shape and it's a circular shape. I'll put this in and this immediately, right here, this little cross hair gets extended. Think of an elastic band that travels over a sphere. Right now I'm drawing behind it. I'll use a dotted line for that. I'm drawing behind the sphere, then this is over it. Then same for the middle line, but watch this, I'll extend it to go over this theoretical spherical form that I'm using as I lay in for the head and it goes around. Then if I were to be responsible and see through the form, go like this and draw a dotted line behind it. I say, be responsible because I find that if you are a draft person, you know, someone who wants to draw well, a draftsman, you want to always know the ins and outs of all your forms, not just what you're seeing, but the backside of it, too. If you can see through your forms, like you have X ray vision or something, you will have more solid form in general. Which seems to be self evident. If you know more, you will have more truth in your drawing. I'm also going to just turn up my white layer to hide the gesture a little bit more back to our form drawing. It's going to get rid of that nose that was there from the gesture and restate it. It was a little too far to the left. I want to put it right in the middle like this, and I'll use my red to indicate midlines. Let me redraw the midline going down the head. This line is in the middle of the form, going over the form. But when it hits the nose, it has to travel around the nose. You see that? Imagine like this is an elastic band wrapping around these forms, and that elastic band travels, of course, around the form as it wraps around it, right? And the same with this cross hair here. Okay. Go back to our black. You see how useful it is to have those colors up there. I don't have to drag in the color picker. Then we will start building the body because we have that. Now, our gesture, remember I was saying that in a cartoon illustration, often your gesture rhythmic lines can actually become final contours. Well, here's where we can start seeing that happen. But let's think of form though. Where would the top of his torso be like the top of rib cage? Well, in the actual drawing here, the top of his rib cage is hidden by the arms, but it's somewhere up there. Let's think of our drawing now, and let's put a little ellipse for the top of the torso form. Then that gestural line we laid in here, I'm actually going to just reuse it. This is the bottom of our torso. I'll use the bottom of the shirt, the top of the hips as the end point of this torso. Then we connect it with this rhythm line that is from our gesture as well. And this too. What we have here is a form. Let me just turn up my middle. There we go. What we want to do is grab our red here and further understand this form. It's flat at the top, then this midline goes down to about here. I can landmark where the middle point is at just below the belly button. And draw up. Again, an elastic band tightly wrapping around that form would look something like this. Now, notice how this deviates from the gesture line beneath it that you can still see. That's because this is not a gesture line. The gesture line captured almost the average rhythm of the body, whereas this line is going over the literal physical three D form. So let's continue that and draw another red line, this being an ellipse that goes over the front of the upper torso, and it's always useful to draw behind, and also our first line, let's draw behind the form. We can draw another one coming down here and ellipse. Notice I'm being very careful. I'm not drawing rhythmically anymore. I'm drawing technically. If the rhythm stuff was the emotional part, then the technical stuff is the physical part. So there is how I build the torso. That's all I need. Let's go back to the black color and let's continue. What I'd like to do looking at my reference drawing there on the left, I'll use the shorts. Let's build the shorts. Instead of building the leg, let's build the shorts and then the lower leg coming out of that. We know we're starting from here and here, let's build the shorts over here first. Again, our gesture, which let me just bring that back a little bit so you can see it. O gesture told us where the shorts end right there. But now it's time to resolve the cylindrical form. That would be the bottom of the shorts. I'll do is I'll draw that all the way around. I'll use a very ghosted line in the back there. This being the part of the shorts you can't see, and this being the part of the shorts here that you can see. Then I will draw the form connecting one side of it, the contour. This is actually a contour now, unlike gesture. You notice the gesture in this case, some of those contours were close, like that one there. But this is where I finally resolve the contours of the form. Now, even this, I'm separating this lesson from shape design. Shape design is the very next lesson. Shape design is where you can alter this further. But in this case, what I'm trying to do is just make sure that I have a solid three dimensional understanding of this character. Not the character, but the three dimensional understanding of the forms that build the character. The final shape, which is the next lesson is where we'll get a final understanding of the character's full look. But this is the three dimensional form. I'll grab my red color here and draw another ellipse for the front of the shorts. Here. I undo that. That ellipse was too flat. I'll talk about why when we back up in the very next section of this lesson, we'll back up and talk some theory. But right now want to get that ellipse as close to right as I can, go around the form. Good. We have this part of the crotch here. The cylinder doesn't go all the way there, but we can imagine it traveling there and connecting. I use my red line connecting with the body up here. Again, trying to see through the form as if we had x ray vision. We are not only drawing the front of these forms, the visible part to us from this view, we are drawing what someone from the back might see. This is a very, very useful and professional skill that if you want to be a character designer of any kind, you absolutely need this skill. Because you will most likely be designing for three D. I mean, usually, productions, these days are three D. But even if you're designing for two D, you know, the animators or the production flow that goes through the pipeline needs to know what these characters look like in three D. So even if you're drawing for a two D medium, like a two D animation or something, you still need to know the three dimensionality of your character. Of course, that's what's going to help you draw the character in any different pose or angle. So I've drawn a couple of ellipses for the other side of the shorts. And then I'll connect that. Now, you know, it's not a perfect cylinder like this. It's not a flat cylinder. His leg is bent, right? So I'm going to bend my cylinder as well. It's like that, and we'll go around to the back of the shorts. Now some of this like this part here, not to jump ahead too much, but this part here, which I'm coloring in black right now, that will actually be visible, because his leg is going to pop out of that. I'll undo that though, I'm getting ahead of myself. I'm just thinking ahead a little bit. There's that cylinder and we can probably make sure that we can connect this rhythm in here, going back to gesture a little bit, making sure that these two forms do line up so that when I draw the crotch area that our forms are not misaligned for that process. Okay, let's actually go to this leg here. The leg comes directly out from inside of the shorts cylinder, we can call it that. This one hits the top of that cylinder because of gravity. The shorts are going to rest on the leg. But this leg, as I showed you just a minute ago, comes out from the middle of the shorts because those are pretty baggy shorts. Meaning this part, we can see inside of this hollow cylinder. That is the inside of the shorts garment, and this leg comes out like that. We have a cylinder here and a cylinder here. If you're responsible, you should also continue that leg. I'll just draw with very ghosted grade outlines or dotted lines, whatever you want. Continue that leg inside the shorts and trace it back to its origin point near at the hips. But while we're here, let's get the shoe. Now, the shoe is less like a cylinder and more like a box. I'm going to draw as a rounded box form. Here is what I mean. Here's the underside of a box form. This is this being the sole of the foot, the underside, and that box is going to just come up like that interfacing with the angle. We're seeing that box from a pretty extreme under angle. Can you see that? That's how I'm going to block in the shoe. Okay now it's time to apply that to the other leg. The first question I always ask myself when I'm drawing pants and shorts is, where does the leg come out from? It was pretty obvious in this one because gravity will force this intersection right here where the shorts are touching the leg. But in this one, these shorts are more in the middle of the leg ish. I won't put it right out of the middle because that's never a good choice. Almost never. Usually, the form will spend more time on one side or the other. I'll choose this side. I'm favoring the right side here, the other side of the leg comes out that way. This cylinder ends like this, this downward tapering ellipse, I'll draw around the form there. The very ghosted line or dotted line, whatever you prefer. That leg is going to come up. Now, where's the knee? In this one, the knee was there. I didn't mention that. Sorry. In this leg. Again, the knee is buried a little bit within the shorts. Same thing here, the knee is about there, and let's be consistent as to where the knees are in relation to the ends of the shorts. Then that leg comes up and meets the hips, crotch right around there, and this leg around here, and we'll draw again, using red, I'll draw the corresponding ellipses that represent the cylindrical forms underneath. Make sure that our character has a semblance of believability underneath the clothing. You'll see this all the time in animated productions where the characters will be drawn naked. I mean, they don't draw like genitalia or anything. There's no point in that. But like a manikin is naked, they'll draw the character like that just to make sure the form is consistent and cohesive and believable throughout. Same thing with the shoe here, I will just block in this shoe as a box. I'm ignoring the elasticity of it for now. I'll get that in in the shape section, which is the very next lesson after this. But I do want to get in the fact that it is bent at the heel. It's like this. I went a little too far back there. Let me just erase that. It's like the shoe ends like this and it has a bent because he's about to step off his foot. This is not a perfect. This is certainly not a drawing of a shoe. This is a good place to remind you that this is not necessarily the final shapes. In fact, it's not the final shapes at all, it's just the forms. Some of these shapes actually could be close to final, but in the case of this shoe and even that shoe there, it's not. These are just the basic forms that we are visualizing in our head before we can commit to the shapes. Now, when it comes to drawing like this, the more experience you get with drawing, the less you have to physically do this step, In fact, when I draw now, I almost never do this, but I always, and that word is intentionally used. Always, think of it. There's never a point where I'm not thinking three D. It's just do you have to go through the steps of drawing this? That depends on your experience. Let's get the shoulders. There's an ellipse here where the shoulder is. Then again, using our gesture, we know our elbow is there. I'll get rid of that X though because I can see the gesture there, and we'll draw the end cap of the cylinder, and then we will connect that. In this case, the arm is a pretty straight up cylinder. It's tapered a little bit like it's wider here, narrower here, so it tapers a little bit, but it is pretty much a straight cylinder. Let's get the other arm in while we're here, we know where the elbow is right there. Again, we'll draw through the form if I continue this up and we know where the top of the torso is, that puts the other shoulder around there. So we can draw that cylinder, I can draw through the form cylinder. This is where I'm noticing that my elbow is a bit too far out. That arm would have to be too long to hit that point. Now, there is a such thing as graphic cheats, especially in two D. In three D, you can't quite do this as much. In two D, I could extend the length of that arm a little bit if I wanted to. In this case, I will bring it in a bit just to be honest about it. But when we get to the final shapes, I may change my mind there and bring it out a little bit more. The D productions have this problem all the time, by the way, where they want a certain pose, a certain silhouette, they can't get it because the character can't physically do that. Studios like Pixar build cheating abilities into their models all the time. It is a very common thing to do in art to cheat the look of a silhouette based on the graphics or a silhouette you want. But that is a shape question, not a form question, so we'll get to that in the next lesson. Let's now get the cylinder for the bottom, the lower arm, which is the top of this drawing. There's where the wrist would end for the front arm and we know where the elbow is. I'm not even going to draw anything, but it would be right there. I'll just continue this thing. Notice what I do usually is I find the two end points of the form, and then connect it. Then what I like to do, riding a bit muddled up with lines here, just ghost out just by painting white over this, ghost out what's behind. You still want to see those lines, but I'm just ghosting it out. You can get an airbrush. There's an airbrush here. You can do that. I'll just ghost out these lines a little bit. Even here. Let that arm appear like it's in front, there we go. Back to our drawing brush. I will share that drawing brush with the class, by the way. I really really enjoy this brush. It's one that I made and customized. I think I got it from a default photoshop brush that I then just customized for my own drawing use. Again, always helpful to have these intermediary ellipses traversing the form. You are responsible for the form at every turn literally. You should know what that form is doing everywhere. If you don't know what the form is doing at a certain point, you are more than likely to make a mistake there. Drawing almost never happens for free. It's very rare that you get lucky and just put the right thing down as extremely rare. When you watch a pro draw, it looks like that's what's happening to them, but it's that their instincts are so honed that they don't always have to do these steps. Here's a box for the hand. Here's a box right here and the fingers are curling in. See that. Here's the back side of the fingers. There we go. This arm, we can use our red and just continue it behind the head. The hand would be around here. There's the wrist, and the hand, of course, would branch from that. But I know that hand is in the right place, so I'm just not going to draw it for this. But the key is, I know it's in the right place. That's why I don't have to draw it here. As for the toy that he's hoisting in the air there, I'll just say thing, but I'll draw this quicker and with the most basic of forms, here's a spherical shape for the head, eye line up there, some hair coming off of it. He's got a very cylindrical tapered arm where it's narrower at the shoulder and a lot wider where the fingers are. And this arm here is also like a tapered cylinder, and that leg is a huge cylinder that goes like this. I'm just more quickly moving through this part of the drawing here and some boxes here for the toes. There we go. This is all making sense now in terms of three dimensional form. I do see what I'm doing here. Going over the lines, making sure things line up, making sure one form appears in front of the other. One thinks the shoulders are connecting to where they roughly should be on the torso. I'm not thinking of anatomy, I'm not thinking about how shoulders actually connect in real life to the collar bone or anything like that. That's not important here. It's just general placement. Obviously, anatomy comes into play when you're learning life drawing, which is a different subject than this class, but the more anatomy you know, I suppose the more could help you here as well. But you certainly don't need to be an anatomy expert to draw this way. All right. Being able to visualize things this way will ensure that your final drawing has that desirable sense of depth and form. To further gain a grasp of what we're doing here though, I've switched over to Blender, which is a three D program. Now you don't need to know blender for this. I'm just going to show you a few things about the nature of drawing in three D and three D space that you need to know again in order to do this well. I've got a cylinder loaded up here, and I can rotate my view to see the cylinder from different angles. But watch this. If I just go into this mode here, I can see all the points that make it up, which is helpful. Because what I'm about to do is add a ring around the cylinder. Here it is here. These are like the rings that we've been drawing in our character. Now watch this though. As I move this ring up and down, can you see that its perspective is changing? I can further show you this by making the cylinder transparent. So now we see around the back of the form, just like we've been drawing. Watch this. As I move the ring up, can you see the ellipse gets narrower? And as I move it down, the ellipse gets wider. You see that. Also, this is dependent on the camera view. If I went like this, move the camera right in line with the cylinder, or I should say with the ellipse there, I'm right in line with that. What appears like a straight line right now. Now watch this. If I do the same thing, if I move it up, it gets wider as we go up. Then I can go down and pass through the point where it's a straight line right there, and I can go down and it gets wider the opposite way. It's critical to understand how this works. It all has to do with the concept of the horizon line. Another word for the horizon line is the ey line. The eyeline or horizon line is a theoretical line in space that is level with your eyes, or in this case, my camera view here in three D. The horizon line in this image is here. I know it's there because that's where my ellipse turned into a perfectly straight line right there. The thing you have to know about the horizon line is anything above the horizon line is above your eyes or above the camera's lens. We're seeing the underside of it. The opposite is true. Anything below the horizon line is below your eyes or camera lens, and therefore, we see the top side of it. For example, with this cylinder here, again, the horizon line is right about here where I'm crossing my mouse cursor here. That means that the top of the cylinder, this part here is above our eye line, so we cannot see the top of it, and the bottom of the cylinder, this part here is below our ey line, so we can't see the bottom of it. If I move the cylinder down below the horizon line, well, look at this. Now we can see that top plane of the cylinder. Also what that means is if I added another ring and I'll make the cylinder transparent again. If I add this ring, now watch this, even though I'm placing this ring right at the top of the cylinder, that ellipse has a different perspective now. Just to remind you if I move this cylinder up where it was before, that ellipse goes out like this. But if it's down here below the eyeline, now that ellipse has changed to go out this way downward. So I can put this cylinder somewhere, put it here and maybe move my eyeline just about like that. You can tell where my eyeline is in three D here, by the way, because you can see that's where the grid terminates. It's very faint, but can you see this line in the very distant horizon, incidentally, that's why it's called the horizon line, It's at your horizon, and it's determined by your eyes. Don't mistake the horizon line for where the water meets the sky. Yes, that is also called a horizon, but that's not what the horizon line is in drawing. The horizon line is that horizontal line that is even with your eyes. In this case, even though look at this, even though I'm looking down, I've rotated my camera to look down. My horizon line is still here. That's because even though I'm looking down, the physical height of my eyes, the level that my eyes are at in space is above the cylinder. Even though I'm looking down, my eye line is still above the cylinder, which means if I made the cylinder transparent and moved this ellipse, you can see that no matter where the ellipse is in the cylinder, I can still see that the top side of that ellipse, because it is always below the horizon line. The change now is the further down below the horizon line it is, the wider it gets. All right. Here's a screenshot of that last frame here in photoshop. Let's just do a little practicing drawing in space here. I know where the horizon line is because again, I can see it right there where the grid terminates in three D. If I were to say just this distance down from the horizon, well, that ellipse would be darn near straight. But because we are still below the horizon line here, we'd still be able to see the top side of it, but we'd be very narrow, something like this. If I continued my distance down from the horizon line, somewhere down here, which is about level with this cylinder, then I know when I can see it in the reference, that the ellipse gets wider than my first one, something like that. Now, my ellipses are drawn by hand by a human. They're not going to be as mechanically perfect as the computer model, but that's okay. I'll try and make it as good as I can, something like that. Now, if I just continue lines down here, it's like draw a cylinder. Now that I'm way down here at this level, I'm so much further down from the horizon line, that ellipse needs to really become wider. I'm trying to almost gesture it. I'm trying to feel it with my arm before committing to these lines. It's something like this. Now that ellipse has to come off of the cylinders, legs there, of course, and it's something like that. I could ghost out the back by painting over But remember, it is important to draw the back of these forms, just like we did with our character a moment ago, we draw through the form as if we had x ray vision. This helps our draftsmanship improve. Because, again, if you can see through your objects, you'll have more cohesive form all the way through. There we go. There's our cylinder. To emphasize that this is the top side of the cylinder, maybe I'll just paint this white, so it looks like a solid form there. And there's our cylinder. Now, let's say we were above the horizon line somewhere up here. Well, now the ellipse goes out this way. But because we are still close to the horizon line, it doesn't come out that much. It's maybe something like this. But now we are seeing the underside of that ellipse. If we just connected these two points, well, now we have ourselves, yet another spatially accurate cylinder. But in this case, I'd mask out or ghost out that back area to make sure that we still see it, still accountable for it. But the visible line to our eyes is this bottom line. The opposite is true on top, I'll mask out or ghost out this part of the ellipse to make sure to emphasize that the top line of this ellipse is the one visible to our eyes. It's a simple concept, but oddly, this goes untaught and unnoticed by a lot of artists. As a result, it makes a lot of people's drawings just incoherent in three D, the attempt is there, but the accuracy is off. If the basic accuracy is off in your form, it defeats the purpose. You can be off with a gesture and still capture a perfectly valid feel, but you can't really be off too much with form and capture valid form. Going back to our Jake character sheet here, the one you've seen before, I just want to show you how I'm applying these. Let's look at this guy here. The first question to ask is, where is the horizon line? That is, if you were to look at Jake here, that is to say, if you were to project your eyeline forward, where would that line collide with the character? What part of his body is your eyes equal with? I would say it's probably around here. Having the eyeline at his chin there means that the camera is pretty low to the ground, which is true. If you look at this, it does look like you're low to the ground, looking up at him just a little bit. Let me put that horizon line back in there. That means that this area is above the horizon line. As we saw with our ellipse a moment ago with the cylinders, that means that this cross contour or this elastic band, sometimes they're called cross contours, by the way, goes around like that. Can you see how well that wraps around his head, and it looks like it's following the perspective? If I did this, something like that, it doesn't look right. There's something wrong about that or inaccurate. This is what feels like it's wrapping around his head. Conversely, look at this part here where the shirt ends, the belt line, that is below the horizon line. Can you see how I've got the ellipse going down? It's this way. If we were to draw a theoretical cylinder there and then ghost in the lines behind it, you can see that we are accountable to our perspective there. All right, Let's move down the page to this version of Jake. This is a very different angle. In this one, we're looking slightly down at him. Same question applies. Where would our eyes be level with in this view? I would say it's somewhere up here, projecting my eye line infinitely into space, it would line up around there, which means it collides with basically the very tip of his hair. That means that in this case, unlike that one where the line went around this way. On this guy, his whole head is below the horizon line. This ellipse goes around his head this way. If we were to ghost in the back of it, it would be like that. If we look at his belt line there again, notice that ellipse is wider because it is further below the horizon line. Again, we can be responsible and do the back, and then we can connect our theoretical cylinder there, and you can see how I'm being accountable to the three D space that these forms live in. Even on very realistic pictures like this, this is painted in a more realistic style. But of course, the same principle holds true. First question, where is the horizon line? Where is our eyes level with his body? I would say it's somewhere about there. There are some very obvious ellipses like this one. See it bends outward because it's going down. This one bends outward even a bit more. This ellipse here bends outward as well. Now his head is above the horizon line, so this one goes out this way. Hopefully, this drives home the importance of knowing where that horizon line is. Now, there is one little extra thing that throws a monkey wrench in all of this, and that is rotation. Back in blender here, I've got a box form selected a rectangular box. I'll make it transparent like I've always done, and I will put our little cross section in there. Let's just put it right there. Now, we're below the horizon line now, so we're looking down even though it's a box form, it's the same principle as an ellipse, as a cylinder. I just happened to be using cylinders before and now it's boxes, but we're looking at the top face of this cross contour or this cross section because we are above the horizon line, it is below the horizon line. I'll just make it even with the horizon line or right there. Now it's perfectly flat. We can see neither the top plane nor the bottom plane, so it's perfectly straight But watch what were to happen now. If I rotate the object. I'm doing this. I'm rotating like this. Let me get my view back to where it was. If I rotate the object, well, suddenly now we are seeing the top plane of that cross section because the object is tilted toward us. We do have to be mindful of that. If the object were unrotated, just perfectly flat up and down like this, we see it flat, but the second it starts rotating, that's a variable we have to consider. Back in my painting here, there are a few objects that are rotated. For example, this leg here. This leg is like a cylinder, but because it's extended toward us, like he's walking, that cylinder form of the leg has been rotated toward us. Our horizon line was what about there? Even though that leg is below well below the horizon line, because it has rotated up toward us, these ellipses break that and go this way. Cylinder goes like this and this wraps around the back like that. I'm accounting for that rotation. It's the same thing with the arms here. Let me just paint out this arm real fast here. If I wanted to draw that arm just flat up and down, well, it's below the horizon line just barely. So this ellipse would be just barely going downward. We'd have the legs of our cylinder here, and this end of the arm would be like that. That would represent the arm hanging downward in space in a perfectly vertical manner. But that's not what's happening here. That arm has rotated out toward us. That rotation is enough to change the nature of the cylinder, so it goes out like this. Here, let me put the horizon line back in somewhere about there. The horizon line concept is still important because what you can do is you can always mentally start from a perfectly flat up and down form, like the box form here I showed you a moment ago, and that was perfectly flat up and down like this, you can imagine where these cross sections are in relation to the horizon line. Then from there, you can rotate them accordingly. This is something that again, I feel is under taught in art, and you really need to be aware of it so that your form makes cohesive sense in a three D space. Let's move on now to the next step of building a character, shape. 8. Characters: Final Shapes: All right, shape design. This is finally, where we get those final final lines in our work. Shapes are like the glue that binds together gesture and form. Shapes, though are also their own problem to solve. A shape is simple. It's like this is a circle. It's just a shape. Everyone draws shapes from a very young age. But as a professional artist, we have to understand the concept that we are going to be drawing many shapes to create a picture. And those shapes need to be read or visually understood by the viewer. It stands to reason that the simpler you can design those shapes, the more logic you can put into how they're drawn, the better it will be for your viewer. As a result, good shape design gives your work an appealing look. In this lesson, let's dive right into shapes. We'll work with the same character we've been working with, but we'll also look at examples of how I use shapes more broadly as well. We'll gain a general philosophy for shape design and then we'll apply it. All right. So I've got my Jake design drawings on the screen here and I've dug up a few more here on the right. I've got this is the whole page I submitted to the client for that particular job. Some of the numbers won't make sense anymore. I've got two number five, two number six, whatever. I initially presented these drawings to the client on two different sheets and in two different passes. But anyway, I'd like to go over these drawings and develop a little checklist of shape design principles to keep in mind. Principles that I use all the time, principles that I think are very effective, and we'll get a bit of a cookbook going for shapes that we'll then use in a drawing. Okay, Item one on our checklist is something I like to consider right away, right off the bat. I like to call it the meta shape. The meta shape is like an overall shape that your character or whatever object you're drawing, really, the overall shape that it conforms to. I can pinpoint the thing that taught me this. It's this right here. This model sheet from Disney's Aladdin. I'll zoom in on it quickly here. It's pretty low res, but it doesn't matter. You've got all the characters from the movie up here. Down here, you can see what simple meta shape or overall shape they all conform to. You notice that each shape is unique. The idea here being that the DNA of the shape being different allows your eye to quickly and easily differentiate between any given character. It's such a useful tool that illustrators apply it to their work, even though you can stare at an illustration forever if you wanted to. It's still very useful for getting that quick binary or DNA read on your stuff. Let's take a look at some of the more obvious ones. Like for example, this guy here, the shape is this big tapering triangle thing, that's just for the body. If I were to include the head in that, the head is like a big balloon that further adds a shape change to it. I like to even color these in or just get the paint bucket fill tool and just do to get a sense for what that shape is doing. We'll get into how to gauge whether or not that's an interesting shape in just a moment, those will be further items on our checklist. But for now, let's just think of the idea of having an overall meta shape. Now, again, these are just principles. You don't always have to do this. Sometimes I'll pronounce it more, sometimes less. For example, this character uses the same meta shape. It's the same tapered triangular thing for the body. Know I'm not including the arms, by the way, because the arms can move so much, it's helpful to really only consider the trunk of the body for this stage, and I connect the feet like I'm doing here. Then, yeah, for this guy, the head, also tapers out, but it's more of an angled style. The other one was more round, if you want, you can just get a paint bucket fill tool and do that. It almost looks like a chest pawn or something with this interesting little spike there. When you fill in your shapes like this, I was about to say silhouette. It's not a silhouette. The silhouette is the actual final shape the character makes. This is more of the driving force behind the silhouette. What you're doing here is just looking at your shape and trying to assign it a character. In this case, does it look fun? I like how it's got a tilt to it. It almost has a built in gesture to it. I like that. This version of Jake is still very similar, but it's a bit more rounded, a bit less exaggerated, a little bit more based in reality, and where the curves and angles are a bit more kept in balance with each other and we'll fill that in and see what it looks like. You can see what I'm thinking about here is an overall design philosophy. Even as early on as this stage is, when you're first laying in your character, you can start tackling this idea of the meta shape. This will actually really help give your character while that sense of character. This version of Jake is more slinky and silky and S curvy. Even the head has got that sleekness to it. I'll fill that in. You can see the difference. This shape suggests to me, a very different physiognomy or body language or general attitude, then say this This version of Jake is more bouncy. This guy is a bit more turned inward, let's say. Let's look at this funky version of him. In this one, it's like the body goes out, it comes in and then goes out again. Then on all of these, the head is huge because he's a young character. Young characters lend themselves to big heads. But there's a lot of undulations here in out, in out, and that is what I was thinking when I designed this version of him. Got a fairly animated look. I like it. This one here, look at this. It's this very angular, almost like cubism inspired version of Jake, where everything is geometric. There's a few curves in there like on the shoes, for example. But almost every part of the body is this angular geometric, and I'll include the hands in here as well just because these totally reflect that same meta shaped philosophy. Everything is super angled, not a lot of curves, although there are some, maybe most notably, the head is very curved. Is that a good idea? Well, I don't know. That's up to the client. I'm just presenting different options here. I'm just trying to build into my meta shapes a bit of contrast, angles versus round in this case. We can see how this one has an almost abstract, again, cubist look to it. In this version of Jake, I inverted what I did here and made it more of a downward taper where it starts wide at the shoulders and goes down. Here I'll just fill this one in without the head. It's not really my job here to decide what's better than the other. My job is to provide options. All right. The thing that we've been getting at so far is the ability to keep our shapes simple and easily readable. The logic is pretty straightforward. If a shape is simple, your eye can read it quickly, and if your eye can read something quickly, your art has a much higher chance at having a high level of appeal to the viewer. Now, one key principle we've been using to achieve that is a difference in the shape. And so far we've been achieving that in a pretty basic way, and that is having a difference of width from the top to the bottom. You can see this shape is much thinner at the top, wider at the bottom. That has been a key player throughout all of these silhouettes. This one is wider at the top, narrower at the bottom, as we discussed. This one here, narrower at the top, wider at the bottom. Remember this one here is much narrower at the top and much wider at the bottom. Again, I'm talking about the trunk of the body here, as that's generally what I look for when I design characters because that's the part of the silhouette that's most consistent. So having that sense of difference in your shape will give it an inherent level of interest as the eye can kind of identify, one side of the shape is the top, one is the bottom. They're not interchangeable. That is maybe the core aspect of keeping your shapes interesting. Let's take that now and add to our list of shape tips that we've been building so far. We've got them meta shape. Now we're moving on to asymmetry. The driving principle behind this is if you have a symmetrical shape like a square, well, it's symmetrical on all four sides, top to bottom, and side to side. You know, this square could be rotated at any different angle and it's the same shape every time. This is undesirable in good shape design. Not to say that there's never a place for symmetry. In art, the word never should almost never be used because there's always exceptions. But the broad reality is that symmetry tends to be boring and that it doesn't really engage the viewer's eye all that well. So what we need to build are tools and ways to offset symmetry. And this is what I call this offset symmetry. In this case, we want the idea of a square, but how about if we did the square more of a trapezoid like this? So what we've done here to offset the symmetry is pretty simple. We've taken what were parallel lines on the left and right, for example, and we have made them not parallel anymore by giving them just slightly tapering angles. If we were to continue these lines, it becomes obvious that the angles are no longer symmetrical. The same is true with the top and bottom lines, although these are a little bit more subtle, if I were just to trace them out, you can see that they would converge way off to the right if I kept those lines going. So whenever you're dealing with a shape that has parallel lines, a great way to offset it is just to rotate those angles a little bit in either direction. Much the same thing applies. If we had a shape that were too circular, say like this, this is a perfectly drawn digital circle here. Well, for this it's actually easy. If I just try to draw a circle by hand, it auto just because I'm human and imperfect, this circle automatically gets offset, and it's something like this. I'll just continue to go over this shape here, and then if I wanted to, I can erase out the areas that I don't want to commit to, something like this, and M version of the circle now represents the same thing we just did with the square, we have offset the symmetry of the circle. In this case, I have no parallel lines to compare to, of course, what I'll do is I'll take the widest point on either side. I think the widest point on the right side is there and the widest point on the left side is there. And you notice how that does not make a horizontal line. It's rotated by ten degrees or so. We can take the widest part at the top, which is probably about there, and the widest part at the bottom, which maybe is there, and you have this. Instead of a perfect cross hair, we have offset it. This idea of measuring the widest points is something I use all the time. Let's say we had more of an organic shape, something that's not a circle or a square, something that combines the two has a few curves in it, maybe something like this. The thing that I'm responding to negatively about this shape is much like the symmetry idea. If I were to measure the width of this shape with these green lines, that width is more or less consistent all the way through the shape. Again, while that is not inherently breaking any rules or anything like that, I don't like that generally, because once again, I think it misses opportunities to engage the viewer. How would I use a shape like that, but design it in a slightly more interesting way? Well, I would use the idea of offset symmetry, and I would say, Okay, how can I find a way to make the semblance of that shape, but maybe make the widest point on either end slightly different, maybe something like this. This shape, I would say, kind of fulfills the same purpose as our original shape. It's got the same kind of identity to it. But you can see now the widest point of the shape, maybe is here to here and that's the width of it. Well, that's different now than the top and bottom. We have a wider middle and a shrunken top and bottom, and even the bottom is even more shrunken than the top. So this shape kind of gains a tapering effect from top to bottom as it travels down. And when a shape has those tapers, those offsets, those differences, you have a much higher chance of that shape engaging the eye. Going back to our jake drawings here, these principles of shape apply not only to the full body as a whole. But any individual little shape like if I zoom in on Jake's arm right there. Let's first of all, trace that shape and I'll cut it off at the wrist. This top part of the arm is straight, a very subtle S curve maybe, and this bottom part of the arm has this taper to it and will again just cut it off at the shoulder there. Let me redraw that shape up here just free hand. This was the top, cut it off there, cut it off there, and it's the bottom of that shape that has that sense of offset. So there's a width change. It's wider up here, narrower down here. One thing I know is true of students, M having been a student for the longest time, and I still consider myself a student and also having taught students for more than ten years now. I think I've been a teacher for 13 years at this point. The general human nature is not to do that. Human nature will want to make shapes like this, just symmetrical. While, again, there is nothing inherently wrong with that, if you repeat symmetry over and over, you are on the quick road to creating boring pictures. Now, this principle is everywhere in my own work because I've trained my muscles to do this. The way I move my hand, I've trained it over the years to make shapes this way. You can see like the nose. You notice how that nose is slightly skewed and on an angle like this. If we were again to identify the widest points of the shape, it's there and there, it's on an angle. Even the sides, it's there and there. It's on an angle. If you look at this ear, it's not a perfect circle ear, it's offset. It's skewed. Again, I love using the widest points there versus there. It's on that angle. It's not vertical, it's 20 degrees off of that. Remember how easy it would be if you weren't aware of these principles, how easy it would be to draw the ear as a perfect semicircle here, where things are a bit too symmetric. Again, while that is not alone going to kill this character. I mean, you could do that in a small area and get away with it. What you want to learn to do in your art is train your hand to avoid that in favor of something less symmetrical. That way, if you want symmetry, you can still do it, but it's not happening by default. If I were just to select that shape here in photoshop, I'll activate the Warp tool here, and this is literally what my brain is doing. My brain is warping the shape like this, just skewing it a little bit, so it's offset. Now, you might say that's all well and good for cartoons, but what if I want to draw realistically. But it turns out that nature is the thing that teaches us this. I like to use the human calf muscle as an example. This is just one small example. There's millions of examples throughout nature. But look at the offset symmetry that happens in this bit of anatomy, the widest part of the shape is different. It's got those different angles like I showed you in the box, the widest part here versus here is off of the horizontal axis, just a little bit, ten degrees, five degrees, something like that, a little bit works. Even look at where the bones are on either side of the foot, it's offset. Also the middle of the back of the knee here. It's offset. What nature will do time and time again is it will change these overall meta angles. The angles between one thing and another will alternate. There's no exact pattern to how they alternate. But as long as they do alternate, or in other words, not just be constantly parallel, you are well on your way to mimicking what nature does, which, in turn, creates a very familiar sight to the viewer because they're used to seeing this in nature all the time. I mean you don't have to be an artist to know that nature very rarely makes symmetry. Symmetry is more of a human thing. Sure, if you're designing a building like a city building, maybe you use symmetry there. But probably for the vast majority of what you're going to be drawing, especially if you're drawing characters or organic scenes, this idea of offsetting symmetry is hugely valuable. Again, you can find this everywhere. Look at the widest point on the biceps here versus the triceps there, pinpointing the widest point of that shape, it's there versus there, offset. Let's look at the deltoid, which is the muscle up here near the shoulder, where the arm interfaces with the shoulder. Let's just trace that deltoid shape. Look at this offset like spheroid shape. If I were to draw it, it's got maybe a spherical top up here, but the way it tapers down, we are pushed over on the right and only a little bit to the left. That axis is offset. And what we're doing here is not studying anatomy, although you could absolutely apply this to anatomy, as it's quite literally what anatomy does to shape. But what we're doing is we're simply noticing what nature does, which is constantly offsetting. I just use the term meta angle. That just refers to observing what's that angle versus that angle versus that angle? If you can introduce variety in that from one thing to the next, down a form, this is just an arm, but we have three very different angles here, and we can take that even further. Look at the angle that's created in the knuckle area here. I know he's wearing a glove, but the hand has been rotated to make an angle like that. These are the simple checks and balances you can use to help you create offset symmetry, for example, or just that sense of difference in your shape that helps propel them so much further. Let's continue to explore the idea of adding difference to your shapes, but the concept of straights versus curves. Remember in gesture, we talked about things being designed with straights or C curves or S curves. It's the same with shapes. You're always using a selection of those three basic types of lines or curves. What you want to do with your shapes, generally speaking, is make sure your shape is composed of a variety of those things. Now, again, these are not hard rules, these can change, or you can apply them in different amounts based on the style you're looking for. But in general, adding different types of curves to how you compose your shape will help add interest. Here are a couple of big foot designs that go along with the Jake character. Let's just take a look at this guy here, for example. Here is an S curve defining one side of the arm and shoulder shape, do you notice on the other side of that shape, it's a straight. Pretty simple. Now, let me show you what it's not. If I were to quickly edit this out. Notice that it's not this. It's not this because that see how it looks like a balloon now at this point or just something that's a bit less appealing. There's nothing inherently wrong with it as I keep saying But in general, I think if I just undid that, went back to the original, this idea of an S curve meeting a straight is a bit more dynamic and interesting because it's more unexpected. Again, the eye has very little to do when you present it with symmetry or when you present it with the same choice repeatedly. Because it's kind of like copying and pasting the same thing on both sides, right? So in the case of this arm, if I have a nice S curve on one side and a straight here, the resulting shape will be a bit more unexpected to the viewer. Let me just quickly fill this in. As a result, that unexpected nature of the shape drives a level of interest that a shape like this wouldn't as much. Because again, this shape has very similar sides on either side. It's not a bad shape, it's perfectly readable and simple, but if you have something that you feel is too mirrored or symmetrical, simply take one side, get rid of it, and try and compose it with a different type of curve, a straight, or maybe it's still an S curve, but this one swoops down lower. And we can use offset symmetry to offset the diagonal axis of this. Let me show you some more examples here. I'll just bring up a sheet of tracing paper here like I've done before. If you look at the overall meta shape of this character down the trunk of the body, here's a C curve. See how nice and simple that C curve is over here, what is it? It's a straight, or maybe it's a concave C curve, but a very narrow concave. This C curve is swooping and this one is very almost angular. I combined this principle of straights versus curves with the principle of the meta shape, which is something I highly recommend you do, and you will find opportunities for this as you gain experience and practice is combining all of these tips together. I took advantage of a similar straights versus curves opportunity on Jake here. He's lying down, so that means I probably could use a straight, where his body is hitting the ground, and also he's reaching, so I could use straights there too. This whole thing is kind of two straights, and that left tons of room for this overall meta shape to be really curved on this side. It's this very exaggerated idea of straights versus curves. Let me just grab the paint bucket tool and fill it in. I'll draw a more abstract version here at the bottom, basically a couple of straights. Then on the opposite side, using every opportunity I can for all kinds of different curves. The shape is not just Jake, it could be a cloud, for example. It could be a dragon lying on its back with a big belly. Shapes are abstract. They can be applied to so many different things. Let's take a look at the arm over here. The arm portion, here's a C curve and here's another C curve, but there are two different C curves. I still consider this under the banner of straights versus curves, but you don't have to think of it literally. You don't have to literally use a straight against a curve. It's more something versus something. In this case, a narrow C curve versus a wider C curve. Of course, that gets combined with the idea of offset symmetry as we have an off axis widest part of the angles here. You can see how this is like a cookbook for shapes rather than some formulaic thing that always produces the same result. You can look for this everywhere. If we traced a shape behind the creature's head like this, this is what an S curve, But then look at the other side. It's a big, wide C curve, even down to the finger designs. Like we have an S curvy thing here, a wide, big bellied S curve versus a narrower S curve there. Again, look for offset symmetry, offset symmetry. I do like to remind people how easy it would be to draw it the other way. For example, if we had the finger going like that, imagine how easy it would be to create a very symmetrical finger. Know this is easy because I see this over and over in student work, including in my own student work. From years ago when I was first discovering these principles. For me, it represented a huge shift in mindset. It's so much within human nature, I guess, to make a shape that is symmetrical like this. But if you start doing symmetrical shape after symmetrical shape, your stuff starts looking like bloated or I call it the banana effect. It looks like a bunch of bananas, and it's hard to unsee that. It's hard to get a sense of appeal there. You know, even look at the toenails. Straight, curve. There's the most basic element of this tip straight versus curve. Let's look at Jake's foot over here. We have S curve like this, kind of this interesting sort of S curvy shape versus a straight and a curve. So it's kind of a boxy form. Let me draw it down here. So it's kind of like a boxy form. But it's made of an S curve there, then a narrow C curve and a straight. Instead of something generic like this, you work within those guidelines and just make it a bit more interesting by varying the type of line that you're using to create that shape. Another way to apply this technique is to look at how a shape kind of travels from beginning to end. And what I mean by that is, let's take a look, for example, at his pants right here. It would have been very easy for me to just draw a straight line all the way down. That would be fine. That shape looks okay and I did do that in other Jakes. That's not something that's against the law or anything. But one thing you can do to use straight versus curves is if you're ever feeling like, Okay, I'm doing a lot of I'm traveling in a straight line a lot here. Let's now somewhere down the shape. It's the same shape. Let's now add a little curve at the bottom, like a little spice, a little swirl, a little flare. Again, this is like a big long C curve, and let's just go S curve at the bottom. In this case, it's like C curve versus S curve, and the same here, C curve versus S curve. I could do the same thing with a straight. If I had a straight shape that I was drawing here, this is one side of a shape, and I want to get say down here. Well, instead of having the straight go all the way down, why not just say, go wide and make a little C curve? Now, don't be tempted to do symmetry on the other side like that. Maybe on the other side, I would go straight and a wider C curve like this. I'd offset that symmetry and I would still use the idea of straights versus curves, which is exactly what I did on this Jake here. You could see overall, his pants are narrow than wide. Within that, it's wider on one side and narrower on the other side. Again, combining these techniques of shape design. Now, remember, it's not a rule. For his pants here, I didn't do that. I just made them straight. Now, I happen to think that this is not as good of a drawing as a result, though I'm not personally attracted to this drawing as much as I am, some of the others. I think it's specifically because my shapes I think are less interesting here. Now, this is a very subjective area of art. This list of tips, this little cookbook, is a series of things you can try. Remember there are no art laws. The art police are not going to come to your door if you ignore this. But if you look and examine any professional artists work, you will see these principles at play. I'll just show you a few more examples. If you take his head here, it's like a C curve on this side and a wider C curve on this side. Same over here. C curve on this side, straights on that side. This one's a bit more symmetrical, but the angles are different. This is more of an offset symmetry thing. Here's a good one, A S curve design, like if you were to think of the overall line of his head, it's like an S curvy thing with a C curve at the back. Then the bottom is like a straight. Then if I were to connect this it's a C curvy thing. This shape here, it almost looks like one of those bullets from Super Mario Brothers. Very simple shape that is made of all three types of curves in this case. You can keep it very subtle, too, on this guy. I think of this as one continuous C curve, but on the other side, it's more of an S curve. It's subtle, it's subtle, and it's something that I'm fully aware of as I draw it. Now, remember, I've trained my hand, the way my hands move, I've trained over the years. I have relegated this to almost an unconscious decision. This is something that becomes easy when you get to that stage. Before you get to that stage, you have to consciously practice it. Even if it's just taking a sketchbook and making a shape like this and say, Okay, there's a straight versus a curve. I like to shade it in just to further emphasize the shape to my eyes. I don't know why that helps, but it seems to. Say, Okay, what's another way to make that shape? How about if it's two straights and the s curve goes up like that? That's a variation of that shape. These are all very conscious design decisions that you can make that will help make your shapes as interesting as possible. As I always like to do, I like to contrast different styles just to show you that these principles apply no matter what. This style could not be more different than this style. But remember that this is something that is not just for artists and draftsmen and drawers and painters. Fashion design does this too. I had photo reference for this dress. I'm not a fashion designer. I had photo reference for this dress. But the way this dress is designed, it's like straight, straight, on the back, it's more of a s curve and like a big swooping s curve. That's how the fashion designer made this dress. These principles are universal that way. I made sure that when I was painting Clara here that I chose the angle to paint her at that maximized this shape relationship. Because remember, when you're zoomed out to see the full thing, your eye doesn't have much time to read everything. You need to give the viewer of these very simple shapes so they can boom, get it immediately. If your shape employs these tips that I'm telling you, I swear they'll be more memorable to the viewer. All right, Let's do a drawing together. I'll be redrawing this version of Jake, and I'll narrate my thoughts throughout. This is real time with narrated thoughts and we will get at all of these shape design tools and put them to use. Now the first thing I always do is get in a gesture and we'll get in a bit of the form stuff we talked about. You notice I will be combining a lot of these concepts together. I just did a bit of form, a bit of gesture. I want to find where that shoulder is pressing up against his cheek versus the other shoulder. Then we'll get a nice C curve here for the body and this pinpoint where I think the shirt will end, maybe where the hips are here. And there's a cylinder there. It's like a tapered cylinder. There's some form here. Now, this is not the final shape. I'll get the final shape in later. The final shape will almost certainly deviate from this a little bit. It's impossible to get it right the first time, at least it is for me, and I don't expect that of myself. The arm is going to be coming down in a bit of a C curve ending here. This arm is out, maybe more of a straight with a little hook at the end. The big hand here, and the boxing glove hand thing, which I can manipulate later. The feet now, let's go straight because the legs are held taut. It's a very not awkward, but it's kind of like, hitched pose. I want to get some straights in the legs to help sell that, and we'll just block in this idea of a continuation of a C curve at the gesture and also just a hint of the tapered offset symmetrically shape here and the f I can also block in the feet with the boxing love principle as well. It's like this. This arm is in. There's my gesture pass with a little hint of form in there as well. Now, what I'll do is I'll block in what I think is going to be the shape of the head. I'm going to go C curve here. Let's go a bit straighter for the underside of the jaw and that filters right into the neck. Once I have a solidified spot for the neck right in here, and there's a cylinder here. Now I know where the shoulder can be based off of that. I know right now the shoulder is probably a bit too wide. So I can move it in. I want to have it right up there and I think it's going to be pressing up that way. But again, I can always erase this out, if I want to. This is digital after all. Even if it were a pencil, I could erase it. But it's just so much easier with digital. Let's get in. I do like to get in for the head, that center ellipse that goes around. I can draw behind the form right with my dotted line. But I usually don't do that when I'm actually drawing. It's something I recommend you practice, but when you go to draw, go ahead and do it if it makes you more comfortable, but I'm not going to do that as much, but I am always visualizing. You'll sometimes see me go around the form invisibly, you could follow my cursor, my mouse cursor or around the form here. Because I have the center line, I know where the nose will end up landing somewhere here. I'll do my best right away to get a shape that has offset symmetry to it, has two different types of curves. This is maybe a straight meeting a C curve. Then from here, I can block in where the eyes are going to go. I'm thinking in perspective here, so the nose is in front of this far eyeball. I like to just ghost in almost gesture in a hint of where those eyes are looking. When you have the character looking somewhere, it immediately implies life. There's just something about that. I even like to put the pupil in. I can always change it. But I even like to put the pupil in at this early stage. Then I can I also helps me get the shape of the eye and in this case, the eyebrowser, comedically or cartoony things that are above the head, which makes no sense on a literal level, but this is a cartoon design after all. The back of the head will be a sweeping s curve but meeting a straight back there and this inverted upside down s curve going this way. I like to start with the head because that will help me land on all my other proportions. The gesture was a hint of that, but I'm already seeing, for example, I think I want the shirt not to be as long. I want the torso, that is to be smaller, so I can even just do this. I can move this up with digital. You can do all these things, and I'll get the shoulder in and the shoulder moving into the arm now is like a cylinder. Now, remember the horizon line concept. Where is the horizon line? I think the horizon line is right around his hips, right around here. Which means when I'm dealing with this arm, this is above the horizon line, so my cylinder goes that way. I'm going to have a nice C curvy arm here, meeting more of a straight. I'm modifying this a little bit from the original. I'm k Freely thinking through it as I go, just using the original as a touch point. This is his elbow here, which I'll design in this little swoopy shape to help have some fun there. Notice this whole arm shape tapers in. Also, it has the straight versus curves. I've got a C curve here, Mr of a straight there. It digs into his pocket about there, and I'm off from the gesture. I'll just erase that to emphasize that and not trip myself up. Now, his shirt Something I like to do is measure if I go back to the original here, his head is this long and his shirt is that long. It's about half of a head length. You can study proportions that way in head lengths. The human body is generally well, in the default male human body is eight head lengths long. Female can be 7.5 generally. A child will vary like a toddler is like three head lengths, and it changes with age until we reach adulthood. But in general, it's a good idea to keep your figure if you're drawing a child about, there's one. Another head length and a half like something like that, will keep your child looking very young if you're doing a child design like I am here. That's why I raised the torso. These are all charts you can study. Just look up human head lengths. You can even look up Andrew Loomis, I think is the first person who popularized this form of measurement. Andrew Loomis human head lengths and you'll find charts that Andrew Loomis made. That's how I learned it. This C curve. See I'm honoring the C curve that I built in with my gesture, but I'm changing it. I'm making it more pronounced. I might even want to get rid of my gesture a little bit, just ghost it out a little bit. I'm doing all this on one layer, by the way. Just because I'm comfortable that way. I like being able to just go back and forth with the lines on the same layer and not have to think about switching. That's just me, though. The tummy comes out and it's more of a straight. And then the pants, notice what I'm doing with the angle. Look at the shirt versus the pants angle, also the shoulder angle, right? And also the bottom of the pants angle. These angles are all offset. These are all things that we looked 9. Class Project 1: Create A Character Design Sheet: In this first class project, I'd like you to use all the drawing lessons we've looked at so far to design your own sheet of characters. With character design and development, it's important to come up with multiple versions of a character. The comparison of those designs helps you further understand and refine who the character is. For this project, the first criteria is to produce at least five versions of a character. The character description, I'll keep it simple, similar to Jake, a child five to 7-years-old with a playful attitude. The gender and ethnicity of the child can be of your choosing. In your drawings, be sure to explore various poses and angles. Doing so will help not only inform who the character is, but it'll help a client further visualize their idea. Finally, coloring the character is not required, but you're free to do so if you choose. As a little bonus, if you would like to present your various stages of work, gesture, form, shape, in your final presentation, feel free to do that as well, but it's not required. That's the first class project. Go ahead and have fun with it. 10. Environments: Practical Light And Color Theory For Illustrators: Okay. We are about to take a pretty massive pivot from drawing concepts and bridge over into painting. Specifically, we're going to be dealing with color and light. The principles we're about to discuss are almost purely divorced from drawing principles, but as we'll see in the very next lesson, they all do come together to create a final illustration. In this section, though, I'd like to focus on the key aspects of color theory and how light and color work together in order to give us kind of a visual vocabulary of how to understand light and color, as well as how to analyze it from photo reference, and I will ultimately show you my process for painting a photo study specifically with the goal of maximizing your skill increase in color and light. Get ready for a fresh start here. Let's get to it. Understanding color starts with understanding the concept of color temperature. This is a color wheel. I'm sure you've seen one of these before. It shows all the hues that we can see in the visible spectrum of light, and the hue meaning the color names, red, orange, yellow, blue, cyan, violet, et cetera, green, and it shows the progression through them. The main thing that we're going to be looking at first, and this is kind of the key concept of all of this, and it's very basic. Is that there is an overall warm section of colors on the color wheel and an overall section of cool colors, and they are opposite each other. This is the warm section of the color wheel. It's like a pie slice that goes around here and encompasses what the yellows, reds, oranges, this area here. This is the warm side of the color wheel. The cool section is, well, it's the exact opposite side of the color wheel. It is starting here with the cyan blues and going into some of the purples, and on the way you have the blues in here. Cyans, blues, purples, some of the violets. That section is the cool section of the color wheel. We have warm versus cool. That concept is called color temperature. Let's take the next little baby step from there and look at individual colors as they relate to color temperature, getting warmer or cooler. When it comes to understanding color, the first and main thing we need to know is that the color names, the hue is useless, red, yellow, green, blue, purple, whatever, cyan, turquoise, orange. That is not very useful. It's not useful because it's not specific enough. Color temperature is the tool that allows us to talk about color with specificity in that it allows us to compare and identify exactly the type of hue we're looking at. I think anyone coming into this class, even if you have no experience, you know that there are different types of red, different types of green, it's different blues, et cetera. There's never just one of the hue. You can see at the top of my chart here. I've got cooler temperature and warmer temperature, and in the middle is the hue that they both emanate from. Let's just start with say red. Just to make sure everyone gets an understanding of what this chart is saying, so we can move on to dig deeper. So we start with red. Now, where is that red on the color wheel? It's probably right about here. We're starting there. Now, we can go warmer, which means we are shifting this way. Now why is that warmer? Well, the warm area of the color wheel is, the yellows, the oranges, the reds. This is the warm slice of the color wheel. Shifting a red that way ensures that it stays warm as opposed to getting cooler, and as we shift that red warmer, we are modifying it slightly. It's eventually going to turn orange. If we go back to our chart here, that is the same progression I'm showing here. The inverse is true, we have that same red starting point, but we want to now shift cooler. If we look at our chart here, red wants to shift cooler, and you can just visually see it. It's getting more violet by the time it gets there. Well, on the color wheel, that shift represents a movement this way. The red shifts this way, I'm selecting colors along the color wheel here until we get into the violets. Now, I stopped at the violet and I stopped at the orange on the other side because once we get into those colors, it's no longer red. It becomes orange and eventually yellow and green, and on this side, it would become violet into the purples and then blues. Those are no longer red. I stopped my shift before the hue totally changes. Let's do another one. Let's pick a green because a lot of people wonder if green is a warm or a cool. Green is kind of a chameleon. It happens to be the color we can see the most variations of. It exists in between the warm and cool slices of the color wheel. Green can really have a lot of flexibility in going either way. Let's say this is our middle green starting point that I've identified here on our chart. When we shift a green warm, same as the red. We are shifting it to this area. We are shifting the green this way. We shift a green cooler, we are shifting it this way. There are a whole ton of greens in between. You can see it on the color wheel and likewise, you can see it in the chart. As I make a green warmer and I go this way, I am picking greens like that, and there are so many greens. All of this is green. Remember, there are so many greens we can see. These greens are getting warmer as they go toward the warm stop on the color wheel. You can almost think of the color wheel as having two different train stops. This is the warm train station, and this is the cool train station. And the basics of shifting from warm and cool are, you know, you are traveling around the color wheel to shift from warm to cool, and you can travel back the other way to shift back from cool to warm. And that's what we are doing with these charts. So that same green is green here, which existed right in here. That green gets cooler by shifting this way. These greens eventually get into the cyan blues. It's the same for every color. That is also by the way, how you warm up a blue. It's another common color question that I get asked a lot, and Any instructor would get asked is blue is a stereotypically cold color, and that's true. How do you warm up a blue? Is that even possible? Well, yeah, it's actually very easily possible using this basic method. All you have to do is take your starting point, let's say we're starting at that blue. And just shift it this way toward the warms. I would say that these blues, I don't want to go too far because then again, I'm going to get into violets and purples and eventually red, and those are no longer blue. But to shift a blue warmer, you just shift it that way. Now, if your blue is here, you might want to shift it this way because it's closer to the warms going that way. Now this is where this particular method falls a bit short because if you were to take a blue say there and shift it that way, well, you have to go through the greens before getting to the yellows, and that can be an issue. We will solve that issue right in the next section. But in general, just know that we have our warm pie slice of the color wheel, and we have our cool pie slice of the color wheel. The most basic way of shifting temperature is to move the given hue, red, yellow, green, blue, in this case, toward those areas of the color wheel. With those concepts under our belt, we can get into more complex ways of moving from warm to cool. Here are four charts. Now, don't be frightened if you don't immediately understand what's on the screen right now. I'll explain it. It's actually quite simple. Well, the first thing is something we already know, the first two charts, these guys here are exactly what we just talked about. It's just they're presented in a different way. In both cases, I'm taking a warm color to start with, in this case, this yellow, and we want to arrive at a cool color in both cases, the same blue. And in chart number one here, I am simply moving in one direction through the color wheel. Yellow, turns into orange, turns into red, turns into violet, turns into purple or indigo, then turns into blue. On the color wheel here, that yellow started about here and simply went around the color wheel this way till it arrived at our blue. Then before I escape back to the chart here, chart number two simply goes the other way. It takes the same yellow and the same blue, but arrives at it this way. As you can see, Chart number two here, same yellow, but this time we pass through the greens, into the turquoises and cyans, and ultimately into these deep blues here. That's Charts number one and two covered. Those are both totally valid ways of controlling color temperature, moving from warm to cool. The problem with just those two charts, though, is everything is very saturated. The colors are obnoxious. It feels like something you'd get at a cotton candy fair or something. They look too vibrant all the way through. We need to be able to control more subtle differences in color, and that is where the next powerful concept comes in when it comes to understanding color temperature, and that is the concept of gray. Back to our color wheel, you probably noticed that there is this middle section that is between every color. You probably also noticed that as you move in from a saturated color, saturation being out here, saturation being when you have any color, say this orange, saturation of the colors way out here, the most vibrant that color can be. That's saturation. On this color wheel, if we picked a saturated color and moved in toward the middle, you notice that color is getting progressively less and less saturated. It's getting more gray. Looking at it on this screen, this orange, as you move toward the middle of the color wheel, that orange would be getting less and less saturated until ultimately it reaches this perfect gray or zero saturation. That zero saturation, every single color has that in common, which is why it's located in the middle of our color wheel. Every color has this zero saturated gray in common. Now on this color wheel, it looks white, it could easily be a gray like this. The whole point is though is that it's zero saturation. If I sample that, and bring in my sampler, you can see it's zero saturation. That's the whole point of this middle section. That is gray. But when I say gray, I'm not talking about just one point. I'm talking about the surrounding area. There's like blob of color in here. Gray plural. Another way you may have heard this before is the neutral colors. Concept of neutral is pretty simple. If we pick a very saturated color and put it there. Well, what's a neutral version of that? Well, it's simply a color it's the same color, just less saturated. This would be a neutralized version of that, and you can maybe pick something in the middle, put it in the middle. We have two neutrals and one saturated color. The same is true for any color, let's pick this purple color. Let's put it here. That's a very saturated version of that color. Well, how can I neutralize it? Same thing, reduce the saturation and go like that. That is a neutralized version of that. I can even neutralize it further and go like this. Now, I tend to not use the word neutral so much. I will just say gray it off. But whether someone says grays or neutrals, it's the same thing. Now, you notice when I do gray something off like that, the identity of the color starts dissolving. If we just saw zoom way in here, if we just saw this color like that, Well, suddenly, it's hard to determine the hue. We can see it's purple ish, but it's nowhere near as obvious as that is. And that is precisely where these bottom two charts come in. They progress through color temperatures going through the gray. Let's take chart number three, for example. This one is actually pretty simple. I'll bring the color picker back up here. All the charts you start at the same color and they all end at the same color. I'll just sample that yellow color and there it is on the color picker here. This chart progresses from warm to cool, not by using any of the hues. Let me sample that again. It simply goes this way, straight back through zero saturation or through the neutral or through the gray. Then it pops out, instantly pops out and comes back out there. Now, How is it allowed to just pop out? Because remember, the top two charts, these guys up here, those ones moved through all these hues. I'll sample it, you could see if you look at the color picker below, see it's moving through all the hues. This one, if I sample it, again, look at the color picker. As I progress through this chart, see it's going through the gray and the hues are pinned. You see it just pop out? Here it is in the yellows. When it gets to gray, it just pops right up into the blues. Now, it's only allowed to do that because once you are at a perfect zero saturation gray or even somewhere very close to it, somewhere in here, Well, remember, all of those colors, like if we are zero saturation, all of those colors share that in common. That zero saturation point might as well be any hue. That means you can use this as a warp zone or a passport, maybe between any two colors or even more than that, any three or four colors, whatever you want, actually. I'm just showing it to you here in these charts with two colors just to keep things simple. But when we get to painting, which we will in the next lesson, we'll see that gray is a unique passage point between any of the colors we're using in our palette. Okay. The fourth and final chart once again shows the same progression overall from this yellow to this blue. But it does so using a combination of charts number one and three. It uses the gray, but it also uses hue. As I sample it, again, let me just enlarge so you can see it. Watch the color picker as I do this. You see it's getting grayer, but also moving hues. Then once it gets to somewhere in the near zero saturation, we are now into the cool pie slice of the color picker of the color chart of the color. Obviously, even though photoshop here represents the color wheel as a straight vertical line, the hue progression is still the same. In fact, let's bring up our color wheel again, and I'll show you what I just did in Chart three and four here from this sheet. Chart three started here and simply went directly through the gray and ended there. Along the way, I picked these colors along the way to get there. Then Chart number four is started and ended here to there. But this one, instead of going around the outside, around the saturation, like Chart number one did, remember Chart number four is a combination of one and three. Instead of doing that, It hugged the gray like this and went out that way. As the colors progressed away from the yellow, they got less saturated and more gray. Then as they progressed through the cooler colors, the violets and blues, they were able to get more saturated. Now, chart number four, in my opinion, is the closest thing to what nature actually does. A close second to that is chart number three. Nature also often uses chart number three, going straight through the grays to pop out at another color. Nature will very rarely use pure saturation, Charts number one and two. You might see some of that in a sunset, for example, very saturated colors, but in general, you will see a lot of C charts three and four. Let's transition now to analyzing these colors and changes in temperature from actual photographs. The first question you need to know the answer to is, where are you going to put your warm and cool colors overall? That has everything to do with the light and shadow. This is obviously a sunlit scene, and it looks like a late afternoon thing, which means the sun is getting a lot warmer and more saturated. Now that is simply a matter of science. Here's a Kelvin temperature chart, and you can see in this area here, We have a direct sunlight somewhere around noon is like here. Then as we get to sunrise and sunset earlier or later in the day, saturation increases. Also the sun gets more orange. By the time we're way into the deep sunset, you can actually get into even the red. I'm sure we've all seen that in just day to day life. This photo that we're looking at is middle to late afternoon, so that sun color is going to be somewhere around here. The sun appears to change color through the day and that is just a matter of science. You can look up the Kelvin color temperature scale chart or simply reference the one on the screen right now. Although you can probably find some that label different times of day a bit more clearly than this. But you don't even need to know the Kelvin stuff. Just looking at the photo, you should be able to determine what the sun's color is, simply by sampling the areas that are lit by the sun. Let's bring in our color picker. As we do this, we can see that there's not a whole lot of variety between different things lit by the sun. I can even pick some of these tree colors. They're very look at where the hue is. This is the wheat field, and this is the tree. Notice that these hues are not changing much. Here's the cut area of wheat. Here's like the grown wheat. I'm not sure if it's actually wheat, looks like it is, but I don't know. Then here's the tree. You can see overall, even though I'm sampling three different types of material. The hue is somewhere stuck around here. That gives us an indication as to the color of the sun. It's good evidence because the sun is a very strong influencer of color. The sun is actually the strongest influencer of colors that we have. When you have a sunlight scene, just sample the things in light if you have a photograph that you're looking at, just sample the colors in various materials, various objects, directly hit by that sun, and you'll get the average of where your hue is is what the sun's color will What these colors represent, these warm colors lit by the sun. That is the warm section of our color chart. I've made a little space beneath the picture here. I'll just put this here as a representation of the warm part of our chart. There's a few variations. I'll just sample a few of those variations and have these are the warms. Now, where are the cools? Well, that's the opposite? The cools you're going to find them mostly in shadow. Now, let's just stop for a second and understand why that's true. Well, remember that the sun gives its color to whatever it hits. Well, the shadows are areas that are not hit directly by the sun. They are free of the sun's influence, the brunt of it is gone because it's blocked. Now, yes, some of the sun's colors can find its way into shadow by bounce light, but that's not what we're talking about yet. We will talk about bounce light as we get into painting and stuff. What we're talking about is the direct influence. B shadows are shadows, because they're not hit directly, they are liable to be much cooler. Let's sample our shadows and look at what we have here. We've got all kinds of colors really. Now, as I do this, there are two overall things you should be seeing here. One is that the hue has gone up here, but also that there are still some hues, down here, I can sample one right there. That hue was in shadow, but it's still there. There, meaning near where the sun's hues were. But also you have hues that are up into the blues and in some of them are in the greens here. That's spans this whole range. That's the first thing you should notice, the hue changes. The second thing you should notice is that We have a lot of neutrals or grays. Let me just sample one of these perfect. This hue was in the sun's realm, but look at the saturation, the level of gray, it's gone way down. By comparison, this is the sunlit what, and this is that same, similar hue, but look at it in shadow. It's much more gray. Obviously, it's darker as well because it's shadow, but let's just look at the color temperature for now if we can. Let's go back to our color charts to talk about what we've just seen and we'll use chart number three to start with. The sun's warm colors, we're not all the way here. This is a full saturation yellow. It wasn't that. It was more in this range. It was like, say about that one there. In our photograph, we started about here as our warmest color. Maybe we had a bit of that too, so we can maybe started somewhere in here as our warmest. Then we got to it was about there. I'll cut this off. The chart in our photograph looks more like this. Let me bring that in. Let's bring this in here. I'll just get rid of that initial chart. I'll just sample that. L paint it in and see how it fits. Now, it's a bit too yellow. Our wheat field is more orange, but all I have to do is just do that. There we go and maybe a bit lighter. There we go. There's our wheat field in light. I can have little varieties like I could go a bit less saturated, I can go a bit more saturated. All these colors appear to fit because they're within the sun's influence. I could change the hue a little bit and still be fine because I'm within the realm of the sun's warm colors. Now, when I switch over to shadow, if I were to just make this color darker and paint with it, it doesn't match. It no longer matches the photograph, and why is that? Well, the value is correct. I've gone darker, value, meaning light versus dark. I've deepened the value to get as dark as I need to be. That is certainly a dark shadow color, but it's not the right temperature. For that color to fit, I would have to make it cooler. How do I do that? Well, I can do it in one of two ways. Method number one is I could shift it away from the warms, I could go up this way if I wanted to and do that, but that's still too saturated, S, I could try going the other way. Let's go the other way this way. And do that. But that's too saturated as well. Method number one doesn't quite work on its own, which corresponded to chart number one and two. That's what I just tried there. Those didn't work because they were two candy coated colors. It was too saturated. What I have to do here, let's try something else. Let's take our sun color again. Let's go darker with it like we just did, but let's now gray it off. Look at this. It fits. Maybe it's a bit too dark, I'll go a bit lighter. Look at that. It perfectly fits. What I just did there was I used chart number three. I simply grade off the color. Now I also darkened ix. We're in shadow. The color charts don't show you light versus dark. They just show you color temperature. I had to add the extra step here and darken it. But I use chart number three, taking the sun's color and if I want to go into a cooler shadow, I darkened it and decrease the saturation and boom, look at that. Just like that, it looks like a photographically believable color. Okay, I can do something else though. I can also look at, going back to our color chart here. Let's try chart number four, which decrease the saturation, but also change the hue. Let's try that in our photograph. Again, I'll start with the sun color, something like that, darken it for shadow, and let's also change the hue and decrease the saturation. What about that color? Look at this. Yeah, that works. I probably wouldn't want to paint that everywhere, but I could find little spots where that works as I'm scumbling it in scumbling as an artist's word for scribbling. I can scumble that in and it works. I can put it everywhere. I can put it in this shadow, this shadow, here. Wherever there's shadow, it will fit. I'll undo it, though, just to get back to the photograph. How about if I do that same thing, but I continue my way down toward Kool and I'm here. Look at that. That works too. What if I continue that? That works too. What if I continue it to blue, and like we did in Chart number four, we get more saturated the closer we are to blue. How about if I did that? Well, let's go back to our photo here and let's maybe go here and increase the saturation. Y, that works. It looks like it could fit. As I'm putting it in various shadows, it looks like it can fit. How would if I went there and just went even more saturated? Now we're starting to get a bit too saturated, but a little bit of that here and there as I'm scumbling it in, follow my cursor here. I'm dotting it throughout the shadow areas. That can work as well. This is the power of our color charts. We suddenly have a map, a map of how worms turn into cools and vice versa. 11. Environments: Light And Color Practice: I want to step you through the process of studying from a photograph and doing a painting that we can call our own in terms of how we're able to internalize light and color. The first thing I'm going to do is just prime the underpainting surface here. We just some I don't know generic warm and cool neutrals. Generic meaning, they can come from any hues, so there's purples and reds and here's some yellows and greens, but neutrals. Notice that my color picker is never leaving 20% saturation. We get this pleasing already look of an underpainting will help. You'll see how it informs the colors moving forward. That's a bit dark, so I'm going to open levels and brighten it a little bit. I don't want it too bright, but just a little bit brighter than that. So it slightly above mid tone, something like this. Be these colors will bleed through and generally, you want lighter colors to bleed through. At least that's my experience. It's beneficial for lighter colors to bleed through. Okay. Let's do the most basic drawing here, and that's one of the reasons I chose a photograph like this is because it's very easy to draw. There's only a few shapes. Here are the trees in the distance, the horizon lines back there. There's an interesting cloud there that we'll just hint at. This is not supposed to be some detailed, fully rendered study, quite the opposite. This canvas, by the way, the one I'm painting on here is only 600 pixels wide. This happens to be 600 by 439. Very small. That enables you to paint not only quickly, but it discourages you from painting detail. The other rule, and this is an absolute rule is no sampling allowed. You're not allowed to sample this because that's not learning anything if you sample. You have to pick the colors yourself. You can always look. What you could do is you can bring the color picker over and say, Oh, what's light versus shadow, you can look at those relationships and then go back over here and re establish them by picking them in your painting. That's allowed. That's fair game, but not directly sampling. So the sky. The thing about skies is they get warmer in the horizon. Now it's still a cooler color, it's sill a bluish color, but a warmer blue. Now how do you warm up a blue? Well, we talked about this. You could go away from the blue, you can go up toward purple, which actually is happening in that sky, if you can believe it. The sky, can you see it's getting slightly more purple, but mostly it gets grayer. I will use these, I will use these purply grays right in there. And put in make sure it's quite light to a bit more toward the purple. Notice it's not literally purple. That would be more like a sunset thing. It's purple ish. It's moving toward the purple. That's one thing that we can learn about color is that it's not necessarily about the final color you're arriving at. It's the direction that it's moving that matters. That's why I showed you these modes of moving color from changing the hue to changing the saturation. It's not about the color that the eye does not actually see the color that you pick. It sees the context of that color through how it is moving. The top of the sky gets more saturated toward the blue. I just put this in. I'm leaving space for that cloud there. The cloud I will lay in a bit later. Let's just leave it like this for now. There we go. I'm just trying to blend a little bit of brushwork there. Just using this hair style brush. Now, let's think about the wheat fields. The color is somewhere in here. Now, it doesn't matter exactly what it is. As long as I choose what my sun color is and pick a relative saturation for it. I'm going to say, it's around this orange and it's about there. This is what the sun is going to hit. It's going to influence colors to be like this. You can see where the underpainting is helping already. I don't have to contend with a white background. Oh, by the way, I'm just painting this on one layer. That's why you don't see my layers window. The sun colors or something like this, and you can vary that. I can make it a bit more yellow and go like this. Scumble that in. Scumbing is a very useful technique. I try and scumble in a directional way though this would be scribbling. Scumbling is like dire like that, directional scribbling. There is a good definition for scumbling. Putting this in and I can go a bit redder if I wanted to. Just by shifting the hue. Whenever you are within close neighbors like yellow, orange, red, you can freely shift. I could not go blue, this would not work at all. You're opposite the color wheel. I could not even really go green. That starts looking a bit odd. There's no reason for those colors to mix, they are too far apart. But if you're doing little shifts like this, you can easily just slide with the same saturation, you can just slide between hues. But again, try and keep those movements minimal when you're doing that. But at the early stage here, it is helpful to lay in some of that. I want to get a few shadow colors in already. To do that, I could just paint them with a brush. But you know what I'll do? I'll just grab the selection tool and I'll draw in just looking at the photograph, just kind of drawing in these, tree shadow shapes, nothing special, and it's okay if I get them wrong. I can always go at it again and that covers all of this. But instead of using a color fill, I will grab a brush, and I'll push control H in photoshop which hides this. Now I got to think color. Well, I like to always sample where I'm at. Sample my starting point. I want to go darker for shadow, and I want to go cooler. Now, that does it right there. But instead of staying at exactly the same hue, let's also move away from this warm slice of the color wheel. I can go in either direction. I can go down this way. And ultimately ending up there or I can go up this way. Let's go up that way. Lay that in. While I do that, I could change my mind and go down this way. It's totally valid to do that, mixing in some of these colors. But because this is a green grass in the foreground, I'll maybe go up this way again, scumble in some of these greens. The other thing about color is when you are mixing hues like this, try and stay in the same value. If I had a green that's much darker, you see that doesn't quite work as well. If you are in the same value, you can more freely mix hues. That's what I'm doing here. I can also continue my trajectory toward blues and maybe even add a bit of saturation as I do. Look at this. This works. Maybe more toward blue and more saturated. Again, following chart number four. Although, unlike chart number four, which went down through the hues this way, I'm going up through the hues that way, which was what chart number two did. I'm combining these charts. Now, I still have my pixel hard selection there. I want to deselect that. I'll grab my favorite smudge tool here and just start smudging these shadows, which is a good way of imitating the soft edges that they have. It's not really blending. I'm not trying to blend the shadows into the lights. I'm simply trying to soften the hard edge because the further away a shadow a cast shadow gets from the object casting it. This is clearly trees behind the camera casting a shadow onto this field. But because those trees are so far away, the edges they create of the shadow will be very soft. That is true of all shadows. The further away they are from the object casting it, the softer their edge will be. I'm just trying to trying to keep the shapes intact of these shadows, but I'm trying to just soften the edge. Then with my smudge tool, by the way, I can also paint with it. Maybe I'll get a neutral warm here, that's too dark. There we go. Scumble in some of these warms. Now I know there's a grassy foreground and a cut what mid ground. I'll get that in a bit later. Right now I'm just trying to get some colors moving here related to each other. These are even though I'm in the same hue here as the sun was, I'm very gray down. This is valid. This will still look cooler than the sunlight. Then what I can do. Because now I have a bit of a range of color. I can hop to my blues and just remember where I was, and maybe even a bit lighter, I can get some of these cooler blues over here. Now, I'm going to put the blues on the outskirts of the shadow because that is where the skylight is most likely to come down and hit them. Because that area of the field is just so open to the sky. Whereas, if we go back to the photograph, this area of the field here, I feel is closer to the trees casting the shadow. This area might block the skylight a bit more, although you can definitely see if I sample it. Look at how blue those greens are. If I bring this in, look how blue green that is. There's clearly a lot of blue sky getting in there too. There's no blue sky getting into the field in sun because the sun is so strong that it dominates all of the blue skylight. There is effectively no blue skylight visible to us where the sun is hitting. What you get as a result then is the idea of a separate color temperature of sunlight versus other separate color temperatures of shadow. You have two different camps, and that is obvious in this photograph. I chose this photograph because of its clarity. Even clouds. If we were to paint this cloud, which got blocked in right here, well, we know that the sun is going to hit it from above, the sun is above the clouds, of course. And the sun is that warmer color. Now, clouds are white, whereas wheat fields have a bit of that earth tone already, that kary tone to them. If let's say the earth, the wheat field, the local color of the wheat field is about there. That's like if you took away all the light, which is impossible to do, but if you did, this would be the local color of the wheat field, something like this. Well, then you add the warm sun and it further warms it. A cloud doesn't start from here, a cloud starts without color, they're white. What you do is you still increase it toward the sun color, but only a little bit, and of course, clouds are very light. Something about there. Even that's maybe a bit too much. This is a bit better. It's still the same principle of the sun color influencing these clouds, but it starts from a lesser saturated local color or base color that we have to take that into consideration. The sun can't make it quite as saturated, it can't make it as saturated as the wheat fields. But if I sampled that and scumbled in this color a little bit, I have to make it a bit lighter to match value a bit better. But this could fit. Actually, this could help harmonize, even though I don't really see it in the photograph, this could help harmonize the scene by having that sun color factor in even more. Even up here in the clouds. Now the shadow of the clouds, it's the same idea as the shadow of the wheat fields. They are cooler. But due to atmospheric perspective, think of distant mountains, they are going to be even colder. I've really increased this blue. This blue does not really exist down here. Even if I got the right value right there, it's more saturated than anything here. When you go in the distance, you are allowed to increase the saturation of your blues because that is what nature does. That's what atmospheric perspective does. It does that, by the way, because, for some reason, I don't know why, yellows are the first colors to be filtered out with distance. Now that you'd have to ask a scientist as to why that is. I don't know. Got to be something to do with the wave length, I suppose. But that's not what this skill share class is all about. Here I am trying out a different type of blue in the clouds, inspired by the photograph here. Again, this is just for the shadows, the shadows of the clouds. Because they are going to be cooler, just like the land, and everything is like that. Let's do the trees. Let's start with the light of the trees. Well, I know, a tree is what, a tree is green. Well, there's green, but that is too cold. It's got to be warmer green. This is where you can go back to the photo and say, Okay, let's bring our color picker in, there's the earth, the oaky wheat fields, and there's the tree. You can see first of all, look at the hue. It's not moving that much. Interestingly though, the value does move, the wheat field is here, look at the value, the light versus dark, it's up here, and the tree is way down there. Trees are very dark. Even in light. Trees are the darkest things in your painting. Whoops I just sampled that, that's against the rules. Let's start back here. Let's see if we can recreate that. Well, a tree is green, but a warmer green. I'm going to go about there, greenish, darker. And but there. Let's put that in. When I say, I don't know if that's right. I, let's try a different one. Let's try that. Let's try a bit warmer. That's a bit too cold for me, I think. Trees are dark because that's how they gain their nourishment. They trap light, photosynthesis and all that. Again, topic for another class, and I'm no expert in this, but that's how a tree gains its nutrition. It traps the light, and therefore, because it traps the light, it doesn't let out so much light, so they are darker. Even a tree in light. This is true for basically every species of tree, especially pines and stuff like that, but they are very, very dark. Even in the light. You notice that though my values down here, it still looks like a tree in the light. But watch what I do with the shadows. The shadows are going to be very much darker maybe here. Because these trees are quite distant, I'm going to go way into the blues. I'm just going to jump straight into the blues and see if I can find that's about right, very saturated due to distance again. I'm just going to try and put in, looks like there's a big shadow being cast along these trees. Around here. By the way, I can always press lightly on my table. If I press hard, it looks like that. If I press lightly, I get a bit of a mix. Just like with traditional paint, you can load the brush with less paint, which in digital means you press more lightly on your stylist. I'm just trying to find these little shadow patterns on the trees that I'm referencing from the photo. I'm not trying to copy them from the photo. First of all, my canvas is too small to copy like that. I'm trying different blues. Let's try this blue here, bit more of a cyan. I know from experience that the further back you get, the more cyan the blue gets. Up here, the distance between this tree and this tree, I don't know, half a mile, something like that. A significant difference in depth between those two points. The closer one, can be more of this deep ultramarine blue, which is a warmer blue, is closer to the reds, as we discussed in the beginning of the section. But as you get back to this part of the trees, it is more cyan blue because that is closer to the sky color. Because the atmospheric perspective forces things ultimately to progress toward the sky color, that should make sense why it's like that. Let's darken the value for our foreground and get a cool green. Something in here, a cooler green, we're taking a green moving it toward blue. I'm just going to get a crazy brush for this, and this will just be just slap dashed together, even darker, I think. Now, this part is interesting because watch what's going to happen here. This would be entirely in shadow. A these reeds and grass blades are entirely in shadow. But they also have their deep In deep shadows within them. I'll show you what I mean in the original photograph. Can you see how it gets really dark in these areas like underneath the grass? Like a shadow within a shadow. That is called ambient occlusion, and that is not just a fancy word for shadow, in fact, it's not shadow at all. The whole thing is shadow. Ambient occlusion is where the ambient light, that is the light coming down from the sky, the ambient light that lit our shadow colors here from the sky. Ambient light cannot get to those areas, the ambient light is occluded, so we call it ambient occlusion. It's kind of a holdover from three D software, actually. Three D software started calling that effect ambient occlusion. It's a very programary language to use there, and it caught on Now ambient occlusion is darker, but you also have an excuse to go warmer there, inverts itself. You have the cooler color for the grass and shadow that instantly reverts back to being warmer for the ambient occlusion. This is something that painters joke about. It's just something to do, just make your ambient occlusion colors warm. It just looks better. I don't know why that is, but for some reason, when you make your ambient occlusion colors too cold, things start looking a bit lifeless. I'm just going in with this rake style brush and putting in dotting in really some ambient occlusion, the darkest darks of the picture. Ambient occlusion will always be your darkest dark, yes, that is the word always. However, it's not always black. I'm still here, not totally black, but it's pretty close. That's because this photo is exposed that way. But depending on all kinds of factors and maybe in the demonstration we paint next, I will lighten up the palette in general and we can have a lighter ambient occlusion. We'll see, we'll see. Let's get a brush set to multiply mode, as you can see up here. L a warm color. What I'm going to do is lay in the cut wheat path here. Just something like that. Gives me this cutaway path for free because I want the values to all stay, the lights and shadows, they should stay. I just want this feeling like there's a little cut out section of the grass, something like this. And I can stay on this multiply brush to continue blocking in some of these details. Multiply, if you don't know, it just makes things darker. It's like water color. It maintains the value structure that you have. It just darkens it, but it darkens it toward a color. If I picked blue, it would darken it toward that blue. Actually, some of that blue might be nice for some of the shadow parts in here, where you'd have slightly cooler passages. Even up in this area here, let's make the warm wheat a bit cooler to conform to our cooler shadows better. While I'm here, I could darken my whole foreground just with this big circular brush. Some interesting purples and stuff in that grass. Can you see that? Just like little splashes of purple? I'm doing this with my multiply brush here. And I will get this crazy brush out, and there's just these little purple wild flowers in there. This brush is ideal for capturing the randomness of things like wild flowers and a little warmer, but still grayed to be cooler. I would call this a warmer cool. In the context of this painting, this is a warmer cool because it's certainly warmer than the blue greens we had, but it's not that warm, it's not as warm as the sun. It's like a neutral warm. So it's a warmer cool. And you can have cooler warms too. If we went up in the sunlit area, we grade that off, this would be a cooler warm. Can you see that? How it's doing that? It's just adding a little bit of that variety and some of that might be nice. Just to throw in there. Even if you don't see it in the photograph, it's still appropriate because it's still mixing in with our actual warms. I'm realizing that just some of these trees here are more shadow, I shod start prioritizing wrapping this up so we can get to our next demonstration where we will paint something from our imaginations. And this should give you a just overview, like a good working base for how colors and light work. Then in the next section, we'll go into it and paint something. But right now I'm just having fun I'm not quite done yet. I'm having fun with exploring different types of hues. Remember chart number four, by the time I was here, not all to blue, by the time I was here, I was just starting to get out of the grays and chart number, that's what I'm doing here. I'm getting that level of the chart. Present in the picture. Now, this is an important thing. You don't need every single part of your chart present in the picture. That's not a requirement. As long as you have little checkpoints along the way, and wherever those checkpoints are, that's up to you. But as long as you have a few of them, and again, I don't know how many. Three, four, five, I don't know. I try and go for at least three though, I guess, if I can put a number on it. As long as you have those checkpoints present along the way. You will be able to communicate to the viewer, like, Hey, this is the path that I'm taking, because all the paths that I showed you are very much derived from nature, the viewer will recognize it. Even if they're not an artist, they'll just just instinctively know what you're doing because they're so used to seeing that type of information. Here are just some bluer, very, very blue plant leaves and stuff. That's because we are in a very cool area of shadow. This grass is green. We can go up to these cools. I would still consider this a cool green. You might look at this and say, Oh, that's not green, it's cyan. I don't know, something like that. That is debatably not green, but for me, it's a cooler green because it was derived from green. It's green got there. Through this path. To me in my brain, that's still green. That's why back to the opening part of this lesson, color names are useless. Because if I say green, well, who would have thought that was green. But in this painting, I think it's green. It's part of the greenery, anyway, that's undeniable. We can even scumble some of that weird slightly grayed off cyan. Now I've graded off a little bit, which is warming it up, but that's nowhere near warm. It's still plenty saturated to be cool. But it's just not as cold as it is in the foreground. I'm just scumbling that into some of the shadows. I really like to have a symphony of color in shadow. Whereas in light, you can be a little bit more actually a lot more monotone because the sunlight, especially in sunlit situations like this, the sunlight is dominant, is so dominant that it won't really allow much color. It bullies the colors to be like it, as we discussed. No other colors are really allowed. No one's allowed in the club. Was with shadow, everyone's allowed in the club because shadow colors can come from anywhere. It can come from the sky, it can come from bounce light. Now we haven't really talked about bounce light yet. We will in the painting demonstration. I'll make sure to pick a scene that has a good amount of bounce light in it and we can discuss how that further modifies this. But this is a good representation of what we are looking at in terms of color and light. It's a very lateral step from characters. It's a completely different track that we're on when it comes to light and color. But the thing that I love about light and color as complex as it may be and is time consuming to learn, just like drawing is time consuming to learn. What I love about this is it really doesn't require a ton of drawing, painting like this. I mean, I didn't do much drawing here. There's a few shapes. I feel like anyone could draw what I just drew. Painting and color is a different story, but the drawing behind this is very simple and basic. If you can follow the principles I laid out here, I think you could easily follow me though and paint this along with me. Your paintings will get better with time, practice, practice, practice. Remember that the relationships of color just by nature, are very subtle. What we are aiming to do with our painting and our illustration is be able to manage and visualize and observe very subtle changes of color, not big changes. Those subtle color changes, they just take time. But keep practicing and you will get there. My initial paintings look nothing like this, and I certainly couldn't paint this fast. But the nice part about understanding, say the color charts I just showed you in this section is that they really are a bit of a recipe for nature. Nature will do this over and over. And if you can understand it, you'll be able to see it not only in photographs like this, but even when you're just standing outside and next time you're on a walk. Hopefully, you'll be looking for this stuff. If you're like me, you'll get to the point where you can't even turn it off. You're like, Oh, wow, you just see these relationships everywhere because they are so consistent. Light and color is not a mystery once you dig into these principles. All right Let's end our study there, and I'll see you in the next lesson where we will further this information by painting something completely imaginative. 12. Completing An Illustration - Part 1: Okay, we've reached, I think the most exciting point in the class. It's time to bring our knowledge of character and environment together to come up with our own illustration. This is the product you'll probably be making for your clients. Even if you're just doing a character design, you'll probably be asked to paint it up for that final professional presentation. Or if you're like me, the client wants a whole illustration, character, background, fully painted, fully integrated, professional looking and fully finished. That is what we will tackle in this section. Along the way, though, I'll also give you tips an actionable practice for developing environments and working with perspective. So this project is inspired by something a client asked me to do with the Big Foot characters. So first, I'll show you that job and explain the steps that went into it, and then we will execute a similar project together. All right, let's get to it. First, I'll read to you verbatim what my project brief said. This is for the cover of our pitch package. Neat image of Jake and his big foot friend playing and having fun in a welcoming lake environment, something like a cottage scene. Please depict them in motion as they play together. All right seem simple enough. These are these sketches I showed them. It's kind of the same environment three times. I just changed the model of Big Foot because actually at this stage, we had not done the character design sheets yet. It's funny, this was actually my first stab at the characters. That's why Jake doesn't really look like any of the Jakes from the sheets and Big Foot has three different ideas there. We ultimately went with this one. And right off the bat, they liked the motion pose. I went cliche a little bit, did the tire swing, but it's got the relationship of the two characters, front and center, and that's obviously the important thing I had to do narrative wise, right? It's way more about the character interaction than it is about the environment. Now, the environment, of course, is there, but I only had room for like a tree and a rock and some water. You don't really have a ton of room, especially on a vertical canvas, I find to do a lot of stuff. The characters being kind of vertical themselves take up a lot of that space. And this was the final painting I produced for them. Let me just enlarge this a bit. Actually, let me zoom in. You can see what my final paintings look like. They're still quite brushy. They're rendered, but not photo rendered. It certainly looks like a painting, and this is a style that I've refined over many, many years now. Again, I've been doing this for at least 20 years. I've always searched for this kind of painterly look. Let me zoom out so you can get an appreciation for the whole thing here, because this is where all the brushwork actually comes together. You can see that compositionally, it's quite a simple piece. It's basically highlighting the characters, and I say that because they are the points of highest contrast in the picture. They're also the largest elements in the picture. It may help to show you this in gray scale. You can see that on a value level, the characters are the highest point of contrast and the tire as well. It's like this triad, triangle of focal point, that's off to the right third of the picture, you might say, and the highest contrast is where your eye is going to look, and I use that as a very simple aesthetic for design all the time. If you want somebody to look somewhere, like the focal point, the characters in this case, use high contrast there. It's pretty basic. I made sure that the characters had a full range of dark to light. If I bring in my color picker here and I sample, I'll use this one. I'll sample like what's the darkest dark? It's basically black, even on the kid here, even on Jake, his darks are equally dark. On the tire, those darks are basically the same. And then the lightest lights. You can look at the big foot muzzle there, it's close to white. Jake's eyes very close to The characters represent that full range. Then the background is, if the characters were here, the background is here, just a step narrower. If you look at the trees I'm sampling values in the tree. Can you see that? Here's the lightest of the tree right there, and here's the darkest of the tree. It's close to the characters because the tree is still a prominent part of this picture, but it's not as prominent as the characters. I likewise stepped its contrast, just a bit down. Then of course, the background tree, that tree may as well not even be there. It's just there for ambience. It needs to be there for the environment, but it's not important to the picture. Look at its value range. It's like there to there. It's very narrow. Again, it's that same basic idea. The higher contrast you go with various elements in your picture, the more the audience will be inclined to look at them. Now, inventing an environment is a daunting task. What I like to do is start from some photo reference that gets you in the ballpark. In this case, it's this photograph that I took on a camping trip a few summers ago. I actually sketched this scene from life in my sketchbook as well, and I did that because I wanted to capture this cozy feel that I think this scene has. Of course, it's always helpful to snap a photo of something if you don't have time to sketch or just in general. I keep a very active folder of photo references that I collect from who knows where? I'm here in photoshop and I'll make a new canvas, and as per the clients request, I'll make it eight by ten, and I'll set it to 150 DPI. Now, your final print resolution will be 300 DPI, that's the standard. But to keep my computer and brushes flowing faster, I like to set it lower and then uprise as I go. I've sped up the footage for this opening part of toning the canvas. I'm using mostly warms, but there's a neutral cool, like a grayish cool. I will slow down the footage now though, and I'm drawing in a basic perspective grid. Now this being an organic environment, linear perspective does not play a huge role I'll show you exactly where it does play a role and it's right here at the beginning. Basically, I want to develop the ground plane. In this case, the ground is the water. I'm putting a vanishing point off the frame. You can see where I'm constantly returning to just to frame right there. You notice that point lies on the horizon line, which is the purple line I laid in first. Then just outcomes a series of radiating lines from that. This is mostly a little mental trick that helps me start seeing in three D space more quickly. What I'm going to do here though is just tone down the opacity of that layer. I did do the perspective grid on a new layer. Using the basic perspective theory we already talked about, I'm drawing in the bottom of a cylinder, that is to say, an ellipse. This ellipse is going to show me my ground plane. This is the water area in front of that big rock that you see in the reference there. That area is important to me because that's where I'm going to have my center stage. That's where the characters are going to go. That's where all the interesting elements are going to be. I'm drawing the perspective area that I'll be working with. I'm branching off from that ellipse now to figure out where the shoreline is and this is where that big centerpiece rock goes. The rock is a centerpiece of the background. It's like that tree in my initial painting. It's an interesting part of the background. It gives a lot of context, but ultimately it is part of the background, and I'll be sure to put the characters in front of this. Of course, I have my two reference pieces loaded up to the left there, the photograph, as well as my painting of the scene. You notice there are differences. My painting of the scene is a bit more idealized than the photo reference. I have picked what I think is the most important area of the scene, for example, in my sketch on the lower left there. I have emphasized the nature of that big round rock, making sure in my sketch, it is the focal point. In my painting, it will be a secondary focal point. I've already just mentioned the characters will take center stage. But I'm establishing the environment here. This is what I normally do. There's different ways to go about this. You could draw the characters first and then fill in the environment. I like to go the other way when I'm doing an environment seen with characters. I like to establish the environment first. Now, I don't fully render it to a completed degree. You'll see as we progress here, the characters do need to come in relatively early on in the process because they inform the composition huge. I like to set a perspective for sure, which is already there. I'm adjusting my perspective grid right now, actually, just to make sure my horizon line is where I think it is. Remember, I'm projecting my eyes straight into the scene and asking myself, where would my eyes collide with the photograph? I would be in the upper area of that rock, which I know is true because when I photographed that scene, I was also sitting on a rock elevated above the water, as you can tell. If I projected my body forward physically in space, it would collide with the upper area of that rock. So I know I have my perspective correct. All right at this early stage, watch this. Here comes the characters. I've got this on a separate layer. Now, let's not get ahead of ourselves. This is not a final drawing of the characters. It's just a placement. You notice it's just the most crude possible silhouette for a boy. This is Jake there. I have no idea what his pose will be or I didn't want to just copy and paste in one of my previous designs. I want to show you how I actually go about discovering a brand new picture. This is a brand new Jake in a brand new pose. I've never painted the scene before, except for the background in my sketchbook. But I mean, I've never painted this as an illustration, never painted it digitally, never put characters in there, et cetera. This is important to me at this stage to define how big the character is mostly. It is mostly about how big the character is, which defines scale everywhere. Right now he's way too big it's like a giant. Because I do want that rock to look much bigger. And it is currently. That rock should be like 15 feet tall. If Jake is that big, we suddenly get a sense for the scale of the rock, which is only twice his height. I will scale this down and of course, that's why I have it on a separate layer. This is the big foot character, if you can believe it. Again, having it on a layer means I can do this, I can move it around. Now, already, there is a very important fundamental that I want to capitalize on, and that is the idea of overlap. You see the top of Jake's head is overlapping the shoreline behind him, like the shoreline disappears behind Jake's head. That is important because it shows depth. In your illustration, maximize the opportunity to put one thing in front of another. Another example of that here is how the big rock in the background is in front of the trees. It seems so simple and it is. But it's amazingly common, and I'm always surprised by this how often art students make the decision to not overlap things. For example, I think a worse decision in this case would be if I put Jake and Bigfoot fully silhouetted within the water cylinder, like the ground plane there, if I put their silhouettes fully within that water area. I mean, yeah, the illustration could work. But I would have lost depth depth that I'm gaining here just by having Jake's head intersect the shoreline behind him. I'm already off the character layer though. I'm in the background layer now. There's only two layers in this picture. Sorry, there's only three layers if you count the perspective grid, which I can't paint on anymore. To painting layers, the background and the characters. There is no hard rules to how you should divvy up your illustration layers wise. It's really just what you feel comfortable with I'm in the minority where I actually don't like layers because it forces me to break away from the creative process. At least for me it does, and I have to start thinking about what's on what layer, and I really can't stand that. I paint on as few layers as possible. I only make a new layer where I absolutely don't know where something goes. In this case, it's the character. Okay, so I'm starting to block in the beginnings of a reflection, a reflection of the rock in the water as well as the background trees in the water. Let's talk about reflections because you might ask, does water respond to the same light and color information as we just saw in the landscape, which had just a regular ground plane, the wheat fields. The answer is yes and no. Water does respond to light hitting it, especially calm water, this is medium calm water here. It's an inlet in a lake. It will respond to light, and you'll see I will paint actual sunlight on this as we go through. But You also have to deal with reflections. Everyone knows what a reflection is. It's the water reflecting the surface above it, so the image shows into the water. Because we're in this case, reflecting dark trees, you're going to have a lot of a dark passage there. You notice in my sketch book illustration, I minimized that because I wanted to favor the rock as I already discussed. I chose to highlight and emphasize the reflection of the lighter rock in the water, flanked by darker reflections in my sketch. But in the photograph, the dark reflection of the trees. Remember, trees are often very dark as we talked about in the previous lesson, that dark reflection dominates in the photograph. That's the direction I will go with in this illustration. That's because I'm planning ahead a little bit and I want to have the sunlight really illuminate the characters. I think I'll have a beam of sunlight coming in from the right, and we can see that beam of sun in the photograph, but I will fully emphasize that and have a full beam of sunlight coming in, illuminating the characters. Therefore, I can use the dark reflection to add contrast to the lighter characters. That is really the number one tip I would have for anyone wanting to do environments is plan your contrast ahead of time and only one aspect of it. That is where is the highest contrast going to go? You can dive that from light, have light hit something in a certain way that gives you that contrast, like for example, maybe a character is in shadow or light, and the thing behind the character is in shadow or light, the opposite one. The other thing that's really really helpful about darks and lights, managing darks and lights across your environment is alternate them, light, dark, light, dark. If you look at my painting, the sky in the very background, which is not really laid in yet, but you can see the sky in the background would be light, then the trees in front of that is dark, then the rock in front of that is light, then the reflection in front of that is dark, it's alternating, dark light, dark light. That will give you even more depth in your picture. Here I'm trying a different Jake. It's just a gesture drawing of him swimming, but I don't like it, so I get rid of it. And I'm back to square one on the characters. Although in my mind, I know that they will work in that center piece area. Another reason I'm confident in that is because if you think of a stage, I've left that water area of the stage fully blank. It feels empty right now. In my landscape sketch on the lower left, that area was populated with an interesting reflection of the rock. In my painting now, it's more blank than that, and that means it can use characters. There's space to fill there. Using the Smudge tool here in photoshop to just start developing these reflections. The other aspect of a reflection is that they are softened or more blurry, let's say, versions of what they are reflecting. A smudgy like tool in Photoshop, it's called the Smudge tool literally, but in other apps, you have different names for it. Anything that looks like it can smudge paint is a good tool for reflections. Now I'm using the Warp tool just to get the shape of that rock a little bit more round and central and friendly. I'm thinking about my shape design lesson, clean shape there. I'm just looking for a certain type of roundness to it. A roundness that I feel would look good. That's the best I can say. Remember that when you take classes like this or any art class, you're going to be presented information and actionable stuff you can use fundamentals. But there is also an aspect of art that is intuitive, like the shape of that rock. How do I know it feels right? Well, I don't know. It's just there's something in me that says, the rock should look more like this. That is something that cannot be taught because it's completely individual and subjective. You absolutely should use your own intuition when you feel the urge to do so. Just remember though that before all that, the fundamentals need to be strong, and that, of course, is what this class focuses on for the majority of it. So speaking of fundamentals, the colors I'm using in my scene follow exactly the lesson I laid out in the last section. Look at the light versus shadow colors of the rock. You can see they are clearly separated into two camps, the lights being warmer colors, the shadows being cooler colors. There's one extra layer of organization within that and that the that is the bluest shadow colors face up on the rock. See they're located on the top of the rock. Then maybe at the bottom of the rock, you have what I would call warmer cools. That's because the skylight, which is blue, comes down from above. It stands to reason that the areas of the rock that face up toward the sky get the most blue, simply because they are getting the most direct skylight. Now I want to amp up the effect of sunlight. In my layers window, I made a new layer, set it to linear dodge mode, and I've got this triple headed brush here that I don't know, it's like a round brush. There's nothing special about it. It's just its shape is slightly offset from round and I find myself using it a lot I'm not sure why. There's nothing special about it. I just enjoy its shape. Now, when you work with a linear dodge layer, you don't have to pick the color super light. Notice my color choice is in the middle. It's a very additive process just like light is in real life. Light will react to the object's color and bring it lighter and towards the color of the sun in this case. But linear dodge acts that way as well, making it an ideal blending mode for painting things like sunlight. And I really, really like the composition of shape that exists in the photograph and the shapes I captured in my plan air painting on the lower left. I like that the shapes are varied in size. Look at the rock, for example, in the photograph. I mean, there are large shapes of sunlight, medium size shapes of sunlight, and small little dappled shapes of sunlight in there. That's another form of contrast. It's almost like contrast equals interest. Now that's not true every time, but for the most part, we need contrast to have something look or feel interesting to our eyes. A big way you can add contrast to your pictures is by varying the shapes and sizes of things. Remember, we've already talked about light and dark contrast, creating interest. This is yet another way of bringing contrast and therefore pumping in the most interest you can into your picture. Now, getting back to rendering water for a moment. Notice I'm keeping this water much more still than it is in the photograph. The more still the water is, the more it can accept light, much like a landscape does. I'm treating sunlight on the water almost exactly the same as sunlight on the rock. It's just maybe a little bit darker because again, it's competing with the ref, the dark reflection a little bit. It's going to bring that value, that light and dark value a bit darker in its reflection. But otherwise, there's no difference. You can see this again on calm water, which I'm depicting here, but also shallower water because the sun can actually get through the water surface and hit the ground beneath it. If you are doing a painting in the middle of the ocean, where it's hundreds of meters deep, then you won't see this. It'll purely be reflection. Also the turbulence of the waves will distort that reflection, and the water will essentially be monochromatic. Okay. Let me quickly talk about what I'm doing here in photoshop. I made a new layer. I want to paint some grass and seaweed and stuff. But I set the layer style to a stroke effect. That is a stroke just puts an outline around your brush stroke. I made it a very dark warm outline, like it's a very deep red outline, and I decrease the opacity, so it's not totally in your 13. Completing An Illustration - Part 2: As I put down these brush strokes, it has that little extra graphic punch to it. That is something I've just found over the years that works with my style. It it adds graphics, I think, graphics, meaning those clean shapes. Because when you're doing things like grass, you're adding so many shapes. Now one thing that's great about that is grass like this tends to be small shapes. Remember, I just talked about the contrast inherent in big medium small shapes. The thing about small shapes is you can have many of them. Exponentially more small shapes can fit in your picture than big shapes. Like see that big rock. Well, there's only enough room for one of those rocks, but there's room for 100 grass blades. At least. You want to maximize the amount of small shapes that you put into your picture and where you put them is important as well. My strategy, there are no rules for this, but my strategy is to put the small shapes around the focal point. The focal point will be the characters which are not there yet, but you can see well, you know where they're going to go because you saw me thumbnail them in before, and they'll still go there. But I know the characters are going to go there. You notice I'm keeping that area of the stage just very open. I do like using the analogy of a stage because that's where the audience is going to look in a stage play. Keep that area of the stage nice and open and feeling a bit empty without the characters. And here I'm just putting in another rock, a medium sized rock that Jake can be standing on. But you notice, I'm making that rock very special by illuminating it with that direct beam of sun. Here's where I'm carrying that idea of the sunbeam as it cascades its way into the scene, illuminating that little rock that Jake will be standing on, and the big foot character will be, I think, swimming just in front of that rock. This is where my process pays off. I didn't have that idea until I was at this part of the painting. I didn't have the idea of Jake standing on a rock and big foot swimming. I needed to develop the world a little bit, and this is where I personally do find it helpful to get the environment in first. Also the idea that I'm thumbnailing on the same canvas as I'm painting as you've seen, because I did start with the abstract nature of the background, those bunches of trees in the background and the rock. I was able to skew things around and move things around and flip the cavas every which way and just use the brush to paint things out, paint things in, and I could do all this without much penalty because there was nothing fully committed yet. Once you start getting the characters in, you're starting to really commit to the scene. That's yet another benefit of starting with the background first is that you can really manipulate the stage in the world these characters live in. Before then committing with the characters. There's really nothing worse than doing a nice rendering of your characters only to find out that they really don't fit in the environment or the environment feels pasted in somehow. That's a very common one. The environment feeling pasted into the background rather than truly being part of the illustration. While I've been talking for the last minute there, I just grabbed a textured brush and just laid in a foreground tree. Again, repeating my alternating pattern, Light for the sky, dark for the trees, light for the rock, and now dark for that brand new tree I just put in. So it's not like I just put a tree there because it happens to also be in the reference. I mean, this is a good example. Yes, that tree is in the reference, it's in front of the rock. But you notice in the reference, the tree argues with the rock value wise, like the light on that tree is similar to the light on the rock. But I've edited that. I've made the tree darker because of the idea of contrast, continuing my alternation of light dark light dark. That's a good tip for you when you do photo studies like we did in the previous section. Now that photo we did in the previous section happened to have a pretty good alternating value system. I didn't even talk about it there because I knew I was going to talk about it here. But if you have a photograph that is just not working out in a photo study, try arranging the values in a more art directed way. See if you can get the depth, for example, to read better by doing so. Okay, it's time to get a character actually in here. It's good that I know where he goes because I got the spot right there for him. You notice his head intersects the shoreline, just like I had planned it now about half hour ago, if not more. I've just got a basic watercolor style brush out and I'm trying to gesture with that. I picked a basic skin color off the reference there off my Jake model sheet, and I'm just painting with that. Putting in a little bit of light and shadow just a hint at the idea that sun will be raking across half his body. I'm putting him on that rock, which is half lit. I want Jake to also be half lit, which will just help sell a little bit of interest and maybe some realism and unexpectedness into lighting. When I paint like this, I mostly am thinking about gesture. You notice my brush strokes are very broad and sweeping and I'm not trying to get exact shapes here. That's all of a gestural mindset, which means that painting this way, with a lot of character relies on your previous fundamental studies with gesture. I use that gestural mindset throughout my painting. You notice the way my brush strokes go down everywhere is very gestural. I learn that from gesture drawing. It's something that you can't be comfortable with until you have a lot of experience with it. Now, once I like the way the character is roughly looking, I will then start thinking about form and ultimately final shapes. But also because this is a cartoon, sometimes gesture, I mentioned this in the previous lesson, sometimes gesture can come close to a final shape. Be a cartoon to begin with is all about those rhythms, those simple statements of a thing. But a big part of this process right now is I have to figure out what the characters are doing. I'm gesturing, but what pose am I gesturing? I started with a pretty generic thing for Jake. I just copied my drawing on the left there, that Jake model I drew on the left. I don't even really know what he's doing. He's anticipatory action of something. It's kind of unclear. I drew that and I realized his arms were not telling the right story. I'm also using, by the way, the floaty from the top Jake drawing. I end up taking that away. You'll see why. But it's there now. And the thing I'm going to do with big foot, I'm actually going to keep Big foot smaller, which is a common joke that we've seen before, Big foot being a small character. But I'm going to keep big foot small, and I'm going to have him wearing a shark costume, like how kids wear those Halloween costumes that go over their head like a big hoodie. The shark will be swallowing Big Foot's head, there's the shark's eyes right there or his eye seen from this angle. And there'll be a shark fin, of course. But Big Foot's face will be coming out of the shark costume. Now, the characters are on a different layer. I've already described that because I don't know exactly where these characters are going to go. Make sure they're on a new layer so I can move them around at my whim. What I'm trying to do here is engulf the big foot character in this nice warm sunbeam, and mostly I'm doing that for contrast reasons. If the sunbeam is hitting the big foot character, then that means he will also cast a shadow back onto the water. That alternation of light dark will be nice. Here I've just got an overlay brush and just warming up the ground that you can see through the water because this is a shallower inlet of a lake. I had a shoreline there before I took that away. I want this all to be water, but it'll be just a few feet deep maybe. That's what I'm imagining and the sun can easily get through and illuminate the warm ground underneath. All right. Time for a little digital texture trick. That is a photograph of a rock that I just found off Google by searching for rock texture. I set the layer to overlay mode and I'll decrease its opacity here by a significant amount. Then I'll just populate that same photo texture over the whole rock. I just use Alton photoshop and click and it'll duplicate it. I've got several layers, I'll flatten them down, make sure they're all set to overlay, and then I'll make a layer mask. If I paint black into that layer mask, which I'm doing right now, I'm hiding parts of the texture that I don't want to see. It's a way of roughly blending it into your painting. When it takes all of 30 seconds to do this, and when I'm happy with how it looks roughed in like this, I will flatten it down, which I'm doing right now. Now, this looks horribly digital right out of the box like this, so it really requires more just hand painted brushwork to fully integrate the texture. But I only wanted to do that here on the rock just for a little bit of realism, and also just to show you a quick trick that you can use as an illustrator or concept artist for efficiency's sake. Switching back to color for a second. See how the light on the water surface is redder. That's something I've noticed from real life. For some reason, there is a slightly redder quality to the color. I'm carcaturing that here by adding even more red to separate it from the yellowish light on the rock. It's okay to do that. There's still both warm colors. Whether I'm using yellowish light or reddish light, they'll still feel like they're in the same camp, they're in the same warm, influenced lighting. It's a nice bit of variety that I found that nature does. You can see it in the photograph, where the light is hitting the water. In the photograph, it's more orangy than red, but orange is on the way to red from yellow. I've just progressed that pre existing path. Putting in some eyebrows on Jake here really influences the facial expression. It's not mean, but he's playing mean. He's he's got a fishing pole, as you can see. He's trying to catch the shark and he's playfully being mean about it. I'm going to catch you thing. That's what I'm currently thinking about anyway. Now, light and color wise, skin tone reacts exactly the same as anything else. Jake's skin shares almost identical colors with the rock colors. He's got a very pale skin, that's how I'm designing him and the rock is a very pale colored rock, it's the same, basically. It's just the drawing that changes what the object is. In my constant exploration on the canvas here, you notice I'm changing Jake's facial expression now. Something a little bit more friendly and almost apologetic. This is just done by changing the eyebrows. I have not changed a single thing. He's still got that smirky smile on his face. But you notice that that can take on like a chameleon. It can take on 100 different expressions just based on what the eyebrows are doing. Eyebrows are magic that way. In fact, I always start at the eyebrows, whether I'm doing a cartoon or a realistic rendering, I always start with the eyebrows and the brow area when working on a facial expression. Say brow area because sometimes if say the eyebrows are furrowed, the flesh of the brow will overtake the eyes and hide the eyeball a little bit. That's not really the eyebrows doing that, it's like the fleshy area around the eyebrows. I do have other classes here on skill share that talk about that. You can look at understanding and painting the head, as well as illustrating children's books. In speaking of children's books, here is a fitting big foot cartoon character, he would fit quite well in a children's book. You notice that that light is going to illuminate his face partially, just like it's illuminating part of Jake's face. Now I'm playing a little bit with color here using this purple color. That is something that is not realistic. The sun would not really allow that purple to exist. The sun would bully the color closer to the reds. But again, because this is a cartoon, I'm willing to skirt the rules of color a little bit here. Again, when it comes to aesthetics, there are no rules and you are free to break away from reality as you see fit. The thing I would suggest though is that when you are breaking away from reality, as I'm doing here with this purple color, that you know you are breaking from reality and that you have a reason to do it. If you can't fill those two criteria, you'll be breaking away from reality all the time and usually without good reason, and it'll show in the work. It'll drag your work down. Philosophically, I do think people enjoy art where it depicts what they expect to see in terms of how light behaves, for example, If you show them art that depicts how light behaves, already they have a built in familiarity with it, and they can go from there. It's like they believe in your world already. If you don't know how light works and therefore, don't depict it well, suddenly, I think you're asking too much of the viewer. Unless the whole point of your art is to be completely abstract and otherworldly, that's a whole other thing. That's not what I'm doing here. I want the viewer to instantly have a recognition and a connection with this scene. I want the viewer to feel like, Oh, I know exactly what it feels like to stand there, because I think we've all seen scenes like this. I'm hoping the viewer has a similar reaction that I do when I see scenes like this and that it's beautiful and calming and relaxing. That is largely pulled off due to the basis of familiarity that exists if you can get the lighting right, for example. I think that getting the lighting right is way more important even than get the drawing right. If you look at the trees in the background, those are barely trees. They're very abstract. But the lighting on them is believable, the colors that exist due to the light. I've noticed as I've worked on, particularly the big foot character that it's difficult to know the scale of him. I put his hand on the right breaking out of the water surface and now I want to do the same thing to the feet. I'm trying to draw two feet coming out of the water, just the heels. And I'll see what I can do there. I have really no idea how that's supposed to look. So I will improvise until something feels right. I do know that the heel sticks out of the water, so I'm effectively just painting the backside of a foot here, like a hairy foot. I'm simplifying them into basic boxes and just painting color on top of that. The bottom of the foot will be lighter for some reason, and then, the purply hair will be on the heel itself, like an animal's paw or something. Here, I'm just doing a little bit of refinement around the muzzle of the big foot character, just making sure those shapes are prominent enough to be red. Small shapes are great, but I don't want too many small shapes obscuring the already small shape, that is Big Foot's face. Just making sure that his muscle is one shape and light and his chin is large like chin area is another shape and light, not too much going on there. And I like to ping pong back and forth. I'm for some reason, switching to the water here. That's because one shape inspires other shapes around it. If I'm simplifying shapes in one area, I may feel the room or the space to have more shapes in a nearby area. Again, for by way of contrast. I've really got to spend some time here to make sure his hands are articulating properly with the interaction with the fishing pole. For me, fishing poles are one of those things that it's easy to visualize in your head, but actually hard to paint the details of. I had no idea where that crank shaft went in relation to the area you hold with your other hand. And here I'm just cleaning up this rock. This rock shape is very important to keep clean, as well as the characters shadows being cast on it. Now, there's one decision here. I edit later because I don't like it. You see how Big Foot's shadow is creeping up onto the rock and intersecting with Jake's shadow. I don't like that. I think it's not clear that that's what's happening. Speaking of things not being clear, I don't love the shark on the guy's head. I like the fact that there is a shark costume on Big Foot's head, but I don't think it's clear enough or maybe just not done well enough. I Googled shark costume and I noticed that a lot of them have a different color on the top than the bottom. Also, I was reminded that a shark's eye is just a dark dot, and I think that was tripping me up too. I'm making those alterations and this is already better. It looks more like a fake shark because before the way the eye was done on the shark was very similar to the way the eyes are done on the characters, like the living characters, and that was confusing. This looks way more like a synthetic costume shark. And I flip the canvas all the time. You've probably seen me do it several times already. I flipped the canvas a lot, I have a hot key for it that I programmed because it helps you see your piece with fresh eyes just momentarily. Every five, 6 minutes, I'll flip the painting or whenever I feel like I haven't done so in a while. Yeah, this is looking way better. One thing I do for texture here is I'm using this scattered dotted brush and then I put a hard brush stroke down like that and I fade it with photoshop, if you push control shift F, you can fade back your last stroke. It's a handy way to blend strokes into the painting. That's what I did just to generate a bit of texture on that synthetic shark outfit. Again, just to separate it out from the living creatures. Then here, I'm taking a few shots at maybe opening Jake's mouth, just trying a few brush strokes in there. I'm not really liking any of it, so I'll undo, try again. I think I try like four or five different things. Then I realize that maybe pulling the smile over to the left a little bit and making sure it doesn't collide with the ear. That was another tangent that was happening. The left part of the smile was moving directly into the upper contour of his ear, and I just don't like that design wise. All I had to do to fix it was pull the smile to the right by a millimeter. He has light colored blonde hair, but blonde hair in shadow is still very dark. This whole head is in shadow, also thinking about ambient occlusion, like underneath his hair, where his hair meets his scalp. There's going to be very dark passages there. Now I'm thinking about the whites of the eyes, just like the rock, adding a bit more blue where it would receive more light from the sky, maybe a bit more yellow there where it might receive a bit more bounce light coming up from the sunlit rock below. And now everyone's favorite part, the highlights in the eye. The eyes are very reflective materials. They have a wet gloss over them, so they will reflect a few different things. Mostly they reflect the lights of the environment. Because he's in a very light environment that's fully engulfing him, I put a few different highlights in the eye. This just even further emphasizes the glossy nature of that material. Also help separate it from the synthetic shark's eye, by the way. I'm right at the end here, just playing with the idea of extending the shark costume a little bit. But I end up not liking this because it starts to interfere with the two feet coming out of the water. I'm crowding that, that micro little area, right where the two feet are coming out. I will get rid of that extra shark body to preserve the two feet because I've decided that the monster's feet are more important than whatever I may be gaining with the elongated shark costume here. I'll flip the canvas just to fully decide. The second I did that, I even noticed the perspective mistake. The costume is it should be resting between the monster's feet, but it's off, so just delete it. We don't need a new problem at this stage. Let's just fill in this dark area here, make it look like it's not hollow. Notice the shadow colors on the shark get warmer nearest the water. That's just due to reflected light bouncing up off the water. I guess at this stage, I feel like everything's working. Just this shark costume just could use a little bit more of a different type of material just to differentiate it even further from the characters. Because people are going to see that shark right away because it hides the monster and that's by design, it hides Bigfoot. What I don't want though is people to think that shark is alive. I want that when you look at it, you instantly know that something is off about it, that it's not a character. Then, of course, you notice big foot underneath it. Still fiddling around here, back behind the boy, I feel like increasing the saturation of the blue. Just felt a little gray back there. But when I'm punching up little areas like that, I know that I'm finished. And here's the fruits of our labor, a fully finished illustration that combines character, narrative, environment, light, color. Something like this could be used conceptually to present the type of story or narrative or fun and games that could happen in this show or book or whatever it is. But beneath all that, it's just an attractive picture that will hold the attention or gain the attention of whoever views it. Which is your primary goal as an illustrator? All right. In the next section, let's talk about putting your work out there and strategies for finding work as an artist. 14. Class Project 2: Create A Narrative Illustration: Before we move on to the next section of this class, we have another class project to do. Once again, it's what you've just seen me do, create a narrative illustration, something suitable for the front cover of a pitch package. That is something that effectively communicates the overall idea and mood of a TV show or movie or book. You can work in a standard eight by ten for like I did, or if you want it to be more, feel free to work in a 16 by nine widescreen aspect ratio. What you'll be painting is your child character from Project one, playing in a fun looking environment, and you may use multiple characters here if you want. It doesn't have to include a big foot, although it can. It could just be your character doing something or maybe your character and another human character. That's up to you. A small story or narrative should be invoked by the characters, meaning you should be able to read into the picture a little bit and understand the action that's going on. If your character or characters are playing a game, well, what kind of game is it? In my illustration, they were playing a game of fishing where Big Foot is dressed up as the shark and the boy is the fisherman. You get an overall sense for that window of interaction they're having. You can imagine moments that are happening before and after and outside of the frame. Lastly, for this project, I'd like you to depict a sunlit scene because that's the lighting situation we've been looking at in this course. It makes the most sense to try that in your illustration. A quick tip there. Remember that sunlight scenes include shadow. Often I see students trying to depict sunlight, and part of that is an avoidance of shadow, but the presence of shadows is the very thing that helps sell the idea of sunlight. Remember you can use shadows strategically as a framing device for your characters like I did. One last tip, Don't give yourself a time limit for this. Let the illustration take however long it needs to take for you. You will become faster with experience. But overall, it's really important that you see your process to a finish. If that takes you a day or three days or a week, give it the time it needs. The most important thing about this class project is that you see your idea evolve from an abstract idea to something tangible and finished. All right. That's class project number two. Enjoy. 15. Putting Yourself Out There: Okay, so you've got some work under your belt, and you think you're ready to get yourself out there and try and find work as a professional artist. First of all, congratulations. That alone is a big step, and a lot of people might struggle with the question, how do I know when I'm ready for work? It's impossible to answer that objectively. But what I like to do is, I like to look at someone's work or look at my own work and say, am I able to handle the various aspects that a job might entail? For example, can I draw characters well? Can I draw facial expressions believably? Can I put that character in an environment? You know the stuff that we did together in this class, if you can span the gamut of those skills, or if you want to hyperfocus, if you can run the gamut of just that one particular skill set, like character design, but have characters rotate in space, being able to draw them in certain poses, for example, then I would say you're ready to start looking. Now, as far as I'm concerned, there are two major ways to look for work. One is as a freelancer, where you just work from home and query clients and people online to see if you can find some work, or two, try and find work in an animation studio or any kind of studio, advertising studio, for example, movie studio game studio, some kind of studio that makes art and employs artists. And that is the road that I took. My first job happened in 2004. My first paid job, that is, and I have a little story for you. The way I got into the industry was actually with an unpaid job. Now, I want to stop right here and say, I do not necessarily recommend working for free. In fact, I think today It's kind of frowned upon to do that and I would not do it. But I started my professional journey, let's say, in 2004. At that time, the studio I was life drawing at, the person I had become friends with a person who ran the studio, and he was looking just for an intern, someone to help him with some art jobs, but also some management jobs like running the life drawing sessions and things like that. I was a still university student at that time. I was studying film, and I had the time to do it and I also loved being in that environment. I was around him being able to watch him work and he would help me with my own art. For me, The benefit was there, and I took that role. I worked there for I was about nine months, I think, before I found out about a job fair that was coming to Toronto, the city I lived in, and that job fair was for a studio that was just down the street actually, and they were crewing up for an animated show. Now, because I had that unpaid intern job, by the way, if you seen my YouTube channel, I have that unpaid intern character, That's me. Anyway, because I've been making art and really curating my portfolio for about nine months at this point, I had a pretty solid presentation to show the art director at that job fair. And long story short, I got that job. I will expand on the story a little bit a little later in this talk, but for now, I got the job, and that is how I broke into the industry. The term breaking in is actually really apt because once you get your first job at a studio, you suddenly meet hundreds of artists, hundreds of professional artists just like you who want to work in the industry. And the nice thing about that, the benefit of that is once that job is done, and maybe the studio has to let go of the employees because they don't have more work or maybe they only have some work, people filter out to other studios. And when they do that, assuming you have been a good person to work with, your name will kind of be on their minds. And for me, how that happened was, I had a friend who a friend that I made at that job, went to a studio called Nlvana, which is a big studio in Toronto, still is. And that person knew me and Nel Vanna was looking for a background painter and I got a call. And that is kind of free natural networking that happens when you work in a studio. Now, I stayed in the studio system from 2004, and I think I left in 2013 or something like that. So almost ten years, I was in the studio system. And during that time, I really wasn't interested in freelance because I had the nine to five job, and I was doing art all day at work. I didn't feel the need to take on more But when it came time to part ways with the studio system, I did that because just it was kind of a natural flow because I had met so many people in almost ten years. I started getting freelance requests from other studios that I'd worked with before or, you know, people who knew me, you know, friend of a friend type stuff. I also started doing teaching stuff and getting jobs that way, too. I started realizing, Hey, maybe I could do this without the nine to five burden. Now, nine to five was fun for a while, but yeah, eventually, I'm like, I can do art at home. Maybe I could break into that personal freedom type thing. I used the context that I had at the time, landed some freelance work just from the word of mouth that had been organically developing. Then here I am today. 2024, I'm recording this more than ten years after that. I'm still freelancing today. I mean, unless something catastrophic happens, I don't ever plan to go back to the studio system, I much prefer the freelance thing. Now, a lot of students that I have met along my teaching years have been wanting to start as a freelancer. And while I think that is certainly possible, I definitely think it's harder because you won't have that organic networking going for you. So the question then is, how do you galvanize that? How do you meet people? You could do several things, but I think the best one, and this is a bit contentious, but in my opinion, this is just my opinion, of course, I think the best option is art conventions. Even if you are introverted person, which I am. Trust me. You might not know that by me talking to the camera, but I'm alone in a room right now. I gain energy when I'm alone. I think a lot of artists are like that. But at a art convention, you are surrounded with like minded people. Everyone there is kind of like you, at least at their core, they're interested in art and creating things, which attracts people together, and it's very easy to make friends at art conventions. You don't even have to table. You can just be an attendee. Or if you want to table and show your work, you'll find yourself getting a lot of feedback that way. And you'll also make friends that way with your table mats and maybe people who come up to your table to talk to you. And remember, professional studios often have a presence at art conventions as well. So not only will you be able to network with peers, but you'll also be able to meet potential employers. In fact, I got several jobs just last year. I was attending Lightbox, which is a popular art convention in LA or just near LA. It's in Pasadena, California. I got two different jobs from just that. And these are people I had never met before. People who found my work and followed up several months later, and I'm working for them today. I think that is a good way of getting out there if you don't have the studio experience, because the reality is if people know who you are and can put a face to the name, it's much more likely that they're going to think of you or remember you or consider you when they need something done. If they need some art done, if they meaning a client. If a client needs work done, the first thought they have is not, Oh, who's some random person I can find online. First question they have is, do I know anybody? Or does my friend, Jim know anybody? That is what the first thought is. I mean, I can't tell you how many times people have asked me, like Marco, do you know someone who could do this job? It happens all the time. Let's circle back to the idea of having a portfolio. That's the crux of this whole thing. Without a way to present your art, you'll never get hired anyway. A portfolio kind of has different forms. The main thing I think a lot of artists do today is put their work on social media, and you should absolutely do that. Put your work on whatever social media platform you feel comfortable with. And I think that it's a good idea for social media stuff to put sketches, finished work, studies, whatever it is you do as an artist, try and keep a presence on there that reminds people that, hey, I'm around doing work and people can look at an overall body of work that you do. However, that is only one type of way to present your work, and it's actually maybe not the best way when it comes to landing a job. That is because when you present your work to a client, you want to give them a very pre digested version of what you do. In other words, you want to curate your work to a client. A typical client, especially if it's like a studio or something, doesn't have time to go through two years of Instagram posts and determine what it is you're good at. You have to tell them with your portfolio, a curated portfolio, curated selection of works, what it is you're good at, what it is you want to do. That is material for a website. 16. Putting Yourself Out There, cont'd: Let's take a look now at my own website. This is makobc.com. I can't get any more clear and direct than that. I happen to be in the personal work section at the moment. One of the main things you see is that they are very large thumbnails that you don't even really need to click on to fully appreciate. I mean, sure, I could pick one and click on it, and there it is a bit larger. It's also nice to have these arrows for easy scrolling. But you don't have to do that. The paintings read at this size, and someone can look at my personal work and I think get a good sense for what I do. For example, I'm very interested in color, very interested in light, I like cartooness. But there's also elements of realism to it like in this one here and of course, you can click on it and see it in higher detail, but not super high. I don't want someone to be able to print this, but just enough that they can get a sense for what I do. And, it just doesn't feel onerous to have to scroll through all this. It's a very friendly experience. Maybe 30 paintings there. This many paintings that give a good sense for what I do, and that's it. Of course, this is like what 5%, maybe less of my overall output, way less if you consider all 20 plus years I've been doing this. But as a professional, this might be like 3% or 5% of my output. So it's just the strongest pieces or the pieces that you think best represent you. Now, if you go to the professional section, it's the exact same layout. But it's the exact same idea. You don't have to click necessarily, but it gives you a sense for clients I've worked for and different projects I've done. Also the different styles that personally, I feel presents a strength for me. I'm able to do more realistic work like this, and very traditional cartoon work like that, and also very much more painfully cartoon work like these ones here. And, you click on one of these, for instance, this is a book cover I did for the Jungle book, and you can scroll through some detail posts. I actually like the way that this is done. When I worked on I used WIC by the way to build my website. This was just one of the WIC templates. WIX is spelled W X and I still use it to this day. I really like it. The amount of interaction is minimal. Everything is here on one page. I really try and minimize the amount of clicks that a client would have to go through to get a sense for my work. Really only need to click on one thing, say, personal work, for example, and done. You can see it. I mean, if you count a second click being the click on the sidebar here to scroll, two clicks, and you get a sense for my work. Then if you're interested, you can click more. But minimize the clicks and maximize the amount of work that you show on a page. You know, I've got a few things here. This is I call this Finer things. This is kind of a joke on fine art. I've got a store where I have my premium classes, and you see a few more sections. Then I've got a clear contact section. And instead of having a form, I like to just put my e mail address right there. And yeah, Spam bots will scrape it, but I just deal with that. Google has a good junk mail filter. I like to put my e mail address there so people can type it in, e mail me directly, and of course, I've got my social links on here. L et's click now to my Instagram and compare it, because I do think they are very different things. Notice my Instagram is, yeah, you can definitely get a sense for thumbnails on this too, but Instagram crops things in a square, which is totally not conducive to artists because look at this. It's cropped it. Look at this one. Her face is cropped out. To my knowledge, there's no way of controlling that. Also, because Instagram doesn't keep the aspect ratio, everything is the same square. Feel like compositionally, it's very noisy. It's very difficult to get a sense for, for example, this painting here is totally cropped out. It's hard to get a sense for how to read anything because you can't control the framing. Whereas on my website, everything was framed in its original aspect ratio, which is why you could freely scroll through it without having to click on anything. Whereas on Instagram, especially if you're looking at this on a phone, these thumbnails are very small, as I'm sure we're all familiar with. You really do have to click on something to load it up and look at it. Instagram is good. You saying Instagram is a proxy for any social media. Kara is new now and I'm new on Cara, so I'll have to post more on there, but Facebook, art station, whatever it is you want to do. It's good for doing posts like this, announcing that I'm at Lightbox. I would never put this photo on my website. This is a very time sensitive post. And the same thing with stuff like this. Here's a little sketchbook sketch that I happen to do after Lightbox. I like to talk about it, little small little journal posts in Pasadena, had a great time at Lightbox. Here's a little goodbye sketch. I don't think this sketch is strong enough to put in my website portfolio. You know, I've done better sketches in my opinion, but it's a nice little proof of life post for an artist to say, Hey, I'm out here, doing my thing. And I do like the idea that you can combine little informal sketches like that with some professional work. This is work I did for Wizards of the Coast on Magic the Gathering. And it's nice that you can just have all this stuff. It is uncurated, meaning it's not the best for presentation. Because a client will look at this. Let's pretend you don't know who I am, and you're like, Well, k, Marco does this book cover of wrestlers, and then he's doing this plane air painting of California scene. That's cool that he can do that, but what am I hiring him for? I as the client have to do the work to determine if there's a proof of concept here and see, is Marco going to work for this job? That's just too much work. For most clients to do. I operate under the assumption that people have short attention spans. Unfortunately, I think that proves more true than false, especially today. So a website is a great way of pre digesting all this to borrow a phrase I used earlier, pre digest all this and only show a client exactly what it is you would like to be hired for. Now, it goes without saying your work has to be good as well. That's why you're taking this class. You want to improve your work. Unfortunately, just having your work up to Par, unless you are the best, that's not going to be enough. You need something to help separate you, especially today with tools like AI, which unfortunately allows even more people to enter art schools pumping out students every year. It's way more saturated and therefore competitive today than it was when I started. So that's a bit of an unfortunate piece of news, I'm afraid. But I think the core tenets of being hirable are still as applicable today as they were when I started 20 years ago, having good work and being able to do some kind of networking. Now, is it possible to network online? I think it is today, yes, way more than it was, again, 20 years ago. Today, you have communities, like discord, for example, I think it is probably the strongest one, at least as I record this here. And discord is nice because it's kind of like a way of getting your name out there and just meeting people. Being digital, it has a bit of a drawback and that people still don't know your face. I mean, putting a face to a name, I mean that literally. People know what you look like and what your voice sounds like, and they've talked to you in person. That is, I think will always be more valuable if you have both? That's ideal. Thankfully, art conventions are worldwide. No matter where you live, you're probably going to be able to find something nearby, even if you have to fly there. For me, when I go to art conventions, usually, I fly out there. I'm flying to the states most of the time. I want to go to some art conventions in Europe next year, for example, but you should be willing hopefully to save up some money, I think, to get to an art convention. Now that leads me to my next thing because I just mentioned money. Here's some advice. Again, this is just some advice, you can take it or leave it. Try not to put pressure on yourself to get a job by a certain date. Don't discard any current income and say, I'm going to quit my job, do art, and I'm giving myself ten months to get a job, don't do that. The art world, unfortunately, is volatile. It goes up and down. Studios and productions and clients are subject to all kinds of regular market forces. Investments are high, then investments are low. Like during the pandemic, investments were very high, and there was a lot of hiring going on on the freelance level. Then after the pandemic, some of those investments weren't paying off, so it went down. As I record this today in June of 2024, there is a market low right now, and I think everyone's feeling it. I was at Lightbox in October, and it was kind of just starting around then or was happening then anyway. And a lot of artists, even big names were saying it's kind of dry out there. But I've been through this before. It was dry when I first started as well, and then I've been through at least one cycle of kind of a boom and bust. So I have faith that it will come back. And those are powers beyond your control, right? So if you give yourself ten months to find a job, well, What if you can't do that and suddenly you've lost income for ten months? That's going to weigh on you, and as you probably know from this class, I'm big on positive mindset, and if you do things that may result in a self defeat, that kind of thing can chip away at your mentality and over time, you may become jaded to the whole thing. Don't put yourself in that position. If you have a job that gives you an income, I would really really try and keep it and try and summon some creative energy before or after that. That's what I did when I was a student, I had a maintenance job at a film studio. I was literally mopping floors, and that I would wake up at 6:00 to go to that job and I'd get home around 4:00 and after 4:00, 4-10 or whatever it is, I would do art. Now, I was younger and a bit more energetic then. I was like 20-years-old. But at that time, that worked out for me. I was able to summon that energy. Now, next piece of advice, you do not need to work on your art for hours and hours a day. It's great if you can summon the energy to do that. When I was younger, I was able to do that, for example, Today, things are a bit different for me. I've got a family, I've got two young kids, it's much harder to find the time to hunker down in this room and be creative. I reserve my nine to five days in here, but that's kind of taken up by work. When it comes to personal work, it's much harder to come by the time for that. However, you do not need to spend and you do not need to feel guilty if you cannot spend hours at a time on your own personal projects. I'd say as long as you can hit it for 30 minutes a day at a minimum, you're good. And when I say per day, like five days a week, four days a week, as long as you can put some momentum behind you, You're good. Even if it's 30 minutes an hour, 2 hours, that's great. To hours is great. Do not wait for big swathes of time to land in your lap and you'll say, Oh, once I have that time, I'm going to do that graphic novel. It's not going to happen. You got to do it 30 minutes a day. If that's all you can do, if you're a working parent, maybe, 30 minutes a day, you can probably find that time to squeeze into your day. That's how you get stuff done. That's how you grow. Growing and skill development, especially creatively is about momentum. You need that momentum behind you. Wind at your back, that's how you move forward. Being good at art and honing your ability to express your creative ideas, not a sprint. If you are truly in this, you need to be in it for the long haul, and the long haul is little bits per day. Maybe some days you can spend 3 hours on it, maybe sundays you can spend 10 hours on it. Maybe the next day, 30 minutes. Then maybe for two days you need a break. Breaks are great. It gives you time to think about what you're doing. In fact, these days, I find my best creative ideas, come when I'm not even in this room. This is my execution room. This is where I execute my ideas. A lot of the time, I'll go for a run or just hang out outside with my kids, and suddenly all these ideas start happening like, Oh, I could do this here and this here, and that's when I get my best stuff. Then whenever I can, I come in here and then I execute. Okay. Getting back to some actionable advice and finding work though. One thing you might want to do is appeal to an agent and apply for someone professional to represent you. This is Kid Shannon, and this is the agency that represented me for almost ten years, actually. I'm no longer with them today, but my relationship with them was great, and they actually landed me some of my bigger jobs like Wizards of the Coast, for example. An agent negotiates on your behalf, and as you can see on their website, they display all the artists work under their banner. You've got some nifty thumbnails here where a client could easily search through styles just by scrolling, if they see an artist they like, they can click obviously and look at more of their portfolio. So let me show you the portfolio I submitted to Kid Shannon that got me represented by them. Here's the PDF I sent them. It's 26 pages. You see you've just got contact information up there, that is no longer my phone number, by the way. I've got illustrations that just range from characters to environments, here's just a pure environment and here's a pure character. But most of them combine characters environments, like stuff like this. You can see that I'm only showing them the type of illustration that well, A, I think they would want to represent me with and B the type of illustration that I enjoy doing. It's notable, I think to talk about what's not here. For example, like life drawing is not here or photo studies are not in here. Those types of studies are the things you do to practice. I equate it to going to the gym to train for a sport. The thing you are ultimately doing is performing in your sport. The stuff you do in the gym is all preparatory. When you do life drawing studies or photo studies or any practice, that stuff benefits you as an artist. But the ultimate result you want to show a client or in this case, an agent, is the fruits of your labor. At the very end here, I allowed myself a couple pages of thumbnails. These aren't studies, these are still concept illustrations, but I use the section to cram in different moods, different color palettes, et cetera. Yeah, I cold e mailed them, meaning they didn't expect an e mail from me. I just e mailed them out of the blue, and I'll read you now the e mail I wrote to. Hello, Shannon Associates, LLC. My name is Marco Bucci. I'm an illustrator with experience ranging from picture books to animation and film design. I appreciate the quality of artists that Shannon Associates and Kid Shannon represent, and I would very much appreciate your consideration with regards to my work finding a home with your agency. My most recent project was illustrating a Disney Press picture book for Sheriff Kalis Wild West due out January 2015. Prior to that, my illustration work includes both American and UK covers for Lego's product catalog, Lucas Arts, Video game illustrations, as well as character and environment design for many animated TV productions in Toronto, Canada. Please find a PDF selection of my work attached to this e mail. Additionally, you can view my website at www.marcab.com. Thank you for your time and I hope to hear from you at your convenience. Yeah, that was my e mail, and they were interested in my work and representing me. But before they fully agreed to it, they wanted me to complete a test, a sample project brief that a client might provide. This was the illustration that resulted from that. Very similar to this class. It's two characters engaging in some narrative story. I imagined a spaghetti delivery duo, that was my own idea. I still want to produce a book of that, by the way. Maybe I'll do that one day. The agent really liked it. They did have a couple of revisions for me because at this point I had never worked in children's books before. They wanted me to clarify the characters and text. Prior to this, I had a lot of more trees and more brushtrokes behind the characters and behind the text. I just cleaned that up to make sure the characters and the text both read very clearly. Yet, they accepted the work and I was then on their website. I credit that agency with providing me many many jobs, but not only that, many contacts, whom I still do work for today. Those are the actions I took to further get myself into the industry. I hope this section has given you ideas of actions you can take. I guess one final closing tip here, I would not recommend putting out your portfolio to clients and agents, especially agents until you feel you have ten to 20 solid images that you fully believe optimally represent you. Agents specifically will categorize you quickly, and if you submit to them a haphazard portfolio or something that's not fully done, they will probably remember your name for the wrong reasons. So I don't recommend querying an agent until you have, again, about ten to 20 solid paintings that fully represent your capabilities. All right, that wraps it up for this section. Let's move on to some final final thoughts. 17. Final Thoughts: Congratulations. We've finished the class. I hope this class has helped you learn the importance of the fundamentals needed to work professionally as an artist. And I hope the class has given you the inspiration to keep at it. Keep progressing. Keep giving this your time because it is worth it. I'd like to take a quick moment to remind you that if you are struggling with any aspect of your art, drawing, painting, color, light, whatever, It's probably your fundamentals that are lacking, not the quality of your ideas. No matter what aspect of life you come from, you are going to bring with you all kinds of great ideas that are just waiting to be realized, where people falter is the fundamentals not being tuned enough to get your vision across properly or optimally. That's where this class comes in. I hope I've given you the tools to practice various fundamentals so that ultimately you can use them to express what's inside of you, and that you can do this in a professional way that will help perhaps garner work in the future. Here on Skillshare, we have a great platform for feedback. Please post your projects in the project gallery below. Doing that will help everybody, both you, me, and all the students. We can see what you did. You can see what other students have done, and that all swirls together and inspires people, and you'll also probably get great feedback from maybe even unexpected sources. Please post your work. We'd all love to see it. At this point, I think the last thing for me to say is goodbye, thank you, good luck and have fun. This is Marco Bucci signing off, and I'll see you in another class.