Transcripts
1. Intro Video: Hello, everyone. My name is Robert Marcelo. And welcome to my course. Care to design the power of the silhouette? In this course, you're gonna learn how to develop a character by first starting with the silhouette and probably wondering why would you start there? Well, it becomes easier to create variations, spark creativity and provide a pastor workflow. After we finished the silhouette, we're gonna pick one of those silhouettes and we're gonna start to refine it by sketching through the silhouette. I'll show you how to refine the inner shapes and forms and come up with various ideas all the while being very creative and exploring the potential Then we're gonna jump into adding values are character. This is the part where we try to round out the forms, had a little bit to picture and basically refined the ideas that we've established thus far . Now, the reason why this is such a good workflow is it allows you to just focus on the shape, texture of the form and getting all the three dimensional aspects and feel to the character in place. Then, after that's all done, we jump into the coloring aspect. This becomes much easier to accomplish, and it's a very minimalistic approach at this point. We've got all the values in place and we just start to paint over top, all utilizing the same layer minus a few correction layers at the end. A very easy workflow. And I think this is really great for anybody that kind of struggles to wrap their head around the painting process by just adding color to the canvas. And I'm gonna show you how this can actually be a nice segue way for you to get ready for that type of painting as well. So I'm very excited to be teaching these lessons. I hope you're excited to learn them. Let's get started.
2. L1 Silouette of the Body Warm Up: Okay, so I want to talk to you about using silhouettes for poses. So one of the things I like to do is actually start with the brush. That's got, ah, a bit of a flat edge. So if I go down with the brush, its wider I go over its dinner. Just a preference. It really doesn't matter. You can use any brush. If you are using a software like this, I'll make sure you got access to a brush like this. But again, use whatever you got markers, pencils. It doesn't matter. But the concept is that the reason why I like to even turn the opacity down is that I can overlap and get a certain darkness. Sometimes I'll do it all the way. Set the black as well, so just kind of play around this. But the main thing is that you start with just kind of sketching and getting an idea going . So let me let me start with line right down the middle, so this would be basically, you know, maybe the height of the character, whatever again. This is just something I like to do is I don't know if it's the way a lot of people might do it, but what I want to do is first go into it thinking of a concept. So are you might even just practice at first. Just any concept. Let's just do that. Let's warm up. So I'm just gonna do a character kind of standing there. I'm gonna get a neck upper torso. Uh, I'll just do a straight on shot of first on. The reason being is I do think it's important to just kind of warm up to anything you're doing. So this will be our little warm up. So there's aways. Who's a pelvic pelvis? Always a pelvic public bone. Pelvis is what I'm talking about there. And, you know, you might look at this and go Well, you know, I don't see the shapes good enough to do this yet, and that's okay. We we all kind of start somewhere, and then we you get better and we elaborate and things like that. The main thing is that you don't think about this being so refined and perfect. Okay, So get perfection right out of your mind. Just get the ball rolling and go with whatever. You're good. You know, where you're at good at or otherwise. Just do wherever you're at. And, uh, uh, you know, completes imposes. So that's the main thing. I'll be giving you tips on the way. I was saying, How toe do this a little bit better. You probably noticed that I'm doing like a more of a back bend in the outward curves. That's kind of like the lightning bolt thing that you see for figure drawing. And so there's just a character standing there, just like that. Not refined, Not too overly clean. Definitely not perfect by any stretch of the imagination. But there's our warm up post. So why is this important? Why even bother drawing silhouettes? Why not just draw character? You probably think, Why can draw pretty good? I don't need to do that. Well, I think I could drop her to get to, but it's not really the reasoning. It actually helps spark your imagination. I don't know why I couldn't really give you an answer to that, but I do know that it works because whenever I feel like my drawings, they're just coming out a bit too repetitive, bit too flat. I can try something like this. Now here's our basic starting point right when get rid of our our line here. And so what can we do to make this look like anything? It just doesn't look like much of anything now the fun and this is getting very imaginative with silhouette. A define herbal silhouette will give you a better character design. That's why it's so important. It's way. See, a lot of character designers do this. Uh, for instance, if I add certain attributes to his character, if I go like this, you might recognize the character. Maybe, maybe not. Eso what happens is a very define herbal silhouette helps you to relate. The character were actually very good at pinpointing the look of something by the silhouette. We can actually spot flaws so you can do little details like pouches on the side of the the hips. There, you know, kind of gauntlet armor pieces, obviously the character holding something, you know, you go like this, and also they're holding a you know, spear, something like that. You know, there's a lot you can convey with that silhouette, so it really starts to speed up your process and allow you to express a lot of ideas on the page rather quickly, and it becomes very fun to add to that. And I developed something else. So we can, you know, if we can pointed ears. Maybe they're elf type warrior or something. We could have Ah, Spike coming off the top. Or maybe you know, some hair in a kind of ponytail fashion flowing off so side. Whatever you can imagine. You see, it's really quick to do that. So there's our little warm up polls. It's glad and get this out of the way or off to the side. And this is our kind of starting point, so let's go ahead and keep trying to develop some ideas.
3. L2 Silouette of the Body Big Brute: Okay, so for this next one, let's try to go into it with a little bit more of an idea and a concept. So I'm thinking like this bigger kind of ogre or barbarian wrote Wide Rolla, kind of hulking brute holding an ax. Okay, so just well, let the rest of it be imaginative and develop it as we go Eso again. We can kind of define a little bit of a height. You could put like a line across here, straight line down straw. It doesn't have to be perfect. And so there's the height of our character that's going to tighten up on this a bit. So again, I'll start with the head. But you can really start wherever you want, but this helps me to gauge the overall height. I'm gonna give him Ah, smaller head because I want to give him this. Ah, bigger body. I also want to try to angle the character. So if I if I don't do any edges on the side of the head, I kind of perceive that this character is looking forward. And then as I work out, I'll get the you know, the tourists on place and I'm gonna go ahead and angle this so I kind of sketches in place . And I think after you become more confident, you don't even need Teoh sketches much like I'm doing here. But I want to make this better and more understandable for beginners. So there's our tour, so we can definitely add some mass onto this character as we go, and then we'll do a wide stance. But we'll have one leg come down. Someone established the links first. So kind of like the skeletal structure, in a sense. And then I'll have one late kind of back a little bit, since that makes a little bit more of an interesting kind of stance, you know? But the chest bowed out. We'll go ahead and hide one arm, you know, we'll get some of that shoulder and there, but we're gonna bring that arm from behind the torso. So this is a It's a good one to pay attention to, because what happens is a lot of artists will just draw everything out to the side like our first example. So this is a good way to kind of fight that are, you know, so we can have this arm in plain view. But before we get too far, let's think about where he's holding this. This ax, is he holding it? You know, after aside, like this, uh, you know, kind of play around some ideas he holding out this way just off to the side. And it could be this big kind of heavy acts. Let's do that. We can also, you know, play around this and adjust it. I'm gonna give him this little arguing, these little stumpy arms, because I really wanna show the mass of the musculature. You know, he's a wider build, so I'm gonna make sure to shorten these portions, given big, big hands. So just like that, we've got an idea in place. So maybe the thumb, it's right here fingers, and obviously, you're gonna fill this in. But I like to kind of draw it in a little bit and then fill it in. I don't know. Something about it just helps me warm up to the idea a little bit. It's like that he's holding this big nose, Big Warhammer. Someone make it with, like, a really big post and just a huge kind of barbaric acts of some kind. I'll just start with a very primitive shape and then elaborate. I just want to show you the importance of that. So again, you know, really preconceived notion of than what we talked about moment ago for this type of character. Your point here, maybe a bit of a spike at the bottom. That might be kind of neat, Your small at the top. You could elaborate on this spike and give it a bit more of a dimensional decorative kind of here at the top. And I'm already thinking in my head, like, you know, maybe there's a Jewell piece of whatever, but that's interior details, so I'm not gonna worry about that. But again, the ideas of already already starting to present themselves and that's what's so fun about this. So we're gonna bring this hour giving these big traps trapezius muscles coming down like that. He's got that big bicep on the side. We're going to see a little bit of tries up. And keep in mind if if this doesn't make sense to you when you look at the shapes of the anatomy, basically, it just means you need to study anatomy, mawr and it even, you know, break down some on you. When you see a cool pose, break it down into a silhouette so that you can start to notice these little details that I'm talking about. So these big, you know, pick legs here again, just kind of getting the base shape in there. Philip Don, there is that, uh, foot right there. Fill that in at the knee here. What? That stands like one legs kind of just back a little bit and actually kind of find the the kneecap, and then the foot's gonna line up with that soas faras positioning. Now the other thing is trying toe, really? Make sure that foot right here is lower. I think this is a little too even, but what it does kind of show is that were just, you know, mawr eye level with the character. So based upon you know, where the feet land, it's going really dictate to the viewer where they're at in respect to the character. So, just like that, we've got a base shaped kind of work from and from here, you know, we just want toe trick him out. We want to give him some detail on some character, and maybe we shrink the head and make the body look bigger, things like that. But what we can do is start to think about what kind of character is this. Do they have, like some furry kind of, uh, boots or whatever? It's always kind of fun. You can paint that in later. So throwing some for just to the edges to the silhouette. And then maybe he's got this one big, asymmetrical, uh, design off to the shoulder piece. I don't like that one. Let's try it again. Try to be creative, you know. And the thing is, here is you really do want to try to experiment because it's so quick to change the shape. It's just a really great way to develop these concepts so fast and again. If the if he silhouette reads is, is being pretty interesting, the chances are the rest of it's gonna work so much better. That's that's been my, you know, experience with it anyways. So a lot of fun and what you could do to is take thes and cut into these shapes. So I have to get so much this on here. You'll see that I'll start to race back, and I'm just jumping to my translucent brush. When I do that, it's the same exact brush. But ah, cut into these shapes and try to make even mawr, you know, fun details or whatever. I just can't see kind of Ah, almost sculpting is the way I look at it whenever I do. This feels a lot more like sculpting than drawing, and you can leave like little negative space details. But I don't know. I think it's almost more fun to fill it in. And then just kind of remember the ideas that yet almost thinking these two spikes off the side be kind of neat. Now, keep in mind, too. If you are working digitally, take advantage of everything there. You can just take man C Command V Edit transformed flip horizontal So you'll see me take little shortcuts like that when I can even still managed to make him cricket, which is this awesome and enter there and then remembered hit command, eat emerged down or just covered with a layer. Where is it? Merge with layer below command E. So just like that, we're starting to get pretty interesting silhouette of this barbarian. You can kind of start to see that this would be a pretty imposing character that could deal some damage. It is a big, brooding Bahamas, you know. He's got some powerful limbs. Get this big, uh, or hammer these holding up with ease, so it just exudes power. You know, it's just shows that he would be somebody that you wouldn't want to mess with. And that's what we want. Like whenever you're trying to develop these ideas for a client, you want to be able to convey this information in the silhouette. Show him these rough sketches you'd probably putting to show him the silhouettes. I mean, some clients might want to see it, but generally you'll take it to the next level and at least do a ah value study or quick sketch through this, and we'll be doing that next. But But hopefully you can see that it just starts to give you more ideas. I kind of want to continue that sash or whatever to the one side, and even if you only get it on one side, it still holds and retains the information. There's a lot of times I'll come back to a silhouette sketch like this and have no problem perceiving the ideas and remembering the ideas. And you think that would be pretty hard because it's just this blacked and still wet. I could be easily forgettable or something, and it's quite the opposite. It pertains a lot of that, and often times you might come back and even have some new, inventive ideas when doing this. So just like this, I like to fill it in. So you just fill it in and I get If I can think of any other details, I'll add those you know, he could be holding something in this hand. Um, not sure what may be. There's some kind of chain link or something, so you could quickly get in there and do some chain links. Maybe that's attached to another. You know, like a weapon of some kind of enchanted something or other. It's like I'm not working from a script here, so it's like it could be anything, but let's just say it's ah kind of this spiked ball since he's already get these spikes going on. Kind of looks like an apple when we run that out a bit more. So he's got these spikes here, something like this. I don't know if that's too much. Now, keep in mind. A lot of times I will veto certain ideas. You know, it's like for now, it's all cool and I'll throw it in there and maybe I keep it. Maybe you don't, but it's better to explore the ideas at this stage. Uh, then not, you know, just be okay with it. Um, you could have, like, a little bit of detail off the arm piece here. So whatever, just again play around these concepts. Even these minute details in the silhouette can do a lot later. So we're just kind of breaking up the shape and not allowing it to look too plain. I, you know, another dynamic is his hair. Maybe there's, you know, some hair kind of blowing off to the side. So you see it just like that. We're able to get a concept down that's got some pretty rich details, You know, some some Segway information. I feel like the handle here could be a bit more interesting. So widen out the the bottom here again. Some little studs or shapes off to the side. Maybe this is wider to the part where it connects to the, uh, the axe head. And there you go. So there's are there next silhouettes little bit rough. I could probably spend some time cleaning that up Now. The other thing that I want to make sure to mention real quick before we move on to the next example is that the other thing that's really powerful about this is being able to quickly edit what's here. So you've heard me talk about, you know, using a translucent brushing, cutting into it, which is great. You could even get some little blades of grass here. Just kind of give him some positioning to the ground there. But they wanted to shrink that are more like I mentioned about the head. You know, you got to remember that every time you adjust the head size, it makes the body look bigger so we could take that and play route. That concept, given a little tiny head and again I'd probably give it a little bit of a raise their and again, it's gonna make the body comparatively look larger. So that's another fun little technique to Dio so moving an arm, you know, you could grab probably this arm with the whole acts and everything, and you could play around with that. You could cut it, pace it back into place, and you could rotate it and see if you get something better. So kind of the neat thing about working with silhouettes is so fast to do that. And sometimes it will help you spark. Ah, better idea. And then you can jump back and forth and see you know which one appeals to more. I almost like I want a bit better. Remember to check them from a distance and also flip them just like that. No, just that part, though. Put that back. Come and eat, emerge and transform Flip, horizontal. And generally, what this will do is help you spot. You know, the weirdness in the polls like that are to the back. Looks a bit strange there, but it's still doable. I'm still going to run with this. I'm going to put that back. So there we go. So there's our next example. Let's head over to the following lesson and create another example and keep exploring the power of silhouettes.
4. L3 Silouette of the Body Female Warrior: all right, So it's going to try another one where we'll start with the height. So right was to align here, line here and let's go for a female character that has some things coming off the side to maybe some big blades or something, I'm kind of picturing, you know, cool stands, looking off to one side. So let's try that. So to start the head, I will have the torso going. This way, we'll start the torso, get a bell shape in there for the female form like that. So I'm gonna have it where she's actually looking back this way so I could get a little bit of that brow. I don't know if the nose that would probably make it look like her head's tilted too far back, so just get the cheek in the chin. We'll elaborate with the hair, so we don't want to make it look like she's stretched too far back. Close like that. Keep in mind, you might need toe scale the brush down. Now notice to him. I'm going straight to black hair. You don't have to do this. I just want to show you, you know, a multitude of ways to do everything that we're doing here and something I think starts toe happen naturally is as you build confidence with it, you start wanting more speed, and the speed is gonna be directly related to going right to black. But will you still cut into these shapes and use a little bit of negative space as well? So I like this brush, but often have, Ah, a little bit more of a tricky time getting the curves the way that I want. So I've the one like here can kind of get back, Ben. See, I'm missing my mark there a little bit. I'm sorry. Anthony's their foot out this way. Okay, So what I'm picturing with this character again, I'm gonna have the arm kind of tucked back, kind of coming out to the side and on this side, thinking she's just cut the arm down and hand would actually be higher up. Probably about here, But again, we're probably maneuver that if we have to, But she's holding. Ah, big blade of some kind. Make sure let's bring it out this way like that. Now, another thing that you can dio I've seen a lot of artists employed this technique, and again, it probably requires a little bit more confidence in what you're doing. But I'll show you real quick. Actually, it's Quinn. Go back. It's about here. And sometimes it just makes sense to grab your selection tools again. If you're comfortable doing this, if you're not, no big deal. But sometimes you can drop in a shape like that, and then you can elaborate from the shape. So try to take nothing off the table, try a little bit of everything. I think that's how you find your comfort zone in your style. Bl roll this for a minute. Still not quite the way I wanted to look, but we'll see what we get as we go here. We can get that anatomy in there family way too much length on the arm here. But we'll correct that as we go way too big of an arm there. It's going to correct that. No gonna grab right up to here, okay? And you see right there, we're gonna lose that hand now based on the position. So I'm just gonna use a little bit of spacing. There's a chisel that out taking a little bit of the air poking out here. Give this kind of messy, and I'm a style here. I think you know, there are hair holding another plater sort of some kind. Yeah, I think she looks pretty deadly at this point. Squint, Flip the work check for any inconsistencies and weirdness in the polls. I think that's all right. I think the weirdest things here here. But I kind of wanted to have this fun, funky vibe to us and mind this and, you know, we're going elaborate as we detail this. So some of this isn't gonna make it to be and result when we do this type of stuff. But the important thing is that we explore ideas more quickly and more energetically. So again, thinking about the gesture of the pose, the energy and the vibe, the mood did it conveys things like that, you know, with character design. It's very much about the, um, the back story. You know, this character has to have enough energy and, uh, storyline to the design of it to where you can identify and you can relate and enjoy that character. The most successful character concepts or ones that are just, you know, fun. And they have, Ah, they have some personality so we probably don't need lying on both sides of the hand. We could get away with just the line on the bottom and like, get away from that. It's kind of amazing how much you could read into something. Actually, let's go and fill that in. And then I use the negative line. Just get in a bit of a hand shape, actually, Just bring the health of it back here. Some like that'll be fine. You heard of that and against that's already doing that. We can get into doing a little bit more shape into the design character. And let's go ahead and just figure out some more little details because right now they're just too plain the sword to cool the hair has some character, but other than that, she's just kind of playing. So let's go ahead and take this a step further. And let's give her some jewelry. A little shoulder, upper arm, plate of some kind armor there in the arm when that out on a almost looking like some kind of I'm necessarily keep but something that comes off the shoulders and weaves down. So maybe a ribbon of some kind. It just kind of flows there at another dynamic to the character so much again. The reason being is that I just feel like she looks a little too boring. So something like this immediately adds a bit more flair. They begin its phone for, ah, action sequences. Gets to ribbon would be kind of flat to the one. And we'll just leaving the points. I think that looks kind of cool. And then ah, you know more in the my heels gauntlets her Sorry boots, taking my terminology right here, folks. Also my bat. I don't know. I just feel like ponytail, but maybe not. Let's just try it. It's so quick to take it away. So if this doesn't work well, get her out of there. Yeah, I picked that school. Okay, so what else? Something here. Maybe she's got another weapon coming off her back here. Ready to go is a is a backup in case she loses her first Teoh blades there So much that on Let's even continue some of the details here. So we could have ah, some of our clothing kind of silhouetted out there, marked in here. I should say, just like that, we have a little bit more of a detailed silhouette, so it's going to shrink this down, see if it's a keeper. You know, like it's got a little bit more of a cartoon, kind of feel with the proportions. But that could be fun. So we're going to keep that one. So now that shows you one, That's ah, you know, starting with black and then using a little bit of negative space or white essentially to convey more of the details. So let's go and do one more because you really want to explore lots of these ideas, and then you're gonna find one that you just really want to add to. For me, it's probably that warrior guy in the middle. He just he just looks fun, like I could do a lot to that, and maybe we'll detail couple of him. But let's go ahead and head over to the next lesson. Create one more character and see what we come up with.
5. L4 Silouette of the Body Creepy Robot: Okay, So for this next one, I want to show you that you can really be inventive with these concepts. And also, you can kind of almost picked different character types and different style types, so you could do something very cartoony. Anime, American comics character designed for game are all these things can utilize this technique . So what I want to do here is I was thinking of like, a little kind of kooky looking a little robot. Dude, I kind of like doing that every now and then. So I'm gonna have, like, this robot, that's kind of hunched over something to start with, just kind of this gesture at first and, um, have these weird kind of legs that attached to the side and come out something like this. So there's definitely a lot more freedom here. In fact, I don't even have to go with this traditional or typical way the legs would attach because it's a robot character. Uh, go like this will have, like, a kind of looks like a a torso like this and the arms attached here in one arm, way over here, and maybe his arms. I don't know. It's try something where they come out, they're coming forward like this. He's got this hands kind of pointing down in these Ah, robot like fingers like this. We'll just give them fingers on its side. So, you see, I'm just trying to think outside of the box here. It looks a bit creepy at first, but But now, as we start to refine this, I want to show you how we can make this look like a robot, because right now, it just kind of looks like a creepy stick person. No. So how do we do that? How we make this read like it's a robot. Well, without doing too much of that negative line drawing, we can basically just show the way the parts inter sector connect. So, for instance, we have, like, a thin part coming over kind of rounded part with the put over kind of a gear look. But something that looks, you know, like it rotates and moves around satirically, I saying that right. Spiritually, I don't know, like, uh, it orbits, rotates around this way, is trying to say whatever word I need to use right there. Preemie cso than one light comes down So again, we repeat that aside, who do these kind of spherical shapes his connection points. And then I would see one quick thing is, you know, maybe a wire something, something coming down that always makes it look a bit more technical. Techie and, uh, just kind of keep elaborating. We'll have some feet that kind of come out. He's got these kind of funky toes in the front, maybe one for balance back here. You see, I'm just really spitballing just developing the concept as I go. But that's what's kind of so fun about this and what so gets a creative gear's going because it's so easy to just drop the ideas in and and Bella show him and shift OEM and have fun with it. And yeah, whenever I find myself really struggling with concepts, um, I think I've already mentioned, like if I'm struggling to draw something, I'll go back to this idea and it generally kind of free something up. It's kind of neat how that works, but so, you know, I think that as artists, we have to really try just a multitude of work flows and see what you know what resonates with us. What really sticks with this and becomes our style or our process even Maybe not just our style, but our process has these big shoulder pieces again. Just kind of throwing some some angles and some different bumps here to make it more interesting. And maybe another little wire really taken advantage of the wire thing to make sure it looks like a robot. Always hands in here, her robot hands, whatever these are. I'm trying to put like a little bump each connection point. This is like starting to read like a robot. I don't wanna mess with too many sharp points. Remember that to that. Sharp points generally comply. Danger. Right? So if you want to make something look mawr dangerous, just give it all these little sharp points. We want to make it fun and friendly. You're gonna make it round and soft looking and you know it's it I think of, you know, Teddy bear or something You wouldn't be afraid of a teddy bear, will hopefully Not sure. Some people are so just like that. We've got what I think. And my imagination looks like a very threatening robot that luckily can't chase you. I don't think this thing could run in any high speed. So we're lucky there. But if it catches you, it could be a problem. And we're going these two little creepy eyes that helps to add to the creepiness along with a little downturned mouth. Yeah, he looks like a bad guy. We could, you know, again use negative shapes if we want to, Like, add to the, you know, techie kind of feel that I keep saying techie, but detail of, ah, robot like shapes with that petechiae. I don't know. Yeah, just like that. We've got our little robot dude. So again, this is a very fun exploration of ideas. It should be anyways. And then what happens is like I kind of mentioned Once you get so many of these, you really start to be able to combine them. In fact, you could even take one. I don't know if I'll be ableto get anything out of this guy, but we'll try. Make a copy of them, and you could immediately add, you know, obviously an extra arm, extra settle legs, whatever you want to do there. But we could take that. Let's just do that Let's just grab in arm. But sometimes you're going overlap. These just to see if a new shape pops out. So that's another fun way to explore the ideas you can. You can flip them back and forth and try it. Just think of a war shack that straight. So try it out. Sutra get. Maybe he's got to two robot bodies, one stacked on top, each other. I don't know where it's a little much, and then it's going to take one of these arms now because that's the one that makes the most sense to me. Couldn't pace that that over here. Were we given another arm pretty much anywhere since it's ah, robot guy, but probably around the shape and the way that it comes off the body. There another one of those, actually, what's going to bring that up if their conflicting too much as faras the position that it kind of throws it off? But what we could do is put it up here and then add another, another connection point bills that's going to get that emerge. This one down with Command E is that and let's just copy this one will be easier. C Command v Move tour again. Let's resize it so it doesn't look too overly repetitive. We could do that, and just so we don't look like we're too lazy and we immediately But with the first thing we could get done, it's going to shift their hand as well. We're not lazy, right? Let's go down Well, more moving over. Yeah, I like that better. He's now more dangerous and probably more clumsy, but that's part of the fun of it. So there you go. There's some different concepts just with silhouettes. And, you know, we're gonna explore these further we're gonna detail. He's out a bit and stuff like that. We're gonna talk about a variety of things, but remember, you can do this with any aspect and any component of your work. I'm gonna show you some examples of doing it for just the heads and things like that. But it could be arms that can be parts to the greater whole. Just really allow yourself to practices, because if you're anything like me, you're going to find great value and where you're able to take this after developing it. So with that, let's finish up here and head on to our next lesson.
6. L5 Sketching Over Our Silhouette: Okay, so now I want to develop more into the silhouette. So I tightened up some of the edges, but still pretty rough. But the thing I want to show you is this gonna be kind of a neat way to develop the ideas even further now. So what I wanna do is make sure this is all pretty much set the black. I was kind of fill that in one last time, and then I'm gonna switch it to white. So that breast has got a horrible Hagel badge, doesn't it? To fix that later. So it s so so basically, the the silhouette gives us the confinement of the perimeter of our shape so we can't go outside of their. And now what we can do is we can actually just draw inside this area. So I find this to be a pretty fun way to create. So there's, you know, a lot of artists will devalue studies and we'll talk about that as well. But then this is kind of a neat way to just start Teoh, you know, connect the dots essentially. So we've got our silhouette there, but it's like, you know, I think this helps If you're an artist that maybe can't see the interior of the shapes, I want to again give you lots of different ways to figure this stuff out. Because ultimately, I think that's what it boils down to. When you figure out what works for you, you kind of level up in your ability and you all suddenly feel like you're drawing better when in reality, I mean, maybe our. But the big reality of it is that you start to feel more comfortable because you found something that works for you. So your ideas flourish in that situation. So what I'm gonna do here, just kind of sketch, But again, I don't have to worry about the outside edge. I'm gonna take details like these studs right here, and I'm gonna bring those to the inside. So it's just a matter of, like, using, you know, not just leaving all the information on the civil wet that's there, but also, you know, remembering to make it make sense as it comes inside the civil war. So again, you know, using the same shapes inside this area. Newsome still trying to figure out what I want to see their the shape that kind of weird looking, but we'll figure it out so, you know, scribble a lot. I always stressed the importance of scribbling like It's just it's where ideas happened. I feel anyways. So you get in some of the anatomy what you know about anatomy. If you don't know, Not a lot about anatomy, just kind of, you know, put in what you do know. The main thing is to be creative regardless. So don't let you at a certain area in the work and you don't really understand it. Don't let it stifle your creativity. Just put something in there, make some marks and then come back with some studies. So even the greatest artists forget certain parts of the body. It's pretty complex subject, so just don't worry too much about it. You know, feel free to throw in shapes like, you know, maybe a a centre designer, Jewell or something on the belt here, uh, again, experiment the stage. So the silhouette was just to get us some ideas going and then to allow us to do this part with more confidence. And again, you could do this with straight to value, and I get really good at that, or you can sketch like this and then paint through. So show you always to get this done. Just like that. Droppings, anatomy or texture for this ah free kind of boot area. If something's not right with silhouette, as I add this in Aiken, jump back and forth like one of the things I'm noticing here that I didn't incorporate. I want Thies, this material that looked like a beat up kind of leather or something. So for that to happen, we need to change that several letters. I go so I might take this. Unlike transparency, make sure I'm on a salad, brush full capacity and then I'll just jump in here. And you said small bumps and I could do this. I could sketching in first on the inside of it and then kind of correspond with these little bumps. But it's pretty easy and leathers pretty random, obviously, like you could just really put these where you need to. I mean, there's obviously Maurin areas where you know there's a transition from like the foot to the ankle, you know, But at the same time, you can really kind of go crazy with the the folds that you get in leather or whatever material that says something like letter. But it basically you can kind of just place these randomly so I will still sculpt the work as I go and then, you know, clean up little inconsistencies on the outside as well. I'm here, so I'm always kind of tweaking it. See that we're bumped from the brush there. I'll fix that that little mark of grass right there and again. Just remember to if you're working the same way, a lot of transparency go back to your cell. A brush or your pencil brush keeps catching. So what The's rankles? I can now kind of bring this information into the leg. I also need to figure out if this is in front of or behind. I want to say it's in front of Blake. Somebody throw somebody spikes and they're real quick. It's a pretty random second. Just play around that you can also pick apart which designs come into the the shape. Maybe some devil, very that up a bit much a little triangles. Basically, as they get towards the middle, they're gonna be more stout or shortened up. So as they go to the outside, they're gonna be more elongated and more abrupt in the middle and probably texturizing that a lot too. I can illustrate the chain links a bit better. You can also drop in little bits of shadow. It just depends on whatever style you're going for. But I kind of look at this like, this is the the lead up into the value or paint that I'm gonna dio. So none of this is wasted information. Basically, I just have to throwing these details, test out some ideas, See if I liked this character concept and then from here I can paint through this, especially working digitally. You can just use, multiply and screen modes different. Different blending modes are called combined modes in this program, and you can really work up over top of this so none of this gets wasted on. I actually like using the rough sketch inside the illustration anyways, because I can. I think that leg needs come up more there. I can blended in. I can use. It is texture. So that's why you don't see me worrying too much about having insanely clean lines at this stage because I know that I could just blend this in really easily. The other thing is, is that because I'm working this way where it's a lot transparent layer, I can distort the line, work with this so everything is gonna move proportionately. So let's say if we go to words it out here, we got to define a selection for, say, we want to modify the arm here, for instance. I can crab this area I can go to. I believe it's a mess. Transformation tell I don't use it a whole lot, but it's right there and I can maneuver this and it's gonna move the line work and the like transparency all together. It's a very effective way when you need to make edits I. I'll be honest. A lot of times I'll just change the shape it's so quick to do and then re sketch in. But that could be really effective for making quick adjustments and just remember the like your pixels again. So I need to figure out the shape of this kind of shoulder piece. But these like studs kind of protruding off studs bike something like that, you know, figure out some thickness and some, uh, designed to it. There's a texture to this area, Andy. And being very rough with it. Just trying to get some ideas going here. We gotta figure out the position of the chest house. Probably the trickiest part, because again, we're in the very inside of the silhouette. What are we related to? So the first thing I would do is get a bit of center line in there, at least for drawing. Anyways, I probably do it even for value studies, but I want to know where my center is, and then I can generally work from there pretty well. It's a very wide character, and I feel like I need to again change the shape over here. So you're going to see me keep doing this now? There's no line over here yet, so I'm just gonna add some way pain right there, like it back and re select black. All right, now what? This care to have very squared off head looking ready camera. I think these will be kind of just coming off the back. Almost. I'm not gonna draw big shoulder piece. I want him to have some real asymmetrical kind of look to him. I still feel like you need to have more on the LAT. He's just such a wide character, and I've got the chest so low, so probably adjust that. But the other thing is you could just simply hit hex and paint back. Now that works better once you're kind of almost thinking the work. But you can move really fast with just flipping these two colors and drawing with white essentially, and it also works for the softer race. So let's say we get to the face or something and we start wanting to really refine details because fair wear that I might get something exactly the way I want first time out. So what I might Dio is drawn some shapes. I don't have this kind of wild looking helmet designed the old mean mug like this. I think these having some kind of designed to him as well. So we'll say something like this. But say I'm still up in the air about Look, I'm still trying to figure this out. How again? The neat thing about this is you can just paint with white as a has a soft airbrush with you know, getting this being locked and you could just basically like a soft race. And then just keep going back and forth and redefining your ideas, your concepts until you could just, you know, just what you're looking for. So just remember that that it's, ah, that it's pretty easy, Teoh. Just keep correcting this so you don't settle on something too fast because you're still exploring ideas. Yes, you've got the silhouette in place, and you've got a pretty good idea what this character is all about. The same time. There's still a lot of interior shapes to explore, so allow yourself to do that. Don't don't feel backed into a corner because there's lots and lots of ways toe edit, or at least ah, a few very important ones. And that would be the soft Tories and redraw method. Just play around their shapes. Let's keep going until you, you know, explore new shapes to figure it out. But I'm kind of liking the way this is going to could probably tell, since I'm not changing it a lot. But, um, I kind of like the vibe that this character is giving looks pretty, pretty dominant, pretty Alfa Male. That's what I was going for strong and imposing. Um So what I'll do now is just you keep sketching through, and I like to do a quick pass over everything so that I don't get too caught up in the one area. Uh, the reason being is I've worked professionally long enough to know that if you do that, you might spend too much time on a bad idea. So what happens is it's usually best to, you know, kind of maneuver around and give everything a once over, especially if you're working on a project and you have to appease other people. They might ask you for an update. Well, if you're detail injustice arm, it's gonna be a pretty embarrassing update like here's a big place. So what with a very detailed arm. So you have to be careful of that, mindful that so just, uh, be aware that basically Okay, So let's go and stop here and head over to the next lesson and continue to refine this sketch
7. L6 Sketching Over Our Silhouette: okay, so I will continue to refine our sketch, make sure to curl the fingers. It's really easy to want to draw them rectangular and side by side, and that's just never looks good. There's only a few artists I've ever seen Weaken draw extremely straight lined fingers, and it somehow works. I can't do it. I have to try to make those curve around and around the knuckles. And I heard another artist say one time when drawing fingers just draw like little interlocking peanut shapes. So you get that little kind of bumper and in our liking bones, really. But he described him as peanut shaped like this. It made sense that kind of stuck with me. So it's funny how those little tips you get from other artists resonate with you and become part of your thought process as you do this, still don't know what I want to do here. This might be just anatomy, because again, I really like asymmetrical attributes. Plus, it makes my life a lot easier, because I don't have to match things up. Just sound crazy, but I actually think it looks better. It just coincides with my laziness, all right, So let's say something like that texture on the hilt or handle different shapes here just to kind of explore some ideas. Sure, if I like that, but we'll see. So there we go. So we've got kind of this once over things that I can look at now, not There's some design in here and I could say, OK, what do I really want to change about this character of the shape, this massive monster? I do want to add even more information to the back here. I just feel like he's gonna be this huge character and he's gonna have this lab. Just it is like, really, really wide. And so I feel like that's gotta be adjusted. Or I need to adjust other proportions, like moving the chest in the center of the sternum, there whatever, and move that over and out. So that might have to happen as well, because I don't feel like it can add any more to the back here. It's getting a little bit extreme, but little things like that. So I also feel like the leg he's to come out. The anatomy here is being much wider, so hopefully you could see, just because you draw the so what doesn't mean that it's, you know, every part of it's a winner, but it can be a very great way to get ideas on the page rather quickly on really explore different character concepts. I absolutely love it. So what we're gonna do now is head over to the next lesson. Okay? So we can continue to refine this and again. We can soft to race this in a way by just painting and white. Um, thanks. See you. Make sure that the transparency set pinning and white and that essentially be like a soft race. Push all this information back. Now, keep in mind this is really the way that you're going. Approach it more or less for painting. Regardless, you at some point you're gonna want to add some color. And that's where keeping this intact works. If not, if you just wanted to turn this into a sketch, you could turn this off, keep soft, erasing and redrawing on. Then said it to multiply because it's basically just gonna turn into a line drawing at that point. Um, so whatever you're after, there's there's ways to do it. But in this case, I'm still trying to preserve the edge. Eso while cleaning up is I go eso now withdrawing inside of here again. I just want to keep refining. These ideas can change any shapes is need be a Most pictures like these air a bit more random than just clean spikes. They've even try a random edge almost like, uh, teeth from, you know, different PC's defeated something like that. It's fun to think about the You know, the idea is behind all of this, not just simply drawing whatever you think looks cool or definitely not. Whatever you just think you can draw well, that's probably the biggest problem that you can fall into is drawing things you just know you can draw so you don't try anything new. And it's actually one of the reasons why I really like this way of creating, because the silhouette is so quick and so creative, essentially, and then you you kind of figure it out from there. So it helps you break out of that mental rot of drawing. You know, things that you just always draw because you're confident with the manure, you know you can do well with, um I think that's when about when we stopped growing. So it's ah, you want to be careful of that. So trying to figure out how I want this piece of things, I want this to come over another material and then, you know, maybe a strap or a band like this and then some, uh, cloth material. Some like that anyways and then maybe a bigger ridge right here again. I'm just working into all these forms and trying to make sure they make sense What I want to see. Well, I'm kind of stretched material across there should be good and something else I noticed his arm just doesn't feel nowhere large enough as I study the character size proportions. I just feel like this lake still needs to come out. This arm does. So I'm gonna take this and just basically distort this into place. So neat thing about arms and legs and a connection points. It's pretty easy to just grab the next segmented area. If the character is segmented, man next command be command shift T to get a distort and then grab each one of these points and really wide it out. Also my pap. I said OK, and I'll just connect this and clean up that edge at the same time. So you see, all while we do this, we're getting more crisp artwork and just making corrections as we go. Yeah, I like that better. I just feel like especially this arm looks so large, by comparison, Brings try, step out. Kind of overly actually going to bring it up. Open out. May it bring this house more as well. We had to compensate for this material that would be over this massive arms. We got to make sure that it looks like it would fit that it would go over that area, something like that. And remember to lock that again. Okay, so a lot of people might not, you know, really value this type of process because it does have steps. And, you know, a lot of times we needed steps more that you could mess up and get wrong. But again, if you feel like you're just not getting as much creativity in your design, I really recommend exploring this. And that's where I found it to be the most helpful of me organic eggs and clean up some of these sketchy lines, but I'll end up this using these Anyways, I'm not a big deal, and I feel like the chest is still a bit weird. Um, let me try to fix that. And also, there's not really any information they're like, Is he just walking around the shirt off? You know, I always feel like that's just not a great design, right? Like, no matter how tough somebody is of their warrior, they probably need some pretty effective armour. So him walking around shirtless means he's either pretty done tough, which would make you wonder why he needs anything else. Um, or he's just Ah, just a big reckless I don't know. Maybe he just doesn't care. But, um, But, you know, what we could do here is make this where it is a chest plate, really easily by making it a shiny surface. So another little cheat there could just be a a form fitting or ah, casted her molded or whatever it is. Uh, but it's made. Reminds me of Sir Lancelot in the old King Arthur movie. One of the depictions, if not maybe all of them, I don't know. But hey wore this chest plate that was completely chromed out like that and it was pretty neat so we could do something like that. Then maybe it's not even cruel, but it could be like a polished black metal of some kind Whatever. If we need to change it for the the, uh, color scheme of this character, so and for here we can just no, no figure out some kind of centerpiece. I'm sure what I want to see their yet maybe a jewell or something, or a stone of some kind. Keep picking up that and you see, this is a bit crooked. So here's another way we could adjust. Something like That's really easy with these silhouettes to just grab an area. I like it. Command shifty. Drag it down to the one side here, drink this side up a little bit, and probably the easiest way is trap a layer and behind it real quick. Use a solid brush and connect the gaps. And while we're here doing that because we keep adjusting this leg that's still bothering me and really, it probably makes more sense to just work on the existing layer sweatshirt. This beginning stage of illustration, so I probably wouldn't even worry about adding an extra layer. But, you know, keep in mind layers always there. If you feel a little bit unsure about what you're doing, use the layer merging together things like that. So let's go and conclude right here had overturned next lesson and continue to add more detail to the sketch.
8. L7 Sketching Over Our Silhouette: I almost feel like he needs a bit more design. So maybe some kind of side skirts or something like that. It's a warrior than he's got all 10 2 different materials going on. It's gonna bring that out line like this. Just fill that in. So don't be afraid. Toe chance, the shape at in new information and in an experiment. And I'm almost not like in the center under rules type thing. It just looks like a too much of a superhero. So let's go and add one more to the front. Get rid of the Andes. Yeah, it looks a bit more appropriate. There we go. I feel that all in and like that. Okay, so we're getting there little by little, just, uh, poking around at these ideas and develop this character or anatomy choices. We could put some patterns on these, Well, everything. Think of very sure. It looks a bit too boring when we think it's a little better than just criss cross lines. Um, maybe some scrollwork. So I'm just going to implement it with this scribble for now, But to me, this is scrollwork, and I can come back and you can either create a texture or I can painstakingly drawing every little scroll. Well, something like that should be break up the monotony And this one, I'm gonna do a bit of an edge and maybe some kind of pattern like that. You probably see having been a whole lot of shading, But that's mainly because I'm gonna let Thea the paintwork, Whatever I decide claims. I'm still thinking about this being a painting, not a drawing. Like I said, I would have just gotten rid of the flood fill background at this point. Worried more about my perimeter line work. But, um, when I paint us, I'll add in all my shadows. So how kind of a lewd or hint to the shadows, But I don't need I don't need that at this point. I'm still just developing ideas. Once I have a very, um, concrete concepts of what it is this character is and looks like Then I just got a pain. In fact, there's a lot of times I go to paint even a lot quicker than what you see here. But for the explanation of this series of lessons, I want to make sure Teoh you know really take my time and kind of over develop the concepts for you so that if you're a bit newer to this type of illustration work you, ah, you gain more from it. If I just jump through and show you how fast I can do something that doesn't benefit you as much believe so. But notice I'm being very loose and sketching. I'm not worrying too much or not. If I was trying to make every line perfect, I'd be a lot tighter to the character. You know, I zoom in and out Teoh to mess around with this. Some lines are better, more scribbled in like the texture that I'm trying to get. Well, texture generally has always better scribbled in. So, um, not to caught up with trying to make this pristine drawing. I know. I might tighten up for something like the face, you know, something like that. It generally wanted to try to make a bit more, um, confidently more readable. You know, the details are smaller too, so I gotta be careful unless I'm just gonna black and lots of shadow in that. In that case, I can really kind of cheat it, but Ah, I think a lot of this information here is gonna be visible. So I need to, you know, maybe tighten up. Like I said on this area, I always feel like you should spend the most time on the face. Unless, of course, it just comes out really easy. And you're struggling with a different part of the illustration. But, um, but the face is where we spend the most time relating to our characters. So it makes sense that that needs to be It's it's a focal point. Needs to read the best. So you can do yourself a service by spending more time on your faces unless time on other things else, if absolutely need be kind of like in this texture here, this kind of swirling bone or something like that. Kind of wondering if I want to give him some cool facial hair. I think maybe little pupils, like, very focused on hurting you. Whoever is thinking, I don't know, but expressions are important, so I want him to have this expression that he's just not to be messed with its Hopefully when I'm conveying their with those tiny little eyes. Yeah, maybe a little bit of scruff. Anyways, let's try. We'll start with scruff, and then we might elaborate further, but of a goatee or something. But again, I'm just gonna scribble this, and I'm just trying to really see if I wanted in there. But I think so. We need something further. Shape the eyebrows. Remember that Adding lines is gonna add age. You know, maybe a scar on the eyes. Something that might be kind of cool. That's why you know, where is this helmet? He's learned his lesson. I feel like they have this trap. It needs to be higher. I looked like a missing pain over there. Something jump in there and fix that real quick. Yeah. So we're getting a little bit closer there, and, uh, he's starting to read Mawr effectively. That's what I want. So we're going wrap up right here, and we will continue on and continue to develop this character. So what? That Let's move on
9. L8 Sketching Over Our Silhouette: Okay, so I want to add some value to this character. Gonna start first by dropping the brightness and contrast, see if this gives me the look I want. So I want there to be pretty in a medium grey, basically something like that, because you know why it's gonna be very rarely used, if ever actually darkens up the lines, which I kind of like that. Eso no. So lock this again. We're gonna take the Jeep in. I'm gonna set that to multiply. Remember, if you don't have this blending mode here, you can simply go into here, find your blending mode under Inc. Put the little I next to it that titles that on and off over here. So just like that, we can pick some of the darker tones now a little too dark. So you gotta you gotta picture that multiplies, actually darkening the color underneath. Now. The only thing is, you have to fill the entire area once when working with multiplied. Because if you do a second pass over top, it'll darken it again. So you have to either isolate the whole area or what I like to just kind of draw perimeter shaped like this and then fill it all in. So just one way to do it and I can, you know, bunt up edges. So say need toe, get the hand here on a big deal of the overlap. It is a little bit of, ah, darker because I can always blend that back. So segmentation kind of, you know, it's pretty easy to fill that in and fix it. It's a little dark run in the bottom of the hand. Come back, do that. Okay, so things like the boots. I want those to be a bit darker now for here. I'll just go ahead and create a quick, quick selection. It's easier to get through all these little points by just kind of going back and forth like this. No, I'm regretting the grass shape there out of a deal and then just fill that in. Mandy did the select Repeat that with the other leg, and we get kind of ah zigzag pattern right here. So just kind of emulate that carried down, through and around the foot, This will be a little bit trickier. So I just got a kind of hold my hand steady and go around these Bess is possible. That one's pretty bad and probably just fix that one, but not really that big of a deal. But remember, you can hold shift, add all to subtract so I can just go like this. I hope for you mean that would be shift was getting confused and I can cut back into the shape just like them. I wonder if flood fell works with the multiple? No, doesn't. I just had to try and folks, that's how you learn experimentation. Okay, so there's the boots commanded TV select. So I obviously don't want everything to be this darker tone. But I'm just trying to get enough of these things in here where it, you know, give some contrast to the character some highs and lows, more interesting kind of ranges of the value, which in turn will make him look more dynamic. So I think even that chest plate I want to be a darker kind of metal. So I'm gonna do that, too. So again, I'll just take this brush. Let's kill it down. Just a little bit of the bracket keys. I'll try to trace out the shape it doesn't have to be perfect. So don't you know, I feel like you've got to get this just right. I mean, there's still a lot of adit that's gonna go on as we do this, but you can use the edges like that. Remember, this is, ah, a chest plate taped material. So it's ah, it's gonna segment away from the arm there. Now, another way to do this is to really just select each one of these areas. Cut and paste. That is nice for, um, editing and going back and forth and back and forth. So it depends on how you paint. The reason I'm showing you this way is because this is actually a lot faster once you get used to it. But it does take some practice to build confidence with it. So just be aware that if you want to make this easier because you do a lot of editing, you can always go back and forth. Just blending some of the inconsistencies here. Um, you could actually crop each one of these areas by generating selections first. Okay, So there is that one value, actually. Know what I think? I want some of the details and this and passed, leaving the edging be the darker value. But some like them, okay, and Seville ball and chain. I could have just colored that in with the boot and save myself some trouble there. But decisions have been made. So just like that, and I think that's about it. Maybe the maybe this part in the handle some pictures was being a darker wood. So I'm just really picturing areas or grabbing areas that are going to be darker in the design. Okay, And this, um, this could be changed even after we get into it, but and you'll see it just really helps to start making this character, uh, read a bit more dimensionally, So values is insanely important for that. Even the hair being dark will be cool. Okay, so there's our first value. Let's pick something lighter now, and let's see if it's too dark for the arm. Maybe a little lighter. Let's go with the material here. It kind of depends on the style you're after. I see a lot of artists will do something like this, and we'll just stop. It's definitely faster, but you can also add in some blending and some digital paintwork with this and make it look . You know, pretty, you go all the way to hyper realistic if you want, but, um, but it just depends again on what your needs are. What your client's needs are things like that. Probably a little bit mess here, too. So let's say the skin tone with later tone. But we can also think about shadows of playing changes. So, for instance, underneath the knees under the muscle groups something that just toe make it a bit more interesting again playing change of the maybe the knuckles here between the fingers, someone and so forth here is a little bit of ah, you know, shadow on the inside of the arm. Here, um, I think maybe the axe head my that you and no, it was piece right here. Once we have the bulk of this value shift in place, we can then start to, um, give it a little bit more great Asian. You can also just do this where you kind of block in over an area. I want those studs that are gonna be on the top of this, or I want those to be a bit different but I'm just going to kind of shoot past that, and I'm also going to start adding little bits of texture. So notice that I can add this end with this lighter brush, but because it set the multiply it still giving me a nice dark shadow. I was gonna go out and jump in there and do a little bit of that to figure out a little bit of the light source spherical objects Here is a great way to define that immediate light source. You know, we get the chest here, which obviously have kind of already defined that a little bit with the the line work. Try to give myself a little pull notes even in the sketched where the shadow's gonna go things like that under the back here inside the phase, under the nose cheeks out of the home it so on and so forth. And, uh oh, yes. And now what? We can do it even dark and just this one side right here. So yeah, so now it's starting to come together a little bit. We're gonna keep picking at this and, uh, you know, detail ing it even further. So let's go and wrap up here, head over to the next lesson and continue to refine our values
10. L9 Adding Values to Our Character Design: Okay, so now I want to add in some or solid at shadows and do some blending at the same time. So the brush I like for that is a smooth watercolor brush up on my favorite in this program because of kind of the versatility of it. So I'm gonna do is take and start sampling from my base, you know, kind of value system that I get going here, and I'm just gonna drop in some areas and then I'm gonna blend out from there. So I'm gonna try to do a quick pass over the whole thing because it's really easy to get caught up in. Um, you know, maybe just doing this arm, I think I've already kind of alluded to that. Like you have to kind of do the same passes in that way. You can kind of gauge what it's taking you. I think there's anatomy is running to get a shift that, um, CIA so just kind of had a little bit move on. Don't get too caught up into it. Not yet, anyways, because then you can kind of watch it all come together as well. So it's important to be mindful of, ah time you put into various areas of the work. So I'm also going to take this off and blend more of these imperfections that I'm noticing . Well, just like that and then put the light back on just so that I'm on the side of it. I don't pain outside of this area so quickly and get rid of that sketch line. That's why. Don't worry too much about it. I just feel like I'll paint over it anyways. S So this is just my process for doing this. Let's jump down here. So I have to think about this material the way it might be lit around. It is it is a speculator. All these things play out in my mind as I start to do this. This kind of refinement of the values. It's a pretty dull material that it has a more dispersed or, ah, you know, fanned out lighting. But if it's speculative, it's gonna have a peak light source of very, very specific kind of, you know, you'll see like a white dot or you know, that glare that comes off of chrome or a glass for, you know, anything speculators. So just paying attention to those things. And really, the only way I think that you get better at understanding that is to do those those studies , you know. So set Ah, glass in your studio and put some lights on and some shadows and just pay attention to it. And it's Ah, I don't know. I know a lot of artists complain about that. It's never is fun, as you'd think. Still, lifes gun. It'll be boring at times. Depends on what you're into, I guess. But But you learn immensely from that to give you a visual library for stuff like this. So don't discount and give it a shot. Probably pretty glad that you did. All right, So for this one, I'm gonna add these shadows on a blend of these lines, and then I'm just gonna head X on the keyboard to go back to White. I'm just gonna drop in Was a little bit of the highlights. One here. I'm trying to figure out the shape of these. I want this to be, like most like studs or something like that. You know, these big metal studs and I probably need to add a little bit of texture so they don't read so clean like jewelry at this point. But I just want to get some of the dimensional field going, You know, I'll just keep picking at it as I go. So just like that, nothing too. I don't want to get too caught up in a busy area. So same thing. I had a little bit of lights worse in here, but this is a picture and like a you know, some kind of leather Glover, something so nothing to speculator. So I need to blend that light source out and around. It needs toe fade across the material. Because if it's too, uh, if I go like this, it becomes a speculator. Highlight. I was gonna be aware that I could get away with some of that on the chains here, But also, I don't want these to be clean and pristine either Want these to be like old and tattered up, so I don't even have to watch my use of highlights here. OK, jump over. Just work our way down and come back up. I guess so. Same thing into here. I'm going to apply paint by putting down pressure and then I lighten up on the pressure, and I just used the way to my hand to blend. So that's how this brush works with the current settings that I have on a case. I didn't say it already. I will make sure to share whatever brushes amusing so that you can use them as well. Now, if they don't work for this program, there was nothing I could do there for you, but especially with this type of brush, I would try to convert it. But these brushes work a bit differently than most other programs. In fact, I'm pretty sure this is the only program that supports this type of brush. Were both paints and blends at the same time. I could be wrong. Wouldn't be the first time, but it's Ah, it's definitely one of the things that led me to start using this. I just thought it was very effective, uh, to paint this way. I just like toe the feel of it. It's over here, blowing some of these shadows around, see him still being pretty messy. Take off the transparency and fixes. Yeah, I try to stay messy for as long as possible. I know people are probably like and I like to work really clean. What would you do? That it's Messi is frustrating to me. Or maybe it is. Maybe it isn't. But for me it's It's, ah, creative. It helps me create ideas and find ideas from being messy. If I'm too specific, then I only get what I can remember. I can only get what is in my front cortex. I don't know where it's at, but it's it's the stuff in the media. And so what happens is is I don't explore ideas as much. But if a messy ideas kind of I don't know, I don't want to say they present themselves, they don't. But I just kind of find more ideas in the mess. Essentially, I think a lot of creative individuals feel that way, but not everybody, I'm sure sure, some people get very anxiety ridden by Messi scenarios and maybe even the way that I'm creating. But B, I'm just basically take what's there blending it out, trying to get rid of some of these ugly lines at the same time, but then turned those into more dimensional versions of that, keeping a light source in mind. So thinking about the light emanating from the top down given me a shadow under these wrinkles. So even like this wrinkle, if I had the illustrated further, I put the shadow there had hit X, and I put the light source right there. But since it's a kind of leathery warned material, want this to be a very subdued light source. So you see, I'm just paying that back, but really, that's all. That's the way you do rankles. It's just a repetitive process of light on the top, dark on the bottle if the late emanating from the top. But I go back into, uh, highlight version or whatever again. I just want to kind of get through this and get some immediate death going. I can blend this all out, press down for paint, and I'm kind of swiping in one direction to re emulate that effect of for texture and that overlap that you get from the for just like there, and they want a little bit more of a hard edge. It's kind of draw those back in. Yeah, I was starting to get there, so let's continue. I know it's my I'm brush here. So what? The anatomy. Same thing as I did with the arm. Really? Just gonna soften up this, uh, shadow there. It's almost like I'm just using the blend brush at this point. Really? Not even a playing that much pain. But it is nice being able to apply pain if I need it. And hoping to see I haven't really had to isolate a lot of areas yet, so it's a lot faster of a process. Now, don't get me wrong if I, um Oh, I got unlike that If I take this and I really need to refine it, really make it a tight kind of illustration. Something that you're going to zoom up to a view up close like a like an art print. Basically. Then I would probably isolate a lot more areas and even segment those so that I can really tighten up my edges. But again, you have to kind of look at and go. What's the end result of this? What is what is this gonna be used for on if you're trying to get a bunch of concepts on the page, then you want to really do something like this. Where you skip some steps and you know you you'd be amazed at what you can achieve just by using your brushes and, you know, cleaning up, uh, the edges that you're going to see first and foremost on blurring something's smudging and blurring something. So one of things you'll notice when you look at some really kind of high end illustration work for fantasy art or whatever concept art is that a lot of it isn't in full focus that there's a big chunk, I would say. I'm almost wondering if it's the 70 30 rule because you have a 70 30 percent rule that goes on with design, and it just means that if you want something have more characteristic, I'm gonna do the short version of what this is about will explain it later. But, uh, that 70% should be one thing, and 30% should be another. This works for, like designing faces and giving him a big hair do on a small face, the 70 30 and so it immediately makes him, um, or define herbal characteristic in our character type, and that might work with everything. Really, I think it's pretty much constant, but um, eso if you basically take, you know what we're doing here and you say, Well, I want there to be 70% of this and focus, but only 30% out of focus and vice versa. Just played that concept, but it's it's probably mawr, just like where your focal points are. That's how I use it. So what I do is when I'm done with this character, I might purposely blend. You know, maybe I'll just kind of drawn this to show you might blend all of this out. Okay, Whatever the shape is, wherever my focal point is, I want that nice and clear. So if I want the focal point of their I'm gonna blur the rest a little bit potentially, even if it's subtle to kind of pull your eye to that focal point. So just, you know, keep that in mind. I don't again. I don't know if the 70 30 rule applies to that. It's just a design rule, but I'm gonna start paying attention to that now. When I study Ah, you know, other artists that I admire, you know, big, big name are types that that I try to pull inspiration from, because it's essentially another way. We learn, you know, we pay attention is people that are a little more accomplished in us and you know what they've been able to do with their work. And I try to take notes from what they dio because they're obviously success. So what they're doing is working. Um, I just don't copy it and then say It's mine training toe. Give me the habit of that. But but basically studying the working, even recreating their work, I'm all for it. I think that it's important to Dio. But like I said, if you posted or reuse it or anything like that, you should probably give credit where credit is due. Plus, it's a nice still like just give your own spin to it and say, You know, I got inspired by this piece and that's what I did. Thanks so much to the artist that created things like that intent you're welcome to share the work as you completed only yes, So anyways, let's just go ahead and keep blending and moving around this thing. No, I'm just smudging some to go back to my paintbrush at the same time here, so the only thing I don't like about doing this one particular effect is that impressing kind of hard. Now this is gonna result to what your settings are in your tablet, you know, so you could make it to where you barely have to press to give this. But then it's going to be tougher to get your accurate blending that you might want to just be aware of that. But a lot of times I'll jump over to more of a solid brush, get a lot of this base kind of texture going. It depends on what it is. It's something like this where I had any, a lot of overlaps and texture. I might even generate a brush. And then I can go back to this or my blend tool and bring it together. So I just kind of look at it like I'm implementing texture and then pushing it back into the design back into the painting essentially, and you can get some really neat kind of rich things going on. They take the same thing. Do a few like quick light source hits appear we roam this out couple of smaller strands. Lights were Sapir so on and so forth. I didn't go back and I could blend that back. You see, it's turned into a focal point because of that little bit of whites. That's another way you draw the eye, and the focal point is with White. So let's go include right here will continue on to keep on developing the values in this character. So with that, let's move on to our next lesson.
11. L10 Adding Values to Our Character Design: Okay, let's continue to ah kind of chisel this character out. So the other thing you can do is when you're doing these hard edge effects with a pencil brushes. So make this you can bump back capacity. And this actually could work really well because you can slowly build up the effect, and it kind of looks like associating at first. But then as you overlap it a few times, it offers a really neat kind of, uh, dynamic to it. So after that, I was Whoa again. Weaken. Utilize this to kind of hide some of those bad lines as we go. We can use this to texture. Keep our light source of mine a little bit of light down here. That big accents gonna block it. It's amusing, that light kind of show the segmentation I can show a little bit of speculator it even on this type of material. So for here, I could block in kind of this bigger shape right here at first like that, like come back. It's time kind of hitting the highest point and then come back and blend that off. Bring that back. So you know, any number of ways you could try to do this. And if you again, you're not sure where this should go with light source should go with shadow. Should go. Maybe just use your layers over top. So you haven't seen me do that a whole lot as I've worked through this, but I've been painting a long time. We're parading much. Nowhere needs to go. And I know how to edit my way out of it if something's not right, But if not, just remember layers can be your best friend you have to do is use a floating layer over top, add your paint and then merger down. So just kind of plan wrote that. And, uh, you know, it's knee about doing this is as you get more and more that's on the page. You start to kind of figure out the next best step. Like, for instance, I might jump back to a soft shadow and kid the bias up here a little bit more rounded. I feel like there's gonna be more this in shadow now that I've defined that light source down here. I've kind of imagine that the ex head is, you know, pretty much casting a shadow. So, for instance, make sure you even just try the floating layer just to show you what I meant. You can even take a solid effect. Okay? The neat thing about the solid effect is you don't have to worry about, is it? Is it overlapping? Isn't making artifacts basically, So you fill this in as a solid and what I'm doing is I'm trying to imagine what this ax had this big shadow this ex head might be casting on this character. So I have to go around the anatomy and also have to think about maybe what the shape might look like as it reacts off this character. And I'm just gonna say it hits up here. I kind of like the light source on that buckles. I'm actually gonna probably do away with this. I don't know if this or, you know, I could probably just say, take command shifty. That's going to bring this back a little bit. Let's just stay with light. Source is only know about their and let's fill that in so many ways. By using this as a another layer like this, we've got more options. So if we would have drew that in an especially on that main layer. We have been stuck with whatever we got, but we can now punch back the opacity of it and not sure why. It's no, I'm still set the multiply for you and me. Don't do that. So you want to isolate this area, go back to full, isolate it, fill it in. It's gotta be set to normal mode. That is the drawback to change in your blend modes. Okay, so now don't make the opacity. Get whatever you think the shadow needs to be at its darkest point. Take a nice, big, softer race brush, soft hairbrush and what you want to do, Or at least what I like to you is a raise it back on the one side a little bit more. Okay, I just feel it looks more natural. I might even erase some of his top edge. So what I'm kind of picturing is that it would be darker back here. In fact, they could even take airbrush, and I could just throwing a little bit more darkness right to this arm side so that it's noticeable that it's changing a little bit darker from the side or to the chest in the middle. So that's just, you know, something you could do If you like that, I'm gonna leave that as a floating layer. So it kind of wonder a bit if I might want to keep that, but because once you merge it, then you've got a Make sure that the rest your paintwork is where you want it. So I'm gonna leave that as a floating layer and just call that X shadow. It's like that. Okay, So back to this part, it's going to tighten up on the head here a little bit and start to get some of this in there. So I can my source upon these, you know, depending on how details do you want these two look, you could have some of the light catching each ridge like that have a stronger light source on the one side, and then some other lights on the inside or other light that's managing to hit the inside. Just things like that, you know, it's going to bring some of this again. As we do this, we get getting rid of those, uh, sketch lines, and it's really easy for me to spend on absorbing amount of time doing this part. So it's tough toe actually teach it because I you telling myself to move faster so that it doesn't appear to be such a lengthy process. But it really is a lengthy process like it, no matter how fast I move. Ah, it's just it takes time. But in comparison to what you get and what you can complete, the imaginative stuff you can create, I feel like the time is is actually pretty fast. It's actually very they're advantageous and north wild. Obviously, that's why so many people are. You know, when they're accomplished artist, they become very sought after, You know, you get people contacting all over the place is asking you to do stuff because its is very impactful. This stuff is very a lot of potential, very powerful stuff. You just have to get confident at it. Good at it, too, where you you know, if you're throwing a different concept, it doesn't bother you. You can just do your same process and get it done, and once that's kind of out there lets people realize you're capable of that. You generally we don't have any shortage of work. You start picking and choosing your battles a little more. I think I can pick and choose what jobs you want to. Ah, participate him. So, yes. So you see, I'm blending some of it in other parts. I'm not. I'm just like, leaving some of it. Ah, more scratchy. And I think that you want a nice variation. You don't want it all to be clean. So and then as I go back through, I just sculpted. So I select from a certain area kind of picture with the shadow would be over here. Some like that, just sculpting the work. I think if you kind of think about it like that, it's better for you to shadow a little more on this side. Okay, again, I love this pencil brush shirts nearly ideally used for this, but with transparency turned down, you can get some really need quick shadows again. Kind of sculpt out the character about with those They call this being shadow. Yeah. Let's go back to the other one and switch it white. A little bit of lights or it's going over here. Make that a little brighter. Don't have toe pump up the capacity and also some of this texture here. So what I'll do with this part because all kind of texture back and forth with this and even the light source a little bit mixed in. See, I'm using a little bit heavier brushstroke here. That's purposefully because I'm going to blend this around. I don't want Thies to really look like lions as much as they do when they're first applied and see a little bit of light source and here won't hear some also trying to get these plain changes. There's gonna be a more focused light through the middle, so a little bit more of a speculator kind of feel. So let's go ahead and blend this back now. So you see, once I start to blend, it looks a little more like a texture. Then a brush strokes, and that's what I want some just pushing that information back. If the and while we're here, let's go ahead and select this Syria. He was a bit of, ah, drop shadow the big shoulder plate there and then remember that you can just blend this back a little bit. Actually, it's going to use the Blur for that. All right, I'm much nicer. OK, so now which was tried that blur over some of these still got some artifacts in there. I'm trying to clean up. Okay, so let's pull back and take a look at this. Little by little, it's coming together. So I feel like there needs to be some more light sores on the anatomy as well. Now, So sample from that light source Just black in some big shapes here and there to ah, just around out these forms basically and go back to my blend and I usually will blend more to one side, but I will eternally blend all the way around since I don't want a very defined line there , but I don't know. Sometimes I like it as faras, a kind of stylized version, but you got to be careful not to place it everywhere. You'll see a blend a lot of that back, but regardless, I want the light source there, too. Help start to round out the anatomy a bit more. And I almost feel like there would be a little bit of ah glare going across this material. So probably add that, but I wait to do that, just kind of drop it in little bits of light source and blend in the pack. And I could use this a little bit as late to separate this. Be hawking chest from the arm like that. Just try to be subtle about it. I think it's helpful. Toe tryto perceive things in Ah, you know, a rounded way. So, for instance, if the lights coming from this one side and it's hitting the side of the leg, if this is rounded, then this starts to fade off. So actually thinking about that is ah, kind of the best way to get this all working. You know, working as a is a dimensional kind of illustration. So we'll just, uh, just don't draw and paint where you think it goes. Tried to think about the roundness of the form, the character perceiving a dimensional way. And hopefully that will translate into your illustration. Yes, we're getting there. So I think at this point, a lot of this is just gonna be redundant. So what to do now is ah going to kick kick this into time lapse? I won't bore you with all my noodling around here. So, um so with that, let's move on to the next lesson and time, lapse this process and get this character refined.
12. L11 Adding Values to Our Character Design Time Lapse: Okay, so now we're just gonna continue to do what we've been doing. So I'm just gonna kind of reiterate some of the steps that I'm doing is a look at this. And ultimately, I'm just trying to create more dimensional forms at the end of the day. So each area I address I'm thinking about where the light might hit the way it might cast a shadow. Is it speculator? Is it diffused lighting? Is it in shadow altogether? Um, and then I'm basically just poking around at it, okay? And that means, like, you know, using whether I use a soft brush with the pencil brush, low opacity. And then I decided to blend it. But the main thing is, all this is being done off of one layer. So it's forcing me. Oh, are maybe just encouraging me, but it's encouraging me to utilize what I know about how to add it. The work. Now I can obviously add a layer and merge over, merge it down like we've talked about previously. But I'm trying to really stay away from that in this particular example, in this set of lessons, I want you to see that there's just a lot you can dio with just one layer. And if you using values and you're not having to worry about color yet, then it becomes pretty easy to just go back and forth, You know, from light to dark now, obviously not just like two dark. You've got a value range. You want to try to stay in the medium tones as much as possible. I think I probably even went a little bit dark on some of this, but try to stay in the middle. Try to use absolute whitened absolute black mawr either towards the end or more for focal points or extreme circumstances. So it becomes very becomes a bad habit to basically use those just because they work really well. It's like they're very effective. Six years I had the light on that spiked ball. It's It's too much. It's overdone, so I need to actually blend that back or paint that back or maybe fix it in the color stage . But again, it's very easy to one. Overuse them because they're so dominant. They're so effective or so almost like I can be, you know, you put him in there and they jumped they pop. So that's why you have toe actually use those at the very end. You know, the whites of the eyes or you've got a really deep shadow and you're really trying to push part of the character design off the page that maybe use some of that strong line waiter shading for that. But really try to reserve yourself because again it's almost say or it is a bad habit to get into. So you see there I'll still edit the shapes here and there. I will manipulate it as need be. But essentially, I'm just staying within those inner areas and continuing to darken up some things bouncing back and forth from, you know, the soft barrage and the hard brush and you see there I'm kind of going over the whole thing with Multiply, which remember the multiply blaming motor combined mode. Depending on the software, using is going to dark and everything, so it's gonna dark in your highlights, and it's gonna dark in your shadows. So it's gonna be aware that because it's not like normal mode were normal mode. If you're using, say, a medium grey, you're gonna wash out Sameer Black and you're gonna dark in some of your whites with that, it's gonna basically turn anything beneath it into a medium grey in the moral pass it eu had over it, the more that's going to take effect. So you see here I'm just trying to fix little elements of it. So this is kind of an area where I look like I I think that I'm basically sculpting, right. So I'm selecting an area of the paintwork. Yeah, I'm selecting the neighboring color by holding Ault, and I'm working with more than opaque brush, and I'm basically sculpting the shapes and then I, you know, utilize the ability to just flip part of it and distorted into place and then merge that down. So again, I'm gonna take every kind of shortcut in a sense and every kind of edit that I can because we're just working off pretty much that one layer, even though this is actually a floating shape until emerge it down. Um, but I really think it's important to try this technique for speed. So even though this whole character production still probably took me, I don't know, 34 hours and total you know, it still seems like a lot, but at the same time, there's been times I've spent 12 hours on a digital painting or whatever. So in in regards to that and the amount of detail we're adding, it's really not that bad. But it's the idea that you can really take this effect and you can generate a lot of different various characters. Eso you see what those silhouettes we started with? We could paint those in the same way, and I can pretty much guarantee you each study you do after the 1st 1 is only gonna get faster. You're gonna find what works, what doesn't. You're gonna find quicker ways to implement an effect. Like, for instance, there's even a few areas within this illustration where I was using the smooth watercolor brush, and I basically just wanted to showcase it for because it is an amazing brushed. But then there's certain areas where I just noticed it was faster to use hard pencil brush with light opacity and then smudge it because one of things about this program is thesis. Mudge ing is just really fast, really, and you know, you get your blur brushes Well, which is extremely effective. So, you know a zoo do that? You're just going to say OK, well, I've got the skin, right. And then you're gonna go through in pain, all the skin, because you're kind of in that mode of what looks good for the skin. The right amount of, you know, rounded shadows or soft shadows combined with hard shadows, whatever, just the right amount of texture. And you're gonna implement that each area of the character on then you move on to the next material. So some of it is like kind of figuring out that workflow for each area on then. Ultimately, the more these characters you do, the more that you know, you just carry that to the next character design on. Then, like I kind of mentioned with the silhouettes previous and these lessons you start to realize that a lot of this you can kind of reuse and for conceptual design, I think that's huge because some of this isn't always going to make it to the end result. Depends on what you're working for. For what particular client. Uh, and again, if this was a piece that was gonna be for print media, then I probably would have spent even more time refining and adding more texture and detail . But some of it just doesn't get seen in the end result. So I face that store boards a lot. And if that's the case and you know that going into a project, why not re utilize your own work? It just makes a lot of sense. It gets the client their work quicker on. You'll notice that as you do more and more of this, you get better and better at utilizing something. But it doesn't show up in the end result. Doesn't look like you re used anything, so you because a lot of this is is you know, especially when you start studying the values, you realize that a lot of this is just overlay of texture and brush strokes and mark making , uh, so it doesn't really hurt, You know, the end result to work some of that end. So just make good use your efforts to try to save yourself time and then notice that a lot of this is Joe Stop an overlapping of textures. So as I scribble some texture and I changed the brush size, I go back from light to dark had little highlights. It's nothing to hard to really accomplish is not hard at all. It's just basically being okay with overlapping things. I think a big part of painting to is not expecting to see the right thing too soon. I think this applies to all aren't really but definitely painting. You have to allow it to build up and work up. And that's how texture works. So you can't, you know, put down a few marks and then get frustrated. Why it's not looking right yet. That's why I kind of stressed earlier that sometimes it's nice to be okay with the messiness of it all and allow it to be messy because that build up with that Messi texture is sometimes going to give you some really good ideas for what to do next. But it's not gonna happen if you get flustered and you think that every line needs to be pristine and correctly placed and things like that. So let's go and wrap up right here, head over to the next video and continue to refine this artwork
13. L12 Adding Values to Our Character Design Time Lapse: okay, So still kind of tweaking the work and again sculpting. I just really want to hit that home because I personally I like to sculpt with Z brush. And there's a free version. If you want to try digital sculpting, it's called sculptress and a great programs Great Z brushes. Just amazing. I'm sure you've heard of it, but But anyways, I like it because I think it helps for what I do right here. So as I come back and I start to work on a project like this, I'm really paying attention to those shapes and trying to get that to read well and get that to make sense. And sculpting is so important because it allows you to think more dimensionally because you're actually having to physically move things to make the shape that you want. And then you come over to a two D version whether it be paper painting, digital device like that, you know, clips, studio pain or Photoshopped. And all, sudden, you start to think like your sculpting. You start to go. Well, what if I just add this little nudge this little piece here and add a little bit more paint here. Um, so it's really neat how that works. It's just basically getting yourself to think more dimensionally askew. Create something so that you can give it this illusion that it's coming away from this two d surface. So whether or not you decide to actually sculpt, that's up to you. You know you can go to your local hobbyist shop and you can get modeling Clay player, their kids. Plato. There's all sorts of things you could do there. But but the main thing is that you think more dimensionally so that when you get here to paint ideas to start to work out, they just start to seem right. Light sources start to appear a little bit more easy to read and understand because you're so used to studying those dimensional objects around you. You know another good thing for reference for this type of work. His toys, you know, I mean, obviously, you know, if you notice any really amazing artists in their studio, you'll probably notice a bunch of toys in the background or what probably look like toys, but they're a little bit more of collector's items or whatever, but that stuff is just great for reference. I have a little Faneuil's piggy bank that I picked up for next to nothing, and it really is more of a toy or kids, you know, thing. But it's just so well done. It's this great reference, so I don't even think I have any change in it. But so just keep that in mind all those things that you can kind of surround yourself with , great reference like that. It all aid to in the process, so that when you come to paint something like this, you're not just grabbing out of thin air. You know you have tons of reference tons of ideas to work from, but I think I've already mentioned this is, well, just make sure that you don't feel like the idea has to be exactly what you're looking at. There's times when you want to study and recreate something exactly the way that you see it , just to kind of strengthen yourself and then this other times you want to really test yourself and just create from imagination, and I think it's really a culmination of those two primary things. There's a lot of gray areas right in between. All that but it does kind of ball down to that. So practice doing still lifes and you know, whether it be, ah, bullet fruit sitting in the middle of the table, practice maneuvering the light so that you can gauge the difference on then practice just painting from imagination and really stretching the boundaries of value Study like this. Now the other thing is this. If you look at something like this in your just thinking, it's just too complex. I can't seem to get all the shapes right. All the texture, all the light and shadow and all the stuff. The forms don't look right. Then you may need to just focus on one aspect at a time, and there's nothing wrong with that. I can't tell you how many pages of just arms and just spikes and just faces that I've done countless. So what you need to be aware of is that one of the reasons we're doing this particular study is so that you can see how value works up and hide how I interpret value and a character design and build up to it without worrying about the color so it simplifies the process. So remember you can take that as far as you need to. You could take that and say, Well, I'm just going to start with these shoulder pieces and I'm gonna illustrate five or 10 shoulder pieces. I'm not going to spend an absorbing amount of time. I'm gonna do basic value studies. I'm not even going full light, full dark. I'm gonna stay in the middle range of value. But I'm gonna do a bunch of different shoulder designs, shoulder straps and armor pieces. Until I feel comfortable with that. I guarantee you, if you go through that work, float that mindset like you start saying I'm just gonna do 10 of this or 15 of that or 20 of that. If you've got that kind of grit about you and that kind of go get her attitude, you're going to get better. You're gonna make amazing art. But if you if you just get frustrated because you're not getting in on the 1st 2nd or third try, then you need to kind of analyze what you want, what you want to do about this. But the main thing is this that you just allow yourself to get better through duration to process like I look back at work that I did 5 10 years ago, and I'm amazed at you know how much I got better at a certain thing or I might even look at and go while I did really good at something back then. God, I remember that took me days, and I could do that in half a day now. So that's the other neat thing about this. Once you do enough of these character creation processes, you just get so much faster. You're not even aware of it. It just happens, but something you might look at and go well, I can paint that better now, but the main thing is, I can paint that a lot faster and one things I could tell you that I've worked with a lot of amazing digital painters. It's actually led me to start digital painting because I've always been more of, ah, pencil artist, and some of them are extremely fast. So, for instance, this character design probably took me about I think I already mentioned, but if I didn't about 45 hours total and that's to the end of color, but you'll see to the end of the video here lessons. But there's artists that I know that could. It did this in one or two. I mean, it's amazing how fast they get on. Hopefully how fast I'll getting how fast you'll get with a practice. But the main thing is that you realize that there is a thana potential with this type of creative process, so don't get to flush it. If it takes you a while, just relax. Do break down studies. Do you know practice for one day practice illustrating eyes another day practice not only just the I, but, you know, getting the skin around the eye to look right. Or, for instance, the way the eye looks wet getting it just that right. Look where it looks rounded over and wet on the peak of the I. You know, things like that pay attention to not just simply, all these things have a glare on him, a speculator highlight. But where is that Claire? Whereas in comparison to the shadow, things like that pay attention to those and you should get a lot better at making these types of illustrations. So here, just kind of noodling around poking and prodding at it at this point, and you see, I also zoom in and out. So now I'm working from a distance. There's certain things I think, that you spot from a distance and obviously detail you're gonna want to tighten up even Mawr and more and more. So if this is something that you want to be hyper realistic, you're gonna probably Titan and pretty far. But you still want to zoom back as much as possible and look at, like the overall ambient light and kind of radiant shadow. You know, the shadows that are kind of all over from If you were to take the very left of the character to the very right, there should be a lease, a slight Grady in, basically, and it's going around over certain forms. But you have to think about, I guess a simple way to put it is this. When you're illustrating a big character, you're generally going always make sure that the lower portion that character is darker, So think about it as a Grady int light. If the light sources on top lights coming from the top, then the shadows they're gonna radiator basically fall under the bottom of the forms, but also there's gonna be a larger radiant of shadow down to the lower portion that character. So it networks with anything networks with buildings, cars. You can always make something look larger by shooting it from the bottom up, so that will bring this one to a close. I know this has been a lot of, you know, little nit picking of the artwork, picking and poking and prodding, but this is kind of how I go about it to refine it. I try to put in as much detail as I can, so that now when we go to add the color, there's very little that we have to add. So with that, let's head over to the next lesson and start to color this
14. L13 Adding Color to Our Character Design Part 1: Okay, so now let's go ahead and apply some color to this. So obviously all the information and the values emerged in the one layer the slayer here. I've got a backdrop color just because it's basically not good to color against white anyways, So I've just implemented a little bit of a color for the background. And so no, make sure this layer is locked and we can pay into this area by using the blending modes over here. So there's a couple ways to do it you could do is layers with blending modes. But like I said, we're just gonna use everything over here. It's a bit quicker, and we don't need this to be highly refined. I One of things I do recommend is that you do a lot of the color mold with this, uh, method I'm gonna show you. And then at the end, you could just do some traditional or, you know, paintwork overtopping, opaque layer or painting over top by sampling. What's there? So I'll try to explain that as we go, but but for this part, we're just gonna take some color and we're gonna set this to color militarily. There with a soft brush, for instance. I'll just kind of jump in here and start painting the arm here. So what happens is by working in this way, I think it tends to be pretty tough to nail down the exact color. The first. Ah, you know the first try, at least for me anyway. So what I'll do is I'll kind of, you know, pick couple colors. Keep brushing over, adjusting a little more to the bread peach kind of color, whatever. Just to get a little bit more of a kind of fleshy kind of look. You know, somebody that looks like it's got some blood flowing under it, that user where the pink, that's where the pinkish red comes from anyways. So something like that and it's still a bit to saturated and dark. But you got to kind of start somewhere. So what I'll generally do is get all of this in in those areas. It's like this. You see, it's a lot darker up here. It's gonna obviously be affected by the value, so areas that have a darker value are going to shift this color. So that's why a painting this way can be tricky, but it's Ah, it kind of goes really nice with getting a lot of the base color and quickly and then, like a kind of mentioned before painting over top with opaque colors after you kind of a concept going. But this is great for conceptual designers because it's just so so fast. You can you've already put all the heavy lifting in with the value study, and now you can just kind of drop into color is looking really orange. No bull fix that. So you could really just kind of brush through this as well. So since you're gonna come back and paint some of these other areas, kind of makes sense that you would just speed up and go right through this. So just like that, because again, we're going to head it a lot of this anyways. So let's say something like this just zero in on just the skin tone here and now let's go and take this and pick something less saturated. Start right here. And so I think what needs to happen here? I was starting the shadows a little bit. We just need to get away from all this oranges, skin tone all the saturation, basically. So just gonna brush some of that back and I kind of play around with that concept of leg lightning, certain areas de saturating certain areas. So, for instance, you can even take this brush, set it to saturation goto white here. And if you notice if I brush right through there, it takes me back to the gray scale. So knowing that I can utilize this and again just kind of get away from all this, uh, overly saturated color. We need some of it, but we don't need this much. Ah, good thing to think about is to try your work at varying levels away from, you know, a Sfar as being zoomed in too much. Try it from a distance and see if if that helps you spot something. So in this case, I can really see from a distance that there's way too much, uh, of a saturation, orangish tone. I might need to change it altogether, but still going to try to work with it because I do tend to see a little bit of this kind of effect on the skin tone that I'm after, so but I am gonna just keep pushing that back. So I'm just barely touching on the color. That's why you don't see it just disappearing like that. I'm just slowly kind of affecting it so that I can hopefully find, uh, look, that, um after without having to go back and forth too many times. Okay, so now the other way of my approaches is that might get in here and say, Well, let's go back to color or overlay. Let's try overlay. Let's see what effect that has on it. So you see, that brightens it up. But also, uh, kind of color dodges that almost that it punches on a bit of a light source. So I gotta be very careful with that. I do like the way it's lightning it, but again, I have to be aware off this artifact that might create of like another Les sores. You don't want to contradict all the values that you've established, but if it's better, it's better. So you just kind of meet the middle, figure out what's working, so I think a little bit of that, because it is again. It's lightening up where I needed to. Let's also try a little bit of Ah, dark blue. And let's go and set that. What do you want? To see what it does with overlay in the shadow of our I do. Kind of like that. So I want to keep some of the shading going as well. I don't want to lighten up shadows, so I gotta be aware of that as I do something to try a little bit of that blue in the shadows. Yeah. Figure like that. Okay. And then a little bit mawr of, ah, Rose color to the highlight side just a little bit. So I'm tryingto make sure there's some variation here that it's not all. It's real easy to kind of put the same effect throughout. Okay, so I want to make sure I don't do that. I want to spot in some different colors and give us some variation. Okay. And then one more. Ah, a little bit of light source. I could probably go a little bit more to a yellowish gold against that. The overlay. Just mix that in just a little bit here and there. Not too much, but just trying to vary it up as I go. Okay, so we'll just stop right there for the skin tone. And then now what I'd like to do is get in a little bit of the Yeah, I got it. I'm already going into this with an idea in mind. So I want the chest plate to be a blue armor. I want there to be some reddish brown on the shoulders. I guess I'll start there. Eso I'm thinking blues, earth tones, reddish browns. Eso I just want you to be aware that I do have kind of a color palette in mind. But I don't like to just put it on the canvas because I'm editing as I go, I'm shifting it. So I want this to be more of like a brown leather type like material. You see him starting with overlay, but I'll push this back and forth as I go. So all this to be that color, some like that and I want probably almost every color I introduced to be evident somewhere else. So whether or not that stays exactly where I put it right now, but I'm just trying to make sure that that's ah parent in the work. So again, don't worry about spelling over an edge if you're gonna come back and pain anyway, since we are working on one layer So something like that, Uh, I think maybe the boots, but I think the boots are gonna be darker, but I can start with this color, so on shift it. So I just couldn't do that for now. So you see, it looks like we're dropping in color extremely fast. I mean, we are basically, but it doesn't mean you can't, you know, the it's gonna go without at it. So, looking at this, you probably tell that especially that last color has dropped in very saturated, very unrefined, basically. So if we take that now, we can jump this over to multiply. Try that a little bit. You can always kind of test it by pressing really hard. You see, that makes it even more saturated. So that's really not the look him after, But again, you can kind of do that and play around with these so you could try, subtract, and it makes a very dark, and that's something we might use at the end to beef up some shadows. But not right now. So let's try. Let's just try color, but let's make it a very dark version and you see that D saturates. But it doesn't really dark, and it just de saturated, which isn't a bad thing, because this is too saturated. So I'm just gonna brush some of that end while I'm here. It's looking very overly animated now. You can also just, you know, brush around it and leave. A little bit of saturation may be in the light source or wherever you think, but usually it's the light source. But you can, you know, kind of edited as you go on play around. I really think that's a good idea, because I don't know me personally. A lot of times I don't know the exact thing until I see it. So I just kind of slowly edged myself towards it sometimes, and other times I got a nice, clear vision, but it's ah you know, it's good to kind of just softly work up this. You see, I've got full capacity and have my brush density, but impressive really light. Likewise, I could jump down the opacity and press a lot harder, but just like that got a little bit more. Um de saturated and again we can go to our saturation here said it white. We can really push this back, but we can almost use this like a paintbrush. So I can just let me get a little closer so I can make it out. Aiken not hit every edge. I can get in between the edges in between the highs and lows of this this piece. So I'm basically painting. I could get the color out of these Spieth cause they're gonna be a different color anyways , but I'm basically painting with this brush in a d saturation kind of way. So some of that saturation is gonna be nice to have to be in result, but there's just too much of it. Constantly push this back and forth a little by little We're getting there. So let's go and conclude this lesson right here. Head over to the next lesson and continue to color our character
15. L14 Adding Color to Our Character Design Part 2: All right, So now let's go and make a copy of this to because I'm a bit of a copy junkie just allows me to feel better about what I'm doing. Um, you know, since we are working on the singular layer. But remember, if all else fails, you could be saturate this and keep pressing forward bs. So let's go ahead and go with a bit of grayish blue for the armor or chest plate, I should say, And that's going to put this back to color. Brush that in and that's a bit too much. Let me take that more of, ah, a later version, hopefully still to blue and maybe something like that. Now I don't mind it being in the middle of the row, you know, medium of autumn looking for. I just don't like it to be overly saturated, and I guess this is all subjective. You might look at this and say, Well, it's extremely saturated, but if it's in the middle, I can work, you know, darker and lighter and saturated unless that more saturated, less saturated things like that. But I do basically just want to get some ideas in place of You know what I'm looking for here. So I don't like them. I also want to see a little bit more of a golden yellow. And this character, I always think that's fun for, like, armor and designs and things. So I want to get some of that in there. Maybe even this This for is kind of a golden yellow. That's a bit too much as well. Let me bring that back. And even a little more. You see, I'm just gonna move in that slider around here and there. Um, there's some like that just to kind of get close again. More in the middle or medium of what I'm looking for. I'm so gonna add some highlights. I'm so gonna shift things around a bit. Shadows from highlights, saturation back and forth. You see, you could really just paint this from a distance. You know what? This I think, to be that same golden yellow. Um, you could really just paint this from a distance and, uh, be okay with it. It doesn't have to be perfection in the beauty of this. If you're working with customers, you could really show color variations like this. You know, again from a distance from, ah, quick representation. And then if they like it, you can press forward so you can, you know, tighten it up and get in there and really detailed the work. Like a lot of these little gold accents. Put that in there. And I think for the helmet pieces of this other stuff, I want a little bit more of a hopefully, like a bone like color. You know what? Actually, one here that I think trim this out in gold as well. So it's important. Like, sit there and try toe figure out little areas that could be trimmed and accented to go with whatever you're doing. So I'm just gonna add the trim around these pieces like that. I think that's kind of of me leaving the underneath material something like that. And then, um, yeah, let's go and go for this bone like color. So it's gonna be even more yellowish white or even a little less yellow than that press role light here, and that should give us closer to a bone like color. I think that's need for things like the spikes, the horns, on the helmet, things like that. Okay, so there's that and lets him thinking for Thea skirting area, whatever this would be called. Something I'm gonna try to sample. So notice I just held Ault and I sampled from some of the blue from the chest plate. And I'm just going to try to bring that down and to hear a bit, see if that works or not. So, basically like Blue gold, you know, Brown's that's probably about it. I could probably use a little bit of this blue highlight color just for some of the reflectivity of the spiked ball there and the axe heads going to stay great. So now we've got a pretty good like base color all throughout. There's a few areas that are lacking Color, I guess, is, um, shoulder piece are I'm sorry? Form guard. But really, that could be a gray. I think. I think the handle for the axe could probably be Have some brown in there. Well, just do that again. I just sampled from what's here. So I'm just holding all sampling. What's there? What's gonna need about that is, the more you paint, the more you can just sample from your existing painting and again, I'm going to say that I think that that's really the weight it to utilize this effect. Even though you're painting over grayscale, there's only it feels like there's only so much you can do. You can do a lot, but I always feel like a the end of it. You just need to paint on the very top. Um, if you're trying to really refine it, I'm not gonna take this to a, you know, extreme level refinement because it just takes a lot longer for that type of explanation, but but we're gonna get pretty close. So what's gonna happen here? Next is I want to take and develop a little bit more of a light source. So I'm gonna take a bit of ah, golden yellow like this, and I'm gonna know set this to something like Add glow kind of tested out. It's extremely bright, so we use it very sparingly. But what I want to do here is just kind of those edges. Okay, so what? Me person, I want to be really careful of going into the character and doing stuff like this, Okay, It's really easy to want to do that and it really rounds them out, but it just takes away from the painting. A lot of times you've got to be very careful the way that you use your lights worse. So in this particular instance, I'm just using what's called Brem lighter, actually, and so that would be a pretty strong light. You see, I've already defined it on the leg here. I can get some of this on to the very edge of the for here and then have it dissipate. So just had a few more little strands and then leave it alone because again, it's very easy to go. Wouldn't it look cool all through here? It probably would. But it's not gonna breed well, it's It's very, I don't know, lights very tricky. And the way that use that your light source is very powerful. So you have to be very specific and careful about it. I think so. Less is more. Sometimes I'm just gonna try to implement some of it, and then, if anything, I'll do some of it and then come back to it so that I kind of guard myself from over doing things. It was just a little bit of like, I'm kind of picturing that the legs blocking some of this. So I'm just gonna put very little bit here and there and that much, maybe a little tiny bit on edge here. It's gonna bring out that detail a little bit. So light not only rounds out your form, it's also an extremely good way to convey a focal point. Um, and forgive me if that's where done, and I think I might have already mentioned it in these lessons, but I want to mention again. It's just that it's kind of the way it works. So whether it might be, uh, light dark areas pretty much anything in extreme, so contrast saturation. Anything in an extreme way can really become a focal point, and it can make you know your viewer. Look at the part of the design, the art that you want them to look at. So just be aware that that it's ah, it's very easy to utilize that, but it also works better if it's used sparingly. So if it's so, if it's over used all throughout the piece, it actually works in the opposite. It becomes distracting. Then you lose that that potential ability, Teoh, direct viewer a couple light sources on the home at bring out some of the the details of this spike. So on and so forth. So again, just trying to little bits here and there. But fighting nerds to, uh, go all throughout the design with this. Okay, so now I've got a little bit more light source. And now what I want to do is, you know, shade a little bit more of the character and also pull away from a lot of this saturation that we have. So what we're gonna do is let's stop right here. We'll head over to the next lesson again. We're going to introduce a little bit of contrast here and there and shadow on. Then we're gonna bump back to saturation. So with that, let's move on to our next lesson.
16. L15 Adding Color to Our Character Design Part 3: okay. So made yet another copy. Just so you know. And so yes, I don't want to do now is really start to de saturate this because that's the thing. When I implement color like this, I feel like it just kind of go overboard of my saturation, then have to come back with saturation, is at the white and big soft brush and just push a lot of us back. So that's where you going to see me do here is just I do want some of it, like I mentioned before, but I want a lot of this push back so that it's not so in your face and all over the place . That saturation loses its flavor when it's everywhere. And this is something I've always kind of struggled with because I just like bright colors . Um, but it's, ah, it's very easy to make something look less professional and, uh, less realistic for sure, because, um, saturation just isn't isn't everywhere. All throughout the, you know, everything we look at, maybe in Disneyland? I don't know. Yes. So just kind of pushing that back, playing around with that a little bit. Um, saying it. Yeah, I could see I could almost go a lot further. So every now and then you'll see me kind of push really heavily through something just to see the effect that I'm implementing in the I like how it are. It looks a lot less saturated, so I'm just gonna keep pushing here. Is this back on? This really needs to be coupled with me adding a bit more shadows. Maybe I'll do that here first for a completely, uh, take all the saturation out of this. I just feel like when I do this, it starts to look a little bit more realistic. A little bit more like what I'm after, anyway. So Okay, let's try something like that and say we could take the previous generation and take the visibility on and off and see the difference there. So it's a slight, but it's there, and some air is not so slight, but, um OK, so now let's go ahead and add a little bit more shadow to this on. Probably there's a couple ways to do this, Really, like one of the ways that I like with this particular program with a lot of programs is you can just go to layer correction layer and let's try something like brightness contrast. Okay, Now what this is doing is this going apply this effect all throughout the design so I could go to contrast, I could not back the brightness, and I'm gonna go a little bit extreme and I'll show you why. So I'm gonna make sure looking at the darkest points of my design, not the lightest points, and I'll hit. Okay, there. That's created a mask with this effect over top. So now what I can dio is Aiken, basically, um, you know, zones. Among that mass, there is a race back, the areas that I don't want to be as affected by this when we just kind of show you Marilyn a little too dark. But we'll see here. So I'm going to stay away from the shadows because I'm trying to trying to add shadows to my work, basically right now. So I'm gonna race back the areas Well, I want that information to showcase. You see, it even effects the backgrounds. They don't have my selection in place, So that's going to go back a few steps, use Command Z and then I'm going to go back to this layer hit command and click, and it will select this and then go back to my mask. It's important that you make sure you go back and forth to do that. Let me just double check that my mask. So you'll see the little icon over there change as you do something. So just making sure that I did get back to my mass there. So again, I'm just gonna keep pushing back the shadows wherever I feel. They're a little bit too impactful to the design, but I kind of wanted a lot more shadow to this, and I'm gonna do you select this, I'm gonna tackle this on and off, and it's a little much, but I like it better than I like this here. So what I'm gonna dio is I'm also gonna play with the slider of just this layer. So now this is the full, the opacity of it overall. So you see, it's it's slowly working up that effect. Now you can do that with everything. You can do that with your saturation. Well, basically, everything you see in here, So if you got a layer correction layer any of these things you want to just same kind of process of, you know, a mask over top that will allow you to edit that. So I kind of like where it's at right there. I still feel like it's a little too saturated all over, you know, throughout. So again, let's try that one more time with layer in correction layer. Let's do hue saturation. Let's punch back the saturation again, the way I do it as I go for kind of the most effective area or in this case, the least saturated. I want to see ah, a particular area because the most de saturated area. So I get all the way back to that. I'll be honest. I even like that a lot better than that right there. It's funny how once I see it by comparison, I would rather have that very de saturated version. But I want to elaborate on that a bit further, and let's go to make sure I don't hit the background again. So I'm going to hit command, select this icon right there to generate my selection, go back, Teoh my mask and then I'm just gonna I think just the race parts. I think you can paint and a racist stubble. Check that. See, as I race back, that makes it more saturated just like that. So if I paint with White, Okay, that doesn't work. Let's see if I paint with black. No, it is a race. So I just want to be aware that these old work a little bit different, but they're all surrounded around dark toe light, a race to paint. Basically. So it's just positive. Negative? I guess. So we're gonna race back again. I just wanna race little bits here and there to establish a little more saturation I could use. This is a focal point. I could, you know, try toe, um, you know, make the face and the helmet a little more saturated. Generally, we look at the face first of a character. Well, I could try toe, bring that out a bit more. That connection anyways, um, yeah, really, really. Actually, like that Really low amount of saturation of this character. I think it kind of toughens them up a bit. So maybe that's that's what I'm seeing about it that I like. But again, just little bits here and there less is more when it comes to saturation. Okay, let's try that. So come, indeed to de select and then toggled us on and off. You see that little bit of a shift? And, uh, yeah, it's getting there now. We could also, if you want to test this against our previous copy, remember that these air affecting this copy here so we could create a group click hold shift dragged these into that group, and then we could talk about on and off. Look how big of a difference that made. I mean, this almost looks animated and just childish, I guess. And then this looks a bit more refined to me anyways, so that's that's what I was after. Now, finally, once you get it to this level, like I said, don't underestimate the ability to sample what's here and really tighten this up even further. You could implement more texture or, you know, some more scratches, some finer. You see, we've got these big scratches, but if you wanted this toe, look, you know, even more detailed, we could just add some smaller little abrasions. You know, if you're really gonna be viewing this up close And that's when you start doing more of this little, you know, refinement for whatever. But what you can do here is go with, uh, you know, normal mode sample from the paint that's here, and you can really just play around with this and in just normal mode. So what? I think it is important to do this anyways. Even if you're not comfortable with this yet is just practice with it, because what happens is your eventually kind of reading yourself. Get yourself ready to paint more naturally. Um, so I like to think that you should try all the different things, even if you're not good, Adam, because eventually something will click and you will get good at it. But you could just add a little imperfections, little stippled. You know you don't always have to use a brush, but you can. But you might see me just get in here and just elaborate on what's here and again. All I'm doing is holding old, selecting what's there and just trying to get some finer details. I always like some of the dark in here, painting Hilsum texture into the shadow side. I might clean up some you've got a lot of kind of poorly rendered edges. I might get in here and just keep cleaning these up. But now that all that work's been done, it doesn't mean I have to keep working in this fashion. I could just work with a full pay clay over top and continue to paint this chip away at these These edges here. But again, this really depends on what you're in result is what you're looking for. How hyper realistic you might want something. Now, obviously those details I just tried to add in the chest plate you're not gonna read those back here. So if the end result is this and the largest client needs to see it is right here, Then again, you gotta be aware that in make the best use of your time, So give this method try hopefully worked along with me and created your own character. I'd love to see what you come up with. Be sure to let me know if you have any questions or recommendations for future content. I want to make sure that you get the most of these lessons. But remember, it's just gonna take implementation. So try the silhouette a value study and then apply color over top. Keep in mind, I'd like to see any stages of the work you create as well. So you could share your silhouettes, your values and your color version. And I can help you through that process. So again, I hope you've enjoyed this. And I really appreciate you allowing me to be your instructor. Good luck with the art and I'll talk to you soon.
Robert Marzullo, Online instructor of Figure Drawing and Comic Art
