Children's Book Illustration: Drawing Engaging Kids Characters in Procreate

1. Introduction: Hello and welcome back to my latest class. I'm thrilled to hear so many of you are eager to explore children's book illustration. That's our focus. In this class, we'll dive into the world of kid character design. And this class is perfect for boosting your skills whether for personal projects or professional work. Hi, I'm a and I'm full time illustrator based in Central Europe. My experience with creating engaging characters has helped me in a range of projects, including the award winning Leg of Friends, which aired as Netflix series, numerous books, magazines, and other products. In this class, I will guide you through designing child characters, highlighting the differences in style and proportions compared to adult characters. And we will also explore drawing turnarounds, which is sketching the same character from multiple angles. This exercise is essential for a strong foundation in character illustration, we will use simple shapes to establish proportions and poses, and this approach eases the pressure of achieving perfection right away. Let's have fun with it. Using basic shapes to bring our characters to life, and weaving in little stories as we go. I'll also share methods to draw inspiration from everyday life, showing you how to simplify real life references in your character designs. This is a fantastic way to develop your unique style. Now for the fun project part, we are setting our characters in a dreamy beach holiday scene of kids building a sand castle. This little story will add extra layer of enjoyment to our practice and learning. I will be there every step of the way, making this class accessible to beginners and more experienced artists alike. I do hope when you follow and watch this class, you will feel super happy about your drawing and you will feel super inspired and happy to share it with others. And I can't wait to see your version of the illustration. And when you are sharing it on Instagram, please make sure that you take me in the image, not only in the description, because that way I can see your illustration. Maybe you'll see it in one of the next videos. If you don't know yet, you can find even more drawing tutorials and classes. There are procreate and other tutorials. I have more than 30 classes there. There is a variety from beginner level to more advanced levels. You can also find different topics. Before we dive in, don't forget to follow me on Instagram. There you will find my latest artworks and glimpses into my life as an artist without further ado. Let's start and see you in the class. 2. Body Proportions: All right, let's start with some of the theory about sketching and drawing kids for children. Illustrations and book illustration or basically any other kid character design that you want to create. How we will start with this one, I will go through different lessons with some theory ideas and tips and tricks. And then we will sketch more ideas for our final project. In this first part, we will be talking about basic proportions. For these tips and tricks lessons, I'm using a basic canvas, which is like a screen size. It doesn't really matter what you use for this part, but my canvas is 3,500 by 2,500 pixels is RGB. You can see it here in the color profile here. I will click down. Then from brushes, you can use any brush for this sketching exercise. And basically these sketches I will be using sketch grain soft number eight from my sketch set. If you're interested in trying more brushes, you can always get my sketch set or go set or whatever you like. Or use any brush that comes with procreate from the colors. I will be using dark brown color, but you can sketch with black or gray or whatever you like. Let's start with the proportions on one layer, which is just predefined layer. In new document, I will sketch few circles. This is also good practice sketching circles because as you can see, the circles are not always perfect when you start sketching. But I will try to keep the circles the same size. It looks like a strange snowman. Anyway, if you're asking what are these circles, you can imagine a head size for the character which is stylized. Not realistic proportions. More like stylized proportions may be used in animation. For this layer with the circles, I will reduce the opacity. It's just our reference. Let's see, around 30% Then I will create a new layer. On that new layer, I will sketch, I will make the brush bigger first, maybe to 7% I will zoom in. Or now let me just make this one a little bit bigger. It doesn't matter if it gets pixelated. I'll just put it here. Go back to second layer here. I will start with torso. Now we are sketching adult female character using simple shapes. As you can see, I'm just using this reverse cut off triangle for the torso. Then I will sketch hips, go down with this again, let's call it reverse triangle. Then I will add feed again, just using triangles here. I can just add line for the legs. Maybe the torso can be even more stylized, a little bit more narrow. If you watch some of my other classes, you know that female character is, has a little bit more narrow shoulders than the male character. It can be like this. Obviously stylized as we don't have usually our glass shape of the body, or at least not all of us. Anyway, this is stylized. Then I can add the head. The head will not be the same size because we still need a neck. This can be simplified head. Then I can add the neck, and then we can add some basic hair and maybe a pony tail. Then I can add stick figure arms. And a second arm maybe on a hip, something like this. Perfect. All right, we have a character which is stylized Perfect. Now I will select both layers with the arrow. I will move it to the side. Then I will copy the reference with the circles duplicate layer by sliding to the left. I will try to keep it in the same height with the help of those lines. Then I will erase the top circle. I could have done this with a selection tool, but I just chose the eraser. All right, now if we sketch the child on the same layer, let's go back to a brush. The child will have a bigger head proportionally compared to this one, where as you see, I didn't use the whole circle for the head for the stylized character for the child. I can create a bigger circle for the head. Then we can add a smaller neck. Now for the child, oops, I move the canvas for the torso. I will actually create very small torso. It will be somewhere almost in the middle of the second circle. This will be the whole torso. Then we can add shorts. These are like hips, but as kids don't really have such a wide hips, you don't usually see such a big difference between male and females when the kids are small. Here I will add the hands, the legs. Now we are not looking at different shape of the legs and feet. Now, this is just about proportions. Then we can add the hair and maybe the ponytail as well. I will create a new layer just to add another color. Let me take maybe green basically, if you compare these proportions, the torso is small when you are stylizing child character here for more adult female is bigger compared to the legs, then the legs are quite long with a lot of the kids. Of course, I can create with different ages for the kids because you have variety and different kids have different body shapes and so on. So there is, of course, huge variety in there. These are just, we can call it basic tips or rules. You can try to create characters which are based on either four heads, four stylized characters which are more adult. Or you can create different proportions for adult characters depending on how much realism you want. And I talk more about that in the other classes Then for kids usually base the proportions on three head or circle principle for these and depending on the age of the child, you can adjust these proportions. Let me just create another color here, You can compare, you can sketch this for yourself as well as your own nodes. But definitely, you don't need to post as your project because you will have more options to post and sketch your own sketches without coloring full versions. But as you can see, proportions of the head size versus the torso side, not size. Torso size in children and more adult character is a little bit different. Okay, now let's move on to the next part where we talk about more tips and tricks when drawing kids characters. 3. Head Proportions: All right, now let's talk about the phase proportions. We can, again, start with the simple circle. You can create pretty rough base shape for the circle. I can reduce this, I can reduce the opacity. I will duplicate this shape. We can have the same head size. I can duplicate it one more time. We have it here as a reference. I can merge all these layers. Now on top, let's start with the frontal view. Obviously, we have the head shape here. Maybe let me reduce the brush size. The head is a little bit squashed, so it's not a perfect circle. Of course, as you can see here, I will draw a line going through the middle of the circle. Then I will draw another line going through, again, middle of the circle, but horizontally, not vertically. Now, I will divide this line in the middle. Then the part which is left over, I will divide again on this line, I will draw ice. Not exactly on the line but a little bit below that. Then I can add the nose here and the mouth here. As you can see, the proportions of the child or kid's character is more squished together. If you want to make it even more cutter or Cai, then you can even move the eyes almost aligned with the nose. You would have everything almost at the same line. Or you can even move the eyes on the same line on the bottom of the circle and have the mouth aligned with the eyes. But that's for another class, if we want to have something super awesome, cute. Anyway, if you want to have average stylized character, you can move the eyes closer to the nose and mouth. If you want to have more adult looking character, you would move the eyes a little bit higher together with the nose. All right, now let's draw the same character more from the side. I will. Let's go to the brush and I can create the circle again as our base. Then before that, let's draw the middle sketch. Middle line of the face, because the character would be now turned to the side, three quarter view. I will draw this curved line. We can do this. Then we can add a little cheek here. Smaller kids have puffy faces. You still have the cute cheeks. You can create the head, which is this rounded and has more volume at the bottom part. Then we can just at the nose at the same place. Then the eyes will be closer to the left side because the head is turned that direction. Then we have the mouth. I can actually cut this out and put it on a separate layer and reduce the opacity so you can see it a little bit better. I will sketch it on a separate layer. Basically, this would be the forehead, then we will have the cheek with the volume. Then here we'll have the mouth. The nose will be a little bit turned. You can also draw it just as a button if you want, but because it's from the side, you can actually draw a simple nose as you see, if you draw the eyes a little bit higher, it already looks a little bit older. Now we can put the eyes lower and it's pretty cute. Now here I can draw the character from the side, basically following the same structure. You can add the forehead because we'll have the nose at the same height. You can have it going out of the face, almost like in this, using this stylized shapes. This is one way you can draw the face proportions. We can even push the mouth little bit lower here or you can keep it the same height here. Then we would just add eyes here. I can add some hair, maybe on the three quarter view it's cut, the forehead would be quite big. In this case, I can add the fringe. As you know, I have also class about drawing hair and tips on that if you want to check that out. Maybe this character has this cuter, like a cute bumpy hairstyle with more volume. At the bottom there is the cheek. We see more hair on this side because the character is looking that way. We can round off maybe this cheek a little bit and then add some of the hair here and we can add the neck. Don't forget the neck needs to be aligned with the middle of the face. Perfect. All right. We have the head basic shapes from all three sides. Just using simple shapes, you can add more cheeks and more volume to the face, for example, on this side, we can reduce it. We can have it covered with hair, but the shape doesn't work with the side. Let me scratch that. And then we just create the simple head shape. Here, the phase proportions are more squwhed together. The eyes, nose, and mouth is closer to each other, or they are closer to each other. Everything is more on the lower part of the face. And when looking forward, you have everything in the middle aligned with the middle line and the horizontal line. When looking like to the side, three quarter view, you push all the facial features more to the side where the character is looking but still aligned with the curve that you drew or sketch as a guide. When you're looking to the side, you can simplify the nose and the proportions and silhouette of the face like this. All right, now let's move on to the next part. 4. Turnarounds: Okay, now let's start with the three quarter view here. As before, I will sketch the head, I will add the cheek, then I will add the narrow neck. In this part, you can actually sketch two more circles, one smaller and one bigger. You are staying in the second circle, basically like this. You can create the torso with a little bit of the belly. A small kids usually have some belly leftover or not leftover, but they are still a little bit chubbier than older kids. Then we can add legs, finishing where the second circle is, and then you can add feet just as a suggestion of feet. Then the legs from this straight lines, you can add little bit. You suggest where the knees are. The legs can be a little bit chubbier. You add this curved line, then we can add hands finishing around the top hip part. This is just suggestion of the hands. As you can see, they are much smaller and we will talk about it in the following lessons. Then we can add ears. Well, first let's add face. I will sketch a line here. We can add the nose and the mouth as before. You want to follow the curved line. If it is three quarter view, we can add the eyes quite low. It doesn't really matter where you place this line when you want to have it higher. Somewhere around here. But everything is pushed to the lower part and we can add the hair as before. Then when you are drawing ears, you can add the ears somewhere from the middle of the eye and finish where the mouth is. With the kids, they are quite bigger, you don't have to have them very small. You can play with that. It's like a stylized feature that the ears are much bigger. Now I will add the hair, maybe this character has shorter Bob hair style, maybe a bow. Because it's turned to the three quarter, it's on the side of the head. All right, then it's in the swimsuit. So I can add this opening for the swimsuit and the bottom part of the swimsuit. I will add this type of line because it's turned this way and this will stay like this. All right, we have three quarter view of a smaller kid. Now I can duplicate these circles and move them to the side. Then we can sketch the frontal view again. We can actually create lines that will help us to create the same proportions like you do in animation. So you can create a turnaround. We have the lines we need to make sure that everything is aligned when you use the tap from With the other hand, you can create exactly a horizontal line. We want to create similar proportions. All right, this is around the waistline, the ice. And the top of the head. And the feet. The knees are here. Actually they're a little bit higher. Let's move this line a little bit higher. All right? And then I'll reduce the opacity of this one. We have that just as guidelines. I can prepare this one for you so you can download it so you don't have to recreate it. Okay, now let's catch the character from the front. So we have the neck around here, then the head is circle. I think this is good warm up practice. Then we have this kind of like a bean shape, right? So we created one circle here, another circle here, because this is a frontal view. Then we will have the legs quite similar as you might have noticed by now. The shoulders are quite narrow compared to the adult character. If you want to distinguish the adult character from the child, one of the features that you definitely can use is narrow shoulders. Because this character is standing here with the feet together, maybe we can actually create legs and feet which are more together. It's the same, or at least similar. We have the feet, they are quite small. Then we have the knees. We can add choppiness to them with the rounded shapes. Draw the middle of the face with the mouth in the middle here we can draw more pronounced nose in this one. In this one from the frontal view, we have to add the eyes here, align with the middle of the face on this one. We can even push it to the side, it's even more. We can also add eyebrows which are higher up. The fringe is somewhere here. Basically, your hair style can help you define also the angle of the character. By using these bigger hairstyles, you can emphasize the size of the head, which is quite nice, creating the illusion that the head is even bigger. Then because it's a front of you, we can add the bow in the middle, then add the hands and a little bit of the chubbiness again. And the arms here, actually, here because it's the three quarter view, let's emphasize the opening on the swimsuit just to push it to the side. Here you can make the torso a little bit more narrow and emphasize the belly from the side. All right, now we can draw side view. Let's duplicate the circles again and align them perfect. Now I'll go to the same layer. We can recreate this bean shape, especially from the side. We can try to align it here. I will create the same circles here. This one will be bigger. This one is a little bit smaller. This one can be a little bit bigger so we can create a belly. Now, I will actually reduce the opacity of this one. I'll just put it on a separate layer because I made it too dark. I'll just put it here as a reference. I will add a line suggesting a belly. Then the back, little bit bent. We have a slight butt here. There will be the arm here. If you draw arm, it will be here on the side. Now as we have the leg here, we can draw the same opening in the swimsuit for the leg. And the knee is somewhere here. The leg is very short, so this is the calf of the leg, and then a small foot. Then we can add the neck. The neck is in the middle of the body. If you remember from the previous lesson, we can align the nose to the approximately same height. The ear is aligned somewhere with the neck. The eye is aligned with the other eye, and the mouth was somewhere here. Then let's try to align the fringe, the hair, then the bow is somewhere here. Maybe we can even add a ponytail which was maybe not so visible in these two other versions. There you have it. Maybe we can reduce this part. Maybe the like, there is more volume than I wanted here. Just reduce it a little bit. But other than that, I think it works nicely. There you go. You can practice drawing the characters from the front view, three quarter view, and side view, and using these two other circles for the middle. And imagining like this bean shape here, because it's a three quarter view. We can even add more volume for the hand or arm because it's covering part of the body, because we're looking from this side, but we will look at more references in the later lessons. This is just one way to practice drawing small kids using 2.5 circles for the proportions and using the bean body shape and adding more volume to the cheeks. Drawing bigger hair and narrow shoulders, some belly, small hands and small feet. Now let's move on to the next part. 5. Sketching Hands: All right, now let's talk about hands. This is part of the illustration I did for the hand drawing class. If you see that, you know all of my tricks and tips when drawing stylized hands. Now let's focus on what is different when drawing hands, or basically stylized hands. For the kids, character character illustrations. One of the tips or tricks, what I use when drawing hands is using the rectangle for a base of the palm. And then we have all ways and tips and tricks, how to draw the thumb in different directions. But then I use this ten shape for the fingers, as many other artists do as well. Let's move this a little bit. Then you have the wrist. Then you can separate the fingers and play with the proportions as we talked about in the other class. But when you are drawing kid's hand, you can use even like a circle instead of a rectangle because the hand is much smaller. Let me move it then. For the thumb, you can draw the smaller rounded sausage. Then for the fingers, we can draw the smaller mitten shape. Then separate the fingers like that. Then we can add the breast and the hand. As you can see, I'm using different shapes when drawing more adult character hands and kids hands. The kids hands will be more chubby and more rounded. Let me sketch more of these here. We can, for example, draw like arm, which is more like a spaghetti and a closed fist. Let me zoom in, it's almost like a paw. Sometimes. Depending how much of a stylized hand you want to create, then this would be a thumb. You can also draw just like three fingers to stylize it even further. This can be a stylized hand which almost looks like, I don't even know what, some type of fruit. But anyway, you can stylize the hand more like this. As I said, three fingers, very looking shape. So we can maybe make this a little bit more narrow, it's more visible what it is. And then maybe the thump can be a little bit smaller and more hidden behind the rest of the hand. Then if you draw a hand which is stretched out, basically this is the whole arm, then you are thinking about that circle we just talked about here. Then we add the thumb with the middle part of the hand. Then if we just have three fingers, as they often do in animation, this can be your stretched out hand which is more like straight. Then we can hand pointing at something with one finger like stretched out and two other fingers just here next to it. And then the thumb is hidden on the other side, maybe even more, just like a little bit here. This is the bottom part of the hand. And the wrist, it's like outstretched. And then if we have a hand on the floor, it's, as I said, almost like a poll. This you can do for very small kids, very short fingers. And I can make this even smaller. But what I like to do, I still like to keep all the fingers, but I just wanted to show you that this is a possibility. Another way how you can actually sketch very simple arm is just to create this type of shape. This is the circle for the hand, as I drew here for the thumb. Then you can create this simple sausage fingers. And just around them off, you can draw four or three fingers and then create this rounded shape. What to remember when drawing hands for kids create shorter fingers than with adults. They can be chubbier and more round. You can simplify the thumb even more than with adult hands where we also add the bone which is on the thumb overall. The arms are also more chubbier with smaller kids or very skinny with kind of like teenagers or these teen twin years. So let's look at more tips in the next lesson. 6. Sketching from References: All right, now let's try to explore some of the poses for our project. The project is buildings and castles on the beach. As I showed you some of the references, you can collect your own or practice first with me and then create the illustration together. First, I imported one of the reference images here in the reference window, which you can find here and activate and okay, it's activated. I guess I have to go deactivated here. You can just import the image. Now I will sketch on the new layer using the same sketch brush which I was using until now. Of course, you can use different brush. You don't have to use the same brush for this exercise. In this case, remember the bean shape that we were using before? As a practice, I'm thinking about this shape. I can reduce the opacity. I can also create the bean shape where it's more like a snowman or something. We have the belly and here it's connected. I'm thinking about these shapes. I can move them here to the side. I think this reference is quite nice. I will create a new layer because the back of the child here, building the same castle, is very rounded, we can emphasize that. And then we can, of course, adjust it. You can already think about this bean shape here, which is hiding there. The head is quite big, we can create a circle for the head. Here, we have those other circles that we talked about with the first sketch. You can be pretty rough and then you can draw on top of it here. I will create a circle for the shoulder. The help of lines to create the elbow and the hand here. And then I can just draw the arm on top of it, suggestion of the hand and then the legs. We have the nap here, so those are the bottom. Then the hip is somewhere here, another circle there. And the knee is behind the arm, so we will see only the top of the knee. And here we can draw this curve. Then this line is quite straight and the legs are finished. Or the feet are below the bad, they are somewhere here. This is the foot. We can re, draw it a little bit better on a separate layer. This is what I notice for now. And the second leg is a little bit further down. They are here and here the feet are placed like this. The other foot is aligned with the. But then the kid has some to to bring or move the send around. It has wheels, but of course you can add a different toy here. Then I will draw the lines for the face because it's tilted downwards, the kid is looking down. And then there will be the nose in the bottom of the face here, like we sketched and some hair. And the neck, I will reduce the opacity of this one and redraw it a little bit better on the top, The rounded back then as you can see there is this curve here. Then this line can go just down. This one is a little bit more straight. I'll straighten it. Then we can draw the second foot. You can add little fingers here. You can draw also the second arm for this exercise, you don't have to. You can also combine different references. For example, you can see that some other kid is sitting in different way. Let's import another reference, and let's move to the next lesson. 7. Sketching Practice: Okay, I imported another image and as you can see, this one is very similar. I will just sketch it quickly and we can compare. This one is sitting in very similar pose, but the legs are much closer to the body. The hair is a little bit longer, which is almost covering the face. Actually, you can even stylize this into a stereotype of a girl with a bow in her hair. If we sketch it like this, I will imagine the character without that shirt more in a swimsuit. Because we want to have the characters like building sand castles. The knee is a little bit better, bigger here, we can see it more. The foot is somewhere here. And we can add some fingers. Then we can add shorts. The back is not so curved as this other one. Maybe this character has a shirt, maybe without sleeves on. We need to also move the knee a little bit lower. We have space for the neck as well. I can just move this whole part a little bit higher. You can always use your selection tool to move parts. I still like a little bit of that curve in the back. I think it's nice for the silhouette. Then we can draw like a bigger ear. And the eye is here and the shoulder would be even lower. I sketched it too high up, and that means it's higher here and the knee lower. We have to move it in our sketch to then we can sketch the other foot. Maybe we can add stripes on that shirt and add that bow. Maybe the shorts are here. The elbow is a little bit lower. As you can see when you do the construction is much easier to get the proportions If you don't want to redraw parts and create nicer sketch, The hair is here and try to keep the same length for the upper arm and lower arm. And then we have the hands back shirt shorts, perfect. Then we can have another hand. We have the sand here already with some, maybe flowers or something like that. As you can see, these are very similar poses, but this one is more tilted forward and this one is just crouching down. Now I will sketch a few more poses and I will catch up with you a little bit later. All right, so now I have a few exploration sketches for the project that I want to do. Hopefully, you also tried sketching maybe the same characters as I don't have exact references for these because I combine variety of poses. But you can of course, look at your own poses or follow these sketches for practice. Now I will go and sketch the idea for the project. And you can choose two of your favorite sketches. Or maybe you can have one character building the sand castle. As I showed you some references for Sandcastle, you can design your own sandcastle and create different pose for the characters. What I think would be nice is to have two characters building the sandcastle. Now let's move on to the next lesson. 8. Composition Ideas: Now let's start sketching the idea for our project. When sketching the idea for your project, you can construct your characters by using the circles and the bean shape. If you want to draw the characters from the side, it looks like the end. Then you can use the stick figure arms to construct the legs. Or you can also use some references that you found online and construct the poses. That way, I will construct the characters using the circles. I will put the Sand Castle in the middle behind them. I will start with that as a composition, you can, of course, look at your own references for the sand castle. Let's first talk about the composition a little bit. I'm thinking that one character be here on the side, Other character can be here on the other edge. Maybe they are building something here. This is the sand castle. This is one idea for the composition. Then maybe you can build the sand castle like this. Maybe one tower is taller, maybe there is something here and more towers. Then the kids are maybe building something here on the side. We can add the towers, this part as well. Another idea for the composition is that your castle is wider and maybe has more towers, maybe the kids are building here. And then you can add some of the towers here and maybe add some sand. As you can see, you have a variety of ideas how you can build these sand castles and adding the characters. You can follow my example when building the sand castle. As a first exercise, you can follow exactly my design and my sketch. And then you can create drawing another sketch if you want to make the illustration more of your own. Because if you follow my same design is great to share, but for more practice that you can also use it in your portfolio is only when you design your own illustration. Because if you follow the same illustration that I created, you can't use it in your portfolio as your own and you can't license it. The best way to practice and create your own illustration, as I said, is first maybe to follow my design, You get more comfortable with designing. And then you can create your own illustration with a different composition and different character poses and maybe different sand castle so you can make it your own and you also learn more. Now I will go ahead and sketch the design of the characters. I think I will go for this type of composition where the castle is in the middle and the characters are in front of it. I will do that now. 9. Refine Your Composition: All right, as I said, I will go for this composition, I will hide, or actually I will group these layers, then I will duplicate it and flatten the group. I will make this sketch or the reference. Then I can delete this part. I will reduce the opacity. I will draw on a separate layer, and I have variety of different sand castles open on another screen. So I can combine the design of different sand castles. I don't just copy someone photography or someone else's sandcastle design. And the same goes for the characters. I will use similar references that I looked at before. For practice, I can just compose the character using those. Let's start with the characters again. I will create the bigger head for one of the characters. Then I will add the lower part for the face, bigger ear, and the eye at the bottom. I like the pose that we created when practicing that the character is from the side and have very short neck and curved back. Then I think the legs can be aligned with the send, basically the leg is here and maybe this one can be a boy. I can add this like fluffy long hair. It's a little bit bigger than the skull and there is like some volume. And the arms are like outstretched, building something in the middle. That would be one of the characters. It will be like this. Maybe I can make everything a little bit smaller. I have space also in the foreground. The second character will be around the same age in very similar pose that we practiced. Again, the top part of the torso, then the bottom part, the body and the legs are like hidden under the arms. This can be a girl. We have a boy and girl. The girl has a longer legs. She's a little bit older. Let's add longer hair, maybe a bow. This is the longer hair curved back as we had before in the sketch. All right, and then the feet are a little bit off the ground, so you can see the heel is a little bit off. And then she's on the balls of her feet. Then the ear is here. And then she's from the side as well. We can add the eye and they are building something in the middle. Then this is the other leg, as you can see, it's very similar to what we sketched. Then maybe she has shorts. I think when you sketch and practice some of these from some of the references, it's a great help because then you can remember these poses when you just want to quickly explore something, you already have that in your visual memory. We have the poses for the characters. Now, I will go ahead and add more details to the castle based on some of the references and I will talk to you in a moment. All right. This is my composition idea sketch. As you can see from the previous design, I decided to go for more simple shape of the castle, not keeping the turnts or any sharp parts of the castle, It will be more like flat layers. I also decided to add a dog using the same technique, just one circle, middle circle for the part and bottom circle. I moved the kids little bit higher up. I also adjusted the size of the head of the boy. Let me see. It was here, you can see that the boy had a little bit smaller head. I made it bigger compared to the body. Also, the girl character has a little bit longer legs. She has longer legs and thinner legs compared to the previous design, she looked a little bit younger. What I did here, let me hide this sketch, it's not confusing. So we have only these two. I made the girl look a little bit older than the boy. He has bigger head compared to his body. This is my composition. In the next lesson, I will show you how I would color it. Let's move on to the next lesson. 10. Canvas Setup: Okay. Now for the coloring, I prepared the color palette for one color pallet, but two for this one. I have one color pallet for the characters and also the sand castle. Because I already tested the colors for you guys. Because sometimes my color testing process can be very messy. I know that the colors work together. Now we will be using this one or these two color pallets for the project, which you can download. Then for the brushes, I will be using brush, I think number eight, which has some texture in it. If you have this brush set, you can use this brush or you can go to the painting folder and maybe use the damp brush. Or you can use the brush for this one, which is very nice or also stucco or stucco brush. Or I also like Tamar or Spectra. Any of these brushes that you like from the painting folder or from the artistic folder. I also quite like this one, which is called Plimsol, which is quite nice. Anyway, these names of the brushes are quite intense. I'm not sure how to pronounce them. But anyway, I will try to keep it for this project just to one brush. Just choose whichever brush that you like with some texture. Now for the canvas can create new canvas which is the same size as we created until now, something which has like a screen size. This one has 3,500 by 2,500 pixels. Let me show you 3,500 by 2,500 which is great for sharing on social media. I think that's a good size. If you are creating your own design, you can create even bigger canvas, maybe like 5,000 pixels. You have bigger resolution if you want to print. But again, if you have your own design and you're not following the same design from this project. What I also like to use for bigger illustrations is this watercolor paper template and sketchbook spread paper for the sketch book. What I usually do is I duplicate my template, which has the textures. Then I can import a sketch into the template on a separate layer. Let me just do that and I talk in a second. 11. Coloring the Background: All right, so I imported the sketch into the new canvas, and this canvas has bigger dimensions, so it's 5,000 by 3,750 pixels. As you can see, the sketch is on a separate layer. Let me zoom in. You see here is the nice paper texture template, which adds texture to your color on the sketch. It's not visible yet, but this is what I usually like to use. I don't have to use, um, extra textures and it looks more traditional, which is super nice. This document is set up with different texture layers for emphasizing highlights and art texture and texture in the background. Then when you collapse the texture on top of this template, you can sketch on all the layers below. For now, I can just turn this off because I just wanted to show you how I like to create illustrations for commissions or for clients that I add this texture with the template. And it's super easy, but not necessary for this project. As I mentioned to you, I will turn this off, then I will sketch and add colors under our sketch layer so I can group these two. This is the sketch. I will rename it. I have this sketch in the other canvas. I can just reduce this part of the sketch, which was more rough, then I can flatten the sketch because I have the copy in case I need it. Then I will set it to multiply and reduce opacity of the sketch. Then, I will start adding colors on separate layers. I said I will separate everything into background and then the castle and the character. It really depends on your project how to separate the layers, or how many layers do you want to use? Because if you, for example, want to animate something, like we want to animate this character and maybe the character is moving one arm, you want to have that arm on a separate layer. Usually when I create illustration for clients, I always have the characters on the separate layer so I can move them. Or if the client would decide like, oh, I actually don't want this dog there. I don't need to redraw the whole background or something like that. If you're not sure about some elements in your illustrations which you are creating for clients, always create them on a separate layer. You have easier process. But when I'm creating illustrations for myself, sometimes I just draw on one layer. Or if it is more complex landscape, I always have the background, middle, and foreground. Three layers are always good if you want to draw behind something. Anyway, let's start coloring the background. Then I will take the brush from my brush set. And as I mentioned, you can choose any brush from the painting or drawing which has some texture for the background. Imagine having some cloud. I will take this lighter blue color. Before doing that, actually, I will scale down the sketch a little bit more. We have more space because I think I can add some of these clouds also higher up. Let's do that. Okay, and make sure that you are on a correct layer so we can call this background. All right, now I can add some clouds with the circular movements, you can add clouds. And if you have more like bristle brush, you can draw with something like that. I would usually use maybe something like this bristle, you can actually smudge it or you can just smudge it with some other brush that you like. This is not necessary, but it makes your life. Easier if you find your favorite textures. But again, as I said, not necessary. You can just go to your favorite brush. Now take white color, we can take white actually from the background or something that you smashed on the edge, it's like lighter blue. Then we can add this type of white edges of the clouds. You are like building a cake. The smudge it from smudges. You can basically take any brush for example. You can take maybe dry brush from painting if you don't have my brush set. And then you can make the brush smaller and then smudge like this. You will get this pain look and feel. All right. Now let's create a new layer. Let's go to the colors. And I will take the darker blue. I will add the ocean. And of course, we need to actually move this layer, it's above the clouds. For this one, you want to make sure that it's actually straight. We have the horizon with your other hand, make sure that the line is straight, then you can add more color, more free hand, but just make sure that the main line is more straight again. You can smudge it here on the edges. I will use the other smudge maybe. Yeah. I will take this one and reduce the strength and make it a little bit smaller. Perfect. And this will be water ops. And now we can color the sand castle. So the sand castle will have a light on one side and it will be darker on the other side. And then we will have some sand in the foreground. Now let's move on to that part. 12. Coloring the Sand: All right. Now for the Sand Castle, we are on a separate layer On the top, I will take lighter brown color, that will be like middle tone. And then we'll have the lighter tones from the light brown or Beijing colors here. Now I will, I need to take a different brush. One brush we're just using before. I'm using brush number eight from the Gah set because it has sharper edge, but with some texture, you can find the brush which has more solid edge, it's not too briskly. Then you can create a silhouette for your castle. You can either color it in or you can drag and drop the color. I usually like to color it in because I like some of these textures that you create when you are drawing it freehand, you can make the brush bigger when you are coloring like bigger parts. When you are drawing the edges, you need to make it smaller again. All right. Now I will alphaock this layer and then I will add some of these other colors. Lighter base on the right side. You can distribute the color quite randomly because there is no smooth surface on the castle. So it's then I will take the lightest color and added here to the edge. I think I need to add more opacity here so I can duplicate the layer if it is through. And I can merge these too. Then I will add darker tones from this other side. Even darker here on the left side, the light is coming from top right. If you want to know more about colors and color theory, you can watch my color and light master class. Here on the left, I will add the darkest colors. Then I will take the smudge. You can use either the smug tool or some of the brushes. For this, I will use the brush number 18, will add more color in that way. And then I will go to the smudge tool. I will take the brush number 21. I will su some of these textures a little bit more. I will make it bigger. I don't want to smash all the textures, but that it's a little bit more blended together. Then I can go back to the same basic brush and add some of these lighter tones. I will paint in a little bit more texture here. And then the lighter brown and smudge it a little bit more perfect. I think that works. It's a little bit too dark on this side, but we can always compare it when we draw at the characters. But I think here on the top, I will make it a little bit lighter. I will make this part lighter and then smudge it a little bit. All right. I think this works. And then I can add the sand here on the bottom part, I will create a new layer. I will create the sand with this lighter tone, closer to the sand castle. Then just create some random shapes here. We need to add the color covering the characters as well because they need to send stand on some sand. Now I will take the darkest color here just to match with the sand castle. The brownish reddish color that will be closer to that sand castle. We have some like a shadow. Then I will have even lighter done going away, something like this. Then I can sample some of these colors. Here we have some spots, as you know, we have different holes and dips in the sand which create shade or shadow, which you will see when you look at the beach. It's not just one color. All right. And then we will have another, like a lump of sand which the kids are building. So we can use the same colors as we used on the sand castle here. Light. Then we can add some middle. Actually, it needs to be a little bit more here. The darker tones on this side you can design also like a smaller castle. In this part, if you want to add highlights and shadows, you're keeping highlights on the top right side. All right, now we have the pace for the castle, then we can add color to the characters before we add more details to the castle. 13. Coloring the Boy: All right, now let's color in the characters. I will create the new layer on top of the other layers, keeping still the same basic brush from the colors. Now I will go and choose some of the colors which I prepared for the character color pallet. Let me go back to the color pallet. I will create silhouettes for the characters, and then I will add other colors. I will select this lighter skin tone because I think it works well in this color pallet. But you can choose, of course, any other skin tone that you like for this composition. In any would also work for these colors. If you choose a darker skin tone for this character, then maybe you want to move the character little bit to the right, it has better contrast against this lighter tone of the castle. I will select this color and I will zoom in and make the brush a little bit smaller. And I will fill in the silhouette. Now I will drag and drop the color. In this case, I will add more colors on the top. So I think that works well. Maybe I can turn on the reference so we see what we have so far. All right, now we have the silhouette created for one of the characters. As you saw when I was dropping the color, I needed to adjust the threshold. So you can always do that by swiping to the left and right. While the color, now I will go on the layer and sell. And then go to the color pallet. And select the darker color which I want to use for the short of the boy, which I will draw directly on this layer. You can draw it on a separate layer on top and use the clipping mask. If you have more layers available, we can do that. In that case, you don't need the alphaoc, I can disable that. You have those two options. Then I will add a T shirt which will be saturated red color, something like this. Then for the hair, let's go to the color palettes for the hair. I will choose darker brown color, which is still in the red tones. Double check if I'm on the correct layer. All right, and now when you're happy you can merge these layers. I don't think I need them to be separated now. I will just pind over some parts and clean up some of these edges where I wasn't very precise. Now I will use the Alpha, Ok, and I will add some highlights for the pants. I will just use lighter color here on the top because the light is coming from the top right. I will just add light here. I'm painting some of the colors back in because I added too much of this light that I wanted. I want to have it just here on the top. Then I will add some of the darker shade, which is basically this color, but just a little bit darker. I will add the fold here and you can watch my other class as well about painting clothing. Because there I explain how I think about these folds and how you can draw the clothes and folds the best or how to understand them. If you haven't done that class, you can check that out even though it's in a little bit different style than this one. But I explain how I think about the folds there more. Now I will add the shadow on the shirt as well. It will be a little bit darker here around the arms, bottom of the shirt. And here I will disable the Alpha look and add a little bit more volume to the shirt. Maybe add some stitching here. Maybe I can remove a little bit of the volume here. Perfect. All right. Now let's add some color to the hair. I need the alphalog again, and I need to add the darker shade and the lighter shade on top of the head. And then we can add even lighter edge here, just a little bit. All right, And now I will smudge a little bit of this here. Perfect. I will also add the face and I will use the same dark color. Then I need a little bit of the darker shade to add these details. The ear and then bottom of the nose, and maybe bottom of the leg, and we need to add eyebrow. All right, perfect. I think this works. Now we can move to the girl character. 14. Coloring the Girl: Now let's color the girl character. I also added some stripes on this character because I think it adds to this beach and seaside mood. Like the sailors or stripy beach mood. You can of add also maybe tropical pattern or whatever outfit or colors that you like. Now for the girl character, I will create a new layer Again, I will start with the silhouette, and I'm using the same or very similar color as I used on the boy character. All right, and now as we have the silhouette for the girl character ready, we can add more colors to it. I will just alpha look and I will draw on the same layer for the girl character. I think it would be nice to have maybe yellow shirt. I will do that for the hair. I will choose the same dark color as we have for the boy. Maybe they are brother and sister, or you can invent other story that you like because some siblings have darker and one sibling has other lighter color. Of course, it's not the same, but for the sake of this illustration, I will just create the same hair color for the pants. I will use the same color like the boy shirt. I'll need to make the brush smaller. Maybe they were shopping in the same surf shop or beach shop. Basically, it's like one collection or you can come up with your own reasoning, but I think that can work. Like imagine you will buy the same top and the bottom. Maybe the top has stripes, the bottom is full color. Or maybe we can add like subtle stripes, lighter red. Let's see if that will work. It's not visible, so we need to make it a little bit lighter. Maybe this is too light. Yeah, maybe something like this. I think it adds a little bit of the color. And then we can add darker red as a shadow. Then we can add also stripes on her shirt. So something like a light yellow. I think we can add a little bit more hair to this part and maybe reduce the curve on her back a little bit. Then we have hair here and then there is the knee. Then we need to add the face, just simple eye eyebrow and the lips with this darker red. All right. I think that works nicely. And then we can add a little bit of this darker base color here just to suggest where the legs and feet are because we didn't separate these colors that well perfect. And then we can add some darker color in the hair to add some shadows. And again, you can watch my class about drawing hair just to understand the, the shadows and highlights in here. A little bit more. All right? And then some highlights. And I need to color the bow so for that I can take some red color. All right. Perfect. So I think the girl is ready and then I can add color to the dog before we move on to the details on the castle. 15. Coloring the Dog: All right. Now I will add some color to the dog. I will create a new layer for the dog. I will go for some brown colors. I will select this light brown color as a base. I will create a silhouette the same like with the characters. It's inspired by, I would say, German Shepherd mix, as you can tell, maybe by the ears and the size of the dog. It's like this cute guardian of the kids here on the beach. Maybe the parents are a little bit further out. This goofy looking dog is protecting them and sitting next to them. It's quite fun. Addition, I think now I will alphaock the layer. I will use the darker color tone just to add this patches of darker color like you can imagine on a German shepherd. But maybe it's like mixed breed. It can have like these dark ears and you can create your favorite dog or mixed breed dog. That's always fun. I think here I will suggest the paws, there are like shadows in between the paws. Then I will add a lighter color on his face, then on the belly, because I think it's quite cute when the dogs have lighter belly, you have this variety in colors on the dog. His front paws are, maybe it's actually still like a big puppy because we have this big paws usually some of these, even bigger breeds don't have such a huge when they are older. As I said, maybe it's a bigger puppy, they are always cut like this by puppy. That can be quite fun if you imagine these two kids with the dog as animation. Like everyone is running around and the dog is maybe helping them dig out some sand holes. That can be quite cute. Here we can add darker desaturated because we have light from the top right. So I will add shadow under his chin, On the side of his chest. Okay, we are calling it him. Maybe it's a male dog because it's a little bit bigger. This part is a little bit darker. We need to suggest the paws, they are like split here and then some shadow on the side and also side of his face. Then maybe we can add some darker tone where the shadows are. It's under nozzle or the snout or how is it called the mouth of the dog Here. I need to adjust it a little bit so we don't need it that far out. Then I can draw the nose for that. I think I need to zoom in. It's even out, it's like symmetrical. Then we add the eyes. Let's see, maybe we need to add a little bit of the shadow here. I think that's fine. And maybe here where the paws are. Let's add the tongue so the tongue can be nice and red color. Perfect. All right, now we have a dog as well. Maybe I can still add some darker tones in the ears. There is also shadow in the ears. All right. Pretty cute. And what else can we add to the dog? Maybe we can smudge some of these colors here a little bit. It's blending better in some of these parts. And then I can still add highlight into his eyes. Perfect. All right. Now let's start adding details to the castle. 16. Sand Castle: All right. Now, depending on the design of your castle, you can add details to it. I have the small cut out where the next level of the castle starts. Because the light comes from the top right. The cut out or this deep will create a shadow. I need to add some shadows in these parts. And basically also, I need to add shadows to the windows and the doors of the castle. To do that, I will create a new layer above the castle. I will select some dark color, maybe something still orange, something like this, which I already tested. Now I will add the color to the doors and these dips. I need to add these to all the levels. It doesn't need to be even because if it is a sand castle, it's not proper building. It can be Won Key and Vb here, I'm adding some of these windows too. We have more of them. We can add that as well here. And also to this side. Some of the castles that I, where I was doing research, they have this texture of bricks. I like the idea, add some of these lines here, suggesting that there are bricks. Again, they are not very even. I can add that here. Also behind the boy character, we need to add that dip here too. Perfect. And also to this level as a shadow under the other level. Perfect. And because it's darker and lighter on one side, we can make one of these sides a little bit dark. I will alpha. Then I can use either just darker color that I have here or I can slide the color slider here more to the bottom right. Make the brush a little bit bigger. I can left side of the shadows a little bit darker. And also these doors, I think here it can be even darker. Let's see, from the color palette, maybe this darker color will work in this part. Yeah, I think that works quite nicely. And then I can add the darker color here. It's like less saturated here. I think it can be a little bit more visible. So I will pull the color to the top right. All right, perfect. Here on this side, I will make it a little bit lighter. I will pull it to the top right. Perfect. I think that works. I will disable the alpha lock. Maybe here I can add another window or door in that color. It's behind that lump that the kids are building, There is like an entrance to the castle, which I think can be nice. Then we can add flag on top of the castle, because a lot of the castles in medieval ages have flags. Why not? And you can of course, design the flag if you have ideas for that. Perfect. Nice. I think that works quite well. Now we can add some more details to the whole illustration. 17. Finalize Your Illustration: Now let's add some details to the illustration. I imagine this beach as this Nordic beach. Maybe Denmark or other Scandinavian beaches where you have some grass growing on the edges of the beach, on the hill. And then you can build castles because it's not too hot basically. You don't mind when there is a lot of sunshine because it's chillier. So let's add some greenery. Because when I used to go to beaches in Denmark, when I lived there, it was always nice to see this little bit of green on the edge of the beach. And the sand was nice and golden, and then you are not too hot. Although during some days it can be very windy and very cold. Anyway, we can imagine some of the days which are nice and sunny, but not too cold. All right, I will create a new layer on top of the other layers. But actually I want the layer to be behind the dog. The grass will be also behind the dog. Here I will take some green color, mid green tone, so it doesn't have to be too dark or too light. And then I will add few plants or grass growing out. I am not too precious about this one, it's not any specific plant. Then I will add a little bit of grass here. As you can see, it's just lumps of green color because it's quite far. I can some lighter tone as well. We have maybe parts of the grass also in there were the nice pink bushes on the side. I can add some of these pink flowers on the grass. I can imagine this to be like rose hip flowers because you can see them quite often in the sand dunes in Denmark. And I always like the sand and the flowers of this bush in the sand dunes also the rose hip, or it's actually wild red roses or you can find different names, but I would just call them wild rose hip, which can be also in this darker pink color. It feels like almost like a red color. Which I think it's quite nice and fits this illustration even though it doesn't grow like this on the grass. But we can imagine something like that. I can add it also to the castle. We decorate our castle with some of the flowers, which I think it's pretty cute. It's basically just suggestion of the flowers. If you want to know how to draw more detailed flowers, I also have a class on that, you can check that out with more detailed flowers. And also like this autumn flower pattern where I talk about mixing different colors. But basically here I just imagine rose flower idea because they're just super pretty. And I always like them in Denmark. Here, I need to add a little bit of the darker tone as well. We have some shadows, maybe here the leaves are hanging as well. Then we can add lighter tones here too. There is some other plant growing on this side as well. Maybe the kids edit some of these plants together on the castle. You can invent your story there too. Maybe I can add some of that here. They are closer to the sand dunes. There is a little bit of that greenery here on the sand as well. And maybe some rose hips fell here as well when they were collecting them. We have some grass here, then we can add some of the grass here on this side as well. We can add some of the flowers here too. All right. I think now we have a lot of details around the illustration. You can add more grass or less grass however you like. You can play around with the sand shapes and maybe add more spots in the sand. And you can build even small other castles or like flowers here, so you can play around with that. But I think this illustration works very nicely. Now we have some flowers and some nice greenery on the castle, which the kids probably decorated. And they have also the flag on top of the castle. We have the dog kind of hanging out with the kids, and they are building some new parts of the castle. You can already imagine the story behind this illustration. Now let me show you how it can look like when you add the texture. If you want to explore more textures in your art, you can see that adding the texture like this to the illustration speeds up your process with adding more textures to your illustration. I like to use this type of method as well, just to make my life easier and create the illustrations with textures faster. I think everything now works well together. We have the castle, we have some flowers here on the castle. We have the goofy dog, then we have the boy character, we have the girl character here. And then we edit some details around as well. Yeah, I think this works super nicely. I hope that you also enjoyed creating your illustration. And either when you follow the same design, it would be nice to see if you take me on social media or you upload your sketches and illustration to the project section. If you created different designs still inspired by this class and the same color palette, I would love to see that. Hopefully you will take me so I can share your art with others. Yeah, so thank you so much for being here and I hope you enjoyed creating this project. And then you also maybe learn something new about drawing kid characters and how to work with the proportions. And also you got some new ideas for future illustrations. Great, thank you so much for being here and I'm looking forward to seeing your project.