Character Quest: Create Characters For Personal Projects

1. Intro & Welcome!: Looking to create a character for your personal projects, then you're in the right place. We're going to develop a character together from scratch and you'll see the entire process video after video. At the end of this course, you'll have a complete character that you can confidently use on all of your projects. Hi, I'm Patrici Caldera from Don Corgi, an art teacher with a love for drawing and keeping things simple in art. I've taught thousands of people around the world, and I'm here to teach you the secrets to create characters for your own projects. We'll start by creating a moodboard to get the creative choice flowing, and I'll even give you a helpful template for that. Then we'll brainstorm your character, doodle to life and keep on refining your design video after video. You'll see your character grow and evolve through each step with short bite sized lessons so you won't feel overwhelmed. We'll also be coloring and creating a character sheet for your character, so you can use it over and over again on your projects. Finally, you'll get tips and tricks throughout the course so you can maximize your creative potential. Are you ready to start creating? I will see you in the next video. 2. Inspiration Overload And Assignment!: Hello, and welcome to the course. In this video, I just want to give you a small assignment before we start creating our character. The assignment is for you to create a simple mood board with the things you like and enjoy. The goal here is for you to think about what inspires you. It can be anything really, images of food, places, patterns, shows, movies, books, quotes, drinks, or flowers. Anything counts because this is a mood board about and for yourself. This mood board will help you focus on the themes you enjoy as you create your character in this course. Not only that, but it will be a handy reference whenever you create something new. If you're having difficulty in finding inspiration for your next project, you can always look back to this moodboard and inspiration might spart again. This moodboard can have as many images as you want. I leave a simple template, so all you have to do is add images to it. You can even do a printed version of your moodboard if that's something you enjoy. I also want to show you my mood board so you can see a quick example. As you can see, I have here a lot of themes such as food, objects, stars, movies, books, and many others. It really doesn't matter what it is, as long as it's something you enjoy. This is it for the first assignments. Have fun creating your mood board. Don't forget to download the template, and I'll see you in the next video. 3. THE Reason To Create A New Character: Hi, and welcome back. There are many reasons why you may want to create a character or even several. Maybe you have a story in mind and want to draw your own comic or web comic. You're interested in creating your own character and use it in a series of illustrations. It can also be for a game. Another option is that you want to create your own avatar, profile picture or a V tuber. This can be based on your own looks or not. For example, I like to draw my own avatar in our courses, videos, and social media posts and profile pic. It doesn't really look like me, but it does have some personal details like the glasses. Finally, you can also be interested in drawing a character just for the fun of it. Maybe there's no specific use for them right now, but it's a fun project you want to tackle. This might be the most important reason. Creating good and interesting characters is important, especially if you're creating a story with them. However, having fun with the process of creating a character is a must. But you and other people will be able to see the love you pour into your own characters, and that only happens if it's something you enjoy. Also, it's important to note that even if you're creating and deciding on a design character right now, it's never final. Today, you might decide on a look, but you can also change it at any time. It can be for personal reasons, or because the story you're creating asks for a change. But in the end, it's always up to you, so don't be afraid to change your character as needed. All right. This is it for now. Feel free to take some time and think what you'd want to use your character in and afterwards, follow me to the next video, where we'll start brainstorming our character. 4. Let's Brainstorm Your New Character!: Hello and welcome back. Before drawing anything, let's first brainstorm or character. Grab your mood board to have a reference and inspiration. Then either grab a piece of paper or sketchbook and the pen. If you prefer to do this digitally, just open a Notepad file or even a new document on Google Docs. Another option is to open your favorite drawing software and do the brainstorming over there. Now, the first thing you want to write right now is what kind of character are you creating? Is it a main character of a story? Is it a secondary character, an avatar or profile picture or an original character for illustration work? This will help ground us into focusing what we'll use our character for. Depending on this, the complexity of your character will change. For example, if you want to create a comic, then your character should be as simple as possible. Otherwise, it might be hard to draw them so frequently. Either it takes too much time or you'll forget about certain details about them along the way. If you're drawing your own avatar, you'll want something that grabs people's attention. It's complexity might be up to you as long as the drawing is readable. Making up your mind about what you're using your character for is a very important step. Next, you'll write down important keywords of what you want to draw. These keywords can be about anything, can be the gender, age, style, colors, outfits, hairstyles, accessories, personality, likes and dislikes, hobbies, and so on. You can even do more than one brainstorming list and then try to combine the lists and see what comes out of that. Another option if you don't really know where to start and what to write down is to use a random character generator and see if you find anything interesting in those prompts. I'll leave you a link for our own character prompt generator that you can use for free whenever you need. This is it for now. Follow me to the next video where you can see a demo of my brainstorming for the character we create in this class. 5. DEMO Brainstorming A New Character: Hello and welcome back. We talked about brainstorming and how you can do it by using your mood board to help you create a character, and now we're going to make our own brainstorming. I'm going to be making my avatar, my profile picture, the image I usually use for our courses, posts, and so on, I rarely have my character drawn with a full body. That's what I'm going to do. What did you talk about before is first, we need to think about what we'll be using our character for. In this case, I want to use it as an avatar. I'm going to try and connect several words to this idea. This can be about anything, it can be their style, who the character is, it can be names, it can be an age, whatever you want. For example, for me. I'm going to say I want it to be cute. I want to be a full body character. It's not just a face or the head or half body. I want a full body. Go with the cute idea, I want it to be a chevy style, cute and small. I want my character to wear comfortable clothes, so we don't get lost in the kind outfits my character could use. This is an idea. You can think about the outfit your character could wear, it could be a dress. Maybe it's some historical outfit or fantasy specific to a profession, for example, I want them to be simple and basic few details. Since we're doing this related to our brand, I might want something with a orgy or something that relates to a org. The glasses. We're going to maintain the glasses there, a main feature. I want to keep the same color scheme with the green and I wanted to have runder shapes. To focus on the round shapes. This is an example of the brainstorming you can do. For example, in my case here, I'm just updating the character I already have my avatar, and for that reason, it's more of a personal drawing and I already have a visual idea of my characters. What I'm doing here is I'm adding keywords of what I want them, of the update I want for them. I already know more or less how they look like, and I want to remember or to focus on the main points on the main ideas of how my character can look like. There's no wrong keywords for you to add here. Just add things that you like and that you think would fit your character. Just have fun. Take your time and when you're ready, follow me to the next video. 6. Doodling A Character To Life: Hello and welcome back. Now that we have an idea of who or what our character is, we can start sketching them. The keywords we wrote before are very important because they'll help shape our character in our mind as we think about them, who they are and how they're like. We start creating a visual idea of them. This is why I always recommend everyone to first write a bit about their character before drawing them. Sometimes we know we want to draw a character, but can barely see them in our head since we don't even know them yet. Once we start deciding certain aspects about them, it's easier to visualize them as well. What we'll be doing right now is open up a new file on your preferred drawing software, or if you prefer open your sketchbook and grab a pencil or pen. This is going to be a very experimental phase. Don't take too long on each sketch. Just make quick and simple doodles, trying different things and styles for your character. If you're doing this on your sketchbook, I even recommend using a pen. This way, you don't fall into temptation of your raising and fixing any mistakes. It's okay if these doodles aren't anatomically correct, you'll be able to fix that later. For now, all you have to do is gather some ideas into paper. Try to have several of them, fill up an entire page, for example. Or if that feels too overwhelming for you right now, do at least three different versions of what your character could look like. You can also mix and match different sketches and see what happens. It's good to let yourself experiment as much as you can in this phase because generally, our first idea will really be the best we can come up with. Don't worry if these sketches are in pretty or organized. What's important is that you understand them and getting a good idea of what you want your character to look like. Feel free to even add some notes about your sketches or certain aspects of it that you find interesting. Alright, now that you know what to do, follow me to the next video where I'll be sketching my character. 7. DEMO Doodling Our New Character!: All right. Hello and welcome back. It's time to start doodling our character, right? We've talked about it for quite a bit before in the previous video. So now it's time to put into action what we just learned. So I have here the brainstorming we did before. I'm using just a normal sketch brush, nothing to fancy. You can use whatever medium you prefer. And now I'm going to make a few sketches. Based on the brainstorming I just did. First thing that I remember is the round shapes. Let's start doing that. Let's focus on that. Just doing some shapes around body, maybe a rounder. Now I'm going to keep the idea of the T shirt here, for example, and the Shiv style. I'm making a very small sketch here, not really on purpose. Again, you don't need to make a whole lot of sketches here. You can just make three sketches of a character. Don't forget the glasses. As you can see, I'm keeping things very simple. I'm not focusing on details here. Here we can have some pants and simple fee. Now for the hair for now, let's keep it the same style. This is one idea, and we could have perhaps a org to our shirt here. Once catches sun, this is it, I don't need to add anything else to it. Let's see what else we can do. Let's again, different shape while still trying to keep a certain roundness. There we go. Again, glasses, big glasses, like a big sweater. Pig sleeves and then just tiny hands appearing. I'm liking this. This is a nice idea. Maybe this is a bit less rounder, but we can round things up a bit more round corners to them, something like this. For example, it's an idea. Two ideas down. Let's grab here the simple basic clothes and maybe do something a bit more in the sports clothing style. Try different shapes here, but keep the roundness. As you can see, I'm being very messy with my sketches, and that's perfectly fine to do. We're just exploring ideas. We don't want to get too attached to these drawings. We don't know what might change, and it doesn't matter if they are super beautiful or not. A T shirt. Let's keep the T shirt. I like the t shirt idea. Then maybe some sweat pants. This is also nd. This one looks a bit more comfy. This is more in that well, comfortable and cozy here and here it's comfortable but a bit more in the sporty area, you know, Let's perhaps do one more sketch using this outfit and something closer to this body type perhaps. I'm going to keep this drawing here. I'm going to actually duplicate it because I like these shapes right here. I think these are good shapes. Let's do the drawing. Our eyes, the big glasses, pop up the hair. Don't forget the arms. Also, don't worry too much about the pose. A simple standing pose is good for now because you can see everything about the character unless you have something specific to show. But I mean, you can see all the limbs, the head. A simple standing pose is good enough for your sketches for your simple sketches. Draw maybe a longer t shirt. Mix and matching all of them here, and the shoes. This is an idea. We could change the hair here. Maybe instead of having it loose, I was thinking of having a small ponytail, something I use quite a lot. Something like this, perhaps, maybe less waves in the hair. Bit of Isabel from animal crossing hairstyle here, if you know about it, and our Kogi again, I think we need to keep our Kogi. This is my idea. I like this one. I really like this. I like both of these. Let me just try and do this one using this hairstyle and this type of body. The eyes and the glasses mandatory. Our small ponytail. Yes, I love it. Big sleeves, the long sleeves, tiny hands appearing. Okay, this is an idea, the orgy to a big sweater here as well. But this is an idea. I like this body shape. Here are my doodles. I have five sketches. The new ideas. The first three were new ideas that we were exploring. The bottom two, we mixed and matched all three of them with a different body shape that I really liked. The most important thing is that you take your time. There's no one here rushing you and for you to have fun. This is a very fun phase. There just coming out with different ideas, there is no wrong ideas. It doesn't matter if the ideas are silly or not, just draw them because as you draw them, new ideas start coming up. Just have some fun, sketch your characters, think about different ideas, mix and match them together, take your time and whenever you're ready. Follow me to the next video. 8. Deciding On A Design: Hello and welcome back. I hope you had fun with your sketches because now it's time to choose one final design and work on it. I know that it can be hard to pick only one design and forget about all the others. Sometimes we like more than one design and cannot choose just one. So one thing you can do is narrow it down to maybe two or three choices. Then pick the things you like about each of those designs. Now, create a new final sketch that gathers all those things that you picked. Just remember to keep your design simple while still keeping it interesting. Sometimes by adding too many details, our character loses their personality and focus. Not only that, but if you'll be drawing your character many times, it can become quite difficult to remember everything as well as keeping each drawing consistent. If you're an artist that focused on details and complexity, and it's something you consider strength, then experiment with that. On the other hand, if you're not as experienced or even prefer to be more minimalist with your art, then go easy on details for now. In the end, it's all up to you. You can even add more or change details on your character later on. You can also ask your friends, family or art community to help you pick a design. Sometimes a new and fresh perspective from someone else can help you see some things you've missed. Now, once you choose a final design, it's time to refine the sketch. When drawing a character, I like to go through three different steps. The loose sketch, just like we did, a detailed sketch, which is where I'll refine the sketch so the design is clearer and add anything I think is missing. Finally, clean liner. That's exactly what we'll do in the next video. Join me there and draw along with me. 9. DEMO Choosing And Drawing The Final Character Design: All right. Hello, and welcome back. As we mentioned in the previous video, now it's time to choose a design and then refine it until we have a final drawing. First things first, let's pick a design. I have here all the sketches we did in the previous videos. These last two are my favorites. I like the body shapes. They are round but not too exaggerated. I really like the shapes we have here, the hairstyle and everything, all about choosing the outfit that I want to use. I really like this one. Although I think it might be a bit too different from what we have right now, and I just want to update it and not go overboard, not only that, but I think that this is a bit, maybe it looks a bit too much like pajamas. I'm not sure I want that. I think we're going to go with this one, keeping the t shirt, some simple pants, shoes, and that's it. We keep a very simple design, so it's easier to draw. This one is also a bit more difficult to draw. I'm going to go over here. Select this one. I'm going to copy and then paste it. Now I can hide this and this. We don't need brainstorming anymore, and let's make it a bit bigger. Something like this. Now what I'm going to do, lower the opacity of my drawing, create a new layer on top, grab my pencil brush, and a darker red. This is my preferred color for the sketch so you can choose whatever feels comfortable to you. Now what I'm going to do is refine my sketch. As you can see, this is a very loose sketch. There is almost no detail. There's half of the face is not drawn here. What I'm going to do is make a more detailed sketch with every detail I want in my design. The lines don't need to be perfect. Just go over your lines, pay attention to the shapes you want for your character. All right. The face I have here a previous drawing. Let's try to keep it relatively close to it. Again, it doesn't need to be perfect right now, very centered right now, but that's fine. Let's just draw very quickly, our orgy print on the T shirt. So see, we have a bit more detail now. We know where everything goes with this sketch. I think this looks nice. So now that I have my final sketch, it's time to go and draw my final lines. So again, I'm going to lower the opacity of my sketch. Then I'm going to create a new vector layer on top. The reason I use vector layers is because that way as I move my lines around, if I scale up or down my lines, they won't lose any quality. It's a bit more comfortable to use but totally optional. Now I'm going to start drawing my line. This is the final step. The design is decided. Now, this part, again, just take your time. You don't need to rush this drawing. Repeat your lines as many times as you need. It's perfectly fine. Just go over your previous lines, your sketch lines until you're happy with them. As you can see, I will be repeating my lines a lot until I'm happy with them. It's perfectly fine if you do the same. Another thing I'm going to do here is I want my character to be very symmetrical. I'm going to be drawing one side, then copy it and paste it, mirror it, and then place it on the other side. Just to make things a bit quicker for you as well. But if you are practicing drawing your lines and drawing the line art, I do recommend for you to just take your time and draw all your lines because this is a good practice for you. So this is it. We started with a very, very loose sketch, and then we added a more detailed sketch with some more details so you can see better what you're doing with your character's design. And finally, when everything has been decided, we went ahead and drew the final lineup just clean line, so your character is ready for coloring. So that's what we're going to talk about in the next video. So I will see you right there. 10. A Splash Of Color For Your Character: High end welcome back. A big part of our character is finished. We have a design and a full drawing, but we're still missing colors. This is something you might already thought about during the brainstorming phase. But even if you didn't, don't worry. We're going to work on colors now. First things first, where to find color palettes. If you'd like to have some control over the colors, I recommend going to palaton.com. Here you can move around the color wheel, play with different color harmonies, as well as the saturation and value of your colors. As you move things around, Palatin will generate different color palettes that you can use. Do color is quite similar with a lot of customization while generating palettes for you. Another website you can use is pigment. Here you don't have as much control. However, you can still customize a few things over the color palettes that are generated for you. You can customize both the saturation and value. You can also select specific colors for your palettes. One thing I like about this website is that the color palettes are quite limited. Sometimes having a wide range of colors to use can be quite overwhelming and even more difficult to use them in a balanced way. Fewer colors are easier to juggle, especially if you're not an experienced artist. Finally, if you're a fan of using completely random color palettes, then both coolers or color hands are good websites for that. In coolers, you can choose how many colors you want the palette to have and then generate a few palettes. If you like one color in a palette but want to see more, you can lock that color and generate again. It's also possible to move colors around and choose different shades of the same color. Generate as many palettes as you want, and then squenshot the one you like and paste it in your canvas. As for color hunt, here you can choose from several different palettes. You can just look for random ones or pick a theme. When you click one color palettes, it will show you the codes for each color, as well as several other examples that are in the same theme. Once you find the color you like, you can download the image and then open it in your canvas. Take your time seeing different color palettes that could fit your character. You can even pick different color palettes and test them. Some might fit better than others, or just like with the sketches, you can mix and match different color palettes until you find the perfect one. Just don't forget to keep things simple. To many colors and your character might be a bit difficult to read. Also, if you're using this character as a profile picture or avatar for your brand, be sure that the colors are in line with it. If your brand is all about pastel colors, then use those colors for your characters. If you already have a logo or something similar, you can use those colors. Unless you want to drastically change your brand, try to follow similar colors. Another thing to remember is that again, chances are you're going to be drawing this character a lot. Keep things simple and easy to remember. Take your time and have fun picking different color palettes you like. When you have a few viable options, follow me to the next video, where we'll be coloring our character. 11. DEMO Coloring Your Character: All right. Hello and welcome back. Our character, the lines of our character are all finished. Now we're going to go for the final phase of creating a character, which is adding some colors. In the previous video, I showed you some places you can go to search for color schemes that you can use for your characters. You can also just choose the colors you want. You may already have a color scheme such as in my case, already had a character and I'm making an updated version. And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to create here a new layer. I've merged everything into one layer, my lines layer, and now I'm going to create a new layer first. I'm going to grab my brush here, make it a little bit bigger, and now I'm going to grab the colors I already have. Now, I don't have all the colors here. I have the skin, the hair color, shirt color, and I don't have, for example, any color for the pants or the shoes. Same thing for the Kary. First, I'm going to solve the pants problem. Since I wanted to pie very simple and neutral, I'm going to go with a dark gray. Something like this, I'm going to not so dark, something like this, so I'm going to make it close to the pink since I know this is a color for the clothes for the orgy, I probably going to use the skin color and maybe something a bit more orange. This can change. For now, this is what I have all very solid. I'm also going to grab here this color in case I want to use it for something else. For now, this is a very simple color scheme. Let's see if this all works together. What I'm going to do is I'm going to create another layer and this one is going to be for my colors and it's going to be beneath my lines layer. Then I'm going to grab my bucket, and I'm going to make sure that I have the option for other layers enabled. So what this is going to do is that I'm going to pick a color and then fill it inside these lines, and the pink bucket will have into account the previous layer. So my lines layer. This is a very quick way for you to add colors to your drawings, and I'm going to add here the pink. I'm going to do the same here with the tongue of my doggie. I might also add it here for the hair band. I'm not going to worry too much about details yet. I'm just going to fill all the colors and then I'm going to fill in the spaces. Next, the leggings or the pants. Paint paint pocket. There we go. Hair. This coloring method, you can do this with other drawing software. Many drawing software nowadays have this option. You can paint inside your lines without using the same layer. It's something worth exploring. Even Procreate has the same option. For that, you just have to mark the lines layer as reference, and then fill your colors in a layer below it. It's very easy. You can also use the selection tool and select the you want to paint, for example, and then use your pain pocket and feel it. Whatever you're more comfortable with as long as it works, it's perfectly fine to use. Now, let's fill in here the skin color. Same thing here on nor doggy. Here the ears with the pink as well maybe. I think so. This is better. This is a bit more balanced. As for the shoes, I think I'm going to go with the pink as well. I think that's nice. I'm going to add a little blush on the nose with the pink. I'm going to add a new layer for that. If I want to change it, I can easily do that. Let's add some opacity here maybe. Let's try again. More that feels a bit too much. Now, let's fill in the gaps. I'm going to lower my brush a little bit, and now I'm going to find the places where the paint pocket missed. For example here. Normally, it's just tiny bits and you can also control these gaps, but I like to go by hand and feel whatever is missing. Just go over all your drawing and be sure everything is properly filled with color. If you want to, of course, if you prefer to have a bit of a messier style, that's fine as well. Now, let's fill in here the white for the eyes. I think I want a bit of color from my glasses, you know, I don't need the highlights of the glass itself. I don't think I want to add that kind of detail, but I do want to have a color difference between my glasses and the face. Let's I'm going to try and pick the brown, the hair color. This might be a bit too dark. Let's try this one. Yes, the orange, I think the orange works much better. Now, let's lower the opacity a bit more even. Let's see 25%. I think I like that. That's a bit of a difference color there but not too much. Basically, my character is finished. Let me just try here because I'm not sure I like the shoes with the pink. We might want to gray. I think this works best. Otherwise, I feel it's too much pink. Just explore your options. Really don't need to rush this process. Try several things because sometimes we think the first option is the best, and then we try different things and figure out it actually there are other better options to use. My character is basically colored. Just to make things a bit more fun, I'm going to add just a little bit of a shape here using the green. Something very simple, just a little shape. There we go. So I can use my green here. You don't need to add any kind of background. We are just focusing on the character right now, focus on the character. Also, I'm not going to be doing shadows or highlights here because that's something that changes with the drawings you're making. Depending on the lightning, the mood you're going for, depending on many things, both the shadows and the highlights will change. That's more to add atmosphere. And mood to a drawing. What we're doing here is just creating the character. We don't need the shadows. Don't worry about it right now unless you want to practice those, of course. But for now, just keep it with the solid colors. Our catch is going to be used in many different things, keep it simple, adding some colors, and that's it. Have fun. Take your time, and I will see you in the next video. 12. Creating A Character Sheet: Hello and welcome back. Our character is finished. Now, so you don't forget anything about them. It's time to create a character sheet. A character sheet is a very important step on creating any character. Here we're going to keep everything about how you should draw your character, and this will be very useful for you, but also for anybody else you might work with in the future and that might need your character's visual information. In this file, we'll add a full turnaround of the character in the simple standing pose. The color palette used along with the codes of each color, detailed drawings of any accessory your character uses plus respective colors. Their name and other details you might find important, such as any traits important to their story, age, height, birth marks, and so on. And finally, portrait references of the main expressions your character might portray, such as happiness, sadness, anger, and so on. This feels quite complex, but you don't need to do everything at once. It would also be a good practice on drawing your character in different perspectives. If drawing and adding everything at once feels too much right now, go one part at a time. Today, draw the front view, tomorrow, the side view, and so on, add things little by little until your character sheet is complete. There's no timer, so go at your own pace. It's also important to remember that things might change in the future. Be sure to keep the actual file instead of just an image. Whenever anything changes, you can edit your character sheet with new information. Now, that's enough talk, follow me to the next video where I'll show you my process of creating a character sheet for my new character. I'll also leave you a template so you can download it and use it for your character. See you in the next video. 13. DEMO Filling In Our Character Sheet Basics: All right. Hello and welcome back. This is our final step of creating our character, which is creating the character sheet. And we're going to draw a full turnaround expressions or a few expressions. We don't need to draw a whole collection of expressions, just a few of them, so you know how your character would react to certain things. The color palette, so we never forget about it, and there's always a place to go grab the colors. Name and other details you might want to remember about your character. And finally, accessories if they do have one. So we're going to start with the easiest part. I have here my character sheet. Now, first, I'm going to go and grab my character, the front view of my character. I'm going to copy this and then paste and move it here. I already have one part of my turnaround, the front view. I'm going to leave it like this for now. I'm also going to create here a folder or a group. So I don't have too many layers laying around and I end up a bit confused about them, and now we're going to fill the color palettes. So for that, I'm going to go over here. I didn't bring the background I did previously because that's not an important part of my character right now. That was just to have a little something there. All you want is our character right now. Color pallet. Let me just zoom in a little bit. I'm going to grab some colors and create a square. You can make a square a circle, wherever you prefer as long as it's organized as you like. Let's duplicate the square, bring it to the side, the next color, feel it, and now we repeat this process until we have all the colors done. I'm going to go and look for each of this color code. One way of doing that is by picking the color and then double click this square here where the color is selected, and now we can go over here to x and copy this code. It is copied. Now I'm going to use the text tool. Bring it here. And paste the cold. We can even keep it with the color might as well, or maybe not because we have a few light colors over there and then we can't read the code. But there we go. Here's one of them. Now, let's bring it here the layer, duplicate this layer and bring it to the side. Now we're going to grab our next code. There we go, double quick here. Copy the code. And paste it over here. There we go. One part of our character sheet is ready. We already have our color palette ready to use as reference. Now let's just very quickly add a few notes here. A new layer, I'm going to write it by hand. I don't have a lot of notes here. I'm just going to say that this is the Dg avatar, used for posts, videos, and other heiferns material and tutorials and well, for glasses. Something I also want to remember in the future is that the glasses use the hair color at 25% opacity. The same goes for the blush shirt color at 25%. Opacity. This is it. These are all the notes I want to keep. So I don't forget about this, what color goes for the glasses and for the blush and the opacity I use for them and what I'm going to be using this character for. You might want to have other details such as my character has three scores, one here, another one there and another over there. Or they have freckles. They like to wear a backpack. The backpack has this and that accessory, those kinds of things that you don't want to forget about your charter. With that done, let's go for other more complex parts of our charter sheet, such as drawing the accessories. I don't have a lot of accessories here besides, for example, the hair band, It's very small, but we don't want to forget about it and our Kogi. So for the Kogi, I'm going to keep things simple and I'm going to go over here. And copy the lines. And I'm going to bring it here and make it a bit bigger. I'm just going to add the colors very quickly. Okay. There we go, and now the hair band. For the hair band, something very simple as well. Now another smaller circle. We can merge these layers together, fill it with the pink there go. These are my accessories. Now all we are missing is our turnaround and expressions reference, that's going to take a bit longer. But that's fine. Again, we don't need to do everything at once. If you want, you can pause, you can do something else, and then go back to the video and draw along with me, or you can watch the whole video and then do your character sheet at your own pace. Do one thing one day, another or the other, and so on and so on. Next, we're going to work on our turnaround. 14. DEMO Creating Our Character Turnaround 3/4 View: Okay, so we've done the easiest part right off screen. I just typed here my notes with a better phone since my writing is not the best, so you can just see things and read things a bit more clearly. I also added here just a small description to the accessories. But that was it. That's a bit more organized and it's clear to read. And now it's time to start our turnaround. So one of the poses is already done. The front view, I'm not going to be drawing a full completed turnaround. For example, you can have a front view, then a three quarter view, turn to the left. Turn to the right, then a three quarter view, but from the back, the back view and the side view, since I'm going to use this for just illustration. I don't need to be so detailed right. I don't need all the angles. But if you're using this for animation, for example, it should be as complete as possible. But it's totally up to you. So I'm going to start with the most challenging pose, which is or angle, which is a three quarter view. It's always a bit more challenging since we are making a mix of two different poses. It's something between the front and the side view. It's always a bit more challenging. Let's take that one out of the way. First thing I'm going to do is draw some guidelines. You're going to need this when drawing a turnaround of your character. You're sure you're drawing everything in its proper place. Create a few lines and distribute them along places that are important. For example, one at the top of your character, another one at the bottom. For example, one here between the small ponytail and the hair, the rest of the hair. Another one here for where the sin touches the neck, another for the shoulders. These guidelines are going to be used for all the different pulses of our turnaround. You don't need to be creating guidelines every time you're doing a new pulse because the guidelines are always the same. It's very important to get these rights. Also, how many guidelines you have is totally up to you. For example, if you feel you're getting a bit lost in your drawing, draw as many guidelines as you need. It doesn't really matter. As long as you do not get confused with them, ten, 20, I don't know, you name it. Whatever is the most comfortable to you. As you can see, I'm drawing quite a lot here because I want to be sure that I'm going to have everything in its proper place. I forgot one here for the ye line, and I should have something for the glasses as well. So as you can see, I have a lot of lines here. Now we can lower the opacity a bit just so it's not as intrusive in my drawing. And now we are ready to draw the character in the three quarter view. So I'm going to create a new layer on top. I'm going to keep my pencil and the red. So I'm going to start just like before with a sketch then add more details. And then finally, I'm going to add the final line art, and the color. It's the same process as we did for drawing the front view. First of all, I want to go over here and remind myself of the shapes I did before. I'm going to have to adapt my shapes, but overall, they're the same. We want to keep the same shapes. Just away from me to warm up a little bit and remind myself of the shapes we use so far. I have here my shapes. Let me just add some opacity here. And now I'm ready to start drawing some shapes, but this time in the three quarter view. Starting with the head, don't worry too much about the first sketch. I'm going to make my three quarter view turn a bit to the right ye line, and here we're going to have a near. Then we have our neck, the chest area. When drawing in a three quarter view, one thing I'd like to do is add a bit of dimensionality to my shape. Instead of drawing to the shape like this, I'm going to add a bit more three D to it, so I have a bit more depth in my shapes, and I can understand better my character. Always keep the main pose right by your side so you can see where everything is and if it's in its right places. There we go, torso is done. Now here this goes up to here, and it's a round shape again. Keeping here my guidelines. I know where the center here is, and now the legs, they go up to here. I forgot this guideline here where the legs go Sis here a little bit because I went too far down with my shape there. I think this is mostly it as far as shapes go. The arms go this way. There we go. The three quarter view can be a bit more complicated to draw. But it's also good to take it out of the way. From the get go. You're drawing in a more of an angular perspective. It's not straightforward like the front and the side view are. The side view can be also a bit complicated, but at least you're only drawing one side of your character, right? My mind shapes are then. We're going to add some details, right? So we have here around here. I'm always looking at my first reference to the front view. So I'm sure I'm doing things with the right shapes in the right places. Can't forget about the doggie here, so the eyes around here. Now, of course, you won't be able to draw your character exactly the same. That's okay. That comes with time and sooner or later, you'll be able to do that. Don't worry too much about that if it doesn't look exactly the same. You have time for that. Now let's go and throw our linear, lower the opacity of my sketch, a new layer on top, grabbing my brush, my preferred brush. Grabbing the. Now, once again, drawing the final lines. Again, take your time to not rush the process. It's fine if you're repeating your lines many times, it's natural. Repeat your lines as many times as you need until you are happy with them. There's no one rushing you. If you need to do more sketches, then do more sketches before going the final lines. There's no rule that you have to do this in one way or another. If the way I'm doing this does not work for you, then you can draw something else. Drawing is not an exact size. Don't be afraid of exploring different methods and different processes. And there we go. As you can see, it's not 100% exactly the same as my first drawing, but it's all there. Now I can go in and color it. I'm going to create a new layer below my lines, use my paint bucket and color pick the colors and fill the gt. Just like we did previously. We are done with the most complicated view, the three quarter view, next, it's time to draw the side view. 15. DEMO Drawing The Side And Back View: Okay. So one more view done. The three quarter view, the most difficult view is done. If it's not perfect, don't worry, you can repeat later. Just make sure it's good enough for now and then you can practice again or if you prefer just practice that view a few times until you are happy with the results. The side view can be a bit simpler since we're only drawing one side of our character. Again, if your character has some asymmetrical details, be sure to draw the side view from the right and from the left. So you have everything you need, every detail in your turnaround. Since my character is very symmetrical, then I'm going to keep it very simple and just draw one side view. Once again, we start with a circle. My character has a very round head. So even from a side view, I'm going to draw a circle and now an ellipse for the side of the face. Okay. Just to make things a bit more interesting and it's not just a circle right there. Here we have our ear. Now we know the neck is here and now we do the torso shape adapting my shapes a little bit again since we are seeing the body from a different perspective. I think these are good shapes. Now, add some opacity, a new layer on top for my detailed sketch. Now we're going to add a few more details and clean our sketch a little bit. The eye is around here in this line, the glasses right here. Now let's draw one side of the hair. We don't need the other side in this case, drawing the t shirt now. You can't really see a lot of corgi here. I think that's good. Let's hide the other layer, create a new layer on top, and draw the final lines. Now all we have to do is go over all our lines, our previous lines for a cleaner drawing. Again, I might be rushing this part a bit just so you don't get bored watching me draw lines over and over, so I'm not being as perfectionist. However, when it's your turn, take your time. Okay? There's no one rushing you again. Just have fun with the whole process. Okay. This is my character from the side. Now I have to do is very quickly add some color to my character. Hide this layer, a new layer below, and now, let's pick our paint packet, and let's start adding our color. This is the quickest part. Now remember that doing the turnaround is very hard, not a simple task. There are many steps in this phase. Again, you can do it little by little, as I said before, and If you finish it, you can come back later and do it again. Try it again. After a few times of drawing your character of practicing them, you might then learn something more about your character, and next time you do their character sheets, things might be easier. And now we're going for the quickest view of the mole, which is the back view. If you do not have a lot of things happening there is very quick because basically, we're going to draw the same shapes, the same drawing as when drawing the front view, but this time with almost no details. What I'm going to do here is actually copy my front view and bring it here and now I'm going to move it. Now, as you can see, I don't have a lot of space here, so I'm going to have to resize my drawings a little bit. Now, let's first hide here our color, going to go to my lines. Again, draw your character all over for some more practice, or if not, you can just tweak it like I'm doing here. But I do recommend you to take the chance and practice drawing your character. We don't need a face here, right? Here changes, the curvature of the shirt also changes. We don't need our argiprint because it's on the other side, and I think this is mostly for now. So now I'm just going to fix my drawing. Othing like this. I also want here for this area of the hair to be connected. If you have any kind of detail on the back, don't forget about them. I like to draw very simple characters, so I don't have that many details to focus on. Fix here the T shirt. We also need to fix the hands here. Okay. There's not a lot happening here on the back. We fixed everything that needed fixing. We don't need this layer over here. Now, I'm just going to fix the color. Again, no shadows or highlights, we don't need those right now, and this is it. Our turnaround is finished. Feel free to do other versions of the three quarter view and the side view. You can also do the three quarter view from the back. It all depends on how much detail your character has just take a few hours, even days to draw your character in different views, and then you can come back to the video or just watch the whole thing and then later do your assignments. It's totally up to you. 16. DEMO Adding Expressions To Our Character: With that done, the only thing we're missing is our expression reference. For the expression reference, you don't need to do a whole lot of expressions here. You can just use the main ones, for example. I think I'm going to do something like happy, angry and said, as simple as possible. You can do more expressions. It really depends on what you're going to use your character. If you're using for a comic, maybe you'll want more examples. But this is so you can have a quick reference of how your character looks like portraying different expressions. Having the most basic ones like said angry and happy is a good reference because then many other expressions are mostly a variation of this. You can use this as a reference and then mix and match them for other expressions. Very quickly here, draw the bit shapes, Let's start with happy. So happy expression, very happy. The eyes are closed. Everything in the face lights up and goes away from the face. When you're happy, everything goes away from the face. The head can even be a bit more elongated if you want. I like to close the eyes when I'm drawing very happy expressions. If you're drawing a happy expression with the eyes open, remember to make them bigger. Maybe even a detail or two here just for the fun. One quick sketch of one expression. Now I'm going to duplicate this being here and the drawing. Now, erase what we don't want. Let's try a angry expression. Now, now we're going to draw angry. Now, for an angry expression, it's the opposite. We want the face closes up. Everything goes to the center of the face. Eyebrows going down and tilted to the center. Cause mouth like this. Again, we can make a small detail over here. When drawing negative emotions, most of the time, everything goes to the center of the face and when it's positive emotions, it's the opposite. Everything goes outwards. This is a good way of memorizing how to draw certain expressions. Now one more for the said expression. Again, our features go to the center of the face. Eyebrows going this way. She You can even have a small tear falling down. The eyebrows here are also tilted, but going the opposite way. I'm going to merge all these layers together, lower the opacity, too much. Now I'm going to draw the final lines for my expression. First, I'm going to draw the head, so I can use it for my other drawings. Now I'm going to make a new layer on top and rode the actual face this way I have the heads in a separate layer and can duplicate it for my other drawings. Now, we're just going to go over our lines and rode the app expression, very simple. Our first expression is done. They, very cute. I like it. Let's duplicate the head and move to the next one to the angry face. I don't often draw angry faces, but I think they're really fun to draw, especially when you exaggerate them. And that's key in drawing expressions. Don't be afraid to exaggerate things. It makes the whole drawing more fun and intensifies the motion you're trying to draw. If you want your character to have a very strong emotion and to be very expressive about what they're feeling, then don't be afraid of using exaggeration. If some features of the face go outside the face itself, outside the head, then do that. It's fine. It's fun. It's really fun to do that, exaggerate your expressions. Let's duplicate our head again and move it here for our said expression. She looks so sad right now. Eyebrows that are tilted in a different direction than the previous one. There we go. Let's duplicate this. D, move it to the other side. I don't think I've ever drawn my character looking sad. This is the first drawing the highlights. There we go. She looks so sad. And there we go. Our expressions, I think are very happy with them. Three expressions, if you want, you can do more or you can just keep just the more basic expressions. As I said, you can then mix and match them because most of the expressions you can draw are based on the most basic emotions, sadness, being angry and happiness. There we go, we managed to do this. It is very challenging. There's a lot to do. But again, take your time, do one thing one day, another thing to the other, if needed, take a rest for a few days, come back to it. Maybe you're not completely happy about it. That's fine. Take a break and when you come back to it, maybe you feel a little bit better and you've got a few new ideas that can help you fix your drawings. Just have fun. Take your time and whenever you're ready, follow me to the next video. 17. Tips: Your Character Will Change!: Hi, and welcome back. Our character is officially done along with every information you need. You can now use your character for any personal project you have in mind, be it for a comic, a game, for your illustrations or to use as an avatar, you have everything you need to draw them, including a very handy and helpful reference, so you don't forget anything about them. I've mentioned this a few times throughout this class, but I feel it's something very important to talk about. Your character will change. As time goes by, your tastes and preferences change. Your drawing ability and style will also change. This is natural to happen. We're always improving and learning new things. As we do, some things about our characters will also change. You start to realize better ways to improve your character, for example. Maybe at first, you thought the design was simple enough. But as you draw your character more often, you realize you can make it even simpler and more interesting. If you're using your character for a story, it's also natural that they might change, and those changes need to be applied to their design as well. Not only that, but chances are you'll never draw your character the same every time. Especially at the beginning. It's normal. Keep on practicing until you find the right pace. Let yourself and your character adapt to the changes. If you're struggling with something in their design, then change it. It's your character, and you'll know best what to do with them. Don't be afraid or stressed out about those changes. Just have fun, change whatever needs to be changed, update your character sheet, and if needed, Do it again in the future. Reason repeat until you're happy with the result. This is it for this video. I hope you're happy with your character. Follow me to the next video so we can talk about your next and final assignments. I will see you there. 18. Assignment Time: Post Your Character: Hello and welcome back artist. We went through everything you need to know and do to create a character for your own personal projects. First, we started by creating a mood board with the things you like so you can use as inspiration to brainstorm your character. Then we went through every step of drawing our character. Sketching choosing a design and refine it, choosing a color palette, and coloring our cart. Once everything was done, we created a reference sheet of your character, so we always have every information needed when drawing them. If you created your character along with me, now's the time to post your completed character sheet. If not, you can also just share a quick doodle of your character along with the brainstorming you did. The most important thing is that you start your cart. I'm looking forward to seeing your art and characters have fun with your drawings, and I will see you in the next video. 19. Conclusion Before You Go!: Congratulations. You've finished the course. You've done an amazing job following through the videos, and you should already have a new character ready for your projects. If you haven't finished your character yet, that's fine as well. Take your time and have fun with the whole process. If you can take the time to leave a honest review, I really appreciate it. It lets me keep on creating and updating new courses for you and reach more people. Don't forget to share and send me your characters. I can't wait to see them. All right. That's about it. Thank you for watching and as always keep on drawing.