Character Design For Beginners - Create Your First Human Character

1. Introduction : Character design is essential, and not just in illustration, but in animation, comics, and games too. Beginners tend to overdrawing human characters. And I get it, humans are the most difficult subjects to draw. We see humans every day. If we draw something off, it will be pretty obvious to everyone. But do you know what's great? Even though there are some universal truths that I will be teaching you in this class. Everybody is unique and there isn't a correct universal way how to draw a character. In this class, you will have the possibility to discover your way of drawing human characters. Hi, my name is Alexandra KD, Art Mother. I'm an artist illustrator on line educator, and I have taught over 65,000 students worldwide. With my online classes, I mostly teach digital illustration. My students love my classes because I make complicated art topics easy for beginners and dry art theory exciting and fun. In this class, I will be teaching you a step by step pro workflow that can get you any time from an empty page and a creative block to a fully developed character design concept like this one. By the end of this class, you will be ready to draw a human character of any age, sex and personality. I'm pretty excited to teach this class because character design is the most fun part for me in digital illustration. It also had the biggest roadblocks for me that I had to overcome on my artistic journey and I'm still learning and evolving. This class was created with beginners in mind. We will be focusing on basics and essentials. We will go through topics like shape, language, and proportions. We will be doing a lot of sketching and thumbnailing. I will show you how to work with value and color. Lastly, I will show you how do I personally illustrate my aspects and you can take away as much from it as you wish. As a class project, we will develop a full concept for human character and we will illustrate this human character as well. Placing this character to an environment or to a functional artwork will be optional, but definitely a possibility. I'm super happy to get started. Aren't you? Well, see you inside the class. 2. About The Class: Hello and welcome to the class. I'm so happy to have you here. In this video, I'm going to talk to you about the class structure, the class resources, and the class project. Generally, the whole class is divided into two main parts. In the first few lessons, we'll be talking about some general topics. We will be talking about human anatomy, proportions, the easiest way to draw a body, the six main body parts and ways to stylize them. We will also talk about shape, language, and do some drawing to warm up or creative muscles. In the second part, we will develop a concept for the character. We will create a mind map, do some research and develop the idea for the character. Then we will grab this idea and bring it to life. We will use thumbnailing and sketching to get the base idea on paper. I will show you also step by step, how I illustrate my characters and how I will create a functional artwork from it. I will be creating a sticker and the thumbnail image for this class. During the whole process, I will give you pro illustrator tips. And I will also try to help you get more confidence in yourself and your way of doing things. Because that is essential to find your own voice and to be able to express yourself through art. Because beginners tend to think that professionals just sit down to their desk and just immediately create perfect artworks like a desk one. But that's just not how it works. Okay, This frame with the stable points will help you to go in baby steps. And with the little wins at every step, you will have this feeling of success that will help you to move forward in the process. If you trust the process, you will end up with a great illustration at the end. Having this work flow framework, or how to call it in your skill set, will help you through your toughest creative blocks. Just trust me, there are several ways to do this class. Very beginners can just watch the theoretical videos and then follow me step by step using my sketch and the video guidance to complete the artwork. Just as I do, it will be completely fine. My sketch is free to use for you because practice makes master right beginners or very beginners with more courage. I recommend you to change something in my sketch. Use your own colors, put something from yourself to the artwork, change the props and accessories in the artwork, and make it your own. And still you can follow the video guidance, but do it your own way. More advanced artists or beginners with more courage can just develop their whole own concept and create their whole own illustration in their own style or in the way they love to illustrate. Or if they have already their own voice, you can just put it into it. All right. When you are done, make sure to applaud your artwork to a project gallery and also check out what others did for the class. I am just so excited to see what you create for it. As a first step now, go to the resources and download them. You will find my sketch there, my brushes, my color palette, and my original file for reference as well. And when you are ready, let's get started. See you in the next video. 3. Body Basics: All right, welcome to Body basics. In this video, we are going to talk about the easiest way to draw a body. Humans are one of the most difficult subjects to draw. If we draw something in a wrong way, it is very obvious. As we see humans every day, we need to have a solid knowledge about anatomy. But not everything has to have defined anatomy, illustration and animation as well. Characters are strongly stylized, which leads us to breaking down our characters into basic geometric shapes. This is when shape language will come into the image. But first, let's talk about stylizing the human anatomy. Every artist works differently. There is no universal method for drawing a body correctly. However, there are universal truths, body masses, and landmarks that will be the same. No matter what approach you choose. It can be counterproductive to start your character with a high level of detail. And, for example, work on the eyes before knowing how the body is looking. I'm guilty of this. When I was a beginner, I always started with the face because that was the acute part. I have drawn the detailed eyes and the smile and expression, and I didn't even know how the body looks like. Changing your mind to working from big to small is to wait to go in illustration. Now you can separate the body into six basic parts. Head, chest, pelvis, shoulders, arms and legs. By dividing the body into shapes, you can see the bigger picture more easily. And now let's just roughly draw a human body together. It will be pretty random, but we have to warm up or drawing muscles. Let's just copy this little doll together so that I can show you the process of my thinking process of creating a human. I don't really want to put you into the box of, you should draw this because it is how it is an anatomy. I want you to explore what you know about the human body right now. Because like you are living in it, right? You know approximately how long your hands are. If you don't know, you can just look at your body. Right. Also I want you to like how you do things. You don't necessarily have to draw a body like this, but there are some universal things that we are going to talk about in this process. Now, create a screen sized canvas or whatever cavas you like. I have screen size, now I will grab black color. You can use the sketching six pencil that comes with procreate Or you can find a sketching pencil in the brush side that comes with the class. You can use this sketching pencil as well. I will go back to the one that comes with procreate. All right. What shape does the head have? It is approximately, this is very random. Okay? It has the upside down shape of an egg. Right? Okay. Now we have this cross in the middle to know the symmetry of the face. And we usually have our eyes at this half part of the head. We are not going to draw eyes now, we want the big picture. Now we have some ears right here, starting from this line. Okay. Now I allow to add or a neck. Yeah. Then what I note are the shoulders. The shoulders are approximately starting these circles where the head width ends. Okay. Approximately right here. Here are two little circles and these are going to be my. Then we have the chest. Chest differs in different male and the female characters, but you can just go with some random shapes that you like. There is the do, I will show you in a second that can help you in forming a body. Basically, we are creating an easier way of this doll on our canvas. Okay, then we have the pelvis. We have a pelvis, let's say like this. We can add the hands to shapes approximately like this coming from the shoulders right here. And then we have some legs. I will it. Okay. Approximately. So this is a female body. What I want to show you now and talk a little bit about shape language, we are going to talk about it a little bit later now that you can see that there are six body parts, or six areas of body that you can work with. Is that every body part here can have different shapes. Okay. This is a universal truth that we have these body parts and approximately how they are placed within the body. But you can play with the shape of this body and have different shapes for the chest part, for the pelvis part, for the hands and legs. Other important part of drawing a human body is proportions. We can play with these proportions to express different things. Let's just talk about it in the next video so that you understand a little bit more what I'm talking about. 4. Proportions: Playing with proportions can help you to strengthen your character and help you express personality traits. Males, females, and children. Even people in different age and also personality have different proportions. For example, in illustration, in character design, you can play with the proportions of giving, for example, a small, bigger pelvis to a character or short legs and the giant chest, et cetera. We are going to play with this in the Shape language video. In this video logit, focus on the most obvious difference in proportions, male, female, and children. You can estimate the realistic base proportions of a figure by counting how many times the length of the head fits into the overall height of the character. The average male measures 7-8 had stall, a female figure 67 head stall. And a child approximately four had stall. Let's say we have this head, it's 123456, this is obviously a female character. The next thing about humans is that we are all unique and are all built different. Even though there are these guidelines that help us to stay on track, there isn't a universal way to draw a body. I can't stress this enough. Let's just try these proportions out and let's draw a male, female, and the child figure. We are going to do the exact same thing we just did with this character. I will just turn off these layers. I will create a new layer, actually I will create a unit table. I will just turn on the canvas and the drawing guide for this, I will just draw a line here, approximately add like three little squares as one unit of head 1234567 and something. Okay, let's have that. Let's start with a male character. Again, what I'm going to do, I am working with basic geometric shapes. Okay, You don't need to go into detail. This drawing exercise is really for you to think through what you know about a human body and add some more knowledge into it and just warm up and, and think from big to small, upside down shape of the head here, upside down egg shape. Then we have the ears here, let's say. Then I will add the circles. Here are the shoulders. All right. Men have thicker necks. I will add a bit more of a rectangular shape for the chest. And then maybe bigger. Yeah, like this. Until this part the chest, a narrow waist here is a little bit of a trouser and it's a leg like this. And let's add some hands here. And let's add the six pack. Yeah, A approximately. Let's create another female. 123456. All right. Let's add a child that is only four heads. 1234, they have big heads. Before we go back to years. Yeah. Again, a narrow little waist little legs. Okay. Can you see that? With proportions, we can express different things like gender and even age. For example, I would, old lady, I would draw all that expresses that she is very old, et cetera. This drawing exercise for you to just warm up and to think from big to small and to try these things out. See how you can express these things through proportions. Now let's see how we can play with these base shapes and create different characters using shape language in the next video. 5. Shape Language: Using shape language is a great starting point for a design and a more flexible approach than limiting a character to realistic proportions. It also helps us to work from big to small. The most commonly used shapes are circles, triangles, and squares or rectangles. Each shape has different traits that can speak to what kind of personality your character has. Circular, round shapes in a character will speak about a softer, kinder personality. A triangle has sharp edges and will help you express a dynamic or even a dangerous character. A square is a solid and compact shape which will make a character look strong and stable. And you can build a character with a combination of these geometric shapes. Now, another thing that you can implement is exaggeration and contrast. They are also key elements in creating a design that is memorable. You can simply exaggerate and contrast the six body parts we identified fight previously. For example, you can exaggerate and contrast a character by giving him a tiny head and a huge body, or a short torso with long legs. That's about the theory. Let's do some sketches to warm up and create character thumbnails and play with these combinations. I will turn this off. What I want from you now is I will just turn this little body on. Is to think about the six body parts and think about the basic geometric shapes. Replace these body parts with the basic geometric shapes. For example, you think that the character could have, let me create a new layer. Could have a triangular head, then a triangular torso. You can also switch this shape and for example, add a pelvis that is also triangular and some triangular legs and also heads. This is a character built up entirely from triangles and also she can have like the shoulders from triangles. Or let's say you think that she should have a round head, not an oval shape, and maybe a small chest and a pelvis with some little legs and some cute hands. This can, I can see a housewife in it, for example. She can have the hands like this and hold, for example, a cake. And she has this big chest and a rounded pelvis, and some legs like this. But I can imagine her having a hair like this. Can you see that? Um, I will just make her smaller. You can think about a man. Now think about also proportions that we already talked about. For example, a man can have a giant chest. You can start with the chest and maybe a tiny head and some long long legs **** like this. Now what we are going to do and what I want from you is to create at least six different basic geometric shape combinations for body parts and make male characters, if you think about them like bigger and approximately, I don't know how many times is the overall body height, like the seven or eight times the head, et cetera. Combine these information that you've got from the free videos and create some sketches. Now I will speed this up and see you at the end of this video where I will be ready with my combinations. Because during this process, I might already develop an idea for my character. This little place with the shapes, geometric shapes and combinations. We'll start your creative thinking. Okay, You might get into the flow state because there isn't something hard that you need to do. This is really just random sketching and thumbnailing. You can start having ideas. All right, so see you at the end of this video. All right, so what do you say about my combinations? I have created ten of them. There are so many different ones. Let me comment on them. I think this female could be a villain. She is this triangular one that I already showed you. I can see like a clumsy monster here with this little circular, I don't know, chest. I can see a grandma in this shape combination. She is small. Can you see the proportions? She only had three heads there. That doesn't really matter. Again, we don't need to like limit ourselves with these guidelines. Then here is the housewife. Here is a little bit an old grandpa who is not really happy. Then here is a soldier with this big strong chat. I actually pretty like this guy. He's like so cool. He's like having this pipe and stuff. I just started to develop the character idea. This one probably I will work with this one, but let's just see the others. This is again a shape. This is again, some clumsy monster like his hands are too long. This is stereotypical Barbie thing, like the hourglass figure and stuff. Now that we have warmed up and have some sketches already and maybe an idea as well, let's move on and define a concept for our character in the next video. 6. The Idea: The first step to creating any character is to know who that character is. We can determine this through a series of questions like who is the character to the story? What kind of a person it is? What is his motivation? What's his archetype with knowing the answers to these questions? Each step forward will be easier if you are working as an illustrator. Some of these questions might be already answered in the brief, but there will be gaps. You will need to fill yourself with research and your own interpretation. Every artist does this differently. But a very usual and helpful tool is creating a mind map. A mind map helps you to find a clear direction with your design is the first key point that helps when you are procrastinating over the projects, just do the mind map and you will see the creative thoughts will start floating out of your head. After we are done with these little sketches, I am sure that one drawing just stood out for you. Or maybe you already have a character in your head or a story in your head that you would love to draw. For me, this guy is something that I would love to develop further. But I'm going to adapt this drawing to my idea and not my idea to this drawing. Okay, we are going to actually create a brief for ourselves. What I find as we don't have a brief right now, what I find to be pretty good is to think about stereotypes. Okay. Stereotypical things may be tied to professions. You can think of a profession and gender, that can be a good starting point to your drawing. I will just rename this a layer to experiment, experiment, and create a new layer. And I will just hide this one. And let's create a mind map. I will just name it mind map right now. Okay, profession. That stood out for me and just popped up in my mind and somehow that character that I have shown you is somehow showing me is a sailor. Actually, it is a returning character in my art, a sailor kind, a father figure that appears in my artwork. But I would love to further develop. Let me show me one illustration I've done. I've created this illustration for Father's Day. This is the father figure that somehow shows up in my artworks a lot of the times, but I haven't developed his character yet. So it would be a great way to combine this hat, because mostly this person doesn't have a body. But now I have an idea about the body and I will combine that with this head. For some reason, this guy is a sailor. For me, what I suggest for you is to start with the profession or a stereotype. So let's say it can be a superhero or it can be just simply said that it is, I don't know, a postman, or a tech guy, or a multi millionaire, or something. That just pops up in your mind and it will say a lot about this person at first. Let's talk about the gender. It be a male for me, okay? It can be a female for you. If you are thinking about gender in a spectrum, then define that spectrum for yourself. Then age. I will write gender here. Think about the gender and let's talk about the age approximately. You don't need to write like numbers. You can write old, I will write middle aged, middle aged men and you can write a teenage teenager or 35 years old, something like that. Let's think about personality is my sailor will be and cool wise. Okay, As you see to the top part of this mind map, I have written some basics and let's just further develop more environmental stuff. What is the environment in environment, okay. What is the environment he's in? My sailor could be on a ship or in the ocean, or on an island. But for some reason it pops up in my mind that it will be at the docks, At the dock. At the dock. This can help me to define more things like assets that I will implant into the illustrations. For example, at the dock, there are sea gulls. Maybe I can implement that bird into the image. Then let's add some characteristics, Characteristic features, features. I want a tag and adage pipe for some reason. This is a new idea for me. Haven't created a guy with a pipe yet. The last thing is the action. Let's see, what is he doing at the doc? A middle aged male, cool and wild sailor with a mustache. Bird and a pipe at the dock. What is he doing is reading is he was smoking his pipe. That's sure for me that he will be smoking his pipe. I think he will be waiting, waiting for the ship to arrive. But he will be very cool with it. As you can see from the simple stereotype, I have a art, a stereotype. From the stereotype, I can develop more details that are just popping up in my mind. Now I have an idea what I want to draw now I might have an image already in my head. The final artwork will definitely not look like the image that you have in your head and don't force it. Okay, we are going to go through some exercises that will just loosen up your fixated things and open your comfort zone for exploration and growth. Now you know what kind of a character you would love to create and what is our next step? Is to do a little research. See you in the next video. Where we are going to get resources to help us to build up this artwork or this concept. See you there. 7. Research: Once you know what a character you would love to create, you can start researching materials for your artwork. Doing a research is essential, and it is sometimes misunderstood with lack of creativity or copying. By creating mood boards, seeing how other artists solve the problem, how something looks in real life, you can make your design grounded in reality and make them more believable, even if the character is based on a fantasy. Now let's create a mood board. It is the best to start on Pinterest. You can even screenshot images and place them on the canvas, or you can create a new Pinterest board. So your task now is to collect inspiration for the subject you have chosen, choose moods, choose colors, even actors who come to your mind when you think about the character. So I will just go to Pinterest and Google. I mean, speed this up and come back to you with my mood board to explain what I just found out. Right here are some things I screenshot from Pinterest. It is a good idea to have a female sailor, but I don't want that. I realized that there has to be tattoos and the mustache and stuff and maybe a ship as a hat, there is a sea gull. Can you see that? On the shoulder here is a pipe as well. And the flute. It is extremely good idea to make the bird as the sea and have some stuff there. It's a cool thing. What I also found is that these colors would go pretty nicely to my artwork. I need to think about the time of the day when he is there. Maybe it will be sunset or sunrise. Maybe sunrise early morning, but there will be blue and orange at the sky, somehow reflected. I'm not sure you can create a visual moodboard for yourself. What I'm going to add to this one, this moodboards, some extra things that just came to my mind based on the research I have done. I will Tattoos. Tattoos. There will be a sea gull on the shoulder. Then what else is the question? I will just write it here as the sea ship. As a hat. As a hat. I want this artwork to be fun. Yeah, I want random things in the bird and there will be a pun in the tattoos. I need to think about a joke that I can play within the tattoos and the random things in the bird, for example, there will be a tattoo, where are my keys? And there will be a key in the bird or something like that. It's good idea where my keys. I will think about this, I will go through a little bit more about the Talor lifestyle. Maybe there will be alcohol somewhere. Rum, for example. I didn't create a mood board visually now because I don't want to use anyone's works here. I just shown them on my phone and I don't really want to copy them. But now I have something in my mind that is more clear. The image that I've got in my head is more clear. But don't stop yourself from creating a mood board or a pins board with the ideas. Okay. And just complement your mind map with your research. It is good. This is why it is good to at first lay down these things that are your choices. First, Cool wise male sailor, middle aged at the dock, waiting, blah, blah, blah. Because if I would go through this research phase, after I just say I want to do a sailor, I might have the impostor syndrome that someone else did something. That is my idea and is already done. Why do I want to draw this, you know, to prevent the impostor syndrome. And again, we are at the personal development thing because this whole journey and the whole design process is connected to your personal development stages. All right, so to prevent the impostor syndrome, lay down your ideas first. You don't need to go into detail but main things. And then you can add some things as well that you go through. Like when you do the research stuff and you just find these ideas like random things in the bird, some fun things might arise in your mind. All right. Now what we are going to do is thumbnailing. Thumbnailing is the stage before sketching, and we are going to only really roughly draw the composition and the character and the things that come to our minds. And then we are going to progress from there to sketching a line, art and painting and stuff. All right, so let's just take baby steps. See you in the next video, where we are going to start with thumbnailing. 8. Thumbnailing: The sad truth is that your first idea will almost never be your best one. I bet you already have an image in your mind, but sometimes images in our minds lack something. They look off when we put them on paper. You might want to stick to your first idea and perfect it. But I think it is better to explore several ideas as we work in small thumbnails. It is really a time effective way of trying out different. Now, some artists prefer to work with silhouettes, some with quick sketches. It's on which one you prefer creating. Thumbnails is not always a linear process. Sometimes you will draw a dozen thumbnails and one will stand out. And sometimes you draw six and take the best bits from three of them. For example, keep in mind the effort will be worth it, as it is the base for a great design. Basically, what we have done here is already a thumbnailing. But what I want you to grab one thing and develop further, As I already told you, I love this guy here. I will work with the idea here that there is a big tummy, a small chest, and like it is chubby legs and this cool head. But you might find that, oh my God, I love this part, and I love this part, and I love this part. And I will combine them together to get a stable base geometric shape composition that we can start sketching on. Because that is the next step. Now we really need to find a stable base composition of basic geometric shapes that we can further develop for sketching. Now, what I wanted to tell you about thumbnailing is that there are several types of thumbnailing. This is character thumbnailing, but we have composition thumbnailing, where we are placing the character into the environment and see how different positions look like. There is color thumbnailing, where you are trying out different color combinations to see what works for the image the most. Now let's do this character thumbnailing and focus only building up this base shape. I will just go to my experiments and select this little guy. I will free finger, swipe, copy, copy and paste. I will turn this off. I will put this on the top. I will take a look on my mind map. Maybe that would be good to do a little recap on what we had on our mind map. It's a sailor, a male, a cool wise, middle aged guy. The mustache bird and a pipe waiting at the dog with a seagull on his shoulders tattooed. He has random things in his bird. But that will be part of the sketching part. I'll turn this off. Place this little guy up here. Now I'm going to speed up this process. What I'm going to do is to quickly go with these basic geometric shapes and play a little bit more with them to have a great composition. If I were to combine several guys from here, you just grab them, paste them there so that you know a reference, like for example this one. And combine two somehow. This is an exploration part. Good luck with it. Yeah, I will incorporate a little bit, not just geometric shapes now, but the basic things we learned about how to draw a body. For example, I will place some shoulders here to develop the body a bit more. Yeah, I realized I overdone this. This is two details. I will just keep my canvas small and try to work in small. Yeah, this works better. What I keep seeing in the thumbnails that the tummy will be big. What I need to figure out is the chest. The chest, how is it? I want the arms to be show a little bit more. I will need to think about ways of showing the hands. So maybe this will be. Let's see. All right, so here are my tom nails. I know they are like pretty weird. So what we learned in this process is at first that don't go into too much detail right away. Okay, So I did that mistake. It is good that I did it because I can now remind you of it. I went through in small drawings and I realized that there are several things I want to combine together that is cool way of using these legs, the big tummy. I want this chest to be like this rectangular because that works well. I want one hint to be in a pocket to be it's cool, but the other will hold the pipe. I decided that this guy will blow the smoke out. That will be pretty cool. Yeah. I will combine several things from the thumbnails together and Yeah. I will see you in the next video where I'm going to complete it and create a final sketch and just sketch out the figure based on these ideas that I had here. See you in the next video. 9. Sketching: Once you have selected the thumbnail or your favorite parts of more thumbnails, combine them together and start working on refining the shapes and elements of the character. This is what we are going to do. I'm going to just make this smaller and put this aside. I will just select this base guy because for some reason he was the bat. Then I love how I've drawn this head. Maybe I will just place it right here. I will just erase this head below it. Yeah, now I have the head here. Here, placed here. Now what I like is this hind here. Yeah, these legs are cool. This hind, Maybe we'll place it here, like this in yeah, erase. I will lower the opacity of this layer. I will at first pinch these together or merge down there on one. I will lower the opacity, create a new layer and just try to refine. And again, try to keep in mind the ways how we are drawing like people, Can you remember that? Keep in mind those things. It looks cool, yeah, this body is giant. As you can see, the shirt will not fit it. What I usually do at this stage, before I refine the sketch that much, is that I create a silhouette. Now this bird doesn't look great, but doesn't matter. I will create a layer below. I will grab a pack brush and a more clear one. I have a clean shader here. I will just paint behind this to see if my silhouette works. It is important to have a working silhouette that our character is recognizable. For example, think about Mickey Mouse. If you don't see the whole character, only the silhouette, you know that it's him. Here is the muscle mass. See the silhouette. See how it works. How does it look like? I think it looks amazing. It's at, oh, maybe I can do a ship. Wow, that's a great idea. Ship as Gandalf did from the smoke. Wow, I love when I get ideas like this. Can you see that working with the techniques can bring you more and more ideas. I just love the silhouette you can play with poses and gestures and et cetera. But I think at this stage, you have a simple pose, your characters in, and we don't need to add more dynamism or gestures, et cetera. I will be just spending time now to refine the sketch. To have a clean sketch, so that we can progress and work with values and color. I will turn this silhouette off. Yeah, refine the sketch even more. And I will find drawing for the ship to incorporate it in it. I will speed this up again. Yeah, what I wanted to say is that this is the time where you can add props and accessories to your guy. So I didn't know how these hats look like, so I just found and just got ideas to add this sign there. All right. So I think I am ready with the sketch. It is not 100% perfect, but can you see that I incorporated the sea? I have the heat here, I have the ship, the tattoos, the pipe. The hand is not the most perfect hand I've ever drawn. I will work on it while painting to get it better. I want this pipe to being focused. I don't want lots of fingers. It is so good that just a small finger and this other one can be seen here. You can just do adjustments like that. Or you can spend hours to get the fingers right, whatever. I love how this part of the hand is much smaller than the by steps. I love this hand as well. It looks pretty amazing. I love this sea gull. It is so cute. I just love it. I'll just show you in a second a hack that I love to implement into my drawings when I am sketching. So usually I just select and flip horizonalI'nurnf this layer and I can see what are the problems in my drawing. Can you see that? That it is like shifting like this in this direction. I might want to work on that. And now what I'm doing is that I'm cutting and just part of the illustration to get it as good as possible. It is always a good idea to take a little break to have a fresh look on the sketch. And this is what I did after the break. I saw that I have some problems with the symmetry. I worked on that. Then I redrawn it all on a completely new layer to have a full clean sketch. All right. I think I am ready with the character. I already did some background like sketches that there will be like clouds in the background, that maybe there will be the sea and this will be the shore or the dock. I'm not sure. I also thought about creating a, a circular design for it, but I will decide on it a little bit later. All right. So can you see what we can do with simple, basic geometric shapes? A little bit of mind map and some research, and it is super cool. All right, so now that we are ready with the character, we have the body. We have the props, the accessories. We have some fun punts like our He rose and crossed over tattoo on him. Let's just move on to the next video and talk about values and color. 10. Color and Values: All right, welcome to Color and Values. Working with color and value is a good way to lead ye to the most important parts of the character. The viewer's eye will be immediately drawn to anywhere with strongly contrasting areas, similar to the thumbnailing process. This stage is about exploring your options and finding the best version of your character. If you created a moodboard, this is the time to revisit it and look for the colors that can make your design work. So what I was thinking about, to have a sun rise at the background and have a C here and maybe a dock here. What about the guy? This means that I will have like pink, blue, and brown at the background. And what color will the guy be? What I'm going to basically do is color thumbnailing. I will grab my sketch and duplicate it several times. Duplicate, duplicate, let's say four times. You know what? Let's say four different thumbnails we're going to try out and it is true, like with the character thumbnails. All right? So you might allow one color in one image. You might like another color combination from the second thumbnail, and you can combine them. What I'm going to do now is to speed the process up. I will create a new layer below all these little sketches. Just go randomly picking color and just filling it in with the pencil. And roughly place the colors behind these sketches to see how these colors work. As I know the background colors I want, I will start with them. All right. So I have four different versions of colors. And I find none of them perfect. But I decided on some things during the process. What I love is this orange to be the bird. I thought about having a dark brown and blue one, but that would be too much blue in the image as there will be in the background, the sky, and also the sea. We will have an orange. I will just create a new palette. I will create a new palette here. Wow, what great colors are here. Let's go here and place these colors. I love this blue. This blue will remain as the color of this shirt. For the trousers, I'm not sure which one looks better. I know that there is green here. But let's just create a value check layer. I will just show you even if you have a color thumbnails. Creating a value check layer will help you to decide which color combinations create better contrast. I create a new layer. I will select a middle gray, fill the layer in, and change the bending mode to color. Let's see what different values, how different values look like on these images. Here are dark trousers and here are light showers. I love this lightness because it stands out from the background. But I'm not sure what the background will look like. I think I will go with some of the darker ones. I will turn off maybe the dark, dark, greenish blue will be good for trousers. We can change that during the whole drawing process. So these things are absolutely not like fixed things. All right, so it's all about exploration. It is just a starting point. Okay. Now what I also like is this golden color. I will implement it somehow. I love the color for the skin that I have found. I will add it here as well. And the brown, this darker brown for the pipe, I will add it there. I now have six colors. For some reason I don't like this orange. I will change that. I will make a little bit lighter orange. Yeah, it looks more better. I will delete this watch and put it here. I will delete this one as well, This blue. I love it to be more like this. Delete this watch and put it here. Delete. Yeah, I think this color poll just looks awesome for this illustration. So now that we have our color palette and we have checked the values, we are going to use this value check layer during the whole process. See you in the next video, where I'm going to start actually painting the whole image. So see you there. 11. Painting The Head: All right, so let's just get into it now. What I'm going to do is to first put everything that I have here into some groups of layers so that I don't like mess up with them. I will just name these layers and you can find them. In the final artwork, I will turn off the color thumbnails. I will turn on the sketch. I will create a new layer below the sketch. I will lower the opacity of the sketch. Now let's talk about the brushes that we are going to use. Now, in the resources, you can find the art meters, ultimate brush set that includes six brushes. Here are they? They are pretty amazing because you can use them for a whole illustration. You have clean shape, texture, shape, or sketching pencil, we are not going to use that, but it's great for details, shader texture, and drop shadows. You can use obviously whatever brushes that you like. I will try to create the whole illustration only with the ones. The first step is to create shapes with the clean shaper. I will grab the color for the skin on this layer, I will just start creating the shape of the head. I will approximately fell in a little bit of bigger shape than it is here maybe. Yeah, approximately that. I don't have missing pixels when I'm painting about them. I'm going to speed this little bit up that I don't bore you on this layer. I'm going to fill in all of the skin shapes. Okay, Yeah. What I will sometimes do is to create a background that is a little bit gray so that I can see my shapes a bit better. Okay, so now we have the skin and let's add now the hat and the bird. Okay? And on a new layer I will add the moustache. And I will turn off this layer so that I can see exactly the shape of this mustache. Okay. I'll turn it back on. Oh, yeah, and I forget add this layer to add this part. Okay. I will start with the head and I will add the shading. It starts forming and then we will add all the other things. What I'm going to do is to alphalock the layer of the skin and actually all the others as well. Now I will shade at first the skin. I will pick up the color of it and choose the darker version. And choose the shader pencil like this. Let's make it smaller. Let's add a little bit of shading. I will make it a bit lighter. This will work well. I will shaded each shape and wear this shape like meet with other shapes. For example, like here, I need to make it even smaller. For example, below the eyebrows. And there will be also the nose here. The ears, Yeah. Cool. This is an Irish sailor. Maybe I will add a little bit of even darker color to the edges like here. Here, the mustache. Yeah, looks cool. And now I will choose a darker version of this orange. Let's go and see how it works. I will make it a bit bigger. Just go through the shape of the bird. Like this looks so fun. I will choose an even darker color and make it a little bit smaller. And again, at the edges And where these shapes meet, I just add an extra shadow like this, Humanity eyebrows like this. And I will make it a bit bigger and just set the edges a bit more. Yeah, it looks cool. Then to the mustache, I will do the exact same thing. I will add this shadow. I love this technique of this shading, adds a little bit of this cut out feeling. I love how the mustache goes from this side, it's like going up at this side. So fun, If I want, I can go with a small brush. Just add a little bit of light at the top. I will try even almost white. Yeah, also to the bird here. It will make it glow a little bit fun. I will add these details. I will create a new layer and choose this dark brown and the texture shaper or the sketch. Let's use the sketching pencil. I will just add the mouth. I don't like the nose like this. The mouth and the eyes in the ears like this. Yeah, super cool. Wow, I love how this looks. I will also add some details at the top to the bird and the mustache. I will create another layer and just add these details. I love the spirals and there will be spirals where he is blowing this ship right here. Try another way. Yeah, I will adjust it a little bit. One fun thing that you can do, and this is why I've put this onto a new layer. You can play with the blending modes. You can see this darkening looks pretty good. If you want something special, maybe you can add screen color overlay. We would like this looks cool. This green looks fun if it looks white, Luminosity, I don't know, Maybe this darken looks cool. Yeah. All right, so let's move on to the hat. The hat is white. I will shade it with gray. I will choose the darker gray. I will choose the shader. It is already alpha logged. I will just add a little bit of shadow again around the edges. Actually, I will make it a bit smaller and I will put this shadow on top of this because I will need a line here here. I will make it a little bit darker, will make it even smaller. I will add a little bit of light here. I'm shadow. I cannot choose this catching pencil and choose an even darker color and just add that there. As you can see, too dark. I will go a little bit. I'm not doing line work, I'm filling in the shapes, adding shadows to them where I need to differentiate between two neighboring areas. I am adding lines of color with shading. So I will maybe add a little bit of this here. All right? And I will choose a dark blue, a navy blue. And just draw this little guy here. Super cool. So I don't want to overcomplicate it, will just divide the process to different parts of the illustration, so we are finished with the hat. Now let's just move on to the clothes and then let's play with the accessories. See in the next video. 12. Painting The Clothes: Okay, so in this video, let's just work on the clothes. The shirt will be white. Okay, I will create a new layer, not a new brush. Choose the clean shaper. And again, just fill in the shape of the T shirt. Okay, now I will again start with the skin. So go to the skin and choose the color that you have shaded it with. If you don't know or it is not in the history, you can just go back to original color and approximately choose a color that you shaded with. It is good also to save those colors on your palette so that you can just return to them. I will again do the same shade around the shape and where it meets with other shapes it will be. I will choose a little bit bigger brush and shade this skin from the outer part as well. Also here, like this tummy as well. Now I will choose an even darker color and a smaller brush and just add a little bit of darker shadow where it needs to be. For example, also here where these muscles meet, there is more definite shadow where this hand is in the pocket, for example. Or where there is this neck part. And around here, and also here at the palm. All right. Okay. I left the tummy out here at the tummy, there is good to have this sharper shadows. Okay, now I will add or shade the shirt. The first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to paint the stripes on it. Because I want the shadows to be on the blue as well. So the way I'm going to do it is to select the shirt, choose the color, and to have a little bit of texture in it. I will add this color with this catching pencil into it. Okay. I think I will not start with the first stripe but with the second because if I would start with the first one, it would be next to the and I don't know if that will look good. I will just add this stripe here and fill it in as if you would like just color with a colored pencil. Don't worry if you have the texture, it will just look good. Okay. Oops, Yeah, If you want to be able to erase from it, you can actually create a new layer and add the stripes there. I will just do that and do this again. I will select and warp it a little bit so I can adjust these stripes to have a better, you know, this curves on the belly. I feel that it is needed to adjust it just a little bit. Yeah, yeah, totally. We'll just add these things here. Yeah, super cool. It looks fantastic. And now I will choose a dark gray and actually add some things like this at the edges of this shirt to add some cool effect also at the nick like this at the bottom like this. Super cool. Now let's add the shadow. I will create a new layer and again, created as a clipping mask, choose black. And I'm going to choose the drop shadow brush. And I will make it big, even bigger. On this clipping mask layer, I will just add shadows where I think there should be. For example, at the neck. Also at this part behind the belly. Maybe I will make it smaller and just make really harsh shadows behind the belly. I will make it bigger and add shadows to this part of the belly just to have that shading now below the head. Yeah, actually what I'm going to do is to gosh, blur it. Go to adjustments. Goshen blur. And just blur it a little bit. Maybe if you think that's too much, just lower its opacity and you already have some cool shadows Now this blue remained blue and it is not that dirty. I will add some shadows to the belly as well. I will go back to the body. Just add with the drop shadow, just a little bit of shadow below these parts to enhance it a little bit. For some reason, I think that this shape should be a little bit adjusted. I will go to the main shape and just erase from it a little bit like this. Yeah, it looks better. Now, what about the skin? I want the tattoos to be ready. And also this hair, I'm going to choose this brown that I have here and this catching pencil, maybe a layer below the head. It shouldn't be a clipping mask. I will just add these little hairs. So fun. It looks super cool. Okay, and also the belly button. And I will add, this is so much fun. Okay. Oh, God, sorry. Okay. You can add some little hair on the, on the hand as well. Maybe he doesn't have a lot of hair everywhere. Just curly, maybe goes on his shoulder. Okay. And I will add some here as well. I'd love to create this fun thing. And another layer I will choose a bit more bluish blue, more of like an indigo blue for the tattoos. Now, I'm just going to add the tattoos. Okay, I think this looks super cool. What else is needed Is just a little bit of line work where these things meet. Okay, I think this looks super fun and it is super cool. I will continue with those trousers, and I just forgot what color it was. It was this dark blue or indigo or whatever. I will choose a clean shaper and just create a new layer and just fill it in. Okay, I will add brown shoes. Actually, this belt is going to be brown as well. I will create a new layer and actually make it a clipping mask so that I can just paint within this shape. And just add this belt here. I will she again, I will choose the shader, choose a little bit darker color and make it a little bit smaller. And oops. I will lock this belt so that I can shade within it. Again, I will shade at the edges. I will maybe choose a little bit lighter color in the middle, make it a little bit like pop on top. I will create a new there and I will choose this yellow, the clean shaper. Just add a belt, something there will be like this and maybe some very dark. Blue or brown, like dots like this. Okay, why not? All right, the trousers, I will alpha the layer of the trousers. I will choose a darker blue or this aqua color shader. And I will make it a bit bigger. And again, yeah, same exact thing, shading the shapes from outside. I will choose this color and add a little bit of glow into the middle. Can you see that? Looks so cool. It immediately adds texture. Now we have this texturizer like brush we can add will make it a little bit smaller. Can you see? We can add a texture like this here. But I like this one a little bit better. I will create a new layer and choose a very dark color again as catching pencil and just add this detail here for the trousers. Here is the pocket. This pocket is tight, you cannot see it. Or I will make it even darker so that you can see it as here. This pocket and this pocket. I will add this Sam at the bottom and new layer below it all make sure it is not a clipping mask. But I will add the shoes and it will be dark brown. I will just add, so I will not work on it in detail. You definitely, it can add to the character's personality to work on the shoes. Just play around. I will alpha lock, I said alpha lock, a darker version shader, Make it smaller and just add some shadows again to this shape. Make it a bit bigger. I will add this golden to the top to again, add a little bit of this glow. I think this guy looks just incredible. Now we have the clothes. What I missed a little bit is this part of the pocket. I will go back to this shape. I will pho and choose this dark color and the clean shaper. Add a pocket here. I will erase this line, choose this color. Again, with the sketching pencil, I will just add to bits. Yeah, cool. Cool. Okay, so see you in the next video where we are going to play with this a little assassies. 13. Painting The Accessories: All right. So let's move on to the accessory. Let's start with the sea gull. I will create another layer. It will be a white bird. Again, with the clean shaper. I will just fill in this whole shape. Okay, now I will alphokhapIaidlphaorayhadrush. Shade it around. Actually, I will paint the wing this gray and shade on it with a lighter one. Where is the shader? Here it is. Can you see that? I created a little bit of variety in the color already. Now I will choose this aqua with the sketching pencil, I will just add this shirt on him as well. Maybe I will create a new layer. I create clipping so I can adjust it super core. Now I will choose this orange, and on a new layer I will just add the beak, Alpha. Why isn't Alpha lock working for me today? I'm not sure. I would choose a darker color shader brush, make it pretty small, and just add a little bit of shadow here with the lighter one. Actually, I would choose a bit of light yellow and I will add on top of it with the sketching pencil, I will create new layer and a gray. I will add the eyes like this. On a new layer I will add with white. This, I said white. This ship. I will choose gray again and I will just add line work on it. It will make it easier. On top of it, I will just add some shapes like this feathers. Looks super cool. Now the pipe, I will create a new layer, choose brown. And again, start with the clean shaper. I will just add the pipe alpha lock. I will choose black. And at the edge or end of this pipe and painted black. I will choose this dark brown. Again, make it a little bit browner with the shader brush. The exact same process, I will just add the shadows. I will enhance the shadows at this bottom, as again, we are shading a round object and there are this shadows. Then I will choose the sketching pencil and I will draw in the inner circle as well. I will choose even darker one to enhance the bottom of it pretty light er, one again with the shader brush. And I will just make it smaller and add a little bit of the glow again to shape amazing. Now I will create a new layer and choose white. Do it with the clean shaper, white ship. Let's see what happens if I turn down the opacity. Yeah, it looks cool. This is how I'm going to do this with a clean shape, fill in the shape, and maybe I can just increase the opacity if I want it to be a little bit more visible. I have an idea. Let me try it. I will duplicate it. And I will select this one and adds bye. It will have some uniform. This is a fact as if it was really from the smoke. Maybe I can motion blur it as well. Yeah, cool. There is a pretty amazing brush, it comes to procreate and its name is in the organic is a perfect find in the library. The organic brushes and the cotton, can you see that? It will create amazing mist. I will make it smaller. I will create another layer. And just I will make it even smaller. I will just add circles. I will make it bigger. Just add this missed here and maybe some coming off of the pipe. I will do something with these decorative elements a little bit. I will create a new layer. Let's say the drop shadow brush. Yeah, with the drop shadow brush, I will add this little circles like that. All right? I love how this looks like, but I feel something is still off and it is because of this shirt, like the belly. I will go to this shirt shape and select it and I will distort it. I will put it a bit more lower. Yeah, that will work. But I will need to select it all. Can I? Yeah, I will make it bigger. I will lower this one a little bit. I will warp just a bit. Yeah, it looks better now. Don't be afraid to adjust things now. I need to adjust the stripes on the base shape. I will do that. This super cool, it's so cool that we can do this. I'm happy with how this looks like. Do you like it? Let's just work on the background in the next video. 14. Painting The Background: Okay, we arrive to the point where we have to decide what will we do with our character. Now as this class focused on character design itself or job should be done. But I would love to help you to get somewhere with your character. And I also need some functions to fulfill with this little illustration. There are several things you can do with your artwork. You can think of a function. So what do you want to do with this character? If you export it as a PNG, you can decorate, for example, your website with it. You can just put it somewhere and it will just show up there and it will look like super amazing. You can create a banner for yourself to Facebook where you will add it. You can add some text. You can create a worksheet for yourself, for example, like this one that I have done. I have got the sketches, I have done the thumbnails. I have my mind map here, the silhouette, and this guy. And I also have this background that I will just show you in a second how I've drawn it. But this is a time where you need to think of the environment. Obviously, when we are creating illustrations, we think about the environment and the character together. Now we focus only on the character. So we will need to adjust the background to it. I don't think we need to do anything complicated as a background now. It should be pretty easy. Obviously, you have the artistic freedom. If you think you want to create a complex environment to your little character, do so. Spend the time on it. It will definitely worth it. Everything is worth it. If you do it with joy, I decided on having a very simple background, so I will create some docks, or the dock or the shore or whatever this is, the sea and some colorful sky with some stars and clouds. I also need a functional Arwa to have this character on the thumbnail image. For this class, I will just need to think about the composition. I will put my character to actually, I will create this background first and then work on the Tamil image. I also want to create a sticker from it because it looks super cool. I will show you in a second also how I can prepare my artwork for that. But in this video, let's just focus it first on the background and then we will talk about the other stuff later. All right, now let's work on the background. I will create a layer behind everything. I will need to first work with the sky because I have this very light. I will need to go a bit darker with the background so that we can see this. I will go and find the blue. I will add clean shape or make it big. I will just grab and fill this part. And then play a little bit with getting that sunset filing or sunrise filing. I will add a little bit of pink into it like this. With the shade or brush, I will alpha lock this shape, we place it to the bottom of this all and make it bigger. Yeah. Add a fact to the sky. This already looks pretty amazing. I love radiance, but blends into each other. Maybe I will need to make this blue a little bit darker. Let's just play with that. Okay, this looks pretty nice. I will add a little bit of this pink, but more pinkish to the bottom like this. Okay, it looks better. Now, what about the sea? It has to be as well. I will add the new layer below this one. We'll just paint the sea here. But it will blend together with the trousers. I will need to think of that as well. Like this, I will alpha lock it again. With the shader brush, I will add a first, a little bit of reflection of the sky onto the water. Maybe I will make it a bit bigger like this. Okay, I will choose a lighter color and just add it here so that makes the character pop a bit to the front. I will add on top of the docs, I will choose the clean shaper and see if this isn't too much. I love actually this color. I think I will put this brown here and pretty dark brown with the shader. I will, I'll follow this shape and just add shadow here and the dark drop shadow for the guy here. Let's just add some details onto this dock. I will add with the shade sketching pencil and the very dark brown some docs. I will add something to the water as well with white. Okay. And onto the sky, I will just add some clouds that I had here with a clean shaper. And the whites, I will just add these, oops, these little clouds. Okay, this looks nice. I will just grab these clouds again, just with the shader brush and a little bit of light gray. I will just go over these shapes like this onto the middle. With the sketching pencil, I will just add these little spirals that I love. Okay, super cool. Now I will just add some stars on the sky. I will create a new layer and find the luminous brushes. Where is the luminous, Here it is, the light pen and I will make it a bit bigger. Just add some stars. This is a sunset. Sunrise, but still, it looks like magical. You can add the moon as well if you wish. I don't want to add it right now. I will turn off the sketch. I haven't done it yet, but I will turn off the sketch. Where is it? Yeah, I turned off the sketch. I will turn on the value check layer to see if everything is well seen on my image. And I think that, yes, I even like this part, it is like a mist on the water. It looks pretty amazing. I'm going to turn off the value check layer if you need to adjust something. For example, this bird, it is a bit too light, I think. So maybe I can darken the sky behind it, so I can just go grab this dark blue. I will choose my shader and I can add shadows behind the whole figure to have, you know, darker. Not that harshly, but just a little bit. All right. So now that we have our beautiful background, we can think about like there are so many negative space around this character, right? This is a possibility so that you can cut from it, so you can create a square size cut out for Instagram and whatever size you need. I will need something like this for my thumbnail image and I will implement the title of the class there. I will do something like this. You can also think about something pretty easy that I already shown you. Like this one, circular design works pretty well. This could be a sticker as well if we are already at stickers. Let me just tell you, how do I create a sticker for this guy? What I had to change was that this ship was white. I made it gray so that it shows on the white background. Because we need to add this white shape around the sticker so that it looks good and that the plotter can cut it out. It looks so cool, it is so beautiful, right? I created the white shape around my design. I also implemented, can you see that this line work here around the heat so that it can be seen because it was totally white. Also with the Sea Gull. I added some line work so that it can be seen on a white background. You need to think about these things as well. Here is my thumbnail. I already did it. I cut out this composition from the artwork and added this little sign here. And I think it looks pretty amazing. And I still have my art work with the background and I can reuse it in so many ways. So I can create different cutouts and use it, for example, as a banner on my Youtube channel, et cetera. So it is very purposeful. All right, so I hope that you enjoy this process. See you in the final video, and let's do a little recap on what we have learned in this class. 15. Final Thoughs: Congratulations, you did it. I am so proud of you. I hope that you enjoy the class and that now you have the skills and courage to do this whole on your own. Make sure to applaud your artwork to the project gallery and I'm so excited to see what you created. Now, let's just do a little recap on what we have learned in this. In this class, you have learned that even though anatomy is important, everybody is unique and that there isn't a universal correct way to draw it. You have learned that we can divide the body to six body parts to simplify the human anatomy. You have learned that in illustration, we can use basic geometric shapes to represent these body parts. And that shape language and playing with proportions help us to express personality traits. We have developed a concept for our character, did some research, found the perfect colors, and created an amazing character illustration that we can work with to have different functions. I created a class thumbnail image and a sticker from my character. What will you use your character for? Make sure to leave a review to the class. It is very important so that others know what to expect and see if it is a great fit for them. Follow me on social media, on Instagram, on Facebook, and also here on Skillshare to get notified about the latest classes, announcements, and challenges. It was a pleasure to have you here and see in my L classes. I wish you all the best and happy creating.