Transcripts
1. 00 | Introduction: it's clicking here from had a draw. Comics dot net I'm super excited to tell you about my brand new course on comic book character production. If you've ever wondered what it would take to create your own full color comic book character design, this course has been created to break down how it's done from beginning to end, giving you an actionable game plan. You can apply to start developing your urn characters right away. When you enrolled in this course, you'll get the full low down on how to draw design. Ain't n color a complete, comical character concept. Each lesson built on top of the last. And as you watch the process unfold, you'll work on creating your own character, putting everything you learnt into practice with the assignments included in each chapter. Ueland. How to give you character design the best chance of success right away from the start by establishing a solid foundation that oppose the fundamental principles. Every well drawn character is built upon proportions, pose and placement. You'll see how the same figure and head shot is constructed from multiple points of view so that you know how to draw them from the front and back 3/4 angles. Once we've got a sturdy foundation to build our character upon, I was sketching their anatomy and pencil at the design dropped on top. This is my favorite part of the whole course, because it's where we really get to exercise our creativity and come up with a character design that's captivating and, most importantly, memorable. You'll also land had to create consistency from one viewpoint to the next so that you know exactly how they're going to look no matter what angle you're drawing on. After we're done with the rock drop, it's time to cement our idea in ink. Using shop slick, energetic lineup will begin by outlining the primary contours that defined the character design. Applying line weight variation for a more dynamic, visually appealing contour. Next will drop in the shadows to suggest the overall riding scheme described form and create contrast between the various materials featured throughout the character design. This step is key to breaking them up with varying levels of dark and light value, creating a greater level of readability and impact on the page. Then we'll push the depth of the character even further, using fine lined hatches to render at the forms, materials and textures for added definition, completing the thinking stage and leaving us with a crystal clean align our presentation for our character design. The final portion off the course is dedicated to coloring, and in the remaining lessons, you learn how to compose an appealing color scheme for your character that complements their design. Will discuss color theory and psychology, along with the technical considerations such as L. A. A hierarchy, brushes and settings used throughout the process. OSHA. My favorite message for rendering forms and materials was realistic shading and lighting. Using adjustment layers end blending modes to create a vivid presentation that makes the character pop right of the page, along with the lessons themselves. You'll also receive the PSD files end digital art brushes featured throughout the demonstration so that you can go back through these documents for yourself to see how everything was organized and composed. The great thing is, you can watch these lessons on your desktop Mac or portable device off your choosing at your own pace and convenience. You can go back through each chapter and recap on the information given throughout the course as many times as you need to to make sure you don't miss a second of inside. By the end of this course, you'll know how to illustrate a full comic book character concept, but even better than that, you'll have created your own with hopefully many more to come after that one. But we've got a lot of ground to cover. So if you're ready to take your comic art skill set to the next level and create characters like a probe, let's do this. Click below to enroll now, and we'll get started in just a few short moments. See you inside.
2. 01 | Course Overview: Hey, doing its Clayton here from had a joke comic starting net, and I'd like to give you a warm welcome to my new course on comic book character creation. In this course, I'm going to share my complete process for drawing, inking and coloring a full comic book character from start to finish. I'll show you had a lay in the foundations, establishing the portions placement and pose of the character right from the very get go so that you can give them the best chance. Oh, success possible. Then over the top of that, we're going to draw in the anatomy and then above. The anatomy will draft at the design for our character, and I'll show you my creative process for that and how to create a look, an aesthetic for the character that truly is captivating and memorable. Then we're going to sit that design in stern as we go over the top and ink out the key contours throughout the character illustration. I'll show you how I use line waits to create slick shop, energetic contours throughout the character, and then how to cross hatch in order to render out the forms and give them that additional level of depth that's really going to make your character pop off of the page. Then, once the inks are complete, it's time to give out character a splash of color, and I'll show you how I go about composing the compelling color scheme that looks pleasing to the eye. And then how to begin rendering in a variety of lighting passes above that to really push the depth and dimension within the character and sit them under a realistic looking, alighting set up. I can't wait to get started on this project with you. There is a lot of ground to cover, so without further ado, I'll see you in the first lesson.
3. 02 | Design Draft Introduction: All right. So the first thing that we're going to focus on here is the pencils off our character, and we're going to keep these pencils pretty loose and rough. We're not going to be getting too refined with them. We're going to say that for the inks. This is really about leaving room to explore your options as far as the design is concerned and come up with something that you're truly happy with, something that you get excited to finish. All right, So the first step here is not necessarily going to be the most fun part, but it is extremely important. And that is, of course, to establish the foundations for your character. We're going to use a very simple basic Minnick, unlike model full, the human figure that allows us to quickly prototype inappropriate pose for the character established their proportions and their placement on the page. Now, once the foundations are down, we will be ready to draw over the top of that. The characters anatomy. And this is really important because what it will allow us to do is to find the shape old, the characters body in a much more convincing way as well as to fit the clothing items throughout their costume design around it in a realistic way in a way in which the clothing can actually follow the forms, and it looks like the character is wearing it instead of it just being slapped in over the top. So we're going to talk about, of course, anatomy. We're going to briefly touch on that. We won't be getting true in depth with a builder will be sharing just enough information with you on that to make sure that you're good to go and that you're ready from that point onward to start drafting up your design over the top of the anatomy as soon as possible. And at that point, it's going to be very much like dressing up a literal merican in a storefront shop. We want to essentially dress the design over the top, all those foundations, making sure that as we place in each of the clothing assets throughout the characters design that they're placed in such a way that it actually does. Look, Aziz, though they're following the form off the body so that again it looks like they wearing it , something which is often skipped over and not really thought about, but it really is the key to introducing that little extra level of depth end. I mentioned to your character that's going toe. Lift up their quality end appeal to a whole new level. And we'll also talk about the creative approach that I tend to use when it comes to actually composing a design in the first place where my sources of inspiration reside, or what it is that actually compels me to create in the first place and just how to get your imagination fired up and ready to go so that you can jump straight in and start to really create a character design that you can be proud off will discuss Theme, will discuss genre and the types of design decisions you'll want to make according to those particular areas within your characters. Archetype that you're going to want to keep in mind in order for the actual look over your character to be understandable to your audience so that when they see it, they get it, and they understand that will also, of course, talk about the technical aspects as to how to execute the pencils for your initial character design draft. So I will be talking about the settings that I use for the darker pencil within Mingus studio and also discussed my layering set up how I stack each one of the components throughout the penciling stage on top of one another in order to essentially compose the finish presentation that will lady use to create the final inks. All right, let's get started and jump straight into it.
4. 03 | Design Draft Overview: all right. So before we jump into the penciling stage off these character design, what I'd like to give you is just a bit of an overview here in mega studio as to how I set up my layers, how I approach the process in general and the kind of tools that I use. So the pencils and the pencil settings and the eraser, just the major components for the penciling process that you're going to want to know about . Let's start over here with the layers. You'll notice that I've actually separated them into a layer groups I've gotta lay agreed there for the pencils, the inks and the inks for the jacket, which she'll later have when it comes to her design. And in order to name these layers, I simply double click on them. Cheer gives them an appropriate name. And if we expand the layer group here, you notice that I've done that for all the layers that I've used throughout this document, I've named them appropriately and the reason as to why you want to make sure that your layers are all named with a name that you're going to be able to look at and recognize with the relative ease is because as you start to build up the illustration, what you're going to find is that you're using a lot of layers to compose it. And so, in order to quickly be able to find the layer that you want to be working on or that you want to be adjusting, it's just best to title them with a name that you're a least going to be able to recognize quickly without getting lost through all the other layers within the document. So this is where it all begins with the foundations off the character. And as you can see these foundations very rough and loose and rudimentary, there is no detail or neatness within them whatsoever. They're highly unrefined at this point, And what I'd like you to keep in mind is the reason as to why these are so loose is because in the beginning, the basic Minnick and motile that you can see here the very simple and rudimentary figure that we've used to establish the initial foundations four out character design A really only meant to do three things. I call them the three p's because the first thing that we want to do when we're establishing the overall character they're figure is we want to figure out what their proportions are going to be, where they're going to be placed on the page and what kind of poise we're going to give them. And it is these three primary foundational elements that the basic figure has captured here for us. And that's all that it needs to do at this point in time because above that, what we're going to build is the wrist off these character. And if you're working on your own character throughout this course, which I highly recommend you do, you'll be building your own on top of the very foundations that you laid down for them. And essentially, what so important, even though this figure is very, very basic, is that those foundations are going to either make or break your character in the long run . So if you mess up on the proportions or the placement of the pose of the character, it's going to mean some major, possibly unfixable changes later on down the track for your character, which often times is simply true late toe address, especially if you've already moved on to the inks or worse, the colors. So you really want to try to focus on getting this stage ride, and at the same time you want to be relaxed, you want to keep it loose. I know that that is very hard to do when I just expressed the importance off, making sure that your proportions and the placement impose of your character all check out . But at the same time, you do want to try to make sure that your grip on the stylist as you work is loose, that your using gestural lines that flow into one another seamlessly. You really want to try to capture the energy in the movement. All the character, which is why you can almost think of this basic Dominican model structure, is essentially the soul of the character that's going to give them life. So have a try to think about it. In that way, you're not going to want to be too tight all loose when it comes to structuring this basic medical model. But at the same time, you will want to consider the important aspects is only three of them. You can count them on less than one hand, and as long as you can incorporate those into that basic medical model structure, you will be fine. But take your time with it and make sure that you have done that correctly. Now you can see here that I've done up a front front 3/4 view and a back three court of you figure for ease. Character design and what that's going to allow us to do is get a good view off her from the front, the back and the side all at once, which saves us from doing a flat side view as well. And I personally like the three court of use because you get a nice look at the kind of three dimensional reality that the character is going toe have. You can see how the outfit, how the costuming is going to wrap around their body. You can see what they look like from these more dynamic angles, which is ultimately going to make them feel a little bit more tangible, especially when it comes to redrawing them for your comic book. Whatever former production you like toe later include them in now, over to the right hand side of the canvas here, you can see that I've got the foundations laid down for a variety of head views that I've done up for E. And those head views, just like the basic manic and model, are at first structured with very rudimentary, basic, very loosely drawn shapes. I've got a sphere here for the cranium, and you can see that that is the case for all of these years. It doesn't matter what angle you're looking at the head from. I always like to start out with the cranium first and foremost, because the cranium really allows us to figure out, just as the basic medical model allows us to understand the overall principles that the character themselves will be built upon, the spherical cranium mess allows us to right from the get go, establish how large the head is going to be, where it's going to be placed on the page and from what angle it's going to be presented from. So that really gives us a nice beginning to structure out the rest of the face that's going to essentially hang off of the front old that sphere, and this fee is broken up into quarters. So it's going to have a line running down the center of the face alone, running down the side of the head. And then let me just change over to Nice read. He s so you can see what's happening. So again, it's divided into four quadrants. Essentially. Now we got the tool to the head, which is also established. And then what we're going to do is we're going to drop down old central line for the front of the face. It's going to run along the way down to the chin, and that establishes the length all the overall head. And it is the same case for all of these different views. Even though we're looking at the head from a variety of different angles here, the same Siris of steps was still be executed. So with this one, we're going to divide the sphere up in the quarters. Same with this one. Drop down the front of the face, and then from there around the side of the head, we're going to drop down the corners of the jaw and lead that down into the chin. Now, with this 3/4 angle, that is one area which is going to be a little bit tricky from time to time, but it's just simply, I think of it as the front plane of the face. So it's just going to drop down straight like that. You're not necessarily going to see the corner of the opposite side of the jaw. So once we've gone the jewel line placed in and we've established the length of the face. Then we're going tohave the proportions of the head plotted out and the placement off, the facial features established and the placement of the facial features a fairly easy to find. In fact, the main thing that you need to keep in mind is that below the brow line. Okay, so from here to here, from the Braille onto the chin, the face is going to be divided up into Actually, could the hairline here? So it's actually from this point away, down to the chin. So we're going to have 1/3 here, and we're going to have another third here, and then the final third will be at the chin, and you want to try to divide these up as equally as possible. You can see here that I haven't necessarily done a perfect job of that. But you want to have 1/3 here in the third here. So these thirds are going to be what helps us to figure out where to place the facial features in a in a proportionally accurate manner. And then the bottom half of the face is divided up into thirds. Okay, so we're going to have the mouth here and in the bottom of the lips. Hello, sir. Have, Ah, a little proportional anchor point place there just to help find them. And you can see that even though we haven't actually placed in any of the facial features just yet, these blue lines that are placed in alone kind of give us an idea as to where the facial features are going to be placed. And funnily enough, that's all you need to establish those proportions. You can see that they look like it looks like here. Just with these visual blue anchor points, the proportions of the face do check out that head looks like it has a correct structure to it. So this is really even though we haven't drawn in any fancy lines or articulated the illustrations here all these character designed to any defined extent. You can see that even with these basic foundations, we've got a promising design ready to be built upon. We've got a promising foundation that's going to hold up everything else. So that takes hair care over the head sketch and the sketch that we've done up for her basic figure. What comes next, though Well above that, what we're going to have is the anatomy sketch, and this will be primarily applied to the figure itself. We will save the facial features toe later, run in the design phase, because that's kind of the point at which I start to attend to the head and the hair star that the character is going toe have and the costume elements as well. For me, that is a design aspect. Old the characters. So that's the point at which I leave it to I build up the characters design in this certain Siris of steps. They is a structure to it. We need that foundation to begin with and then above that were able to place in the anatomy and then beyond the anatomy. That's when we're able to start to sketch and the did not design, which will jump onto in a moment. But for now, you can see that, especially if I turned the foundations blue here that we've got on top old this foundation a and more refined anatomy sketch built and that is based purely on that foundation. You can see the commonalities between the anatomy sketch and the foundational drawing that we've done up here. What are those commonalities all the three p's off course. That Anatomy sketch has the same proportions, the same pose and the same placement on the canvass. The only adjustment that have made here is on her arm, and often times I will make those adjustments on the fly. If I see a better option, a better direction that I can take any of those aspects, I will make the necessary adjustments in order to incorporate those improvements. At this stage, it's very loose and very, very sketchy, so changes can be made fairly fast, with a minimal amount off time being wasted. That is one of the reasons, and one of the perks off keeping things were often the beginning is that you can quickly prototype the different options that you could explore for your character before settling on anything concrete. So once we've got the anatomy sketch in and you know you can see that again, it's pretty refined. What have I done here will have articulated the shape of the arms. I really defined that contour there and this shape all of your characters. Anatomy is really what is going to hold them up, especially when it comes to female characters. You don't necessarily want to be including a whole lot of detail or to find muscle mass, because that's just that will cause them to look Ah, a little bit to define will make them look too masculine. And it's very easy on a female character to get to that point. So I like to leave it really up to the outside contours to define the anatomy of the character. And in order to be able to define the anatomy accurately, there is no shame in using references. Anatomy references, thes anatomy references could be really life photographs showing the anatomy of an actual person. It could be an anatomy diagram that you found in a muscle building magazine or, for example, there were lots of comic book. How to draw comic book books back in the day. That actually would include, within those instructions a diagram off a stylized representation, all the muscle structure but the female and male body. I've also found a few of them on Web sites such as Pinterest and Ah, Google images will do fine as well. Essentially, you just want to track down as many references for the areas of your drawings that you're not 100% confident on. And even if you are 100% confident, even if you know anatomy back to front, there is still room for errors. So, you know, I'm fairly comfortable with anatomy. I've been drawing for a veil a very long time. I know where you know there's major muscle groups are going to need to be placed. Yet at the same time, I know that the muscle structure of the human body is an insanely complex system so complex that it's almost near impossible for me or anyone else, for that matter, to remember exactly where the muscles need to go. So I have references off the female body off the female anatomy up next to me. As I was working on this demonstration here as I was working on his character design, just to if I ran into trouble or I was unsure, I had that point of reference there to double check that what I was drawing down onto the page was actually accurate. So above the anatomy sketch, well, we're then going to place in is the design sketch and that will be built directly over the top all the anatomy sketch, which was built directly over the top, or the foundational, manic and model again. You can see that even though we're dealing with a many more design elements here, alot of them are conforming to the proportions. Placement end the pose of the character that we established beforehand, so this is extremely important to take note off. It is not the design, all the details or the pretty trinkets and decorations off your character that are going to make them look accurate, convincing or good for that matter, it all comes down to those foundations. Once you get the foundations sorted, you get to jump into the fund stage, which is really what you're seeing here, where you get to essentially dress that manic and model up clue that costume it and create a character design, which is interesting, visually appealing and captivating toe look at, but it is built on that foundational structures. So if you can at least get that rudimentary foundational structured down, you are off to a very, very good start. So the design sketch is actually quite simple in and of itself as well, so you can see there that it's still extremely rough. There has been nothing defined, too, any clear degree of clarity just yet. It's old, very, very rough still, and you want to keep it rough. You want to make sure that you have the ability to tweak it, erase it and readjusted if needed. And you will notice that the design sketch is built on a completely different layer. So that way, if I do need to erase a portion old that design, I can do so without accidentally erasing the anatomy, sketch underneath and redrawing it out so that anatomy sketch and those foundations will always be present in the workflow, which is the beauty of keeping all of these different steps within the process confined to separate layers because it allows you to work in a non destructive manner. If you do need to go back or one step, you can do that with relative ease. And, sure, it takes a little while to draft up the design of your character. But at least if you do, you mess it up in a huge way. You can always go back to the anatomy stage and rework it from there instead of Khost starting completely from scratch. So the design sketches really something, which is composed based on a lot of reference material, as well as the already existing ideas, theme and genre that you have floating around inside your mind. So that's really what provides your direction. Initially, I had an idea to create a golf punk rebel looking bad us chick, and she was going to be a fighter. She was going to actually. Her story, which I vaguely kind of put together, was just that she was a character in this post apocalyptic world where she was fighting against this alien race and, you know, trying to save her friends from them, essentially, who had been captured. So, you know, I wanted her toe have this almost like Mad Max type vibe to her, but mixed with a little bit more of a Gothic SciFi. Same. And that was really all that I had to go off a Sfar as her visuals. Maybe a had something fairly vague and generic floating around inside my mind. But a lot of the details within that design that I ultimately settled upon was derived from the reference material that I'd gathered from again websites like Pinterest, Google Images and my already pre made reference library that I had sitting on my hard drive . So the reason as to why you always want to use reference material to inform the details all your design idea is because anything you've got inside your mind is usually going to be dumbed down and fairly generic. So if you're creating a design just purely from your imagination, without any outside input from other third party references, you're going to find the one. It's very, very difficult to come up with a compelling design. And if you do end up coming up with a design at all, it's going to usually be boring, and it's just going toe lack a certain level off refinement and detail. Now you can have a vague idea that you roughly sketch up, but to fill it out, to really articulate it to a high degree of refinement, you will need that reference material there to help you out along the way unless your brain it just has an enormous capacity to be able to not only store ideas but also store that I let them at a high resolution of detail, which is just not going to happen for most of us. So it for May I've got that vague idea. I know that I want that punk rebel badass looking chick. So what do I do? I jump onto Pinterest and I search for references such as, you know, got both characters punk, punk characters, punk, SciFi. Um, and I gather as many of them as I can because that's the themes that should genre that I want to work with. And I know at least that much. And then, depending on the kind of closing assets that I see from those particular references, that will help me to find out what references do I actually need together for this subject matter. So as an example, if the characters wearing stilettos or she's wearing and denim shorts. Well, now I know that I'm going to need to find a bunch of references off denim shorts and stilettos or, you know, leggings or belt or gloves or tops or whatever it is Gothic style fashion. I'll actually want the subject matter references at that point, and that's going to help me once again produce that additional level of realism within the characters design and make it look more convincing. So finally, the last thing that you want to look for references for is just, you know, the anatomy off the character. So that's really the last thing that I will try to find references for it. It's kind of broken up into three separate topics. So you want references for the theme and genre, the general kind of archetype that you want your character to be built upon. And then you want references for the actual subject matter. So all the different assets that are going to be included within the design and then finally, you want the references for their anatomy to make sure that that all checks out. We've already kind of mentioned that so we won't get too much more into it. but just in the same way that I'm tracking down those references for the design of the character itself, I'm making sure that I'm using Pinterest to do that or Google images. You can find references almost anywhere these days, and you can, even if you want to find them on deviant art as well. That's another great resource to find inspiration from. And a lot of the time those references are really there to serve as inspiration to give you additional ideas, because the design process that your mind goes through is really a result of its ability to associate everything that it sees to new ideas that associates import and generates based on that input, new ideas that you can use because our minds are very good at associating one thing toe another. So we want to take control and use that ability to it fullest extent when it comes to character design for our comic book characters, then finally, above the design sketch, we've got the design sketch forehead trench coat, which is essentially going to be over laid on top of her. So if we turn off this one, you can see that it's simply just another layer off costume asset that we put over the top of her main design there. And I really wanted to experiment with a range of different looks for E. And I thought that this trench coat would really give her very interesting silhouette so it would adjust her shape. You can see with the big color there that it would really help to give her a memorable design that stuck in the mind of the viewer, just you, to the Sylar that were that we went for. And that silhouette is really what the audience is going to take in first. That's what they're going to see first and foremost. And so we want to try to make sure that when we're thinking about the overall shape of the character and how they look from a distance, that they're readable, that they look interesting and that they're highly recognizable, especially when you're thinking about a comic book or a storyboard, where that character may very well be presented from a distance. So again, that's something that I had kept in mind. And I also just thought that hey, she's a badass rebel chick. Of course, she needs a trench coat. So same deal is with the rest of her costume design. I jumped onto the Internet, found a bunch of cool references for Goethe looking SciFi jackets, and I use that to inform my own idea that I developed for her trenchcoat in the end and then beyond that, we've got okay, So then finally, we've got her face, which we sketched in on top off the basic foundations that we laid down for it in the beginning. And you can see that all those proportional anchor points that we put it out to begin with and the overall structure all the head has been really what has enabled me to be able to place these facial features accurately at the right size, because that's really the most important or aspect of the head that you want to get right. If you are able to per draw a proportionally accurate, structurally sound head, that's usually going to throw out the rest of the character and cause your audience to question Thea, the integrity of your drawing like it's just that if there's going to be a mistake in your work, that's the first mistake that they're going to spot so heads and faces a very difficult to draw because we're so familiar with them. And that's precisely why we can tell right away whether or not this something off about them, whether that be in regards to their shape, the place, one of their facial features, or just the structure of it and the way it looks overall. So we want to make sure that we do focus on that and that we get it right. It can be even more important, I would argue, than getting the proportions of the body correct. Now they're both important. But the face is really where the attention off your audience is going to be drawn to it first precisely because of what I just mentioned. That's how they're going to relate with the character first and foremost, so we want to really make sure that not only are the facial features placed in the correct spot on the head, but we also want to ensure that they're drawn correctly, that the eye looks like an eye, that the nose looks like a nose and that the mouth and ears look like they're supposed to look. And the thing is, is that what enables you to create convincing looking facial features and to structure them accurately, regardless, off the angle at which you're observing the head from is you want to try to think of them just is in the same way. We constructed the basic foundation of the heady, using primitive, three dimensional forms. You want to think of the individual facial features as actually having their own geometry, thinking about how they not only sit on the face but fit into it. Because the facial features are actually built into the structure off the skull, the eyes sit into the eye sockets off the head, the nose protrudes off of the face, and it has its own form. Tow it. The meth actually curves Iran that the front off the face. And so you want to make sure that as you draw them in their conforming Tuesday geometry, all the skull and the way in which they're built into it so that it doesn't just look like you've drawn it on top of the face, but they're actually apart off it. And then you also want to try to give them that extra level of death, and I mention and again that's going to come from the way in which you're thinking about them. Don't think of the facial features as mere shapes. Think of them as having there are informed. The eyelids curve around the sphere off the eyeball. They sit underneath the brow that protrudes Ford above them. The nose protrudes above the mouth K, and you want to think about the angles and the shapes old, these geometries, so that you can get it toe look right. That's how you draw dynamic heads, and that's what's really going to help you to create a convincing looking character, regardless of the angle that you're observing them from. Now that's the face. And that's probably the most important thing to focus on when it comes to the head shot off your characters. But of course, beyond that, we've also got the various design aspects that come with it. So you've got the hair style, which is probably the next most prominent part off the head shot within your character. And so you want to try to think about what style is going to suit my character now. From May, I already had a solid ideas, the to the kind of style that I wanted to go for with these hair design. But you also will want to tend to use references for that, even if you've got a vague idea. I certainly had references available to me when I was just figuring out, You know, when you're dealing with a messy hairstyle such as this, it is quite complex and difficult to draw from a multitude of different angles. And the the whole point of creating a character concept is to figure that stuff out. Okay, how is this character going to be presented from one viewpoint to the next and really exploring that, really understanding it on a fundamental level than presenting it so that you can go back to this concept and reference it when it comes to drawing up your character? Later run. So for me I had a bunch of references there for her hairstyle. I made sure that I understood it from a multitude of different angles so that I was able to redraw regardless, all the viewer which I was looking at her from. So I think off hairstyles as having there are inform and geometry to them as well. I think about the overall mass off the hair, and then how that mass is going to be broken up in the individual clumps of hair to give it texture and just the overall flow of it and how that's going to be composed. So once the hairstyle has been established and roughly sketched in there, you can see justice with the design sketch that I did up for her full body view. I've also going ahead here, and I've roughly sketched in the facial features. I have roughly sketched out the basic overall structure off her hair style. And then the only other thing that have placed in here around her neck is the costume elements that are going to be presented and featured within this particular area. So you can see that we've got her color, which comes up quite quite a fair way up her neck and then wraps around it. And then we've also got the dog color, essentially the leather color that wraps around the midsection of it as well. I thought that would be really cool and really plays into the Gothic punk theme that I'm creating e around so that pretty much wraps up the penciling stage for ease, character design. And that's really what will be focused on first and foremost. So let's jump into the demonstration now and actually watch how all of this is executed. So that kind of wraps up the penciling stage for ease, character design. But before we jump into the demonstration, what I'd like to just mention here is the tools that I actually used to draw it up, and often times I'll be asked. Well, Clayton, what settings are you using for your pencils? Because often times I especially when I'm talking about the refined inks. So before we jump into the demonstration for the pencils here, what I just like to go over just for a moment is the settings that I use for my pencil in Mangus Studio. Now I often get asked about this all the time, and this is probably going to seem fairly anti climactic when I reveal the settings. But essentially, I simply use the DACA pencil tool, which you can shortcut to using the P key on your keyboard or toggle that with the Pento by just hitting it multiple times and switching back and forth. But I'll use the BB using the pencil tool for this penciling stage within the character design. And the settings for that pencil are essentially just the DACA pencil as faras, the various settings that we have available to us in Mangus Studio. You can play around with that as much as you want. That is completely up to you. Me personally, I don't adjust these whatsoever. I've always just use the default settings for the darker pencil within Mangus Studio. So as long as you're using the darker pencil and you can pick what pencil you want to use here again, try these out. Some of these might work a little bit better for you than they do for me, so you don't necessarily have to use the exact tools that I'm using to execute this stuff. You could be using pencil and paper, especially for this stage. It wouldn't matter because, as you can see, we're not really dealing with any form of refined the line work just yet. But he used the dunk a pencil in Mangus studio. I keep all the settings as default, and when it comes to capturing, because again I work from a distance. Most of the time and everybody asked me. Well, Clayton, how do you manage to incorporate details into your illustrations that you do when you're working from such a distant when you're working from such a such a long distance away from the canvas? How do you capture these details? Well, I just adjust the size of my brush so you can see here that you know, you can draw this how? And that's a pretty, pretty thick line, right, if you're working with a larger brush size, but for me, I don't really use with a larger brush size. I actually just I take my brush size down to a really, really tiny level. So you know, I don't even know what size that brush would be. There's nothing really there to indicate it, but you can see how small it is, and that allows me to get these thin, very fine lines. And based on the amount of pressure that I'm applying to my stylist as I draw those lines out, I can make them DACA or I can make the lighter very similar to if you were sketching up your character design traditionally. So just to show you how Doc these lines can get so you can see them. I'm keeping it very, very light. I'm only applying a little bit of pressure to these last lines. But then, if I press down harder, you can see that I could get these much heavier, sicker looking lines. Yet at the same time, there's still fairly fine and thin, and that's due to the brush size that I'm using. So I would say, if you want to get the kind of line work that you're going to be seeing throughout this demonstration, and this goes for the Yanks and this goes for the pencils as well a just and calibrate the size of your brush according to the amount of pressure you habitually apply when drawing. For all I know, you might have a heavy a hand or a lot of hand than I do. It depends. My grip is often quite tight. When I'm doing details, this fine and I pressed down fairly hard, which is why I need a smaller brush size because of the fact that if I was pressing down hard with a larger brush, well, you know I wouldn't be able to draw lines like this, which is super thin and said they come out like this super thick. So if you've got a lighter pressure that you have bitch Lee, apply when you're drawing, then you can maybe have somewhat larger brush size, and you can still capture those you know, Sinn Fein lines. But you do have to adjust the size of your brush according to the amount of pressure you apply when drawing. There were signs of that. The only other tool that I use within Mangus studio when it comes to sketching up a drawer ing is the eraser tool, and that pretty much allows me to erase whatever area I've just done that I don't really find that I'm happy with. And, ah, I could just easily get rid of it as needed. Little place it back in and hit the undo button a lot of times in order to undo mistakes that I've already that I've done. And if I can't undo it, if I've gone too far in and I run out of undoes, simply use the eraser tool to just get rid of the whole thing and start again. So the eraser tool and the pencil tool is really the only tools that I use at this stage. I don't use anything else essentially, unless I'm re sizing and moving the actual drawing around, which, in order to do that, sometimes omega selection around the character or the area of the drawing that I want to adjust the positioning off, Oh, hit control tea on my keyboard and I'll make sure that I'm able to actually adjust it. And then I'll simply use thes handles up here toward just the size of the character or move them to a different position on the canvas so that I will use from time to time just to make sure the layout in the composition off my character concept looks good presentation wise. But beyond that again, it's really only the pencil and the eraser tool that I use over here in the file menu. Of course, you want to make sure that you're saving your document out. You don't want to lose all the wonderful work that you've been spending time on doing, and you want to make sure that you're hitting that save button on a consistent basis in order to in worst case scenarios. Say if Mangus studio crashes which sometimes it does. It doesn't most of the time, but there have been times when it has crashed for me, and I've lost work and it really, really hurts. So you want to make sure that your constantly saving so that if the program does crash or something else happens, your computer dis restarts for no reason. Your work is recently saved, and you're able to get back to it without having lost too much. So that pretty much wraps up the the penciling stage here, over to the right hand side of the screen. Just before we jump onto the next lesson, I want to just point out the Navigator menu. The Navigator Penhall is really, really great for being able to get that distant far off. Look at how your character design is coming along and you want to make sure that you've got your overall view, their invisible as you're working to make sure that the design is reading. This will become more important later run when we start to ink and color. But for now, what this is going to tell you is worth or not overall, the design that you've constructed for your character that you drafted up is going to look good from a distance as far as its shape is concerned. So if you take out all those details, you really want to make sure that your the overall silhouette off the character is reading right to make it more recognizable and easy to remember and appealing off course. And besides the Navigator menu, another way in which you can do that is just by squinting your eyes and blurring your vision a little bit, Um, in order to change the layers that I'm working with the blue because later on, when it comes to the inking stage, I will do that just so that I've got a distinction between the pencils and the inks. I was simply dropped down here to the Layers property panel, and I'll hit the layer color button in order to change everything within that Group. Two Blue. You can also do that with individual layers as well, if you so desire. This is really handy again just for making sure that you're able to have that visual distinction between the draft or whatever layer it is that you're working over the top off and the new more refined drawing or inks that you're about to drop in over the top. So that wraps up the design drafting stage for your character design here and the kind of tools you're going to want to use and the process of construction you're going toe one of follow in order to give your characters the best chance off success. So let's jump into the next lesson. Well, actually show you how all of this is done.
5. 04 | Sketching The Design Draft: all right, so we're in Minga studio, and the way that we're going to start this out is with a few very rough figure drawings that we're going to use to essentially prototype the pose that we're going to pick for the character now think particular character is someone of a bad us. She's not to be messed with. She's a bit of a rebel. So the kind of pose that I'm trying to go for here, I want to make sure that it's going to be conveying that through the way in which her body is composed through her body language. That's very important because a lot of the attitude and the personality off the character can really comes through in the way in which they hold themselves. So, as you can see with the first pose was a bit generic. There wasn't really a whole are going on the second pose already, however, we've got a bit more off an attitude. We've got a bit more personality to it, but it maybe isn't the best for a character concept where we want to show off the design. It may be a little bit too expressive to the point where it's kind of distracting. So I'm going to do up 1/3 and final pose in just a minute. And the reason is toe want to come up with multiple poses is because oftentimes the first pose isn't necessarily going to cut it. And you want to give yourself the opportunity to experiment, to explore what your options are before you settle on anything concrete. And by doing so, you really never know what you're going to be able to come up with. This was the third pose that I decided to stick with in the end, and if I hadn't have taken the time to come up with a multitude of different poses, a variety of different Minnick and models that I could potentially pick for the characters final design, I wouldn't have been able to strike upon it. I wouldn't have been able to come across it, so I decided to go with that one. And now what I'm sketching up is a back view of that very same poise because we're essentially going to be creating a turnaround. All this character's designed so that we can see it from the front three court of you in the back three court of you. And the reason that I choose the three court of you in particular is because not only does it allow us to view what the character is going to look like from the front and from the back, but it's also going to allow us to see what the character looks right from the side as well . So we're kind of getting a bit of extra bang for our buck here, where able to rather than drawing up the character from the flat front visa, flat back view end, the front and the Flat side view were able to kind of encompass all of them in two views instead of three. And on top of that, we also get more of a three dimensional representation off how the character is going toe look. So once the basic Minnick and Model sketches down, which is essentially the foundations of the character that's going to hold up the rest of the design from here on out, I'm going to turn that toe blue using the layer color function within Mangus Studio, and he confined that in the Layer Properties panel to the right hand side of the screen at the little blue box there and by converting the foundations later blew. This allows me to create more of a visual distinction between those underlying foundations and the final drawing or sketch draft, whatever you want to call it, that I'm going to be composing on top for that design. So I've created a new layer above the foundations here, and what I'm doing now is a meticulous hating. The characters body her underlying body. Before we've started to allay any of the costume assets or elements in on top. And the reason is toe, why I want to articulate that and give her anatomy symbol. Clarity is because the clothing that we're going to be laying in on top needs toe look Aziz there. It's actually being worn by her. And the only way to be able to do that in a confident way is to make sure that we know what's going on underneath those clothes because the material, all those costume assets, will be wrapping around her body and by actually making it look Aziz. There, the clothes are conforming to the surface of her body. It's going to make the overall design much more convincing. The one of the worst things that you want to try to avoid is having a character who's wearing a costume, which is just that has no depth of three dimensionality to it. It doesn't really look as though they're wearing. It almost looks like the clothes that just kind of almost painted on this. There's really no depth to them. They're flat. There's no sense of of dimension. And so the way in which I like to go about avoiding a flat looking design that lacks a visual appeal, depth and interest is to really build it up in layers to understand that every part of the design is built on top of this basic foundation that we're doing up here. They're on the same at the same time in order to convey that depth accurately. We also want to try to think of the character is being made up off a series of three dimensional forms, and this goes back to the underlying foundations as well. You know, each and every part of the simplistic, basic shapes that we used to construct the underlying Minnick and model. I was thinking of them along the entire way as being thes literal three dimensional forms just like a wooden wanted American you might find in an odd store. But you can see from keeping this very loose, even as I skitch over the top old, that underlying foundation and I refined the anatomy of the character. I'm still depicting her body with very rough line work, and it's not clean, and it's not super slicker, refined. It's quite messy, in fact. And although it is a little more distinct than that underlying foundation, the reason that I am keeping it more or less loose, rough and free flowing is because with still in the drafting stage, all the character and we will be in the drafting stage of her design for quite a long time before we start to go over the top and really articulate the final line work with the inks , and the reason that we want to keep it rough and not really super refined in the beginning is because of this precise example where we're going to be erasing and adjusting this character, you can see me, you know, just getting rid of her arms entirely there and replacing them, too. Give her overall stance a little bit more impact to give her the figure here more attitude and personality. And the more that you can incorporate that personality, the more alive your character is going toe look. So now that we've got the foundation's done, and we've also got the anatomy, which we've refined over the top off, those foundations are then the same thing to the anatomy layer that I did to the foundations. I've turned it to blue using the layer color button in the Layer Properties panel and then who created another layer above that for the design sketch. The design sketches, really where we're going to be creating the overall look for this particular character. Up until this point, she could have been anyone. She was essentially just a standard generic looking female figure. But now this is where we're going to actually create her look. This is where we're going to begin designing her costume assets, her hairstyle, her facial features and in the same way that we kept the line work rough for her underlying anatomy. We're also going to keep it rough here for the same reason because we're experimenting. I have a few references at which I'm using to help inspire her design. You know, golf SciFi type images from various movies and TV shows and even other comic books just to help get my creativity going to give it some momentum. But other than that, I'm really just kind of going with the flow, dropping in elements and seeing whether or not they're going toe work. And if they don't work, I don't wanna have put so much time and energy and investment into this design drops sketch that I'm going to be reluctant to erase part of it in order to reach a better outcome in order to reach a better design. So you really want to give yourself room and space to experiment with the character design process, because in the end, when all is said and done, we will have reached a final design for the character on the way in which he looks. And it may be a working on a male character or her completely different character altogether. Maybe you're working on a, you know, a brute or a creature, or whatever it is. Any character design. In the end, the way in which they look will be due to the experimentation and exploration we did along the way in order to reach that final outcome. Now I'm going to go for a very golf looking appearance for this character. Her name is E, by the way, and ah, she was a character idea that I came up with four. A sigh If I kind of gulf looking comic book that I thought would be pretty cool too, you know, hopefully someday create. Unfortunately, it never really got that far. And she just remain as this character designed that you know, who knows? Maybe I'll do something with it one day, because I think that she is a pretty cool character. And it's not just the way she looks, but also the attitude in the personality that's coming through within the design. You know, a way, the way that a character dresses really says a lot about who they are as a person. It's really an outside form off expression and who they are on the inside. Sometimes it's just the way in which we choose to be perceived by the outside world, the people around us, and we can intentionally influence that through the way in which we dress and present ourselves. You know, something that might be really cool is to have e here, you know, dresses. It's really punk, badass looking shake that is somewhat intimidating in the presence of other people. But maybe on the inside she's a real softy. And that kind of contrast that conflict within the character can really lead to more depth and interest within them. So we've got lots of belts and straps that are wrapping around her, her boots there and her body and Hille. She's got so many straps and belts throughout her design. And, of course, that comes from the kind of Goethe SciFi vibe that we want to go for here. And her story does reside within this kind of post apocalyptic future where Earth has been taken over by this alien race, and she's kind of one of the remaining survivors who are rebelling against the palace that be so that kind of lens toward the reason as to why I have chosen this particular type of design for her. You know, if you've ever seen the Mad Max movies, I in fact did have a few references from that movie to help inspire this particular design . And I think it is important to make sure that your collecting references to help inform the design direction that you're going to take with your character because when it comes to creating something which is captivating and interesting to look at, that can really only happen when you've got that those outside references there to help associate new ideas to create a design that is going to ultimately be more interesting and unique. Toe. Look at because if you don't have those outside references and you're just going with what's whatever's floating around inside your mind? Well, usually, what you'll find is that you're only going to be able to come up with something that semi generic, if anything at all, simply because the idea is that reside within our minds are already within this simplified , dumbed down form. They haven't really being articulated to a high level of resolution and details simply because that would require us and our brains just too much processing power. We don't have enough hard drive space, you could say to store our ideas at that level of resolution. And so although we might be able to come up with a general design direction for our characters that may work. We want to collect as many references as we can within the context of that already existing idea that we may have come up with inside now mind so that we can articulate it toe fine a degree of resolution so that we can fill out the details within the overall design idea that we've got already. So sometimes when you get stuck in a design and that can often happen where you're just kind of searching for additional ideas something do you add to your design that's going to level armpits interest. Those references can come in super handy because if you've got, say, 50 old them and usually I do over to the over my second monitor have a dual monitor display set up. So that's really handy to have when it comes to digital artwork. Now you got your references on hand, and you can just glance over at them as you're working. When you've got about 50 references of their I've got this assortment of ideas. You can mix and match and combine different reference images to come up with a completely new design. And oftentimes, if I get stuck, I will tend to do that. You know, You say, for example, that I just didn't know what kind of gloves I wanted to give e here. Well, you know, I might look over to my references and I might see some knuckle dusters. And I might see, you know, really thick, kind of chunky looking glove, which he can see that she's got there. And I just might like the shape of that. And maybe I'll just take the shape of it. And I like the knuckle dusters. So maybe I'll just take the knuckle dusters and maybe I'll wrap some straps around that because of the Garth overall theme that we're going for here. And that will allow me to create this portion of her designed, this costume asset from the ingredients that have gathered within my reference library. And that's super cool because it's almost like this college that you're creating. And the ultimate result in the end, is this new character that's never been seen before, even though it was inspired by this already existing material. So now I'm jumping over to the back view off E here, and I'm trying that the big challenge that I'm going to run into is making sure that the costume assets on the front view line up with the back view and vice versa. And so her skirt needs to come up to the same level around her waist on the back view as it does the front view. Her top and the belts wrapping around the base of it need to come down to the same point on her belly as they do on the back view, as they do in the front view. And the reason is toe. Why this is important is because we want to keep these views consistent. They really do need to line up, since we're rotating the character and part of doing up a design, a turnaround, a character turnaround like this is because when you pass this on to another artist who might be working on the comic book that this character is for, or even if you're using it as your own reference for a comic book that you're creating and this is your character, this is your story. You want to make sure that there's a consistency between the various views that you've created for your design so that you can redraw the character accurately. Because if there's a lack of consistency within that character, what's going to happen is your audience will be taken at off the story that you're depicting them within. So you want to try to make sure that that initial design is as together as it possibly can be that it does make sense from the viewpoint of viewpoint and that can grew Insee is present within them. So now you can see that I have taken the overall design there that I've done up for A. And I did this previously as well for the front view I've taken that have turned it to blue now so that I can create another layer over the top of it for the trench coat that is going to be over laid around her body on top of that design, and the reason that I'm doing this is because her trenchcoat is a major part off her character design. You can see how much it's adjusting and affecting her silhouette. That, and I mean by silhouette the overall shape of the character. If we were to fill her entire design with black just so that and take out all the details just leaving that outline in this shape, the color off her trenchcoat would significantly adjust the way in which she appears. So it's an important part. All the design. Now you can see that, and this is a perfect example of why you want to keep things loose. Rough and Messi. In the beginning, you can see that that skirt just wasn't working for me, and I decided that instead of having a skirt I was going to place on Cem Tor nup, pent jeans, denim pants and, ah, I thought that that would make her design look a little bit more sexiest. It would increase the sex appeal of her design, so she's a bad us. But she's also sexy, which you know if you can combine those two elements on any character, it's going Teoh really represent them in a an appealing light. People are going to be drawn to that. They're going to love it, and they're going to remember it. So you know, it depends on the type of character in this story, of course, But you know, the point remains, that part of her design just wasn't working and even the trench coat here is being adjusted now. And so you want to take a step back from time to time just to see whether or not the character that your designing is coming together in the way that you wanted to come together to see how it's traveling. Sometimes it'll work out and you'll get a clean run along the way through from start to finish. And that's great. When that happens, it's the best, because it just comes out so easily under the page. You don't have to struggle whatsoever. However, most of the time they are going to be adjustments that simply need to be made because as a designer you want to develop a good eye for what needs to be adjusted and really what can stay. What's working already because you need to be able to tell the difference between the two and you need to be able to see both. You need to be able to observe what the design and what about the design is working well, and what about it needs to be changed up in order to arrive at a better design in order to increase the designs quality so that it is going toe work in a bed away. That could be very difficult sometimes because you don't always have the pieces of the puzzle is that you need in order to really know what needs to be taken out and replaced. So this is where experience comes into play, where you develop an eye for what is going to look good and what's not going to look good. And that's just simply artistic taste you're and and really, where you, as an artist, will start to incorporate a little bit more of yourself into your drawings and designs. So now we're going to be working on some headshots for E that are going to show a close up , a representation off her face and her hair style. And this is important because the head of a character is, of course, one of the primary point of interest throughout their entire design. Now you can see the way in which I'm constructing the head here is pretty much the same Siris of steps for every view of the head that I'm doing up. I start out with a sphere for the cranium, which you can see me doing up here, and then I'll divide that in the quarters, place in the face, which is just simply a line that's going to run down the front of the face all the way down to the chin and then plot out where the facial features are going to sit Now. Usually, when it comes to placing in the facial features, we're going to see that the eyes set about at the halfway point between the top of the head and the bottom of the face. And the facing general can actually be divided up into thirds from the hairline down to the bottom of the chin, where we'll see on the 1st 3rd the bottom of the note. While the first word will have the brow, the 2nd 3rd will have the bottom of the noise, and then the final Well, the final third will be divided up into thirds again, and on that second load of thirds, we'll find on the top the mouth and then that the bottom off the mouth there and when you're breaking up the head in this way, what it allows you to do isn't necessarily to create a unique face, but an idealized one that's going to ultimately find its uniqueness through the additional design elements that you incorporate into it. So this face could be really anyone's face at this point in time. But what will make it look like he's head is her hairstyle, her prominent hair style, which you know, is a short, kind of messy looking punk hairstyle? And that's really where her the difference between her and any other character will reside is in those additional elements the ah, the literal design of the character, Not necessarily there the the body underneath or the face underneath, but the way in which we dress it up. And the reason that we want to keep it that way is because in general, especially when it comes to comic book illustration or, you know, the protagonist was in your stories, you want to try to idealize them as much as you possibly can, because when their idealized, uh, your audience will tend to look up to them a little bit more and you'll find that they can relate with, um on an in an easy away, they don't have to struggle because they're so idealized. They could be anyone that so generic that they could be anyone, including the audience, and so the audience can relate with them a little bit easier. But if they have these more unique, I guess you could say looking proportions to their face. Unique looking facial features that kind of wouldn't be what you'd see on a generic looking face. They'll tend to be hotted to relate with, cause they end up looking like someone else. They're not idealized anymore. So it's It's more difficult to be able to feel like you could be that character. And it's an interesting thing to think about because then we get into the psychology off character design. And, of course, when it comes to eat here, she's going to be more relatable to, you know, kind of got punk rock looking people because of the way in which she dresses. Is that connection there that familiarity that association, where other people who dress in the same way is her going to feel this instant connection? But still you've got that generic face there, sir, whatever. They look like the physical part of their their body. The part of the contra sample change will be generic enough for them to still be able to connect with the character. So you know, it's an interesting thing because a lot of the time people often say that it's much better to have a unique looking character that's a bit more realistic. But I find that the more realistic, unless idealized the character appears the harder it is for people to really feel like they have a connection with them. Because a game they just look, somebody like somebody else you'd see down the street or on the bus. They don't feel like they could be you, and they don't necessarily result in a character that you would aspire to be either. And the only way in which you could get familiar with them and to enoughto liked um, is to read their stories enough so that you're able to grow toe like, um, and that's difficult because you need to be boarding in the first place to actually be willing to get into their story to participate within the narrative. So that's the rough design for E sketched up from the front 3/4 on the back 3/4. We've also got some head shots that we've drawn up off the 3/4 view of her face, the up would front view and the side view. So these air it is a very prominent views of the characters that I think cover a fair bit of ground is, too. You know what she's going to look like, and all the other views and intricacies in between can really be filled in between those primary presentations of the design. With the basic design draft down, we're now ready to enter into the inking stage where we're going to cement the design and refine all of this. So I look forward to seeing in the next listen. Thanks for watching.
6. 05 | Design Draft Assignment: all right, so that completes the penciling stage for our character designed draft. I hope that you enjoyed the demonstration and that you got a ton of insight out of it. Now let's put some of that insight into action with your first assignment for this assignment. What I'd like you to do is, if you need to go back through the demonstration, revised some of what I shared and create your first character design draft. Remember to start out with the foundations. Make sure that you've picked a poise which is appropriate for your character, something that says something about their personality and gives an inkling into their attitude. And maybe what's going through their mind that nonverbal communication can be extremely impactful when it comes to allowing people to relate to who your character is, not just what they look like. Months the poses established. Make sure that that pose is proportionally accurate. These are the key principles that you need to have established right from the beginning, because everything else is going to depend on it. It's all built on top old, those basic foundations that you initially laid down. I know that the Minnick and Model that's kind of rough and, you know, isn't very pretty, but it will allow you to uphold the three drawing principles that will essentially make or break your character design. And remember those three p's posed proportion and placement. Make sure that they're all incorporated into the foundation's off your character, and then you will be set to go to lay in the anatomy over your character over the top off that foundation. Now just keep the anatomy loose. Use references if you need to. And don't be too concerned about getting everything 100% accurate. What matters most when it comes to the anatomy over your characters is just to make sure that you're articulating the outside contours with a good, nice amount of vivid shape that really helps to describe the underlying the anatomy off the body. So, in other words, as you're laying in the contours around the body of your character, their arms and their legs, try to describe the anatomy in an interesting way. Be descriptive with your line work because the more descriptive that you can be, the more vivid your character will come across as a result, and the more impactful the visuals for your character are going to ultimately bay. So do your best to incorporate as much energy and shape into the outside contours that define the anatomy. All of your karent e. You do not need to articulate every single one off the muscle groups throughout your character or you need to do. Is it focus on the outline and you'll be good to go now with the anatomy sketch over the top of your foundations. You will then be ready to start drafting in the design off your characters, costuming, their hair style and any other assets that you think will add to the overall look and appeal off their visuals in order to do that. What I'd suggest if you're struggling for ideas now, maybe you've already got an idea for a character designed that you've just been waiting to get out there onto the page, which is fantastic. That gives you a place to start. But even in saying that you will want to inspire new ideas, things that you can add to that already existing design and fill it out, really trying to think about and find references that are going to allow you to incorporate an additional level old detail to your characters designed that adds that additional level off dimension makes them look more convincing, more realistic and is ultimately going to allow you to produce a much better presentation for your character. Because in general, if you don't have those sources of inspirations there, even if you've got an idea floating around within the the confines of your imagination, you're going to find that a lot of the time anything you draw out onto the page simply won't be as high resolution. It's going to be somewhat generic. It'll lose the details. I mean, the details won't be there in the first place. So although you may have a vague idea of the different components that they're going to make up your character's designed, do your best to find reference images that correlate directly with that already existing idea. Seek reference images and put them into the context off your idea, and then use those reference images to fill out the details and essentially up the rez over your characters. Design because they're amazing when it comes to inspiring new things that you can add into your design and really fill them out and make them look that much more interesting. So that just about wraps up the brief for this assignment. Good luck. I hope that you do. Well, I'm sure that you're going to please make sure that you complete this assignment before jumping on to the next listen. Otherwise, you won't have anything to ink at the end of it. All right, I'm gonna let you go ahead. Now get out of pencil and paper, or if you're working digitally, jump into your favorite during application. And, Ah, again. Good luck. I can't wait to see what you come up with for your character design draft. Then when you finished, I'll see you in the next lesson.
7. 06 | Inking Introduction: all right. So now that the design dropped for our character is complete, it's time to refine that and solidify the characters design with slick shop, energetic inked line work. We're going to start this hat with the outline off the character first, defining the overall design and setting it in stone. Then, once that's done, will introduce a whole new level of depth and dimension throughout the character, through the use of shadows and rendering a show you the various techniques that I use in order to get a nice appeal aesthetic appeal to the very line work that I'm laying down within my inks, and also how to use extremely fine hatching to make sure all the forms and materials throughout your character a shaded accurately according to the lighting set up that you've placed them under. Once that's done, we will be set to color up that line, work and really bring the presentation all of our characters through to a close. But before we jump into the inking, what I'd like to give you here is another quick overview of the process that I like to use when it comes to actually composing the inks and setting them up because there is a Siris of steps to the process, a process that will help you keep it all organized specifically concerning the layers and the order at which they're stacked. And essentially each one of these layers are going to be a step within the inking process that you're going to want to follow through on. And I will also be revealing the settings that are used for the G pen within Mangus Studio . And you may be surprised because I really don't wake those settings. Ah, whole lot in order to get the kind of line wick that you've likely seen me define my characters with before. All right, let's jump straight into it.
8. 07 | Inking Overview: all right, So now that we penciled up the draft for our character design, it's time to move on to the banks. But before we jump into the actual demonstration, what I like to give you here in this lesson is just a quick overview off the inking process , how I set up the layers and the sittings that I use for the G pen. So let's start with the layers now over here to the right hand side of the screen in the layers panel. You can see that I've created a new layer group for the inks, and within that lay a group of gotta Siri's off layers that I've used to compose the inks with and each one of these layers essentially a step within the inking process that I will go through until the eggs are complete. So we'll start out with the outline for the character than our progress through to the core shadows and then finally drop in the rendering. On top of that, building up the inked illustration one step at a time. So there's a bit of a process to it, and I like to work in that way because it helps me keep track of where I'm at in the inks and enables me to predict how long that kind of going to take. And also on top of that, it helps me to, in my own mind know where I'm at within the illustration, because oftentimes the thinking process can take a substantial amount of energy and man hours in order to get them done. So it's important to make sure that you're able to take a look at your progress and know exactly where it is your right, so that you can schedule more effectively essentially and know how much more work you've got to do on them. But also on top of that, just is without penciled. Carrying to draft by keeping all the different components that make of the inks on separately is if we do need to change something, say, for example, adjusting the shadows, whether it's adding them in or taking them out. Or the same case might be for the rendering that we either want to add more, rendering in or take a little bit of it out, just a turn it back. Usually it's going to be tone it back more often than not because I have a tendency to over render everything essentially. And if I do need to do that, if I do need to make any of those adjustments, that's very easy to do because everything is on a separate layer so I can turn off the shadows and I can adjust them and Aiken tweet them as needed. Same thing with the rendering. It's just a matter of, you know, say, for example, that I did want to our race away some of the shadows because I thought that, you know, they just went working in a particular area and that I could take a different approach. Well, I just click on the course shadows layer, and then I could just get my eraser out and get rid of it, right? And it doesn't affect any of the line, not the line, not the initial outline. Old, the character, those main T contours that to find the design are still intact. I haven't erased them, so it's just quicker than going in and trying to erase the shadows in between those main contours that I've outlined the character with same deal with the rendering. So hit the undo button because I quite like where I got the shadow is there now. Maybe you're not necessarily going to want to erase the entire section of shadow. Maybe it's more a case off going in and just tweaking the shape of that shadow a little bit . Well, you can do that. And again, you don't have to necessarily worry about the fact that you know you may. You may, if they were on the same layer, accidentally end up a racing part of the characters, outline all their rendering so you can kind of address various aspects all the inks individually as needed by keeping those aspects separate on individual layers. So you'll notice that Zoe's particular layers are all placed into a layer groups, which I have labeled as inks as before. We want to make sure that these layers are labeled appropriately so that we know what it is we're working on and that we can navigate to the layer that we want to be working on with a minimal amount of stress, and we can essentially optimize our process and work. A look quicker of those lately is just titled with appropriate names, so you can see you know, rendering course shadows. Linnaeus. I know exactly what it on those layers just by the titles Off them alone makes sense. So again, here we can see that the inked the inks Clay, a group is actually sitting on top of the pencils layer group, which will be placed below them. And that makes sense because we are going to be inking over the top off the design draft. So we want to make sure that those pencils are sitting underneath the inks instead of sitting above them, which we could, of course, placed them above. But we don't want that. We want to make sure that we're building up the illustration one bid at a time, making sure that all those layers organized accurately so that, you know, in the end we're able to compose an image that structurally makes sense. You know, it's not just the overall illustration that we want to do a good job with. We actually want to streamline our process and make sure that's all organized so that we can get it done in the minimal amount of time possible, because that in the end means that we're able to produce our work to a reasonable level of quality and at the same time produce more of it. Where is it turns being taken up by layers that aren't labeled correctly or on correctly organized within the layer hierarchy. That's going to cause us to run into some severe problems later on down the line. When that document ends up racking up a huge amount of Les is inevitably so. He'll notice that now that I've switched on the pencils Layer group, it's kind of confusing to tell what it is we're looking at. Are we looking at an inked outline or penciled outline? It's difficult to tell the difference between the two. Now, of course, the inks. You know, they're kind of obvious because they do have a cleaner contour. But still, it's just confusing toe look at. There's a little bit of ambiguity there on. That's certainly going to cause some confusion when it comes to actually inking over the top old the penciled character draft, because you won't be easily able to see how that final outline is going toe. Look how it's going to appear because you'll have that underlying sketch there distracting the shape of the line and causing you to not get a very clear understanding of whether or not that line is shaped in the way that you wanted to be shaped, whether or not it's smooth, whether it's clean. So you want to make sure that you've got a really good clear look at how those things are looking on the canvas and in order to be able to do that to create a very clear, vivid distinction between the pencils and the inks. What I like to do is essentially click on the entire layer group for the pencils, go over here to the layers property panel and switch on the layer color for that layer group, and that's going to convert everything within that layer group to blue. And now, as you can see, we have a very clear distinction between whether or not we're looking at the pencils or the inks because the pencils the area completely different color now. So we definitely know that they are the pencils and that the inks, which is still in black, very clearly the inks. So now we can see much more clearly the line work and its quality as we've laid it down onto the page, so make sure that when you are organizing your layers and you're working over the top of the pencils, you're able to clearly tell whether or not you're looking at the inks of the pencils and that, more importantly, you're able to see how the inks look against them. And the best way that I found to be able to do that is just to convert them to blue, using this very nifty little function over here in the Layer Properties menu, the layout color and you can change that to whatever color you like. I like the blue because that's kind of how they used to work. Traditionally, when it came to comic book out, they would actually pencil up the illustration first in blue pencil, and then they would ink over the top of it. And just due to the nature of the skin and how it essentially interpreted the and the inks in the pencils, it essentially left out those pencils and only ended up scanning the ink. So again, I'm not sure about that traditional workflow because I've always work digitally and that just for me is the easiest way to work because as a minimal amount of messing around, and I can only keep everything in one place. So that's kind of the route that I have chosen. But again, main thing to keep in mind here is just to make sure that the underlying pencils are converted to blue, or at least easily. You're easily able to tell the difference between the two, sir. With that said, let's take a look at the layers that these inks actually consists. Also, if we turn off these top ones here and just leave the outline that we've inked in for the character, you can see that the main thing that I was focused on here primarily was capturing a nice shape for every single part off the character with sharp, slick, refined looking line work. And so you can see here that I've taken this rough, very basic, rudimentary sketch, and I've articulated the line work with a much with a much more vivid line, essentially with one that is more energetic, one which is more cemented and essentially that is what the lot the key contours that are going to define the character in terms of inking will actually do for us, is cement that design because if we take the inks away, you can see that this design drought, even though all the information that we're going to need to know is already there, you can see that it's just it's very, very messy, like that line on is not defined whatsoever. So that is the job old the out ink outline. And once we're able to get that in, then we can have a very clear understanding of exactly how this character is going to look . All those lines have now been established, so every aspect off the design, the clothing assets, the hair style, the facial features, the anatomy of the character. It's all there on the page, and we're able to then build up the inks and start to describe the form within those contours and really get them to read through the use of the course shadows. Now the course shadows I switched them on here will only be placed in certain areas throughout the character design, and the reason for that is because there is simply going to be different materials that reflect light and create shadows in very different ways, and you can see here that the darker materials that are made of leather throughout her caution design. Have most of the shadow applied to them. In fact, I would argue all of the shadow applied to them except for the back of her hair there. And so why is that? Well, it's because one the material here that we're dealing with is just generally much darker in terms of value. But also on top of that, the way in which it reflects the light is going to cause a high contrast transition between the highlights and the shadows. And so you're going to see more shadow there and more Heil out with less over blend between the two. But because it's a darker material, that's why we're going to see most off it covered in shadow. Where is her skin? There isn't dark. It's actually a very light colored skin, quite pale and seem with her denim shorts. It's, you know, they aren't really super dark. They're not a black material there. Blue material. Same with her hair. Her hair is going to be colored teal, so it's a lighter, most saturated, vibrant color, which means it's not going to pick up a much shadow Or at least we won't want to depict as much shadow in these areas. And if we were to well, that would lower the overall value off those particular portions old the character and make them look much darker, as you can see here just by adding in the course shadows. Already, those particular areas within her costuming now look much darker in terms off their color in terms of their perceived value. So that's really the effect that shadows introduced onto the certain materials that are featured throughout the character Now, on top of that, other than just suggesting the value and the level of brightness over particular material throughout the character, they also help to describe the forms within those areas. So you can see here that by placing in the shadow is essentially were lighting the forms over wherever they are going to be placed. So around her leg, for example, we can see a very obvious set up for the lighting direction and from where it is casting down onto the character from, you can see that there's a highlight heating the right side of the character in the back 3/4 view here, saying with the front 3/4 view, except this time of the light direction is coming from the left. So there's going to be Ah, highlight on the left side of her leg there and on the shadow side, the dark side of her leg as it turns away from the light. We're going to see a nice, big, thick shadow along that particular portion off the form, which ultimately helps to describe it. Because when you introduce allotting to a form, ultimately, that's going to suggest it's that it has a surface that the light is hitting upon and reflecting off of without light and it without shadow. Essentially, you have no form, and it reads just as a flat, two dimensional shape, which is kind of what you can see here with her skin, because there's no shadows applied to it just yet. And there's no rendering, nor is there any color or shading within the coloring, for that matter. All we have here to define the leg is this outline, and that outline a loon isn't really dis necessarily describing this particular portion off her design or, you know, some of the other portions, either with a huge amount of depth. However, that depth is still suggested because of the fact that the leggings a wrapping around her leg. We have suggested that, and so the form which is depicted in those portions off her leg, the areas that are actually wearing the boots and wearing the leggings are going to help to inform the viewer that, yes, this leg does actually have some form to it. It's got depth to it just by default, just because those areas of her leg do have shadow within them the areas that are covered by clothing assets such as the boots and leggings there. So that's something to keep in mind that you can suggest in away form without actually placing in shadows into the entire character. Sometimes, as you can see here, not all the character needs toe have rendering or a whole Tana rendering applied to it. It doesn't need to suggest lighting, and you can leave it out to other assets throughout the design to help convey those particular aspects to help convey depth and three dimensionality once the course shut out. Now, actually, I got to go back here and tell you how I went about placing these shadows in because I actually use what I like to refer to as a shadow draft initially to get them placed in with in the right areas and shaped appropriately to the form that I placed them upon. And it re is really important. Just as with the key contours that defined the characters design the outline of the character. We want to make sure that the outline off those shadows have some nice, sharp, vivid shape to them to make for more impactful. Leinart illustration. Because it is the silhouettes, the outlines of each of these areas, each of these aspects within the character, the shadows included that are going to give them more of a distinct visual representation. And without that sharp line work, those shapes aren't strong, is a meek if they aren't energetic. That's when we're going to start to lose the level off impact that the character is exuding on the page. So we don't want to lose that. And in order to avoid losing that energy, we want to make sure that those shapes of vivid that we've really spent time almost exaggerating the shapes and style izing them to an extent in order to maintain the level at which this character is being presented as far as how powerful the visuals are for them. So keep your line work sharp. Make sure those shapes are emphasized to the max, and you will find that your drawings, your comic book illustrations are much, much more impactful, and it going to have a way when they're going to leave way more of impression on the audience. As a result, this is where the energy within comic book comes from is in the way in which the anatomy is stylized in the way in which the clothing and the hair is stylized, the facial features. And also on top of that, the shading in the shadows. Every aspect, really. Oh, the comic book character creation process needs toe have that level of energy and exaggeration incorporated into the very line work that makes it up. And this also comes through in the coloring. You know, you want your colors to be vivid, energetic as well on top of that, for there to be a substantial impact left on the viewer as they're taking the men. This is what will increase the quality of your presentation so make sure that the shapes are strong. And this is what I did in the shadow draft I went through. I made sure that, you know, if I needed to, I kind of erased back the shape. And I tweeted, for example, down here with the leggings. You know, maybe I thought, you know, the shadows Too sick. Or maybe instead I decided that I wanted it to coming around the back here, and I kind of shaded it in like that. And the point is, is that I wanted to make sure as much as possible that the shadows that were placed and featured throughout he's carrying to design with strong shadows that again would enhance the inks and give the presentation and overall, higher level of quality. So once the shadow dropped has done, of course, I would turn them to blue then, just like I did with the penciled character design, and I will go over the top of them in, lay in the course shadows, using that shadow draft to guide the final inks for them and then once the shadows, Aaron and ready to go our place in the rendering over the top of everything else. And this is really where the details started, coming to play in a big way in order to convey things such as texture to convey the surface material that you're working with in order to convey form. These are the things that rendering really introduces into the character in a huge way, and it does look very complex. It looks difficult to do, and there is a lot going on. I'm not going to lie to you. But as intimidating as rendering can feel, I've personally found it to be the fastest part of the entire process overall, because all the hard work really comes through the defining of the outline of the character . Because again you're taking those rough pencils that use for the design draft, and then you're articulating them to a polished, much more final degree of clarity. Now, once that's done, the design is essentially finished. The line work is there, it's ready to go. All you need to do is work in over the top of it. Place those cause shadows and really the core shadows air going to inform the way in which your lighting the character So when it comes to the rendering while you know where the different densities over entering a going to need to be placed in order to articulate and further produce additional depth within the forms that they're going to be helping to describe. So once the shadow is Aaron, you don't really have to think about the lighting direction or where those render lines or more commonly known as hatches are going to make the most impact. Now you also notice that I use a little hatching, but I don't use to much cross hatches now by hatches. I just mean these parallel lines that run next to one another along the form in order to help describe it and the way in which it's a lip its surface. Now I could also adding, on top of those cross hatches that go in the opposite direction on a 90 degree angle in order to increase the contrast of the shading that I'm using within these areas. However, I don't do that. I just keep it as hatches, especially when I'm looking at a character from this distance. And more than that, you also want to make sure that when it comes to rendering, you're not over rendering your characters, and this goes for male characters and female characters are seen. People do this with both. They just absolutely pack in the detail, and it just makes the entire character character look quite frankly, visually disorientated. Toe look at it's hard to make out what is going on. And just as I talked about with the pencil design draft, you want to make sure that from a distance, the inked outline the shadows that you're placing in onto the character to help describe form and the value of the materials within their design, as well as the rendering from a distance. All of that reads all of that you're easily able to make out, and you can see up here in the top right off the the the layout. Here you can see interface. That's the word I was looking for in the interface. You can see that we've got the Navigator Penhall there and that even from this far back, we can easily make out these character design. You can see the clarity there. There's no confusion whatsoever. Your characters should also be the same. Now keep in mind that the amount of rendering you add into certain sections off. The character will ultimately take down and lower the amount of value it in that area, essentially changing the form and the shape along with the material, or it will lighten it up in heighten it. So you always want to be dialing back and forth the amount of rendering that you're placing in and make sure that wherever you're including that rendering, it's for a reason. It's for a purpose that you're not just adding it in there for details sake. So rendering isn't that hard in and of itself. But strategically placing it in where it's going to work best is really what is the going to be the most difficult aspect off the entire process. So let me give you an example of over rendering here and how easy it is to do so. Say, for example, I was thinking, as I was inking up, ease face that, you know, I just needed a little bit more detail, a little bit more definition, you know, often times one off the temptations is to add in rendering around the cheekbones and to emphasize them just to make the face look more detailed for one reason or another. But the thing is, as soon as I do that, let's say, for example, that I go ahead here and I start to rendering the cheeks. Now I don't even after you add in that many hatches here. To do that could simply just go ahead here. And as you can see by doing that, all of a sudden she looks almost skeletal, especially if I start building on top of that rendering. She might also appear more masculine. That's another risk that you end up running specifically with female characters unless they are masculine characters. Which to be Frank E. Is you're going to want to make sure that you tone down that rendering, especially around the face and even the ease and masculine character. Even I have left out. Some of that definition, and it produced a much more aesthetically pleasing were end result for her head shots in the end. Now the reason for that is actually you know it's there is some logic to it when you think about it, and that is is that when you start to add too much rendering to the faces of your characters, it essentially causes their skin toe appear more blemished because there's a difference in tone there. Where is healthy looking skin really doesn't transition that much within turn unless it's lit in a very dramatic way. For example, you know does depend on the lighting as to how you render things, of course, but most of the time, if you're talking about clear skin, that really doesn't transition from one tone to the next. Really, the only rendering you should be placing in there should be based on you know, the lighting conditions and also think about the fact that female characters usually have softer skin, which is usually why you want to feel out the cheeks a little bit more and leave the emphasis old those cheekbones out when it comes to the rendering. So just get rid of that. The and ah, leave it as it was, because again, you can see how much better that looks. Sometimes less is going to be much, much more, especially when it comes to rendering. Now the thing that I will mention he had just because this is kind of the final step in the inking process gain once you've got the outline done then you place in the course shadows. They look great. And then you add in the rendering. Now, in order to actually place in the rendering, you might be wondering What? How do you get those lines looking so done? Fine, because, as you can see, they're extremely thin. And most of the time I work from a distance because, as I said before, I want to see how all of this is coming together as a whole. So that's the same as the pencil right? I use the default G pen with in mega studio, and if I open up the settings over here, you can see that I just leave them all. As is. There's really no adjusting here. It's all the default settings within mega studio, and the only thing that I modify is the matter pressure that I apply as I work my grip around the stylist and the size of my brush. Now, same rules apply here. If I want a sin line a super ultra fine line like these, then I'll simply make my brush a little bit smaller. Now the G pen does feel a little bit more different to the pencil. The darker pencil within mega studios. So it does take some getting used to, and the biggest difference is the way in which it lays Down Inc. The amount of pressure that you need to apply is substantially different. The pencil lets out a relatively large amount off lead onto the canvas as you work. But the G pen feels much shopper, which is great. I love that feeling. I think it feels very, very traditional in that sense. But when you start to lay down these lines, you'll notice that you don't really need a super small brush to get them to look fine. You can see there that they're very, very sand. And of course, if I in large the brush here, I'm going to get much sickle line. So it really depends what it is you're working on and what distance you're working on the character from. So, you know, if I was zoomed right in here and I was looking at Karen at these head shot from this distance, we I could use a much thicker brush in order to get these lines late in. You know, that wouldn't be a big deal at all. And the reason as to why I don't work in this close. Besides, the fact that I can't really see what's going on with everything else is because it just takes me a lot longer, Like the distance that I need to draw around the jaw at this distance is much longer than the distance that I need to take that line. If I'm working this far back, you can see that I'm able to get that line down much, much faster. So I tend to avoid working close and the closest, ah usually zoom in is about 25 about 25% which is kind of the extent to which I zoomed in there. But I would never work, you know, it is close up, and I guess that, Ah, lot of the time when it does come to thinking because of the level of confidence that some beginners have, they do feel like they need to zoom right in there, close up on the character in order to get those lines looking perfect. But you have to remember that it depends on the size of which you're going to ultimately be printing your artwork out at now. If you're talking about a huge poster, for example, you know, one that you might put onto a billboard, then you want to be working in super close and a huge resolution in order to be able to make sure you're printing that at a high level of quality. However, if you know you're only talking about printing your character illustration in a comic book , for example, comic book size dimensions, then you need to think about if you hold up a comic book, how big is that really going to need to be? And that's kind of how I judge how far in I need to be zoomed now you know, if I am working on a character, I will keep in mind the size of the dimensions of that comic book and just scream in a little bit more closer than that size, just so that when I do go to print it out, I'll know that the resolution is fairly detailed enough for it to be printed out at that size, and the quality will still be maintained. Whereas if I go any lower than that than there's the running, the risk of picks, elation and the loss of lying quality when it comes to the final presentation. So I want to make sure that I'm avoiding that. But most of the time these days, I'm kind of working almost from this distance. I don't zoom in a whole lot sometimes, you know, maybe Obi zooming in 16%. As you can see here, sometimes I'll zoom in a little bit more, maybe to 20%. But usually it's from quite a distance. Now again, you can see her hair here has so many like little tiny hatches, their defining the shading and giving it some separation, describing its texture. And to get lines like that, well, my pen is going to be about this big. You can see the brush size is barely visible. That, and I'll go in at a lay in, sometimes only in multiple lines in order to complete the stroke. But the way in which he controlled the Grady in is just based on the distance towards these lines of sitting and in order to have a grading that goes from doctor light will, it simply means that these hatches need to go from sick, too thin and spread out further and further until they completely decay into the highlights , the lit area of the form. And that's kind of the way in which I'm thinking, so. These, you know, they're not 100% perfect. But I talked about cross hatching before, and cross hatching is really just, you know, having hatch is going in the opposite direction. That helped Teoh describe the form on the opposite axes. So instead of vertical, maybe horizontal, or instead of running the hatches along the form, you're going around the phone now with these cross hatches, and that kind of adds a little bit more contrast and helps to describe the form further. But usually I will leave them out because that just takes extra time and usually causes the illustration to become over detailed. If you're not placing them in the areas that need the most again, if it does not need it, do not add in additional hatching. So that brings me to how I approach the hatching for certain materials throughout the character design, because the areas that have more shadow are, of course, going toe have more hatches because those materials are of a lower value, so we want to convey that lower value by increasing the amount of hatches will which will in turn take down the tone to a Dhaka level. So, for example, just to show you real quick here opposed to go ahead and fill in, say, for example, I was to fill in her denim shorts, he at the back completely with hatches, right? And I was to go in, filled me in on like that. Well, now you can see that there are a lot less bright than they were before. So, depending on the darkness, older material that you're working with that's going to ultimately determined how much shadow you're going to include within that particular area of the character and how much hatching will also be incorporated within it. So consider that ever think about it, and that will direct your approach to the rendering process and where those render lines are going to be needed most now, as I mentioned before, you want to try to make sure that you're rendering, and also the shadows helped to describe the shape off the form and its surface. So here you can see with the top that he is wearing that I've added in a bunch of rendering a bunch of shadows throughout it. But you can see how the way in which that shading is composed also helps to describe the underlying forms off her body that her top is wrapped around. So again, rendering allows you to do a couple of things, as does Shadow. It hopes to describe the form, of course, by lighting it and shading it. And it also helps to describe things such as the texture, all that form and the surface material that you're using foreign. So that completes the inking, set up the breakdown that I like to full it when it comes to the thinking process. And I go through this process each and every time it comes to creating an indie illustration off my characters or an entire comic book scene for that matter. The last thing I'll mention is just that you'll notice. Here are not thinking over the top of a polished penciled line drawing, and it took me a little wild to get to the point where I could have the confidence to be able to think straight over the top off a rough draft like you're seeing here, and the reason as to why I decided to skip out on the Polish pencils is because in my mind , I just figured that the final inks were ultimately going to be what was featured in the final presentation old the character illustration. So I didn't feel like there was quite a need to go through the whole Polish penciling process where I refined the line out all depends is and then simply replicated that refinement with the inks. This also allowed me to get a little bit more creative with the inks themselves. So instead of tracing right over the top of a refined pencil drawing, I was able to goes through and lay in the refine lineup with the inks for the first time. And that for me, just felt like the line out that I ended up with within the final ings was a lot more genuine, kind of improvised and also had within it that spark of creativity that just couldn't be replicated if I was tracing right over the top of the polished pencils. So that's kind of my approach in the way that I like to go through it again. I wish there was more than I could tell you, as far as the G pen girls and the settings that I use for that. It's honestly just your ability to calibrate the size of your brush with the amount of pressure that you're applying as you lay those sinks in and looking at the lines that you're out putting onto the page and then adjusting that pressure and the brush size as needed to get the kind of lines that you want. So it's ultimately down to your own preference. You're going to have to experiment with a little bit, and when you stumble across something that works, stick with it. You'll remember the kind of brush size that you need to be at, and also the amount of pressure that you need to apply. Make sure that you're monitoring that stuff. Not only do you need to take note of what doesn't work within your process, you also need to make sure that you are aware of what's already working for you so that you can stick with that and build upon it, improve it, optimize it. So that's the overview off my thinking process. Let's jump into the demonstration now and see how all of this stuff is applied
9. 08 | Inking The Outline: all right, so we've got the design sketch done n dusted. So now it's time to go over the top of it and refine once there with the final ink outline . In this lesson, we will be Fergus primarily on the outline alone, so we won't be getting into any shadowing or rendering or anything like that. We're really just going over the top of this design draft and defining the key contours that it going to be present in the final character design illustration. And I'm starting with the front three coat of you of e here with her face and pretty much just out of habit. I always begin with the face of the character first and foremost, because for me it's the most important part of the character. That's where we're going to essentially see. Their identity comes through in the most potent way besides their body language, of course, and the way in which they hold themselves because the face is an extremely expressive part of the body. When you think about all the muscles that he used to control, the way in which our eyes and mouths move, and the very subtle micro expressions that were able to make that give away how we're feeling and what we're thinking in almost an unconscious way to another person. It's It's an incredible way to be able to connect with your audience and have your carrying to feel more real. So I start with the face first because that's the first point of entry for the audience to be able to get to know your character. That's exactly where their attention is going to be drawn to immediately when they first experience who your character is when they come across the presentation, all of your designs. So I like to get it out of the way right off the bat and make sure that it looks good, because if I know the face looks good, it takes the stress and the pressure off of me as I start to developed the rest of the design and bring it through the completion. So now that the faces done, I've got the hair outlined again, we really only dealing with the primary contours that are going to be encompassing the shape of these elements. It's essentially just going to be a line drawing were not really considering the lighting conditions at this point, or even the rendering of the forms and how they're going to be lit. It's old, just the outline alone, the main contours that are going to define the design. And he can see that I'm using the G pen to outline the character here in Mangus Studio now photo open up the settings, and I often get asked about the settings that I use for the G pen. What you'll see is that they're essentially just the default settings within Mingus Studio , which is otherwise known as clips studio paint these days. But before we continue on with that, I just want to draw your attention towards happened here on the screen, you can see that the belts that were wrapping around the midsection off her upper body just weren't working for me. They weren't quite looking the way that I wanted them to look, and they didn't drive so well with the design. So I decided to simply erase them, even at this point where we're dropping in the final outline for the character designed in the inking stage, I erased them, took them out, and I rejigged her top two come up with something that I thought worked better for her character. So anything is changeable at any point throughout the process, except for probably the coloring stage. But what would doing the inks? And we're dealing with the outline of the character, the main contours. If you see anything throughout your design that you know you're second guessing and that maybe if you changed it or tweet that you could arrive at a better design, it's totally worth going back and adjusting it. But back to the G pen here in mega studio, a k a clip studio paint. If I would open up the settings, they just be the default settings. I don't really adjust them too much. In fact, I don't adjust them at all because Mingus studio already has a fantastic pen tool. I mean it. It doesn't need any adjusting. It works very much in the same way as any traditional G pen would. And so I find that if I just leave it as is and I start drawing with it, I didn't really need to remember the kind of settings that I use for the G pen first starters and I can just get straight to work. I don't have to tweak anything. I can feel confident that minger studios default settings are gonna work out just fine for what I need the application to do for me. And I can focus on the production off my character design or, you know, whatever project I'm working on, whatever piece of comic book Adam I'm working with. So you might be asking yourself. Well, how do you get the kind of lines that you're throwing down onto the canvas here because, you know, they look pretty slick. And, you know, I get this a lot, you know, because whenever someone sees a demonstration like this, they want to be ableto put pen to canvas and get the same looking line work for their characters. And here's the secret. He is what I do in order to get the lines of looking the way that you see them looking here , it all comes down to the size of your brush and the amount of pressure that you're applying as you draw out each line and you'll notice that the size of the brush that I'm using here is extremely small. I don't know what the exact sizes cause I kind of just, you know, I will tweak the size of the brush as needed while I'm working, using the bracket keys on my keyboard, on the bracelet keys, and by doing that, I kind of just tweak the size of the brush for the line that I need at the time. Now, the other component of this is the amount of pressure that I'm applying, as I'd rule. If I want a thin A line off, simply lighten a, loosen my grip and all ease up on the matter pressure that I'm applying to the stylist as I work. If I want a thicker Denzel Line, then I'll simply press down harder. And so, with those two combined the size of the brush and the amount of pressure that you're applying, what you conduce is you can experiment. You can try out different amounts of pressure and different brush sizes to see what's going to work for you individually, because at the end of the day you're going to have maybe a naturally tighter grip than I do . Maybe you have a looser grip. Maybe you have a heavier hand or a lighter hand, and however you tend to habitually work. That's also going to affect the way in which your lines come out onto the page. So you have to calibrate those two elements. When it comes to inking, you have to calibrate the size of the brush with the metal pressure that you're applying. As you draw out these inked outlines and through a little bit of trial and testing, you'll find what naturally works best for you. And it's almost like you're controlling the gears in the cockpit of the aircraft, right? You're figuring out OK, how much do I need to accelerate here? Or in our case, how much do it pressure doing it in the need to apply? You know they have fast. Do you need to go? Ah, how much? How big does the size of the brush need to be right? You know, it's kind of Ah, interesting metaphor, but it does. It does feel like that sometimes, like you're constantly controlling the gears of the panel most and after a while, you don't even have to think about it. Yes, in the beginning, you must remain conscious of these things in order to get used to and familiar with the tools, but not just that also familiar with the way in which you like to work. But that's just a matter of time and experience and really making that mileage, because along the way you're getting to know the way in which you like toe work. You're getting to know yourself as an artist, and that's just part of the process. It's not necessarily even a technical thing at that point, because, technically, it's actually this is actually not a whole lot to it. You know, we're just using the pen tool and withdrawing in these thin, really fine, faint lines around the character design draft. And the only reason that I'm able to get these lines looking the way they do. The only way in which I'm controlling the outcome of this line work is through the amount of pressure that I'm applying in the size of that brush. So it's actually quite simple. What's difficult is being able to control those two elements at any one point in time because it almost is a constant analysis of whether or not you're getting the line down onto the page in the way that you want it to be presented because often times you just simply won't know her without putting Penda canvas first. And it's not like you can keep your brush size at that one size the entire way through because you're going tohave thick and thin lines throughout the entire piece. At this stage, my brush size is fairly consistent. Just because I'm not applying any line waits in a dramatic way here. I'm just kind of focused on getting that main outline in so that we can solidify this design in its final presentation. But you know, when we start to place in the shadows and we get those crosshatch is drawn in. Yes, I will be constantly tweaking the size off this brush and the amount of pressure that I'm applying to get those lines. Soto. It's very dynamic in the way that you work. There's not one way of doing things. You kind of have to adjust to whatever it is you're working on within the artwork at any one point in time, and that will that the artwork itself and what it entails will kind of decide what you end up doing, how big that brush is going to be and how much pressure you going to be applying so you kind of have to think about it in that way that there's not just one way of doing things and we like toe. I think that there is, Ideally, we would love that just be one way of doing things because it had mean that we could own. We would only have to learn it once and that'll be it will be set to go. But you know there's not. There's an incalculable amount of ways to do these things and you're going to find that just to the due to the nature off drawing and illustration and the amount of freedom that you have to draw essentially anything you want and depict it is going to be a 1,000,000,000 ways to do that. You know you're going to come across materials that you've never dealt with before, textures that you've never dealt with design elements that you've never dealt with before, and it's going to require you to come up with a new approach for each and every one of these things that you come across for the first time and in this particular character design later on, because a lot of her costume assets on this black shiny leather material, you know that great was shadows. I don't feel as confident with them as I do, say, outlining the character design here. So when you come face to face with those aspects off your designs in your illustrations that you know you're not as well versed in that you're not as comfortable with. That's when you're challenged to come up with a new approach and a new way of doing things the most. And when you find what works, then you'll stick with it. But make no mistake. Just because you conquer one aspect of your art doesn't mean you're never going to come across another obstacle again. You will. It's just the nature off being a comic book artist. It comes with the territory. So now I'm working on the back view here. I've got the front 3/4 view of E outlined and ready to go again. You can see we're really only dealing with the outline here. That hasn't been necessarily ah, whole out of line weight applied. I naturally tend to vary the thickness of my line as I work, just in the way that I laid down the stroke, but I haven't going in and intentionally adjusted the his line weights necessarily. Not just yet, anyway. That will come at the end as we get further and further into the inks for E here. Usually I'll leave it chill the rendering stage. They were really publishing out that line, working and tweaking it to the right specifications that we want for the final presentation , and I find that it's easier toe lay in the line weights a little later down the track just because we get a good view as toe. You know what what's happening with the inks or of a role. You know, once that main outline is in, we can kind of judge better wear those line weights are going to be most effective, so I build the character up in passes. You'll notice that I go through a particular process when it comes to character design production for comic book characters. And in the beginning we laid down the foundation. You saw that, and I do that every single time that I draw out of character. Always begin with that basic Minnick and Motile Foundation that will build in a rough design over the top of that, keeping it super loose. And then we do the outline of the character in inks. And this is the finished outline. And what's interesting is that previously I take a lot more time polishing up the pencils of the character before I jumped into the line out stage simply out of lack of confidence that I could just lay in the incline. Not without those polished pencils. But after a while I came to the conclusion that I was spending about double the amount of time polishing the pencils off the character design as I was laying in the final line, not for the inks. So I thought, Well, why not just get the middleman? Why don't I just do the basic sketch like I've been doing anyway and leave the funnel I not full yanking stage instead of polishing it up in the penciling stage as well? That essentially cut my production time in half, and it really sped up my process dramatically, so I never looked back After I started to just jump straight under the inks from the initial rough draft. It took a little bit of time to build up the confidence to be able to do that as I said, but and it did feel very uncomfortable to begin with. However, after a while I just got used to it and it's like with anything else anything new that you learned or try out for the first time. It feels uncomfortable. It doesn't feel quite right. And it's really the last thing that you want to do. You kind of want to go back to the old previous process that, you know, you were comfortable with you that you knew rather than trying out something new. But I think the payoff for me was just much greater, so I decided to stick with it, and in the end I didn't regret it whatsoever because I found that I was able to add a little bit more character into the line out off the inks into the incline on, and I think that was because I didn't really need to rehearse it anymore. In the polished penciling stage. I was leaving that out completely and the first time that this final lineup was being laid in was now the inking stage and that just it gave it a little bit more a genuineness. It was a bit more improvised and less manufactured, and I really liked what that brought to the finished result of my artwork to the finish line work. Because the way I figured it is that the inks were really what was going to be representing this character in the end, the contours off the character. No matter how much I published at the pencils, they simply weren't going to be part of the final product. So I figured that, hey, that the inks are really what matters here. So I'm going to focus on that and really master the ability to go from the rough draft to the inks essentially come team at a time that it took me in half and end up with a better result in the long run. Anyway, see Ruiz optimum it, my zing, your process as a comic book illustrator, or is any illustrator as any writer? As any musician, you're always optimizing the way that you do things so that you can produce a better product in a less amount of time, and I find that this has Bean, one of the most powerful things that I've done for My comic book illustration process is to optimize it because it's allowed me to drool much more and produce loads more work than I would have have been otherwise able to produce. And that's great, because there's only a limited amount of time for all I know that I've got to be able to draw. Ah, already. I'm you know, I'm getting tired. I cop fatigue when I've been drawing for a long period of time. My wrist in my hand hurts, and I can only imagine that that's going to grow worse as I get older. And so while I can drool and I'm still quite young. But while I can drool, I want to draw as much as possible and produce, I guess draw, draw less. But produce more work would be really the equation that I'm looking for here. And so I'm always looking for ways in which I can get my work done faster but still maintain the quality that I'm producing with it. So it's always you're always weighing those two elements up. You're always weighing up speed and quality, and when you can have both, really, there's nothing better that you could ask for so try to think about the ways that you can optimize your own process. It's very difficult to evolve as an artist toe. Find new and better ways of doing things that are ultimately going to benefit you and your craft. But if you could be daring and brave enough to give something new ago that you know will ultimately in the long run be beneficial to you, then you'll have no regrets about that. Everything's uncomfortable in the beginning, even the process that you might be working with now. At some point, that was uncomfortable. But if he can keep on pushing the boundary, pushing outside your comfort sign, that's where you'll find that you're able to reach. The epitome of what you can be is an artist that's just told getting better. That's the evolution autistic development, and that goes for anything that goes for your pencil drawings That goes for your inking, agrees for your coloring every single aspect off your comic art production work floor. You can work on them individually, and he can work on them as a whole and ultimately come up with a process that allows you to produce more work in less time and have it still look absolutely amazing. So I've gone over the top of these design from the back here. We're almost ready to wrap that up and jump onto the faces, but and you can see it was very much the same process, often times with intricate line out like this, where you've got a lot of details going on. You can see in her gloves and her boots the belt so leather and buckles and what not with all that detail. You will tend to find that you want to try to keep your line out as fine and sin as possible, because that will allow you to articulate the details on a more more intricate level. So try to keep your brush small, especially if you're working with a very intricate looking illustration, very intricate character design, so that you can capture all those details that you've incorporated within it. So now I'm working on the 1st 3/4 hair view off E here, and I'm starting with the eyes because if you're thinking about if the face of the character is the first point of connection for the audience, where they begin to relate with the character understand their pit personality and kind of communicate with them on that non verbal level. It's almost like a form of telecom nieces. In a way, we were observing the expressions of the face in order to be able to gather some understanding of who that person is and what's going on inside their mind. But in the eyes, Ah, that for the face. They are the first point of attention on the face because of their level of expressiveness , the faces, a whole, very expressive. But the eyes Ah, the one feature on the face that expresses the most, you know, the entire I. It's surrounded by this band of muscle. That band of muscle allows us to make these micro expressions that help us to communicate without with other people in a very substantial way without ever saying a word. So he is going toe, have this heavy make up around horizons, Harry, sick mascara and eyeliner and mostly going to later on in the coloring stage place in a little bit of blush and some lipstick, of course, just toe really enhance her facial features and draw more attention to them. You can see the ear. They're very intricate. We're gonna let a college going on with the You know, the face is probably one of the most detailed areas over person. Overall, there's a lot going on with it. You got a bunch of features there that you've got to account for, and the thing is, is that a lot of the attention is going to be on the face, So you want to try to make sure that you're the pit to get it in the most accurate way possible. And that's what makes it difficult, unfortunately, because in almost an instant, anyone can tell just by looking at the face of the character, whether or not it's drawn accurately. And if the face isn't drawn accurately, there's some kind of flew within it, even if it's just a small one. It kind of tarnishes the rest of the design and kind of painted within a negative context. You know, the faces missed out, then you know the risks of the design doesn't really matter in comparison, However, if you draw a nice looking face for the character and you know the features air proportionally placed onto the face accurately and that drawn beautifully. It's nicely idealized in a an appealing way. Well, then the rest of it is on kind of compliments. That so the design alone the body of the character really isn't quite enough for the final presentation. All their design to be appealing, not alone. You need the head, and the head needs to be drawn accurately if it's gonna work out well. So ah, always try to draw on appealing looking face for your characters. Yes, you can have a realistic looking one if you want to. But, um, you know, that needs to be something, something that was going for it. You know, it needs to be a likable looking face unless you know you're dealing with a villain. Villains usually have that mawr unique set of proportions going on where the facial features are exaggerated in different ways. And you know, because of that, they, ah, you know, lists necessarily easy to connect with. Ah, they are a bit more. You know, there are villains faces a less appealing in general, and and they're supposed to be. Of course, they're supposed to make us feel uncomfortable. We're not supposed to necessarily relate with them. At least on a personal level, maybe we can relate with what they're doing and what their intentions are in this story, and that's fantastic. But usually you'll want to make sure that you're able to relate with the protagonist first and foremost and and really have it so that the audience can put themselves in the shoes or that protagonist, because that's what draws them into the story. That's what makes them feel like there actively participating within the narrative. So I'm going in and I'm articulating the outline for the facial features off the front upward view of ease head. And you can see that treason, some very specific views here to present her head in. Just that I can get a nice, wholesome ideas toe what it looks like from each of these primary angles. I want to get a nice understanding as to what the structure of her face is going to be like , where her facial features are going to see and what they're going to appear as. And then, of course, her hair style is, you know, it's quite messy. It's not a neat hair style. It's kind of choppy looking and again, it's good that punk vibe going on. So within these different points of view, that's probably won it going to be one element throughout the close up view of these head design that I'm going to want to try to understand on a fundamental level. I want to get to know its shape and what that shape is going toe appear like, as I turned the head and view it from a multitude of different directions because it is quite complex in the way in which the hair has been styled. So it's important to be able to not just draw it from these particular points of view, but also really understand it on again that fundamental level so that not only can I draw it from these different point of view, but I can turn the head and observe it from any other angle and rule that pistol out accurately. And it's interesting that that is one of the most difficult aspects off these head design here. You would think the face itself is, but really it's not too much again. We're not dealing with any unique proportions here. It's essentially the same proportions as any other female protagonists head would have at least that I would give any other female protagonist. And so all that we need to keep in mind there is to think about whether or not the features placed under the head accurately, you know, are they are their proportion is a proportional relationships between each of the facial features correctly measured out and, of course, being able to draw those facial features themselves, you know, actually being able to draw and I correctly and the nose correctly in the mouth and the way in which he draw these facial features will ultimately come down to your particular taste in style. And you may have very well have other artistic influences that you work off, and you may look at the way in which they depict the highs and noses and mouths, and you know, the overall shape off the head. You might look at the way in which they shade the face, you know, maybe they've got a more stylized aesthetic to the way in which they depict the human head . But you know, ultimately alot of those styles, regardless of going to have a consistent appearance as far as the way in which the facial features a structure like the noise still has to look like a noise. The I still has to look like an eye, and the mouth still needs to look like a mouth for me personally. A lot of my influence came from artists such as Michael Turner, and my work is often compared to Michael Turner's work. Some people compare my work to great carpoolers as well, and I admittedly great. Capulet was one of the first inspirations that I had. He inspired me back when he was working on the Spawn comic book to really get into comic book illustration in the first place. And then, of course, I've got other inspirations like Jim Lee and even a little bit of Ah J. Scott Campbell has influenced the direction that have taken my work in, and I've practiced intentionally being able to draw the eyes, nose, mouth and ears in those specific styles, says I can get familiar with them and a lot of the time That's just flat at copying some of their work and really trying to understand it, because when you copy a reference directly from observation and you do what would be referred to as a study of that particular artist style. Well, if he teach you a lot about the kind of a line work that they use about those shapes that they use for each of the elements throughout their characters, and you can take what you learn from that and begin to incorporate it into your own character designs into your own illustrations off the off the characters within your comic books. And that's really how you develop your own style, funnily enough, by taking influence from a multitude of different artists and then combining them together with a little bit of yourself. Of course, you want to add a little bit of you into your own style, which ultimately just comes from years and years of repetition. You will find that your starches naturally begins to direct itself in its own way, because no matter how much you copy someone else's style, even if you're just copying one of the persons style, you might get really, really good at it. Usually it's not such a good idea to just work from one other person style and never really push it or develop it beyond that. But over time you'll find that you naturally have a way off laying in a line that looks good to you and feels good to you as you're laying it in. And that line will determine the ultimate style and aesthetic that your artwork is going to take on. You'll find that you render in a certain way that feels comfortable to you. Maybe try out a range of different cross hatching techniques, and you stick with the one that works best. You find that you maybe add in tons of shadow into your characters at first, but then you dial it back a little bit and you find that that works a little bit better. And so you stick with it, right? It's all experimentation, seeing what works and feels comfortable to you. Keeping that and throwing out what doesn't feel comfortable to you And what doesn't work Now just redone. Ease. I there, both of them, actually, but done redone both of her eyes, and the reason was because they looked too big. They weren't quite fitting on her head in the right way, for some reason, and it could have been the amount of eyeliner that I placed in around the window of the Iran. The eyelids could have been, ah, the, uh, amount of rendering that I placed in around it as well. But for some reason it was just making her eyes look a little bit bigger than they needed to look, and it was causing her to come across is two. Stylized, at least for my taste, made her look too cartoony, not realistic enough. And I knew that we are creating stylized comic book art here. But at the same time, you're going to find that there's a certain dial that you'll turn back and forth according to your own preferences, and that dialogue will allow you to skew your outworked between a very ultra stylized looking aesthetic and a very realistic one. You know, you've got artists out there like J. Scott Campbell, as I said before, he draws is very, very stylistic Disney looking characters. But then you've got other artists, like Alex Ross again, both calm people goddess. But Alex Ross has a very realistic aesthetic to his work. It's it's ultra realistic. In fact, it's almost photo realistic, so there's a multitude of different styles that you go for and the one that you ultimately pick is really going to come down to your own preferences. There's there's never any right or wrong to the way in which you depict your artwork. You can choose anything you want. And the fun part is is that you simply have to choose what looks best here and what feels right to you. Think about how you want your artwork toe look really consider. It takes some time to meditate upon it, and then, after you've decided or what you want your artwork toe look like what's going to inspire you every day and make you look forward to waking up in and working on your craft. Then you have that direction. You know what you're aiming toward, and as long as you stay on track, eventually you will be able to create the kind of our work that you've always dreamt off creating. But you do need to consider the different aspects that are going to go into that final aesthetic the you desire. You're going to want to consider the kind of a line work that you want your characters to be defined with. Do you want this thin, fine line where, uh, contours that allow you to capture all the subtle details throughout the designs of your characters, Or do you want a thicker outline that gives you a much more stylized, cartoony looking aesthetic? There's no right or wrong between the two of those. You could pick either one, and all that it would come down to is what you personally feel would work best for the kind of artwork that you want to create. How do you choose that? Well, it all comes down to how you wanted to pick the ideas inside your mind. How do you want to present them to the world? You know this sentence styles that are going to be more desirable than others, of course. But you know, this is the kind of thing I asked myself right in the beginning. And honestly, I didn't have to dwell on that question for too long because it was really my inspirations who inspired me to draw in the first place, and because they inspired me so much, I instantly knew exactly how I wanted my artwork toe Look, I wanted it to look just like there's so I studied the kind of line work that they used. I studied the kind of rendering style that they had and how much shadow the included within their work, how they defined the shape of the character in their anatomy and the facial features and what not how they rendered hair, how they articulated the closing of their characters and presented the folds and increases every single aspect, all their artwork. I analyzed on a deep level, and I tried to replicate that as best I could within my own work, and that was in the beginning. Over the years, of course, I've added more and more of myself and of kind of like girl off the crutches that were essentially those artistic influences in the beginning and have really come into my own. But I think that you do need that initial direction just to give you a bit of momentum just to get you rolling somewhat. So now we're working on the outline for ease trench coat, and we're essentially doing what we did for the front three coat of you. The back three court of U N her various head views as friends. The outline is concerned. We're just kind of going over the top there, off that very rough design draft, and we're picking and choosing the lines that we would like to go with for the final presentation. Off ease, design. And sometimes this can be difficult, but I find that you know it. It's actually easier than you think to pick the lines that you want to go with. You don't want to trace over the exact rough sketch that you've drawn upon that you that you've done up for the initial design draft. No, that's nothing idea whatsoever. You kind of you're taking what's there, that initial idea and then through the final ink line, work your re drawing that line in not necessarily exactly over the top of the design dropped, but you're just you're you're taking what you can see from the initial concept from the preliminary sketch, and you're using that to inform the final line work that you're going to depict within the inks. So that's kind of the way in which I think about it. The last thing that you want to do is retrace over the top over the rough sketch and define every single line of the rough sketch in ink. That's not the idea whatsoever, and I think that one of the things that I always used to habitually do when I did go for the Polish penciling approach Teoh inks is that I would always draw exactly over the top and retrace those Polish pencils with the England work. And that led to a lifeless, stiff illustration that didn't really have a whole lot of character going on within it. But when I let go of that and I started to work over the top of the rough draft instead, all of a sudden my ink line work had so much more energy to it. It was really something on its own. It didn't need have that polished pencil blood work there anymore. And I think that that's really interesting, because what artists often find who do trace over the top off their pencil line work with the inks is the pencil loan. Work just always looks so much better. And the reason that it always looks so much better than the inks is because, you know, that was that was really when you're Polish line work had the most amount of energy and character within it. If you retrace over the top of that now, it's going to lose part of it, no matter how good you are thinking. So you have no other choice but to reinvent the final contours with the inks themselves. I don't think that e that published pencils are really going to serve you in a positive way when it comes to comic book illustration or really any form of illustration that requires in tow line work. The best thing that you can do is just stumps straight to the inks right off the bat, especially if you're working digitally. Because if you do mess up and you do make a mistake and you find that you need to redraw that inked outline in in one aspect or another, it doesn't really matter. You can just pull out the eraser tool, and you can erase the area in question that isn't quite working, and he can drop the inks back in over the top. So you never confining yourself whatsoever. You're always able to change things up, especially when it comes to did a lot. Now, if you're thinking traditionally and you're creating an ink illustration using the traditional tool set that you would as an Inca and I don't actually even know what they use traditionally taking comic book illustrations. But because I've never used it, I've really only everything to my work. Using the's digital tool sets within Mangus Studio when photo shop and you know other applications like that. I even experimented with illustrator back in the day. But, you know, honestly, um, if you are working traditionally yet might be a little bit trickier. Uh, I think that most for most artful well, most of the aspects that go into the development of a comic book illustration are beginning to go digital. So the penciling is going digital. The inking is going digital, and so is the coloring. And I don't think that that's a bad thing necessarily. I think the better that you can get a using those digital tools, the more money you're going to save in the long run and the fast you're going to be able to produce your work and fix the mistakes within it. Of course, that, uh, would have otherwise have been a little bit more difficult to fix if you're working traditionally, so that is pretty much it for the ink outline. For a here, you can see that the line work that we've used to go over her design is extremely fine and sin, and that's kind of how you want to keep it. So if you want to capture a similar aesthetic within the incline work of your own character designs than what I would suggest, it's just use the G pen tool within Minga studio. Keep the default settings as is. Make your brush very, very small and work extremely, a lightly. That's the best advice I can give. That's how I go about it. And I heard that it helps you out as well. Try out some of the techniques and tips and advice that we've gone over here in this lesson and see how Ugo good luck. I'll catch you in the next lesson where will drop the shadows in over the top of this line work and really had a bit of contrast to ease design here
10. 09 | Inking The Shadows: all rights. Another, the Leinart is inked in for ease design. I'm going to go in and drop the shadows in all right. So in order to be able to do that effectively, I first have to consider where the light source is going to be positioned in the scene and what direction it's going to be projecting down onto the from and to indicate that light direction of drawn in some arrows. Some three dimensional errors, in fact, which not only show me whether or not the light is projecting down onto the character from the left to the right, but whether or not it's projecting onto her from the front or the back. And then what I'm doing is of created and Neilia above the outline and have cold this layer . The shuttered dropped, and that's because I really am doing somewhat of a draft pass, which will show me whereabouts. I'm going to ink in the final shadows, and I'm kind of keeping the placement of these shadows fairly loose in very much the same way. I kept the design dropped super roughed super Ruffin rudimentary, and the reason that I do that is because I wanna take away shadow and add shudder in as I see fit in order to make sure that I've got the right amounts of shudder in the correct areas, all the design that it needs to be present within and most specifically, those areas are going to be the portions off her outfit that have a black 11 material, which is a good majority of it, pretty much all of it, except for her denim shorts. So this is really about readability and whether or not the shadows as they encompass the forms that they're surrounding I describing them accurately, whether or not the right amount of contrast is present throughout the design as a whole, thanks to the shadows that we've incorporated within it. And so I'm using my eye a lot here. I'm really trying to judge whether or not the shadows are placed in the correct areas off ease, character design and whether or not they're working, whether or not they're helping the design to read better and complimenting it, or whether they're making it more confusing to visually decipher. And you can see just how much contrast incorporating the shadows within the shadow draft alone has already introduced into her design. And that contrast really is something which is going to increase the amount of appeal within the design as a whole because people love contrast. For some reason, it just adds that additional level of interest to outwork when we've got those black and white values complementing one another. And it's interesting because you can literally direct the audiences, experience all of your artwork through the way in which he composes these different values of time, and we will introduce more time to ease design through the rendering stage. But for now, I'm just focused on these shadows now, things to the fact that we've already established the direction, all delight source and from where it shining down onto E from this essentially tells me where the shadows need to be placed. Now. This could be very tricky, with more complex, intricate forms such as the clothing folds throughout, ease costuming. But for more simplified costume assets, such as the cylindrical gloves that we've got wrapping around her forearms and the leggings and her boots, it's quite easy to figure out where the course shadows need to be placed because we're simply looking at the shadow side of the form the side of the form, which is turning away from the light source and falling into shadow in order to place the core shadows in order to figure out where they need to go. And, of course, in the lightest portions old that former just going to leave that white for now. Yes, we will create somewhat of a blend later on with the rendering between those black and white values. Buttle that matters at this point in time is those course shadows because their placement will direct where the rendering needs to be incorporated. As for the more complex forms concerning the folds within her top, for example, well, this is where things get a little bit tricky, because here we need to focus not just on the secondary forms that are created by the folds of the clothing, but also the underlying major forms that the clothing is wrapping around. And so we kind of as a priority trying to first informers get those underlying forms to read once they read accurately and weaken. Tell that the costuming is actually being worn by her body and sort of just bean, you know, flat and pasted on top of like some kind of two dimensional sticker once lose major forms of reading. Then the next task is to articulate the shadows off the secondary forms that are going to be wrapping around the major surface forms below. And so it's kind of a dance off contrast and form there and trying to make sure that the secondary form kind of allows us to depict what those underlying forms are going to be. The underlying forms that they're wrapping around the top off, and they really should conform to those major forms below, because, really, the folds are just surface details on top of those major primary forms that make up the body and honestly, when it comes to material, the reason as to why those major forms of going to show through from below is because the material and really any form of drapery is going to conform. Tow it. It's just a material that really has a knack for conforming to the surface off. Whatever it is it's covering. But of course, you get wrinkles, and he increases within that material because it is so thin. So the very same reason as to why it wraps so closely around the underlying forms that are wearing it is the same reason that it is so wrinkly and full of creases because it's it's very thin, extremely thin a lot of the time. And of course you will get depending on the clothing item that you're dealing with varying levels of sickness. But now case the kind of costuming that are presented here for a is it's a It's a somewhat thick material. It's supposed to be little bits, so they will be more thickness to it and say cotton. But at the same time, you can see that it's not super, super thick and heavy. It's actually, you know, somewhat thin and easily maneuverable, which is important for ease design because she is somebody who will find herself in various conflicts against the bad guys. And she'll need that maneuverability available to her in order to execute her fighting moves and to maintain her ability to remain agile and fast when she's engaging with the enemy. So I'm thinking about these things on a multitude of different levels. It's not just the technical execution of the artwork itself that really makes it. It's the idea that it's presenting overall, and whether or not it makes sense. Because if the kind of clothing I've picked for a doesn't quite makes sense for the kind of character she's supposed to be, then there's a disconnect. It doesn't quite work out. And when you have that disconnect and really results in a floor design, that doesn't make a whole lot of sense, it kind of defeats the whole purpose of coming up with the design in the first place. A design must follow function. It must work and make sense. Why? Because if it doesn't, then it won't be believable. People won't be bored in and a believable characters precisely what creates that engagement , that level of immersion, that all important ability to relate with that character? If they design doesn't make sense, they just won't seem riel. So for the most part, we've got the shadow draft placed in over the top of the final line work that we did up in the previous listen and now I'm kind of going in anima racing back portions over just to make sure on the front three core of you that the folds and the creases within her top and this shadows that are helping to articulate them makes sense that it looks correct, because I really want to make sure that you know that tightness of the material around the breast there is presented in the right way. I want to make sure that the thickness of the material is coming across, because if it looks thinner or thicker than it's supposed to be, then that's not going to work out well. And as the underlying forms that it's covering aren't really coming through, then that's also not going to work for me. So again, these things do need to be considered so that you're able to come up with a convincing looking design that you're not only happy with, but also that the audience is going to be bought into the more they buy into your character , the more the characters are going to stay with them and the more memorable your character will be Now that doesn't necessarily mean that your character has to be ultra realistic or logically work. I mean, it helps if it does, but sometimes you know if you're taking a more you know, stylized, wacky looking character. Let's say, for example, that. You know, you wanted to really go for more of a cartoon type character. But why did cartoons work so well? You know, for example, the Simpsons Air extremely unrealistic. But why do they work? Why are they still relatable? Well, again, they work because within the confines, off the narrative and the context that they've been developed in they work. So within The Simpsons world, every single other person is also conveyed in the same style with same in a while. Most same color, right? You know, the classic yellow for The Simpsons is probably the most memorable aspect about them. You know, they will have their eyes drawn in the same way. For the most part, there's a few variations there, but even those variations are consistent. So when it comes to your comical card, well, really, as long as your character design is consistent within the world that you're designing them for, that's totally fine. You know, you could be designing a character that is, you know, an alien, for example, and on that particular characters planet. Everyone is a blue and has forearms instead of two. And that would be totally fine because that would make sense within the context of the narrative that you're designing them for, sir. You know, it's a little bit of it's something that comes into play in a big way, and it's the reason as to why it's important to really have its solid ideas to who your character, Aries and who they're going to be. No, what their biography entails, kind of before you even go into the design phase. Okay, so we've got the shadow draft down that's complete. It's ready to go. And so the next step is to actually think it out, and you'll notice that the way in which I approach the inking, all the shadows. And just so you know, I'm thinking in the shadows and a completely new layer here. So the lineup is separate on a completely different layer, and the shadow is also separate, so I can turn those on and off By getting to change them. I can erase the shadows without erasing the line on. So I'm working in a nondestructive. Many here on a multitude of different players that together make up the whole of the design , and it's a good way toe work, and one that I would highly suggest, because it helps you to. If you make a mistake at one point throughout the production process over your character design, it allows you to go back and work on that one aspect. It allows you to re tweak it without affecting everything that you've already done. So try to if he can compartmentalize the various parts of your illustration into separate layers, and that will really help to gain, allow you to avoid the trap off, making everything on one layer and really preventing yourself, trapping us open away from being able to go back and work on the individual components of your character design separately. So the way in which I approach the inking of the shadows is all outline their bounding contours first, and the reason that I do that is because I want to give them a nice solid shape before I fill them in. I want to make sure that their silhouette is strong and impactful, and sometimes I'll even exaggerate the shape of the shadows just to increase the amount of visual impact that they're going tohave and when he can keep them shop and you can make their shapes purposeful looking that's really going to add to the overall quality and impact that your illustration is going toe have. So that's just the way that I work. I find it. It's kind of difficult for me to do it the other way where I'm kind of just, you know, filling in the shadows. And, ah, you know, I'm not really filling them in within the confines, all the shape that I've articulated and defined for them in the first place. I'm just kind of painting them out. That usually doesn't lead to a solar looking shadow that has the additional level off solidarity. That a shadow which has been outlined usually has, at least for me. And it's also kind of an optimized way of working as well, because if you are collaborating with another team of artists, say, for example, are you Have you say that, for example, urine, Inca, and you want to kind of save time by just letting someone else spot the blacks for you, which is essentially the process we're going through here as we feel in the shadows with black ink, you can just outline the shadows and let them take care of it then, and they know exactly you know where those shadows need to be placed in, and you can just take care off, making sure each of those shadows has a strong outline, a strong silhouette that's defining them. But it does ultimately lead, regardless to a much more impactful presentation for your character designs. So I'd highly recommend at least trying that out just to see if it works for you now only outlining the shadow very lightly. I'm not concerned with making sure that it's got a line weight or anything like that. It doesn't really need them. But what I'm doing here is I'm kind of going in. I'm adding some additional shadows in underneath her denim shorts there just to give them some lift and additional depth. And really, that's what shadows introduce to your character designs. They actually allow you to make your presentation look more three dimensional, because those shadows are falling around the forms of the characters. So they're depicting that form was an additional level off clarity, which is absolutely excellent. The more dimension you can incorporate into your character design, the better. That's what comic book illustration especially, is all about maximum impact. And a lot of that impact is going to come from your ability to make your work pop as much as possible. Three dimensionally to make them look like they could walk right over the page rather than being a flat, two dimensional, lifeless looking cut out of a character. Which would essentially be the alternative if you weren't able to properly present them in the full three D context that you can see me presenting a here. So that's something which is worth practicing and contemplating as well, Really asking yourself or hey, how can I add even more depth to my character design, especially as you get toward the finish line? And you can see here not only with the drawing in my building, the character design up in passes, you know, starting with that initial foundation than the design draft, then the ink outline, but eventually breaking the inks up into separate passes as well. That helps me to keep my process organized. It helps me to figure out where I am at any one point in time throughout the process, so that I can predict roughly how much more time I'm going to be spending on this illustration exceptionally important when it comes to doing up work for a client or meeting a deadline, whether it be for a comic book company that you're working with or any other entertainment studio, or if you're working for yourself, it's good to know how long things are going to take you and for me, by separating each and every part of the process and working on it one at a time. I'm able to predict that much more accurately, and it helps me to have some level of four side as well as to what I'm going to be doing next, so that if I take a break, I can keep up with myself. I know where I need toe attend when I go back to the drawing board, so to speak, and often times I will take a break. For example, you know I'm doing the shadows here for a Well, maybe, oh outlined will the shadows first, and then I'll feel in the blacks after taking a small break in between. Well, maybe I'll just get them all that in one hit and then in between placing in the shadows for the front 3/4 view and the back three court of you are Take another break. You know, maybe I'll have a coffee or I'll go for a walk and stretch my legs, which, as a artist who is sitting down all the time, is not a bad idea. It's very important to try to exercise when and where you can as you're working, usually are split my day up into two separate portions. I'll have the morning where I'll get a little bit of work done. And then I've got the afternoon where all complete that work. But in between, usually I'll hit the gym and I'll try to, you know, move my body around a little bit and do a few strength exercises just to make sure that physically are not being too taxed by the amount of time I'm sitting down at the desk and working on my illustrations. So if you can do that for yourself, you'll find that you have a little bit more longevity when it comes to producing your artwork. And I got to tell you one of the worst experiences that I ever had was back when I was a uni, and I needed to get this project done for an assignment that I'd been working on. And I was a very ambitious student. This particular project was for a video game that I'd created, and I'd wanted to do have a bunch of character design concepts for it, very similar to what you're seeing me do up here for. E and I worked all night on these concepts. I did up a bunch of the my inked, um, I colored them and everything. And you know what happened? I ended up working so much on that project for lunch such a long an extended period of time without any breaks in between that I ended up getting this condition within my wrist called repetitive strain injury, which is where you overuse your Risch risk for an extended period of time. It's almost like the onset of carpal tunnel, though I'm lucky enough that I didn't end up getting that. I kind of decided that. Hey, this wasn't a good idea from getting rs. I repetitive. Strange injury already strain injury already. Um, I should probably cut back a little bit and take a female breaks because this isn't good. If I want to be a comical goddess or any artist at all. Then I need to make sure that I'm getting my work done in reasonable bursts and not just sitting there for a long period of time without any breaks in between, because that's going to hurt you physically. And so you know, you wanna also in the same way make sure that your keeping your posture in check that your chair is at the right height, that you know, you're monitoring how much you're using your wrist in comparison to how much you using your elbow and that you're ensuring that Bo is the kind of helping out of the other in order to make sure that you're able to maintain your physical well being as you work on your arm. But when I did get repetitive strain, injury wanted ended up happening, and this was the worst part of all is that I had to stop drawing for like, three months, and that was horrible because not only did that set me back within my assignments for school, but I loved drawing, and I didn't want a full behind. This was at a point within my autistic development where I was really determined to get better. And because I couldn't draw, I couldn't practice. And so I couldn't improve, which was, you know, just the worst feeling in the whole wide world. So you can see that here as I work on the back three court of U of o v. I'm doing the exact same thing. I'm outlining the shadows and I'm feeling them in with Black as I go now. I could go about this in a multitude of different ways. I could just outline ALS the shadows at once throughout the entire design and then fill in the blacks. But I'm kind of doing it in small chunks. And I find that if you conduce things in small chunks as you work, it kind of makes your experience working on your artwork a little less intimidating and also less taxing as well. So it's something which is worth considering when it comes to how you approach your artwork in the first place. You know, if you think off it as a whole instead of the individual little components that make it up , are you going to be, you know, too intimidated to work on it? Is that going to turn you off of it and cause you to procrastinate in comparison to If you're only working on a first, say, you know a small trunk of time and you know that in the next half a Naylor all you've got to focus on is outlining the shadows off the character and then filling them in rather than , you know, thinking about whether or not you're going to be able to get the entire character a inked and colored up by the end of the day. If you can do it in small bits and pieces one step at a time, it helps you to prevent yourself becoming overwhelmed. And thus you enjoy the process a little bit better and in the long run probably get more done as a result anyway, because you don't put it off for us long. You know, it's just a small task. It's one small chunk of the process out of the hole, and so in your mind that's going to allow you to believe that you can get it done, you know, maybe in half on hour, maybe within an hour, and that particular goal will have been completed, you'll be that much closer to the end, and that will push you and inspire you to progress with it to keep on going with it. Whereas if you sit yourself a huge, UNR realistic goal and you know it's something like completing your entire character and all the views for the character that I say, for example, I've got E here and I need to have set the task to complete a front view, have back view and all the head views and color them up in a single day, which maybe I could do. But if I tell myself that I'm gonna do that by the end of the day and I don't achieve it, that's going to be incredibly discouraging for me in comparison to. Maybe instead I go ahead and I set little goals up for myself throughout the day. Maybe in the morning, I tell myself, Hey, you know what? I'm going to get the outline for the character inked in after lunch. I'm going to get the shadow is put in Great, you know, if I get to lunch and I've completed the outline awesome, I feel accomplished. That feels good to May, right, and then I go ahead and I feel the shadows in boom by the afternoon shadows had done inks of pretty much finished. Then maybe I render it out in the evening. Great. You know, I felt accomplished throughout the entire day. And my ultimate goal, which was maybe to get the inks done, has successfully bean reached. And when you're encourage like that, three for feeling your own goals, the realistic goals that you set for yourself, it pushes you further. It helps you to remain inspired, to remain pumped up and ready to tackle the next task at hand. But if you get discouraged because you know completing your goals, and I've been through this so much because I was always somebody who overestimated how much I could get done because I wanted to get it done, who doesn't? Who doesn't want to get their work done in a minimal amount of time and and do, as much of it is possible? We all do. But then, if you set those goals for yourself and they're so big that you just can't achieve them realistically, there's nothing. There's no worse feeling than that. It it leaves you feeling miserable at the end of the day, and that truly does. I felt absolutely miserable when I couldn't complete my goals, and I really felt discouraged. I felt like a failure as an artist, and that certainly didn't want to make me keep on pursuing it. Luckily, I was driven enough to continue pushing forward, and you re a value waiting the way in which I thought, in which I thought about my artwork and ah, the way in which I was going about it. Some feeling in the shadows for ease Boots here, and you can see that they look so slick and shiny with those shadows implemented into their design, and it really does bring across the kind of material that they're made off. So this is one other thing to keep in mind. You'll notice that although we have Atanas shudder throughout the black leather portions, all of these costume design we have a very minimalist shadow amount of shadow throughout her body, the exposed areas off her skin. In fact, we have no shadows in these areas, and if we look at her denim shorts, it's pretty much the same deal there as well. We have a little bit of rendering here and there, but a very minimal amount of sick black shadow. And the reason for that is because her skin is simply a lot of color than the black 11 material that have boots and gloves and top and leggings A made off. And because of that, they're going to have a significantly DACA turn and g to the fact that they, ah, a reflective leather material. You know, I'm thinking of this is kind of like a like a leather. Very, very reflective bounces like straight off of it. Well, that's also going to change the way in which these shadows are placed onto the outfit anyway. So as a result, we need to convey these a lower dark it times and the materials that we're drawing the that we're implementing these tones in on top off in the correct way, we need to reflect that through the shadows and the rendering that we're going to be placing in on top all the lineup. And so, in contrast, we want to see that. Okay, yes, the skin is lighter. And yes, the costume elements of the made of black leather a much much DACA and they're reflecting light in very different ways. You know, skin isn't quite as reflective as black leather, depending on the kind of liva that you're dealing with. And so you all of these characteristics, all the materials that are presented throughout your character design really will be conveyed through the way in which you play shadow en cross hatching in order to reach those times in order to have those tones implemented and depicted within the character design. And if you can do that effectively than your character will look much more interesting because of those additional levels of contrast between the different materials throughout. The design and contrast can come through not just in the values, the black and white values that are present within the character design, but also within the colors as well, in the way that different colors contrast off of one another, which we will, of course, get into in the coloring stage. But for now, it's just black and white Leinart, and you can see just how much contrast and visual appeal these shadows alone have introduced into ease design. It's so much more impactful it jumps off of the page at you, and it's something which, when you're thinking about how you want to compose the design of your character, it's worth considering whereabouts. Throughout the design. You're going tohave doctor materials and darker tones and darker values where you're going to have lighter materials, a lot of values and lighter tones, and how they will be composed together and broken up by one another in order to create a more interesting and visually appealing presentation for the design itself. Because he can see how those dock areas throughout these design catch your eye almost straight away. And as the character moves from Penalty Penhall and say a comic book just as an example, your I will also catch these same areas to the way in which we design. A here will impact the way in which she is depicted later on them, the track and whatever production she's going to be used in, some working on the last head here and placing in the shadows for red. You can see that at the back of her hair we got this nice, thick black turn that kind of separates it from the rest of her hair style. And again, what's that creating that's creating a nice amount of contrast here for us to work with and you'll also notice is well that the shadow have outlined around the color. That's a nice example as to why, you know, I really try to take the time to create a strong silhouette, a strong contour to encompass it. And you can see that once it's filled, then how shop that looks, even though have just erased most of it. Um, but again, you know, sometimes shadows is need to be cut backers and not going toe work in the way you intentionally meant for them toe work. So that completes the shadowing portion all the inks again. I heard that you learned a lot and took away Aton of value from this lesson, every single aspect of your character design has a number of steps to it within the process . And in this particular portion, off the inking process we went over the shadows and even the shadows themselves have a process to them where we dropped them up first. Then we outlined the shadows within that draft and fill the men remember those steps and that should really help you out. I have that you enjoyed this lesson and that you found it useful. Let's jump into the next one
11. 10 | Rendering With Cross Hatches: All right, so now here we go with the rendering. Now, firstly, what am I talking about? When I referred to rendering in the comic book art Sense Well, rendering is really just a form of shading, and because we're dealing with just black and white value here with the inks, that shading will be composed with a Siri's off hatches. Some of those hatches will also be cross hatches in order to smooth out the blend between the shadows and the highlights and to create more contrast between those two values. But essentially, ah, lot of the hatching that will be placing in here to shade the character will be primarily serving the purpose off, describing the forms, materials and textures throughout the characters design and depending on the material or texture that we're dealing with concerning a particular form the arrangement off that hatching how dense leap act they are and to what degree they're being put around, the form, their length there, sickness. That's all going to be determined by those materials and textures that we're trying to depict. And the idea is to try to depict them as accurately as possible so that they're coming across in the correct way. We're trying to suggest certain materials in Texas throughout the character. Now, for the most part, the rendering is really going to reside and again by rendering. I'm talking about the cross hatches that we're going to be using to shade these forms into to pick the various materials throughout these design here. Most of that rendering is going to reside throughout her costuming assets. So within the let the black leather top that she's wearing and the gloves and the boots and her leggings and ulcer around her denim shorts. And you can see me placing in some cross hatches there just to describe the flow of the folds and the creases throughout that material. Now the blending between the pure black values and the pure white values across the dark, a leather materials off her costume are going to be fairly stopped. There's going to be a larger amount of contrast that the blend won't be smooth and gradual . It'll transition quite rapidly from black toe white. We're only creating a little bit of a Grady int there on. The reason for that is because the material that we're dealing with is highly reflective it's not a matte material, and because it is more shiny, we're going to see less of a blended transition between the shadows and the highlights. So this is what I mean when I'm talking about how the materials throughout the characters designed are really going to determine how we go about placing this hatching into and around the forms that we're working with, because it is the overlapping materials that are going to significantly determine how we approach the rendering process. Now I am adding a few more details here to the belly off E as we work some very subtle rendering, and you can see how vory faint those lines are. And it's because we don't need a whole lot of detail there to describe her body, the exposed areas off skin throughout her design. And if we were to add in an over abundance of rendering into those exposed areas of flesh, what we had tend to see happen to ease design, especially because she is a female character, is her skin would begin to look blemished. It had very quickly start to appear over detailed, and that is something that we greatly want to avoid when it comes to drawing comic book women were dealing with a stylized medium here, and so the way in which we present the various aspects, all the character really does count and can affect the overall finished presentation all their design and specifically concerning the body of the character where we're seeing the exposed areas of skin. We want to try to keep that fairly bare. We want a minimum amount of detail in a minimum amount of rendering their because he is what happens if we start to over detail those exposed areas of flesh again. The skin is going toe blemished, but it's also going toe appear to overly defined, especially if we start to articulate the muscles to too great of an extent. She'll look very, very gaunt. Her anatomy will be very ripped. It'll be a low amount of body fat there, and, you know, women are supposed to look in general. If you're talking about the idealized female character, they're supposed to look soft. They have somewhat of a a soft complexion to them, especially in comparison to a male character, and that just seems to work quite well when it comes to the more stylized representation off characters. When we're talking about men and women and the differences between the two, it just looks more appealing when we're talking about a female character. And so we're going to keep the detail within the exposed areas of ease body to a minimum, leaving just enough there to define the primary areas of anatomy. And even then, we want to leave most of that up to the outside bounding contour that is really outlining the arm. So that shape that the outside contour is describing pretty much informs whatever is going on on the interior structure of the arm, even though there's nothing visible they, even though we haven't used any rendering whatsoever to the picked those muscles, there's enough visual information there for the audience or whoever is looking at this character designed to fill in the gaps. And that's important because we want to give the design space to breathe. We just referring back to the way in which we can use contrast to create a more readable design. Well, he wising a great example of that. It is in those areas of exposed skin that we're able to ease up a little bit and let the eyes rest on those areas without creating this congested mess of detail. And so the Eiken travel throughout the design, rest at those points throughout it and work its way into the more complex, intricate areas off the character where we see her costume assets. And again, most off the cross hatching and the details are going to reside in those areas because we're also dealing, remember with a much darker material. So the cross hatches and the density and the size at which they're going to be placed in low is the overall tone of that particular design asset for the costuming costuming asset, I should say for the design. And so we want to try to work with that. We want to think about the tones that these cross hatches are going to be creating and what we're really trying to go for when it comes to the finished representation off the character. You know, how light do we want ese skin to appear in comparison in direct contrast to the costume assets that she's wearing around her body, and we need to use the shading strategically in order to be able to get that to across to the viewer using just black and white value. A learn, sir, Every little detail, every little stroke that you place in every crosshatch is going to somewhat lower the area of the format, which it's being placed in terms of value and turn the areas in which there's no details whatsoever, where it's just left as basically pure white. That's going to give the impression that we're looking at a light attire alighted area of the form. So that's pretty much the general rule is that you want to think about when it comes to the placement of the hatching. They can see me here working on the first head shot that we've done up for either 3/4 portrait that we've got there and what I'm doing before. I've even really gotten into the cross hatching. I am starting to transition into it now, but you'll notice that before I got into it, I added in the line, waits throughout her hair just to give it more definition and to break it up a bit. We really want to clarify the style, all the hair and to make it clear to the viewer exactly how the layers are composed and what hair clumps air in front of others. We want to create depth within the hair, and the rendering is really allowing us to emphasize that depth, because you'll notice that the underlying layers of hair actually have a higher amount of hatches that have been placed in to push them back further. To darken them up and make them appear is though there further back than the overlapping layers of hair that are sitting on top. And again, that terminal contrast is precisely what allows us to produce an additional level of depth within the character design. So this is something that I'm constantly thinking about is how can I make my characters look more three dimensional, knowing that within my arsenal of tools that I've got to work with in order to achieve that , that I've got rendering and turn and contrast to be able to pull it off in a convincing way that looks visually compelling. So same deal here with the second head shot where we're looking at ease head straight on from the front, a little bit lower, so we're looking up out of the I'm laying in the line, waits throughout the hair to emphasize it's style and to give it some additional definition before I start to shade it. And that for me, just hopes me to make sense of exactly how her hair style is composed and the kind of shapes that we're dealing with because, as I said in the previous video, when you start to incorporate line wakes within your work, they can really lend to the light direction and suggested they can also create depth, and they can emphasize key areas of focus within the design. So in this particular circumstance, the way in which I'm using them is just to help me. One emphasize how the hair is composed and to to give the layering all that hair a little bit of death while also keeping in mind a light direction. So the line waits here, really fulfilling all three purposes that they serve, and then over the top of that, we start to add in the rendering. And as you'll see for the most part, there's not a whole lot of hatching that was required to fill in the details for the face. That's pretty much left as is, and it looks fantastic because of that. If I was to shade in East cheekbones, for example, and her eyelids and and start to, you know, articulate the underlying structure of her face on the surface to a greater degree of definition, she would look extremely going, maybe even more masculine than I'm intending her to be. And it simply wouldn't look asses ecstatically pleasing as just leaving that detail out. So sometimes the rule applies that less is much more, especially when it comes to rendering comic book styled women. So now I'm adding in some details around her neck just to articulate some of the primary muscle groups around it. And I'm doing that according to the light. So when you're laying in this rendering, really, you want to be keeping a few things in mind where the light sources in the scene, and also the forms that you're dealing with, along with the materials and the level of turn that you want to present them within and keeping those things in mind what you're then able to do is place the hatches in a way that helps the overall design read accurately. That helps lose materials to read correctly because they're informing where you're going to place that next hatch. And so, in general, on the darker side of the character, what you're going to see throughout those various costume assets and throughout her anatomy throughout the hairstyle is a greater level off density for those hatches. And the reason for that is because that is the dark side of these elements, where the light is less intense, where the form is turning away from it, and it's just inevitably going to have a lower tone. Because of that, we're suggesting that shading that's going to be incorporated into those elements as a result of them turning away from the light and the more hatches that we place in the lower that tone is going to go now. When it comes to placing these hatches in on a technical level within mega studio, you'll notice that the very, very fine an intricate and you might have thought before watching this demonstration that in order to get them drawn in there, I would have had a zoomed in super close in order to get them drawn in. But that's not what's happening here. You'll see that I'm actually working from quite a distance. So then how do I get them that fine? Well, I'm just using an extremely small brush size for the G pen, which is still what I'm using. Same settings. The only thing that's changed, if anything at all, is just the brush size, and it is absolutely tiny. You might even be having trouble seeing it on the screen here as I lay those hatches in. But the other thing that I most sir adjusting as I draw those hatches in the amount of pressure them applying. So if I want a super thin, very fine, subtle hatch, then go take the pressure off a press less hard as I drawing that next stroke. And that results in a much faint a line in a thin line and so combined when you're taking the pressure off of your brush when you're taking the pressure off of your stylist. As you draw the line in and the smaller that brush size is, the light of the line is going to be. Of course, in contrast to that, if you start pressing down harder on your stylus as you ink, you're going to find that the line thickens up and it'll thicken up even more if you increase the size of the brush that you're working with again. I simply use the bracket keys on my keyboard on the fly as I work in order to adjust the size of the brush. And really not. It's become a habit of mind just to do that. Now I don't even have to think about it. I just adjust the size of that brush depending on the line that I need to draw down, and I do it very, very quickly. I do it on the fly essentially, and that's where keyboard shortcuts can really become. Valuable is they just speed up your process and they help you to learn the habitual shortcuts. All the tools that you use, the more so that you can save time. You don't have to go into the settings. You can just kind of hit that key, and that leaves you more room to think about what it is you're actually trying to achieve with the illustration as you develop it. So just place my signature in there and ah, this pretty much kind of wraps up. For the most part, the rendering off these full body. 3/4 view from the front, the back and then the head views that have done up to the right hand side of the canvas there. But what we forgot in the last lesson is to place in the shadows off the trenchcoat that she's going to be wearing over the top off her body. So now we're pretty much repeating that same process for the shadowing we're going in. We've created a brand new layer for the Shadow Draft, and now I'm dropping in the shadows around a trench coat and trying to get the various forms at a oh that underneath it, to read on top of the surface of that trench coat, while also at the same time, trying to describe the much thicker wrinkles increases within the trench coat material itself because it is a thick a court. So we're going to see it much, much more as as a result, we're going to see those folds increase has become much more obvious. And so that's something that I'm trying to depict in a way that is going to make sense to the audience, especially from a distance. You really want to make sure that as you're working every shadow you place in every bit of rendering that you used to describe the forms and the surface off the asset that you're illustrating. It needs toe make sense from a distance. It needs toe. Look as though those forms air coming across in a clear way when you zoom back out, because this is one of the traps that you can fall into if you are working clothes and why I try to avoid it most of the time is that when your working clothes she can't really see whether or not the illustration as a whole is going to read correctly. And so it's much better, much wiser to work from a distance, especially in these initial drafting stages. Because at least if you got the shadows dropped in, you can kind of see how they're coming together and remain confident that even when you zoom in to articulate their final outlining to fill them in, you know, is that the overall composition that you've got them incorporated into the in this case, the jacket. It'll work, and it'll it'll read correctly. Alternatively, if you're working inclusion using back at a lot of the time you're going to find that without the ability to see how old of what you're incorporating into the illustration is coming together as that. It it's simply might shock you that it's not coming together in the way that you thought it was going to be coming together. And this happened to me so much in the beginning, I would be working for hours. I'd be zoomed in super close, incorporating all of this intricate detail. And you can probably tell as you watch this demonstration just how much I love detail and you know it. Zoom back out. And what do you know, all of a sudden, the shadows and the amount of shadow, I would say the dispersion of the shadow and the rendering just didn't make a whole lot of sense. Yes, it worked in the one little area that I was zoomed in on. That's fantastic. But when I zoomed out, that one little area that I was working on didn't quite fit into the hole. So what's wise is again to make sure that you're working from a distance and at least for the draft, because the draft will provide a map for you to continue along the correct path. Even if you are zoomed in, it will give you enough their toe work upon. And you know that way. What if you're in doubt and you've been working on top of the draft, but then you need to start adding in the rendering. For example, you can kind of zoom back out and just check whether or not what you've done so far is coming together correctly. And even if you don't have a draft, you can do the same thing. You can kind of just work bit by bit on small sections of the illustration if you need to. But again, I'd really suggest just practicing, working with a smaller brush. And I'll write her pressure in order to get those more intricate lions incorporated into your illustrations. Because if you can master that, you also find that you're able to finish thumb up much more quickly as well. Your ableto capture the amount of detail that you're looking for. You're able to make sure that all that detail when all this said and done, is coming together to give the overall illustration a greater level of readability, and you're able to finish it much more quickly, I would say in half the amount of time. If you're zoomed out at, say, it would say you're working a 25% where you're going to finish it twice as fast. And if you resumed in 50%. If that makes sense because you've got twice as far to draw out each line and when you can optimize your process in that way again, every portion off your workflow that you can optimize is going to be of a great benefit to you in the long run. It might be tricky at the start, but if you can work on it and you can practice it and you can get past those points of uncomfortableness, you'll find that it really does contribute to your overall development. As a comic book artist, you're able to get things done faster. You're able to see it with a much larger view of how your illustrations come together. And it's just something that I would would highly promote that if you can optimize your process, that means in turn that you're able to produce a greater amount of work. And how amazing is that now? Here is a great example off, where I'm trying to get the underlying forms to come through. On top of the trench coat, you can see in the back view there how I've tried to indicate the underlying form off her bottom through the trench coat. So and I've done that by strategically placing the shadows around that underlying form but still kind of blending it into the trajectory, all the material as it wraps around that lowest section off her body. Now, of course, around the waist, we see much more detail as friars, the shadows a concerned just because there's more creases and folds in that section as the material crumples up around the belt. And once the shadow draft is complete, we're going in over the top of it and outlining the shadows just as before and filling them in as we go. And it's pretty much the exact same process. So what you'll find when it comes to designing your own comical characters or creating any sort off comic book illustration. Once you become familiar with the few parts of the process that are repeatable and that you'll need to repeat in order to finish the complete illustration, for example, here we're going through the same process as before, or outlining that shadow and filling it in. Once you learn that particular process for incorporating shadows into your ink, come people characters. Well, then you can move on to the next thing. And maybe that next thing is working on your cross hatching technique. Well, what really does it take to effectively crosshatch a character and a shaded accurately? Well, honestly, it's. There's a few challenges ahead of you. You've gotta work on plate way to place the cross hatches, then the sickness of those close such is the distance between them. And then whether or not you're even going tohave cross hatches, maybe they're just hatches and the kind of density that you'll need toe draw them in A. In order to achieve that various tones that you might be after. But once you learn how to do that, you take it with you and repeat it for the next character illustration. So there's various processes that go into any workflow. That one she learned as simply repeatable. And the great thing about it is that the more you repeat that particular process, the better you're going to get at it until you've taken all of these different aspects. Oh, the comic book our production work for and you've really mastered each and every single one just through that repetition. So you know, again, line, which would be another one, you know, practicing your own ways, getting good at them, practicing his shadow is mastering them. And then, of course, the rendering. And you know, if you want to get into the coloring than you can learn how to do that and what that'll entails, which we will be going over here for a. What I'm saying to you is, it doesn't have to be that hard, really. At the end of the day, you're just learning a few a few things, and once you can master lose few things, he can simply repeat them. A lot of the difficulty and the challenges come from the considerations that you need to make. It's not that hard toe actually draw in the shadows, as in this example, it's not that hard to draw in the rendering. What's difficult is knowing where to place it and to what degree it should be placed. But once, once you know how to at least get the technical stuff out of the way. The strategy is really what you want to focus on, and that is something that I battle with still to this day. You know, sometimes I nail it. Other times I don't I wonder why the heck you know it's a beautiful shadow. Maybe that I placed in and maybe the shape is great and you know it works well in some aspects. But I'll take a look, and I wonder, why did I place it there? It doesn't make sense. Or maybe I'll find that I placed too much shadow onto a particular costume element, and it's taken down the tone and overall value off that particular asset to a lower darkness that I wanted it to be at. So you have to kind of think about what it is you're doing and remain conscious not necessarily on the technical execution, but more on the subject matter that you're trying to depict. Because rendering and shadows and line weights, these air oldest tools and knowing and understanding how the tool works isn't necessarily the hardest part. Using it in the right way is that is by far the most difficult aspect of executing your comic book illustrations. You can see here that I'm going in and again outlining those shadows, filling them in. We got a few Long shadow is here. Luckily, we can kind of fill them in and just needn up the outline there for them. But you'll notice just what any impact these shadows and incorporating them has made to the overall presentation off her trenchcoat. And you can see there that I'm just taking a good look at exactly how that trench Kurt is appearing when it's over, laid on top of the rest of these designed the So Now it's time to render out the trench curdle. Got the shadows in From here on out. All we need to do is going by those shadows and using them as a guide. Incorporate the hatching that's going to help to describe the various forms throughout this trench. Kurt. Now, the way in which these forms are depicted a going to be influenced to a higher degree by the folds of the fabric. Then we saw in the underlying design that the trench coat is going to be worn around. The reason for that is again because it is a thicker material. So although that figure material will conform generally to the underlying body that it's being worn by, there's still going to be a significant Siris of forms that come about ju just to the the weight of that material and the way in which it collapses against itself the way in which it scrunches up. And so it has. It's a little bit more difficult here because the way in which you blend the surface forms and the underlying forms together from material to material is going to vary depending on the material that you're dealing with. And I think that's really what makes comic book illustration and really any form of illustration. The most difficult is that there's never one way of doing anything. You kind of have to, you know, do the best you can and become comfortable with the things that you draw most commonly and no, and have faith and trust in yourself that when you do come up against something that you're less familiar with, that you have enough understanding all the tools at your disposal to work your way through it and to get past it and to maybe learn something new, and it is a constant learning process as you can see him erasing all those hatches that I just placed in cause they weren't quite describing the form or the time that I was aiming for in the correct way. So sometimes you just gotta go back to the drawing board and have another go, and I think knowing that that's okay is extremely important. You don't have to get down the perfect line every single time. You don't have to draw out the entire design in one fell swoop. It's going to be a process of trial and error most of the time, even for more experienced artists. I know that for me again. As I said, this is still the case, and that's kind of what keeps me immersed in the art of comic book illustration. That's what keeps me wanting to do. More of it is because I'm always learning something new. I'm aways experimenting, and I think that that intrigue and curiosity as to what I'm going to come up with next is really what keeps me so hawked. So we're going around the sleeve here and adding in some more hatches, trying to describe the form and figure out what direction those hatches need to be running in in order to most effectively be able to do that. Sometimes Ole in some hatches and their work really well. It'll turn out to be the right decision I made toe lay them in in a specific way most of the time. Maybe no. Most of the time, but half the time they won't work out well and I'll have to erase them back and try something new. Often times I don't know exactly what's going toe work best, unfortunately, and in this case you can see I'm adding in a new shadows. You know, I'm jumping a few steps back now on. It's not even just a case of erasing that hatching and putting it back in. I'm actually redirecting some of those shadows to get a better read on the forms within the material that I'm working with here and then well, plays back in the hatching. But the point is is that you never raised this hatching so many times now, and it just hasn't been describing the forms that I'm trying to represent in the way that I want to represent them, so it's not a big deal. And I think that's why it's important to try to take your ego out of your work. Don't ASSOCIATE. You're in self worth to the outcome off your comic book illustrations so much you know these illustrations. Fine as is you can only do the best that you conduce at any one point in time, depending on your level of skill. Yes, try your hardest. Do the best that you possibly can, but know that it doesn't mean that you're any less of an artist. If it doesn't quite turn out the way that you wanted it to turn out, you're just you try better next time or along the way you know you'll erasing your readjust as required in order to reach the outcome that you're after. But don't beat yourself up too much. You know it's important to maintain a healthy frame of mind and a healthy attitude. When it comes to your own art, you want it remain inspired, and to remain inspired, you need to encourage yourself. You need to push yourself forward and see every obstacle as a challenge that once you've overcome it, that's another experience point in the bank. Now you're that much better. So I'm working on the back of the trench Kurt here now, and, um, adding in some hatches, trying to figure out what direction toe have them running in order to best describe not only those underlying forms but also the secondary forms that we're seeing in the material itself as it wraps around the body. I'm always trying to figure out, you know, what is the best way to go about this? Just how much do I need those underlying forms to come through? How much should they come through in comparison to the larger folds increases that we're going to see in the trench card? And this who comes down to the different points of tension throughout the material that we're going to see as it wraps around the body? And you'll notice that at the top of the trench card, Yes, we have some creases and we have some fold them. We got a little bit of rendering there to help to pick that, but there's much less detail there than we're seeing around the midsection. All the trench Kurt, where there's a significantly greater amount of creases and folding happening as the material Bunches up within this area. And so the major tension point that we're seeing in the trench coat is actually at the top , where we're seeing it wrap around the shoulders and back there. And, of course, we're going to see another tension point around her behind her bottom because of the fact that that material is stretching out and evening out across those larger forms as it hangs off of them and is subject to the effects of gravity. But it's not just gravity that's going to cause the material to compose itself in this way , as it conforms to the various tension points throughout the character. It's also going to be the characters pose their stance, their movement that affect the way in which the material moves as it conforms to their body . So material, whether it be a trench Kurt, you know trenchcoat, which has a little loose material like this, is usually going toe, have a significantly greater amount of folds increases, apparently, then it most skin type material will have a significantly less amount off creasing, which is visible but still, sometimes you'll see that, and then you've got materials in between, such as the denim shorts that is wearing where we're going to see. Ah increases around, you know her a growing area and then around the the pretty much around the base off the leg hole that around the denim pants just because you know that's where the material is going to crease. It's kind of like where the body creases. Even you will see a crease between your groin and Europe a leg most of the time, and the material over the top of that is going to crease in the exact same area. You'll see a crease around your you know your armpits, so you're going to see creases within the material that you're wearing in this exact same area. You usually see increase as your arm bends around the inner Elber, and again you're going to see a greater amount of folds increases within those areas when it comes to the clothing that you're wearing. So these are important considerations to make because clothing isn't just drawn in one way , it's a dynamic material, much like the way in which hair is affected by the movement of the character in the outside environmental conditions that they're being presented in. You know, there is a strong gust of wind, for example, will then you've got other points of tension and pull at play on the trench coat and the hair free. And and so you know it's not just the body, then that's going to be manipulating and directing the composition off the material within the trench coat. It's also going to be that the wind as an example, and if she moves her leg in one direction or another or, you know, puts her arms up again, that's going to cause the material to reconfigure itself in a just. And So you know, you really need to understand at that point how material physically reacts to certain things the physics off drapery essentially and by understanding the physics of drapery. Then you can begin to depict it in a more dynamic context. And, of course, when it comes to comic book illustration, we're always talking about dynamic characters because they can be presented and such a new , normal amount of ways. It's just, you know, you have to be able to understand the fundamentals off drapery and form, and you need to know anatomy in order to be able to effectively do that, because you just can't go by I alone with this stuff. Unfortunately, there's not enough references out there for us to be able to do that. And that wraps out the rendering portion for these inks here. Thanks for watching. I had that. You got a ton of value and insight out of this lesson. Let's jump under the next one.
12. 11 | Inking Assignment: and that completes the demonstration for the inks. As you can see in King can be rather tedious. It takes a little while, but it's totally worth it in the end, when you see the final result. Now, before we jump onto the next section, where we're going to color up this character, you're going to need to think your own character design draft. So that's what will be focused on for this assignment. Your task is to go through and give the basic rough sketch that you've done up for your design thus far a nice, slick, clean looking outline that really emphasizes the design and all the components that have gone into it thus far. So what you want to be focused on at this point when you're defining the final ain't outline for your character is making sure that you're placing in the line weights and adding some variation to the trajectory of your line as its defining the various areas over your character. Because that's really going to increase the lying quality and the visual representation old those contours and we love variation. We want that contrast between thick and thin throughout the line. Work that defines out character. It's really going to up the quality over your final presentation, and it's really something that for me personally, when I started introducing line waits through the outlines off my illustrations. That's when I noticed a significant improvement that really made it look a whole lot more pro without me having to do too much at all. Then, once the main outlined for the character has been defined with the thinks, it's time to then add some depth end dimension to the forms and also some distinction between the various materials that are going to be present throughout the design. So for that, we're going to drop in some shadows. And, of course, then what we're going to be delving into there is lighting. So you'll want to consider where the light source is with in the scene that the character is being lit under. Is it coming from the left? Is it coming from the right? Is it coming from the front or the back orb alert? Right? It's your choice as to how you like your character in the position to which you placed that light source, but it will allow you to figure out where the shadows air going to sit throughout your character. Now in saying that, remember that different materials are going to reflect light and pick up shadow in different ways. You're going to want to keep that in mind. Is the material that you're dealing with a dark material or a light material isn't Matt isn't reflective is a chromatic, right? This is your character design, so it's going to be ultimately down to your own preferences. But just keep that in mind that you will want to not necessarily blanket the entire character with the same level off shadow from one section to the next. You want to break it up a bit and make sure that you're using the shadows sparingly in order to emphasize the contrast threw out hm. And really make sure that you're shadowing the materials appropriately so that it makes sense again. Doc materials are inevitably going toe, have a lot more shadow than lighter materials, and just keep in mind again that they may Avery will reflect light in totally different aways. Now, finally, in order to just really boost that level of depths throughout our character, what will want to add Ian is, of course, the cross hatches, which you know I used to render out the forms and to just create a smooth transition, a nice blend between the shadows and the highlights. Now, just like the shadows, they're going to be various areas throughout the character that require more hatching or less hatching. It really depends on the material that you're working with in the area of the characters that you're working on. So just try to keep that in mind and ah yeah, it's It's one step at a time again, The inking process can take a little while. Boredom can start to seep in. But just try toe, have a strong vision off what the in presentation is going to look like to keep you going. Now remember the pen settings as well. I keep them as default. I do not change them one bit. The only thing that is adjusted in order to get the line work that you just saw throughout that demonstration is the amount of pressure that I'm applying to my stylist. As I lay the lines in and the size of which the brush is set up, you want to calibrate the amount of pressure applying end the size you brush accordingly in order to get the line that you're after serving. Need to experiment a little bit. First figure out how much pressure he needed to apply in order to get the line at the correct thickness that is going to be most suitable to define your character with. All right with that said, good luck. I can't wait to see or what you come up with. I'm really looking forward to it. Take your time with this assignment again. If you can get this right and he can really polish up the line, work for your character within the inking stage. You're going to be so thankful that you did so because again they are going to be what is representing the final line up the final contours within your characters presentation. So again, take your time to polish them up and make sure that they're looking as good as they possibly can. Once you finished that assignment and please make sure you do it before you jump on to the next section of this course will be taking that line up and will be coloring it up. And I cannot wait for that. All right, good luck, and I'll see you soon
13. 12 Colors Introduction: all right, So now that you've completed the inks for your comic book character design, it's time to give them some color. So in this next section, that's exactly what will be focused on. Will start out by establishing a compelling base color scheme for them first making sure that all the colors throughout the characters sit together well and that none of them clash also show you how to take each one old those colors individually tweet them and modify them to your exact specifications before we move on to the shading and the highlights, which will then use to add that additional level off death end. I mentioned to your character and also enrich the overall scheme after the shading has been done, and we really given out characters that additional level of depth. We're then adding the finishing touches were placing a rim light to give them that additional level of cinematic appeal and will also place in the speculum highlights to make sure that all the materials throughout the character designed that need it that turned up to the right level of shiny nous and glossy nous. Finally, I'll show you had a place in the appropriate adjustment layers over the top over your colors to tweak and modify them to the correct level off brightness, contrast and Cala balance. That's really going to allow you to wrap up the presentation of your character and presented to a high level of professional quality. I can't wait to jump into this with you. But before we do enter into the demonstration, what I'd like to give you is an in depth overview. All the coloring process itself talking about the way in which the layers used throughout that process are ordered, the kind of brushes that I use and the actual techniques that I apply in order to get the final aesthetics for my coloring that you're going to see throughout the demonstration. So let's jump into that overview. We've got a lot of ground to cover with that, so just bear with me as I take you through that process, you're going to get a lot out of it, and I'll see there
14. 13 | Coloring Overview: all right, so now that we've inked out character up, it's time to give them some color. But before we jump into the demonstration on like to give you another quick overview here off the coloring process that I like to use and how I set up the layers for it the kind of brushes and their settings so that you've got a very clear idea as you go through that demonstration as to what it sees I'm exactly doing and why I'm doing it. Because, as you can see over here in the Layers panel, there is a lot of layers going on, which I've used to compose the colors for my character. Now, right off the bat, you're going to notice that I'm not working in Mangus Studio anymore. I've actually switched over into photo shop, and that's because I've developed my coloring process in photo shop. Unfortunately, I haven't managed to create one just yet within Mangus Judea that works for me. So I'm sticking to further shop and because for social does use particular layers, which I'm going to be implementing into my coloring process to achieve certain of fix to do with my lighting and my shadows. It maybe with in your best interest to also use photo shop if you want to get your colors looking exactly the same way as the colors that you're seeing here in front of you. But you can also try at some of the same techniques within the other applications that are out there. Since further shop does offer a monthly subscription, though, you might be able to actually, just even if its rich just for a trial version. Try out for the shop and, you know, see whether or not you're even able to put these techniques into action. Just tested out on DA. If the trial runs out, then you can decide whether or not you want to get the full version. It's completely up to you. A lot of what I'm going to be talking about here does have to do with things such as form and when it comes to foreman lighting, that applies regardless of the application that you're going to be using to color up your characters. But let's jump into this without any further ado. Now, just like Mingus Studio, there is a layers panel and a navigator in photo shop so there's a lot of commonalities here that are going to cross over from one application to the next. And just like Mega studios layering set up, made sure that all of them are arranged in a particular order. And that high rocky is very, very important to keep in mind when it does come to coloring up your characters because they're specifically arranged in a manner that allows us to overlay the shadows and the highlights and essentially build up the rendering from dark to light, bringing up those forms in giving them more and more depth as we lay in each parts of rendering and light, the character bringing her through to completion. All right, so here are the layers were dealing with Let's break it down and talk about the very first step that we're going to want to go through now. The first step, of course, is to make sure that you've imported your inks. The great thing about using Mega Studio is that you can save your documents out in mega studio as PSD files so that you can open that document up directly within photo shop, which is very nifty. So there is that cross compatibility between the two applications, at least that we can take advantage over. And so you're layers. And the set up that you have used in order to compose your inks should still all be intact if you're opening up the PSD file that you saved out from Maga Studio in photo shop. But you will notice that the things are still sitting on top here, and that's because we want them to be sitting on top off any coloring that we do. Because we're dealing with a comic art medium. The line out is going to be present in that final presentation, so that only makes sense. Underneath the inks, However, you'll notice that we've created a layer group for the colors, and within that layer group there are a ton off differently is that we've used to create the coloring composition for E. Now with in the Colors Layer group. I've also created another Leah group for what I like to refer to as the base colors, and these were really the first colors that were going to be laying in to the character, and they're essentially going to be establishing the overall color scheme for her So let's turn off all these other ones that have created above them because, as you'll see, we're actually going to be using them to build up the characters form bit by bit. And essentially, once we get these based colors down, we will only be working in terms of value to pull out those forms and to give them some depth. So once we've turned all of them off, as you can see here, all that were left with is the base color tones. And the reason that they called the base kala tones or also known as the flats is because we're only dealing with one flat tone of color that does not vary in terms off value of saturation or thew throughout each section. Off the character. You can see here that the skin is just one flat skin turn that had denim shorts are just one time, and that's kind of all that we're going to need to worry about in the beginning off the coloring process, because the first thing on our order of things off the list off many steps in this process to execute is just to get that initial color scheme established so that we've got something to work with. So what are we concerned that in this initial step? Well, the main thing that you want to worry about is just whether or not the colors that you have picked for your character and filled into each section throughout their design go together . You want to make sure that none of them clash, that they all sit nicely together in the one composition, because that's going to create the aesthetic appeal that we want to make sure that our character has in their final presentation. So color theory really comes into play in a big way here. That means you're going to want tohave a color wheel on a hand you're going to be wanting to think about, held the different colors throughout your current is design is going to make the audience feel the kind of mood they're going to produce overall for that particular character. As you can see here, all the colors that I've used for a in particular go together and contribute true the overall theme that she's being presented in. So she is a Goethe kind of rebel type character, which means her outfit is going to essentially be clad in leather, so darker turns. Then we've got her hair style, which is quite vibrant in comparison, and producers or lots and lots of contrast with in that particular area in her design. And that's something that again feeds into that rebellious punk type archetype that have created around and her skin. You'll notice, in terms of color combinations, actually sits very nicely together, with the cooler tones off her outfit and her hair so we don't just want, especially when it comes to dealing with Graham muted tones. We don't actually just want to make them gray. We do want to add in a hint off color or attend, if you will. So the grays that you're seeing in the dark tones throughout her outfit here you'll notice that they're not just again gray. They actually have a blue hue to them, and that just enriches the color that a little bit more and produces an overrule color temperature within those areas that will sit nicely with the warmer tones that I've used for her skin. So you can see that every single color here that I've used goes together quite well, and it's their combination that you want to make sure you've nailed, so that as you build in the shading on top and start to pull out the highlights to give each part of the character that additional level of Foreman death, you're going to know that the underlying color scheme is contributing to that overall final presentation the whole way through. So you'll notice that I've separated each one all thes based colors on take individual layers so the skin is on a layer. The hair is on another layer, and the eyes and the color and holy other assets that make up a costuming. They're all separated out onto a individual layers now. Done that for a few reasons, And the primary reason is that later on, when it comes to actually shading the character, laying in the shadows, placing in the highlights and all the other forms of rendering that it going to come in on top all these based colors I'll be able to confine them through these particular base color layers by using them as selection mosques. So let me show you what I mean by that we can create a selection mosque around anyone of these layers by simply holding down control hovering over the sun. They'll old that layer and then simply clicking on it. So I'm going to do that with the skin right now. So we'll click on it like so, and you'll notice that as soon as I clicked on the thumbnail for that particularly, it's going to make a selection around everything which is placed onto that layer. So, of course, we've got a selection now around the skin. Same with her hair. If we would hover over the top off the sun nail that I've used for her hair layer, we're going to see that it selects her hair and just her hair doesn't select anything else if I want to add to that selection. So say, for example, that I not only want to select her skin here, but I also want to select a hair than I can hold down control shift, hover over the hair, and it will also select the head. It will add to that selection, and I can do that with all the layers that I've got here throughout her character design and at is many to them off them, as I want to to that selection, so that's very, very handy. And it enables us that greater level of control to section at particular areas of the character, that we wanna work on any one point in time and just be able to focus on them. So that means that, say, for example, we want to add some shading to the hair I can confined that shading just to the hair section. All the character with that, whatever I'm doing on that layer or that within that particular area flooding out into the rest of the character or outside the inked contours off the line work. So let me show you an example of that. Say say that I wanted to add some additional shading to her face. Well, I could select her skin there, make sure that, um, we're on a different layer because we don't actually want to be painting directly onto the base colors. But let's say I just wanted to add some shading here real quick. Now that I've got that particular area selected, I can make sure that anything that I'm adding on to this particular section off her body will be confined just within that area. So let's pick and nice. That's a and nice warm. It's Horan. Four has skin there. Maybe we had a bit ability to it that looks pretty good. And over here to the left hand side of the screen, let's add some shading to the front 3/4 view off her character design. You know, let's say the light direction is coming from the right hand side of the screen there. Well, I can just add that shading in, and you'll notice that, as I added in, it's not traveling outside of that area, and I can use a relatively big brush and still have it confined to that particular section all the character that I've got selected. And as you can see, it's very, very fast to start adding in that shading. Same thing with her head. Say, for example, that I wanted toe give some some shading to her head, just a lift out those forms and give that bit of three dimensionality. Let's actually you can see here that you can select colors that you've already laid down by using the eyedropper tool, the short cut so that is just old on your keyboard. Click in the area that you want to select the color Frohman that'll add it to your color palette over here, And then we can just Duncan that up a little bit may adjust it. Someone maybe had some blue to it would make a real dark just toe. Make it obvious and what I'll show you next is just how toe hide the selection that you're working with. They can hide the selection pretty easily just by hitting control h on your keyboard if you're using a Mac, that a big command H and that will hide the selection that you just created. But it's only toddling off the visibility so that selection is still there, even though you've hidden it. All right, so now let's go ahead here and add in some shading for her hair. Alright, again, Any shading that I add in here is going to be fined, confined just to the area off her hair because I've made a selection around that base color that I've used for it. All right, say that I wanted to add in some highlights. Well, I could also do that can I could just go right in over the top there, and it would not flood outside. All the zone that are dedicated to her has base color. Now, if I didn't have those areas selected, so say, for example, I had controlled the on my keyboard to get rid of that selection. Well, there's a good chance that that color is going to flood outside of the area that I'm working on. And I say that I wanted toe add some shading and underneath it here, well, I can't do that. And even if I'm really, really making sure I'm sticking close to the line there, there's still a chance that the soft outside shape all the airbrush is going to cause the color to slightly league outside of those ink contours or into other sections off the character design. So to keep a clean cut, we want to divide the different areas of the character up into selection mosques, which we can create on the fly just by default by using the base color layers as those selection mice and dividing them on two separate layers that we can come back and individually select later on. Now, of course, we could keep all of these base color layers only one layer and I conduce that by simply right clicking and merging all these layers together. And then, of course, once you did that, you could just go through with the magic one tool here and select him like So now why don't I do it that way? Well, it's because if I want to tweak thes colors once they've been laid down, for example, maybe I want to change the hue, maybe the color of the hair. I'm just not digging too much. And I want to change it up a little bit. Or now, because a lot of those colors are on the one layer. If I do it, just try to adjust one of them. They're all going to change, so I can't adjust them individually anymore. Makes it difficult. So I want to make sure again for that additional reason that they're all placed on two separate individual layers. Like sir, we'll just get rid off those shading experiments that we could what that we just did. All right, Now let me show you how you actually go about tweaking one of these colors. If you want to change it once it's laid down because oftentimes I won't know whether or not a color is going toe work until I've actually placed it down onto the canvas and I can see it with my eyes. So say that I want to change up her hair. Maybe instead of teal, I want to try out a red tone instead, I can simply now just make sure that I have the hair base color layer selected. Go up to image adjustments, hue, saturation, and you can see there that there are a bunch of adjustments that we can make here. We can change the brightness of the color. We can change the levels occurs the exposure, which is just more complicated versions. Apartness. In contrast, we can change the vibrance and the color saturation, the color balance spell. Let's just stick with the coup saturation here because that's a good one to use for this example. So it's a free again that we wanted to just change up the collar off her head and let's make it more red. You know, we could go ahead and do that just by changing and shifting this slider here on the other end of the ah, the the scale that we have to work with, and you can see that we can do that easily without changing up. Any of the other colors were working on just that layer and mortifying at separately, away from all the others. We can change up its saturation as well. If you know, say, for example, the color that we laid down as a little bit too vibrant, we can change the lightness and adjust that. So there's a lot of things that you conducing a lot of modifications that you can make by keeping all of these layers on separate individual layers. Keeping all these colors on separate individual layers, I should say so. Ah, that's something to keep in mind and another reason as to why you will want to make sure your base colors are or you know exclusively on singular layers so you can go make selection mosques and adjust them as needed once they've been placed down onto the page. Now, just as a funny little uh no to selfie, you can see how, as I just this color that because the ear I've accidentally placed it under the same layer as the hair that as I just the hue for the hair the hue for the ear is also being adjusted because again, they're on the one layer than not separated out from one another. So that's just to show you what happens when you place more than bit one based color onto the same layer. All right, so it's just get rid of that and take a look at what the next step is. Once you got those based colors down now, I should mention before we move on, actually, the brush that I use specifically in order to place these base colors down, and the brush that I use is a hot edged, completely opaque brush. So over here in the Brushes selection panel, going to make sure that the brush that I select as a completely hard edged for a hard edge to it and that it's not see through whatsoever that's what opaque means. A pig means that it's completely not see through that. It's a solid, flat toned color. All right, so there's do you mean a bit just to show you how it looks? All right, let's use these face here. Well, it was zoomed in a little bit too far. Okay, so we've got these face. Now. The reason as to why you want to use a completely opaque flat, ah hot edge of brush is because it helps you to stay inside the lines a little bit easier. In fact, it instead of you know, you could also go around and select each of the different areas with the lasso tool and then just fill them in. But I don't do that. I find it much more fun to just use the brush to color them in because it feels very much like you're You're coloring in a coloring in book, and I guess as long as you can keep inside the lines, you'll be able to pull up the flats fairly easily. It is very much like a coloring in book. In that sense, it just stay inside the lines and you'll be absolutely fine. Besides the understanding of color theory that you'll need to know about in order to make sure all the colors go together well or you need to consider, then is your ability to stay inside the lines so you do need somewhat of a steady hand. But what helps you to be able to do that is to Let's just use a different color here for his skin. You know, maybe we wanted to instead. Well, let's make it blue just to make it real obvious here, you know, say that we wanted to color in her face blue. Well, we can go ahead and do that make a new layer here fairly easily, staying inside the lines, using this hard edge brush because the by the hot what I mean by heart edges that it's not going tohave a soft shape to it. It's going to be solid. It's going to have a very clean shop edge around it. The outside okay, and because it has a clean shop edge around the outside, it means that we can get it to come in right up against the Leinart that we've laid down. Now you'll notice how we've got thes slight variations in tone here, and that's because of turn down the rapacity of the brush to 60%. Now that's not what we want. We want that opacity to be at 100% again. We wanted to be completely opaque, solid, non see through. So the difference is going to be this all right. You can see that no matter how many times we go over the top of that, now it's going to be solid, and what will usually do is I'll go around the outside edge off the bounding contour within each section, and then once I've kind of done that, I'm able to use a larger brush after that in order to fill in the rest of it. And because I've got essentially a nice, thick outline that have created around that section, and I've gone carefully carefully around it was just slightly sina wool of color, which I'm pressing right up against the line on over that area. I can be a little less hesitant and careful as I fill in the rest of it, so that I just find to be an optimal way of working. It's much better than using a tiny little brush the entire way through and trying to fill it in that way. I would rather just sticking up the boundary that I have to work within to prevent myself and give myself a less of a chance of going outside of that area by simply gained running along the outside edge. All the bounding come to a that I think it in. And then using a slightly thicker brush that I'm going to brush, that I'm going to lay the color in with fairly quickly. So in contrast to the hard edge, completely opaque brush, what we would see is the airbrush, which has a very soft edge to it. And here's the difference, right? You can see that. Get that very soft outside shape, which is somewhat great for blending two colors together, but not so good when you're laying in the initial base colors. Sir, if we were to go over here and we were to try to feel in the face with that brush well, as you can see, what we're going to end up with is this slight color bleed outside the ink contours that will occur in see it right there, which is not what we want. We want to make sure that the area where laying the base color into is defined sharply with the in the line work that we've already created around that particular section. So again, just another example there off why you would want to use the brushes and those settings in the way of just demonstrated and how that's going to help you get those based colors laid down, nice shop and solid again. The reason that we call these the flats is because they're not supposed to very in terms of tone, brightness, saturation or Hugh. So we want to make sure, in order to prevent ourselves from doing that, that the brush way using is going to allow us to output a color down onto the canvas, which is soloed, which is one flat, single turn of color. All right, so now that we have done that and taking care of the base colors rather thoroughly, I would argue, Zoom out a bit here to get a nice look at e's overall design once more. So now that we sorted out the base colors and they do take a little while because you go to make sure that you're getting them all placed into the one section bit by bit until the entire character is filled out, considering along the way the color scheme and whether or not all the colors fit together and make sense for the particular character that you created once you've done all of that, what you wanted in place in over the top of the base colors is a color film layer, and that's what this is going to look like. Not at first. However, at first the color feel layer is going to look a little bit like this. Let me show you, um, now, before you add in the field color layer, by the way, you want to make sure that you've selected all the base colors to create a selection mosque around the character that the color fill layer will be applied to. Otherwise, it will just blanket the entire canvas here in the same shadow color. That's not what you want. So the color field layer is really what's going to be used to create a shadow overlay, which has cast upon the base colors that will then use to pull out the forms. Alright, but let me show you what it looks like it first, so we're going to go toe layer in order to access it. New Phil layer solid color. We're going to hit that. Give it a name if you want to. I called a shadow overlay because that's kind of what it's going to be doing is overlaying shadow on top of the character, and usually what you wanna pick for the color fill off. This layer is a nice blue turn because most lighting schemes air going to consist of cooler shadows and warmer highlights. And because this is going to be used to overlay the shadow onto our character, we're going to want to go for a de saturated blue, maybe purple time. Once that's done, hit OK, and it's going to make it look as though we've just taken all our hard work here that we took to create the base colors in the first place and gotten rid of them, replacing them with his blue time. That's applied to the entire character. But once we change the blending murdered over here at the top of the layers panel to multiply, it's going to overlay that shadow Time, wrote a writing over the top. Now, the cool thing about the color feel layer is that if you don't like the tone that you picked for the shadow, you can't go back and tweak it as much as you need to. It's totally fine. So say, for example, we wanted to go for something like that. Well, great. That's looking pretty good. Except how did we then start to pull out the forms off the character from there? Well, then we can go through hits, say the skin layer, for example. Make a selection around it and then jump up to our color fill layer. Use a soft airbrush in order to do this because we want a nice soft transition for our times here. And then we can simply go over the top awful. The areas that we've just selected for the skin and we can start to very faintly lay in an initial pass of rendering for it. Now the thing that we have to keep in mind is that this color Phil does only use black and white of value to create the various tones that we're going to see here. So in order to create a lighter tones what we're going to want to use as a black in order to pull back those tones right back down to the base shadow Phil Value, then we'll want a year's white. So let's pull out some highlights instead, and we just stroke gently over the top off the area that we want to pull the highlights out on and will do that initial lighting pass. And we can go throughout the entire character here, sinking in terms or very basic form in order to really give the character and initial lighting pass quite quickly. And we're just thinking at this point because this is the next step out of the base colors . All we're thinking about is the press, the basic overall form that we're dealing with. So we're thinking of the arms is cylinders as the legs cylinders and there's the body is being built of the same things again, basic primitive cylinders and spheres in a very generic geometry, essentially just to help us to think about this in simple terms because all that we're trying to do is given overall cast off light, which is going to fall off across the character and essentially established the lighting scheme that we're going to be building the more intricate highlights and sub forms that sit on top of these main forms into. So once that's done, then we can go in and start making selections, and this is really the next step is that we're going to be building up the highlights here and describing the forms toe a higher and higher degree off clarity as well. ESU the sub forms and pull them out further and further to create additional depth within the character. So it zoom in here to her face just to take a look at that and how again we would begin pulling out those sub forms and again by sub forms I'm talking about, not the overall oval shape over her head, you know, again, it's kind of spherical, and that's how the light hits it and costs off around it, creating this doctor light full off. What we're talking about is the facial features now the actual structure, all the skull, that the shadows and the highlights are going to be caught around as the light cast down across the head as a whole. So, for example, say that we wanted to pull out the forehead of the character and the nose area, and this is really where you want to start thinking of the head as being made up of planes geometrical three dimensional planes essentially all right now, actually, the lights coming from this direction. So we want to go around here and just make that selection ran the eyes and the forehead, so you don't want to select necessarily the whole thing over all. You want to make little selections around the face and just pull it out bit by bit. The high point of the face, right? Say up here we can add a bit more highlight around the tip of the noise. We can add more highlight as well. Then around the cheeks we can add some highlights, and I'm just doing this really, really quickly. I'm not necessarily thinking about it, but that's just again. You can see there was a very hard edge there. So you want to try to avoid those hard edges, just a bid. And if you do end up getting super hard edges and you want to try to blend them back, but especially on the face, I try to try to make a selection, which is wide enough so that I can get rid of those those areas that are going to give me that shop cut out looking area of highlight that we want to avoid. It's going to cause a lack of softness within the face. Say, you know, for example, I might just add it in there on the other really cool thing that you can do not just pulling out high point within the form. But you can also push areas back to create shadowed portions within the sub forms. So say, for example, around the eye here, we wanted to make it a little bit darker and and bring more of that shadow back in. Well, we just switch over to the white and we can strike in to that selection lightly. If you find that you're adding true much to those particular areas, what you can do is turn back Europe ass ITI to about 60% is good, cause you can just kind of tap in these values riel lightly and build them up gradually. But as you can see complacent shadows, and then you can build up the highlights around them. So say, for example, you wanted to add a highlight in here. You could do that by simply hitting these little arrows here and switching between the two colors. You can also hit X on your keyboard to do that on the fly, but again, you can add that highlight in and so you can build up highlights and shadows as needed, until you described all the forms throughout your character to a degree that you're happy with and the amount to which you do that the layering over rendering that you place in is going to be down to one your style and how refined you want your rendering to be, how smooth he wanted to be and the amount of time that you've got. So once that's done, let's just get rid of that. And look at the pre baked version, which have created He is the shadow overlay that I did up for a previously in the actual demonstration that you're going to watch after this overview can good a 16% here, Um, so you know, that's the point of which we're going to take it to. We're going to go throughout our entire character, and we're going to add in the shadows. We're going to pull out the highlights and try to give a lot of forms throughout the character, an additional level of depth and thus three dimensionality to their overall presentation. Next up, what we will then one to place in is the highlight overlay. Now the highlight overlay is what is going to give all the lighting within the colors here . Some ah, Hugh a particular hue. And you can see that I picked a nice, warm Hugh for that, which contrast beautifully with the cooler tones that I've used for the shadows. In fact, I would say that the warmer, yellowish orange highlight is a direct compliment to the purplish blue hue that I've used for the shadows in that color fill layer. Now the highlight overlay is cold and overlay, primarily because it does apply the color riding over the top of all the lighting that we've done thus far. But also on top of that, it's easy to remember what blending word, and he used to be set out because it is set at the overlay blending mode. And what's great about this particular layer is that it really does in a rich all the colors that we've placed into the character thus far. And let me show you like, for example, if we wanted to let's just make a brand new highlight, overly just so that you can see how we've gone about this and that kind of a fix that it has so you know, again it This looks great, the forms of reading But there's not really that richness to the color scheme just yet. So let's make this layer and overlay. That's all you really have to do. Label it as a highlight overlay, I would suggest, just to make sure you're keeping track of what's on all these layers, then what you can do is let's pick a nice orangey. I like to get more read something like that. Maybe you want to add some saturation to it. It's completely up to you. But once you've got that selected, then you can just sweep in right over the top of these areas, and you can see how immediately I just adds that much more richness to the color scheme you've created. And that's why often times the color overly is really my favorite part of the entire process, because it really pushes the colors and as just that little bit more to them that seemed to be absent up until this point and see how immediately, by the way, that just pulls out everything that we've done and boosts its level of depth. And I mentioned straight away, and it's because all the shading is preserved as we lay in this color over the top of them . It's essentially colorizing all that shading now. The reason as to why I go through this step and as to why it looks so good is because a lot of the time you're going to find that most naturally lit environments do you have this war ? McCullough Turn to the lighting and cooler colors to the shadows, especially, its son said. I think you can really see this effect happen now. In contrast of that, if you're dealing with a environment which is lit at night time, where you got the moonlight shining down onto the character in order to describe their forms and delight them up, well, then what you're going to usually find is the opposite effect. You're going to have cooler highlights in that case, and and warmer shadows and by warmer shadows, I don't mean necessarily the shadows are going to be orange or red or yellow. They'll just be a warmer variation of the cooler tone that we would say be using here for the shadows. So instead of say, for example, blue, they might be purple, you might add a little bit more read to them or a little bit more orange. See the same with the the highlights as well. So with that said once well before we move on. Actually, the highlight overlay is fairly easy to add in because, just like with the initial pass on the shadow overlay, you're only thinking in terms of broad basic shapes. So in other words, instead of thinking off the head as the head with all its facial features and the complex structure of the skull, you're only thinking of it as nothing more complex than a very basic three dimensional sphere. Or maybe oval if you want to get really fancy. But you're not really thinking beyond it as being anything more intricate than that, and the same with the body. You just breaking that up into spheres and cylinders and essentially lighting the major portions of it as you place in the highlight overlay. Because you really don't want to start getting too complex since you're going and you're placing in the the cost of light as it falls off across the entire character and all of its major forms, you're essentially setting the lighting hierarchy that all the sub forms will be rented out within the context off. So you want to set that initial lighting scheme out first and foremost before you jump into the final highlight pass, which is where we're going toe once more, create a bunch of selections and really push the depth off the secondary forms throughout the character to give it that additional level off dimension. And that's what we're really doing throughout. This entire coloring process is with each and every rendering pass where just building up the depth and dimension, we're pushing it further and further and further. And in order to do this, you can see the final highlight Pass really doesn't have any special blending mode applied to it. And that's because at this point we're actually color picking from the canvas in order to create burrata variations of the colors that are already present. So, for example, say that I was working on the final highlight pass here, and I wanted to zoom into her lips, said that I wanted to just bump them out a little bit more. I'd use my last suit tool Whoops. In order to de select a selection you made, by the way, just he controlled the on your keyboard. You might make a selection around her lips there makes it a little bit bigger using the last suitor which he confined over here to the left, inside of the screen, in the toolbar. And then I'm going to hide that selection now, in order to give this a broader highlight in ALS, the other highlights that would be placed on the final highlight past. What you would do is you would simply color pick from that particular area. Bump up the brightness over here in the color panel, you can see Hey, HSB stands for hue saturation brightness bump up the brightness, turn it up lower. The saturation could usually light atones are going to lose their saturation as they get brighter. And then, you know, maybe we add some more warmth. Tow it in saying that and then once we've done that, will just go over the top, as we've done that. If I was a with the other highlights and will push those out some more now, as you can see, we got that additional level off form, which has been described within that particular area of the characters face Awesome looks great. So now we have to do is go around the entire character and do the exact same thing, which you will see me do within the demonstration. That would be jumping onto straight after this overview. So that's the final highlight parts and really the final frontier hold the entire coloring process. Besides that, there is true, more very special rendering passes that we're going to be doing on the character. Let me to describe to you what those are, because they are really going to be what use the final presentation, that extra level of polish. All right, let's zoom back out here so we can see what's going on. Said that zoom to 16% again. You can see here with the navigating menu a little while. As with the inking process, you want to make sure that as your coloring as your shading all the former throughout the character that they read from a distance the best way that you can ensure that is by constantly giving the Navigator menu a glance just to make sure that from a zoomed out perspective those forms air coming through all right, so the higher the speculum highlights what a speculum highlights. Well, if we turned them on here, what you'll see immediately is all of a sudden, the leather portions over her outfit at cheeks and lips and noses. They all look a whole lot more shiny. And that's precisely what speculum highlights allow you to do is to add additional shyness and glossy nous to various materials throughout your characters design. And that, of course, gives them more death, but also allows you to describe what that material is made off and a lot of the time, the level of speculum. In other words, the intensity to which light
15. 14 | Composing a Base Color Scheme: all right, so here we are in for to show up, ready to color, ease character, design up and you'll notice over to the right hand side of the screen. The first thing that I'm doing is I'm creating a series of base color layers, and I'm going to be placing the base colors throughout ease character design onto each one of these layers, depending on the section that I'm working on. So, for example, the first base color that were laying in here is ease skin tone and you'll notice that I'm laying it on the skin layer. And the reason that we wanna lay in each one all these based colors on separate layers is because later on, when it comes to the shading and the highlights that we're going to add in on top old this base colors game will be able to use the base color layers as selection mosques to ensure that the section that we're working within were able to use these big broad airbrush is without traveling outside the edges old, that particular area and having the shading all the all the highlights, for that matter, spill out over into other sections of the character that we don't really want to focus on, some going through. And I'm feeling in this peachy pink de saturated hue that I've used for the skin here, and I'm using a hard edged, completely opaque brush to do so. And what I mean by opaque is that the color that you seeing me laid down here is completely solid. It's not see through whatsoever. It's one flat, consistent tone that does not transition from light to dark in terms of value, saturation or contrast, it is one flat turn, which is why this particular portion all the comic book coloring process is often referred to as the flats or flat ing. Because you're dealing with just flat turn colors, there's no shading involved, at least not at this point in time. And this is really the first step. When it comes to coloring your comic book characters, you want to lay in a base color scheme so that you can get that sorted and worry about the shading later, Ron. So what do you have to focus on at this point if we're not really worrying about the rendering off form, necessarily through laying in the shadows and the highlights just yet. What we are focused on is whether or not the colors that were laying down onto the canvas here and feeling in E with. We want to know whether or not they're going to fit together well, whether or not they're going to look good together and complement one another. We need to make sure that every single color that we're going to be using to compose ease color scheme here is going to jive well together with the rest. And so color theory comes into play in a big way, knowing and being able to observe and look at the colors you've got that you filled in your character with and knowing that they go together well, what colors aren't going toe work? What colors are going to clash and which colors will make the character easier to soak in and to look at? Because essentially, we want to create a pleasing color scheme here that enhances the visuals off the character and also makes sense to include the colors within their design. You'll notice that I've picked a nice teal blue cool color for her hair there, and that makes sense within the context off the character because she is supposed to be this punk, rebel type character. And so the hair kind of just suits that particular theme. It works well, and you'll notice that as I lay in the dark de saturated cool graze throughout her costuming, you know we're going through her top. We filled that in. Now we're focused on the gloves and the color and all the other leather assets that make up her costuming. You can see that that also makes sense because a game she is supposed to be a character featured within this SciFi punk golf theme. So black leather clothing with cooler, graha de saturated, muted times just makes sense now. Also on top of that, you'll notice we've also got a nice contrast between the colors that we're dealing with here. You'll notice that the teal hair actually complements the warmer pink tones off her skin. So cool and warm colors often sit really nice next to one another, because that contrast really helps us to enrich the color scheme. They just look great together and that so when you're looking at the color wheel and you're noticing what colors reside within the coolest sections of the color wheel and the colors with that reside within the warmer sections. You wanna have a look? It which colors on either side of that color wheel and often times they will oppose one another are going to be fit for the color scheme that you want to create for your characters design and by looking at just for a moment before you jump into coloring your characters and laying in these base use, take some time to just look at the color wheel. See and observe what colors you might think could be suitable for your character, and it might even give you some ideas. If you're initially struggling. Link to figure out which colors are going toe work well, and I find that sometimes I don't know exactly what colors are going. Toe work for my characters, in which colors wine often times, only to lay down the color first to see it there on the canvas to no one. Whether or not the color is going to be suitable for the character, whether or not it is going to look the way that I think it's going to look, but most importantly whether or not. It goes well with all the other colors that I might have already filled the character in west. So you really have to use your eyes often times to judge whether or not one color is going to compliment or look good next to another color, and often times you won't be able to do that if there's nothing there to look at. So it's all the process off trial and error experimentation, as are many things with when it comes to comic book character production. You just don't always know what's going to look good right off the bat until you give it a girl. And so you can see me here laying in all the different colors throughout her costume design , and I'm doing it bit by bit. I want to know how the colors are going to look specifically on the costuming in her front 3/4 view presentations so that I can take those colors if they work once they're all placed in an end composed together and place them onto the back 3/4 view. Because I knew that I wanted to give her a teal color for her hair. So I went along, and I laid in the teal based color throughout all the difference illustrations that we've done up here for a character design. But her costuming I wasn't so sure on there were certain aspects of it. Where did I want? Ah, higher level of contrast between those colors. For the most part, we're actually dealing with a somewhat monochromatic color scheme there. In other words, rather than having contrast ing colors featured within her clothing assets, we've actually got a hue, which is a dark grey de saturated blue that is simply from one section to the next, varying in terms of value. So we've got a lighter version of that same color in certain areas. Say, for example, her leggings. And then that same color is used and just slightly adjusted in terms of its level of darkness or brightness for other areas. Say, for example, the gloves or the belts or the buckles, even a simply just a super light version of that same color. So there's different kinds of color schemes that you can use here again. You can have those contrast ing complementary colors that sit on the opposite ends off the color wheel. They usually going to fit well together. Then you've got colors that contrast, not necessarily in terms of few, but instead value. So you've got lighter and darker versions of that very same color. Usually they're going to go together well, and then you've got various tents, warm mittens and Kula tins off the colors that you're dealing with. And so you want to try toe experiment, as I said before, and explore the kind of schemes that you can compose with these colors. And you may surprise yourself through that exploration again, I wasn't quite sure exactly 100% what I was going to come up with here for the color scheme , particularly within ease. Costuming I wanted. He saw me probably before actually try out some red doc de saturated leggings. And as soon as I laid that down, I knew that it was going to be a mistake. Here you can see me with her denim shorts messing around with the base color that I've used for them. I've changed up their hue a little bit, made them less blue and more green, instead hoping that that green, a Hugh, will actually mix in well with her teal colored hair. Now I may change that back later. Run just because I did actually prefer the blue. It's just that I felt like I needed a little more contrast between the colors within her outfit. However, in saying that there is already a huge amount of contrast in ease overall character design , as faras Color is concerned because where is the greatest, most prominent point of contrast within her overall color scheme? It's her hair, of course, because it is starkly different to the rest off all the other coiling assets. Even her skin contrast directly with that and, sir, because it does have such a high level of contrast not just in terms of its you but also its level of saturation and lightness. That's the first point of attention that the audiences focus will be drawn into her face her head. It's going to stand out the most. They'll notice again once I've got those colors laid down. I'm going back every now and then and adjusting them in the image adjustment settings. So I'm rejigging the amount of hue and where the slider sits on that I'm also adjusting the brightness and I'm adjusting the level off saturation in order to make sure that these cars tweet just right to ensure that they go together. Well, because it's the subtleties that count here and oftentimes make or break and otherwise, what would have been a great color scheme for your character again? I'm going back there, adjusting the brightness of the denim shorts and the hue and the saturation. You can see me getting those box those ah adjustment settings up and tweaking it as needed . Getting that zoomed out Look at how all of these colors coming together. So now I'm doing something a little bit different. You can see that I've changed from that hard edge, completely opaque brush, and I'm now using and soft edged airbrush delay in her makeup. Essentially, that's what I'm laying in here. I'm adding in some warmer pinker tones to her skin around the cheek area around her lips. He can see that I'm placing in some eye shadow there around the outside of her eyes, and the reason that I do this is one, of course, to actually enhance the aesthetics off her facial features, because that's essentially what make out does it adds thes warmer and cooler tones, These areas of contrast that are a little bit more potent in order for us to be drawn in more to those particular areas on her face. That's what makeup does. It enhances the contrast to draw more attention to those particular features. So now what I'm doing is I've essentially selected all those based colors and combined them into a single marquis. Essentially, that's what's happening. And the reason for that is I'm going to take this selection, which encompasses the entire design, and I'm going to fill it in with a flat grey so that later on I can go back and not only make selection masks around the individual base colors themselves, but also if and when I want to the entire character as a whole. So now I'm laying in the base colors for her trench coat, and you can see there that I'm using another de saturated blue gray tone, as I did for the rest of her costuming. And I'm just laying that in going back to the hard edged, completely opaque, non see through brush that I was using before toe lay in the other base colors. And I'm just going throughout this particular element and a making sure that it's all filled in ensuring that I'm remaining inside the lines as I work. That's of course key here because we want to make sure that that color isn't spilling out into the outside edges off the contours defined by the line I and again, besides actually making sure that all the colors featured throughout these character design have been composed in an aesthetically pleasing away, the only other challenge is making sure that you're keeping inside the lines as you work, and you'll notice that I'm kind of tracing around the outside edge first off the area that I'm about to fill in, some giving it essentially a sicker outline of color there just to help me to. I have a sick of boundary there that'll prevent the prevent me going outside the edges. It will give me a greater chance to kind of, you know, use a slightly thicker brush to feel in the middle old, that particular area, without again traveling outside those very thin contours defined by the things there, which is why I kind of use a slightly smaller brush so that I can get in and trace around those outside Inc contours. And just make sure that again that color isn't spilling outside those edges. That's the main thing, feeling in the white of the eyes to wrap up. And that is ease base color scheme established now already to pull out those forms with the shading and the highlights. So now that her base color scheme is complete, let's move on to the next lesson.
16. 15 | Overlaying The Shadows: a que saying now that the base colors a complete it's time to lay in the shadow overly using a color fill layer, and I'm selecting a de saturated purple. For that said, it's blending mode to multiply to overlay the color on top off the base colors that I've already got there and at the first step in the coloring process is to figure out well, what kind of lighting set up do I want from which direction with the main light source be projecting down on to e from. And so, using an airbrush, I'm broadly swooping over all the character design illustrations of Done Up a V here, and I'm thinking in terms of very basic, simplistic shapes, I'm thinking off her head as a three dimensional oval. Her body is being made of cylinders and spheres, and I'm shading and describing the basic forms throughout her character design by pulling them out old the shadow overlay. And to do that, I'm simply using a slightly lower intensity. I've adjusted the A passage e old that airbrush to 60% so I'm lightly not playing, applying a whole lot of pressure, just going over the top of those basic forms using the shadow fill their to do so. The Shadow Phil Layer. It actually only works with black and white values. You can see there that I've got black selected and by adding in that black color to the mask that is also applied to the shadow Phil Layer, I'm able to pull out those forms I'm able to take away and get rid off that purple overlay . It's almost like a racing it away. In order to have the lighter times, the mid times you could say all the base colors begin to come through more and more, and we gradually going to be pulling those forms out further and further, giving the more and more high, adding more and more depth to the character as we do so throughout the coloring process. The colors we've already picked them. We know what colors will be present throughout her color scheme. Now the idea is to kind of stop thinking about the colors we're dealing with and just focus on the values of shading that we're going to be using to describe the forms throughout her design toe a higher and higher degree of clarity and you'll notice that now I have described and kind of let the broad overall forms featured throughout the character. I'm now going in a zoomed in here, and I'm using the last Sue tool to break those larger forms up and start to describe the secondary forms off her face here, for example, he can see that although we shaded it as if it were a three dimensional oval, including her hair there, which you can see me breaking up a little bit as well just to describe its texture and ah, the the layering, all the hair itself. You can see that over initially. I may have treated it as his broader spherical form on now going in, and I'm starting to articulate the features. I'm starting to articulate the layering of the head with her outfit here, her top. I'm going in. I'm selecting the folds and the creases within it. I'm selecting and breaking off the cola, and I'm focused in on laying the highlights across those larger forms so that I can pull out the more detailed aspects. All of them. So now it's simply taking those same forms that we lit initially and we're starting to describe them on a whole new level of articulation. So this is very much the same way in which we constructed the character in the first place . There's some similarities here. We started out broad Justus we're doing here and now we're working in the details were starting to articulate it to a finer and finer degree off detail. He can see here with her belly. Yes, I did initially shade it as if it was just a basic cylinder, but now I'm actually going in. I'm selecting with the last suitable her abdominal muscles and her hips and her ribs, and I'm reliably stroking over the top off those selected areas with my airbrush to pull them out to give them more and more height. And that's what this process will be about, even as we start to lay in the mid tones essentially here because that's what we're doing. We're really this first pass of shading. We've established how dark the shadows are going to be. We've got that base level value that will allow us to figure out the darkest values and where they're going to be featured throughout the character designer. So we've got the maximum depth that we can have that and now the process will be to pull out the mid times, which is really what this particular lesson will be about. Because the mid tones are essentially the base colors that we laid in in the previous listen, they're not the highlights, but they are the mid tones. And so now the challenge is just to begin with, to take that initial overlay of shadow and to a race away part of it, to get rid of parts of it, using the black and white values that it works with to pull till pull that back out those mid tones that the base colors allowed us to establish in the first place. So now this is very much a case where instead of thinking in terms of color, we're not thinking in terms of value to figure out how much height we need to give each form, and that's going to depend on the area that we're working with, because every single aspect all these character design has its own uniqueness. It's got its own material. It's got its own level of reflectivity. It's gotta tone surface forms. And so because of that we need to shade all of these different areas in their own way. In other words, the way in which we go about adding the highlights, too. Say, for example, the leather reflective materials that we can see in her top, her leggings, her gloves, her boots. They're going to need to apply more intense highlights to them. We're going to need to bring out those mid tones to a greater level of intensity in order to get them to appear more reflective. Sense a light does reflect off of those with a much greater intensity, whereas if we're talking about the skin and the denim shorts that she's wearing well, in those cases, we have less reflectivity. Those materials that we're dealing with aren't going to be bouncing light off of them to such a high degree off intensity. So it's going to absorb more light, which means the highlights themselves won't be as intense. They won't be as potent, so we'll want to strike them in a bit more suddenly than we would on the leggings that were stroking the highlighting on now and her boots. So all of these different materials are going to affect the way in which, and the intensity at which we lay in the highlights to convey them accurately. We want to make sure that there is a distinction between each one of these materials throughout ease design because that's what's going to give her that additional level of believability that will help us to depict him, present the materials within her design more accurately. And it'll also create this certain level of contrast throughout her character design that allows us to introduce more interest to it. Sit down going in and are not only pulling out forms and you can see this around the face and you'll see it more obviously, as I place in additional levels of shadow throughout her character, designed to articulate and describe the forms further. But I'm not just pulling out the mid tones and brightening the forms up. I'm also pushing back the shadows, and you can see this with the face. This is really going to be a major area where we're going toe 12 not only describe the high point of the face, but we're also going to want to describe the form as it recedes because those facial features aren't just you know, painted in on top off a flat surface, they actually affect the very structure of the head itself. And so you've got areas such as the eyes, for example, which a push back into the skull. So we're going to see additional levels of shading around them, which we can add in, thanks to the fact that we've already kind of lit the broad overall form. So now that we've raised the level of value to a lighter time, we can push it back in order to have it. Book is, though, the eyes are receding into the face. But then, of course, we've got areas such as the cheeks and then the noise which were prudes out of the face. So then we can add more intense highlights to those areas in order to create these different areas of elevation and deepness depths within the face and thus describe it with a high level of accuracy, depths and form, which is exactly what we're trying to do here. For every other part. All these character design, we're trying to bring out the forms, give them height, and then we're trying to push them back as much as they need to be pushed back in order to ensure that they have the right level off depths, because all these different forms is going to be some of them where we want to really introduce some high levels of contrast between the dock and light values around them. But then there's also going to be other areas where we want a less intense contrasts with throughout the form we want to smoother blend. We want a nice, gradual transition from light to dark. And that'll depend, of course, on what material we're dealing with and exactly how much form the or depth the particular area that we're working with is supposed to have, because some areas are just going to be flat, some will be rounded, some will be steep, some will have more height than others, and we need to convey all of those characteristics as we add in the highlights. And it's the intensity toe which they're at it in that will allow us and help us to do that . So you can see here. I'm using the last through tour a lot now. At first, all I needed was to select the base. Colors are used, the base colors as a selection mosque in orderto add in those broad sweeping brushstrokes, using the airbrush to the picked the light source and the direction toe, which was rejecting down onto the character from. And that really did allow me to create this hierarchy of light across the entire figure. And it's that hierarchy that we're using as the context of place in the highlights and shadows now, because we know where the light just areas off the character is going to be, and we know where the darkest areas will be. So even though we're breaking up those larger forms now and we're starting to define within , then the secondary forms more detailed areas, old, that surface. We are doing so within the hierarchy of light, the transition between the broader highlights and the dark it docks. And that's going to allow us to make sure that all the highlights and shadows throughout these forms of balance correctly so that the broader overall forms still read even as we break them up. And that's super important because from a distance we want that readability and of course, secondary forms are always going to be shaded within the context of the primary forms that we're dealing with. So here, for example, as I last sue the various sub forms throughout, ease face in order to describe the facial features and give them a greater amount of clarity. You'll notice that the highlights that I'm adding in to pop them out, or the shadows that I'm using toe push them back and to give the features more death and done, sir, based on the amount off highlight or shadow on either side. Although I'd reform that those features air sitting upon and so on the left side of her face here you'll notice that the highlights on her left cheek are going to be brighter than the highlights on her right cheek, simply because the left side of her face is brighter. That's where the light is hitting at its most intensity. So I want to make sure that even though there's going to be highlights across the entire face as we describe all the subtle forms that are going to be within it, I want to make sure that the brightest highlights are going to be on the left side off the overall form and that the darkest darks are going to be on the right side because of course that's the dark side of the form. So there's highlights and the shadows throughout the entire form here that we're looking at and all the sub forms that are going to be a lit will be lit according to it. So they're highlights and their shadows will be balanced out and scaled appropriately according to the overarching lighting that we've already given That brought a form. So this is important because it's we don't want every single sub form to be lit to the same intensity because then the larger form simply won't read. It will flatten out, will lose its depth. Now we're going in and was starting to make selections around he's hair in order to pull out the layers, give it more volume and give it more depth. And again, this is very much this a process off using the last suit tool to section out particular areas, and I will make multiple selections throughout the hair that I need to do in order to be able to add to the selections that I've already created is simply to hold down shift on my keyboard and I'll be ableto add more and more to the current selection and once I've done that, are simply stroke right over the top of everything that selected softly with the airbrush that I'm working with. And it's important to really monitor how much pressure you're applying to it As you work. You don't want to go true overboard with that. You don't want accidentally adding true met too much intensity to those highlights. If it's not going to give the area that you're working on the correct amount of depths because it is the end outcome, the the ultimate amount of depth that you want that area have that matters most. And if it isn't balanced, right if, say, for example, I start to shade the neck of E here and I pull those highlights out and I give them a super huge amount of intensity to the point where all of a sudden it makes it look like her neck is popping forward more story than the highest, most protruding point of her face, which would be her nose. And that won't make much sense. So we're trying to create a scale of depth here where the areas all the forms that we're dealing with that a popping out in most really do look like they're coming out Mawr than those that are sitting behind. So we want the head overall because it's sitting on the neck to look Aziz, though it's sitting Mawr Ford than the neck and we want to push the neck back a little bit . But of course, that's all relative, because we don't want to push the next right back and you don't want to pull the face right forward. We wanna pull them back and forth at just the right amount, the amount of which is appropriate in relation to those two forms. It's now I'm going through and I'm doing pretty much the same thing for the next drawing that I've done up here off her head and we're looking at it now in the 3/4 view. So I'm just I'm using a very soft airbrush at this point to really try to get a nice, smooth transition between the darks and the lights that are going to be describing the forms off her face and I want to make sure that, you know, I'm not really dealing with any hard transitions because skin is supposed to be soft. So I want to try to describe again. Skin is like any other material. We're trying out best here to describe these materials in an accurate way. And so the way in which a light reflects off of them, how it transitions into shadow and how fast those transitions happen. So the contrast and the intensity of the starkness of those transitions from doctor light. They also need to be monitored very, very carefully because that will change and will be affected due to the material that you're working with and all materials some of similar, more similar than others. But most materials are going to reflect the light and react a light in very different ways . Now skin is an interesting material to work with, because in a sense it's kind of both. It is a little bit reflective, but it's also quite Matt as well. Matt is just another word for materials that don't have a whole lot of reflection to them, whereas, for example, if you're dealing with some of the leather assets that have featured throughout ease costume design, well, then you're dealing with shiny and materials so they have an additional level off what you would call, speculate or ity and speculate. Or it is just another word for shyness. And we'll talk about that more later on when we actually intensely start to add in a super bright, high intensity. Speculate highlights to really push the shiny nous within those materials that need it most . And even skin will have that high level of shyness to it at some points. The reason as to why skin isn't super Matt. In other words, the reason ist why it does reflect light of slightly higher intensity than, say, the denim shorts would is because of the fact that skin often has over laid on top of it oils, sweat material, other materials that sit on top of it and cause it to reflect light at a slightly higher intensity than it otherwise would. And so we want to try to make sure that in order to create accurate looking skin and a shaded in an appropriate way, that makes sense that looks convincing and, most importantly, looks correct. We go to make those considerations and understand that the subtleties between these materials will make or break the realism within the characters that we're shading that we're rendering at. It's now going through him, adding more texture to her hair, really trying toe lift the overlaying layers up and out in order to give them some separation from the lower layers that they're overlapping. And that is precisely what will allow us to create that additional level of depth. What will allow us to give the heavy volume and texture as well? Because you can see he and that instead of being one flat transition from Dr Lad across the entire heads actually broken up. Now the surface of it has been broken up to convey texture, which hand needs because it as a material is the shiny textural surface that when it comes to comic book character design, you want to try to implement in the best way that you possibly can. Now, keep in mind that because we are working on comic book characters here, there is room for stylization. We're not trying to create ah photo realistic character here, and the cutting grad technique, which is the coloring method that I'm using to color e up here, is kind of a graphic style off coloring in and of itself, and I have found that it works extremely well when it comes to black and white. Leinart. It just It drives well with that particular style with the comic book style, because of the fact that it's also quite high contrast and later run when we start to really bump out those highlights and incorporate them on top of the mid tones that were pulling out. Now, across these forms will really see that bumping contrast intensify, and you'll see just how appealing it looks because of the way it jives with the Leinart itself. Those two particular styles just seemed to really suit the comic book art style, and I find that it introduces a nice graphic finish presentation for my characters that, you know, I, I do think introduces an additional level of peal of appeal to them. So now, with a side view of her head, I'm going in and I'm segmenting out the overlapping layers off her hair there, and you can see how, based on the selections that I have made, it's only the area within that selection that gets that additional level of lighter value. Grady in and thus all the areas that are un selected end up getting pushed back, in contrast, because they're not getting any light whatsoever. There's lot of values or only confined, confined to that particular selection. And in order to be able to render out each one of these areas accurately, it is good to try to, even though we're dealing with the sub forms now, those secondary forms on top of the major primitive forms that we initially brushed in and rendered out. Even though we're working on a final level of detail, he it's still good to try to think in simple terms because that's what will upgrade and enhance the readability off your overall design by allowing yourself to disconnect a little bit and not get too caught up in the details. Now you can see me working in the opposite direction. We're not adding in the highlights anymore, but instead I'm starting to render in some shadows. And to do that you'll notice that I've switched my color from black toe white and because we're working with just black and white value here on this color fill layer, which is what this layer works with, primarily just value now have essentially inverted what I'm painting in. So instead off rendering in highlights. I'm actually rendering and shadows on putting back in Mawr that purple overlay color under the surface off these forms. And I often will do this in order to introduce drop shadows to certain areas off the design . So, for example, you can see me laying in a drop shadow underneath, ease hair here and around her collar area as well. That's going to imply, and this is really where drop shadows really get most of their power from, and what they introduced to your work on a great a level of depth and three dimensionality is the fact that if something is casting a drop shadow, that means that it is solid, especially if it's casting it over the top, often underlying object that it's sitting on top of. So now what we're suggesting is the fact that this form is actually blocking a light and causing a shadow to be projected as a result, down onto the form that sitting behind it. So that is the shadow overlay portion off the coloring process. Next up, we're going to jump onto the highlights
17. 16 | Adding The Highlights: all right. So just as before, with the Shadow overly, we're going to start this out by adding in an over late for the highlights. And more specifically, this overly is going to allow us to add color to the lighting itself. You can see that I've picked a yellow orange hue. In order to do that was the highlight. Overlay is placed on top old the shadow overlay that shadow fillet that we placed in in the previous listen and it's blending. Murdered is set toe overlay. So instead of multiply as we set the blending mode to on the shadow filled layer, we've now set the highlight overlay to the overlay blending mode. So the name and what we've labeled the layer here is actually quite appropriate Now. The reason as to why I'm going over the top off these character design with this highlight overlay color is because most natural lighting does tend to have some color to it, which, if we can apply it here to our character, is going to make the overall lighting scheme much more convincing. It's also going to enrich the color palette that we're dealing with here now, most of the time when you're talking about naturally lit environments, you're going to find that the highlights are going to be warmer in terms off their colored tent. And the shadows, in contrast, will tend to have a cooler tying to them. Which is why here we've got those orangey a yellow hues coming through in the highlights, the lighter values within the color scheme that we're working with here and in the shadows . We've got the purple e cooler blues and that's going to allow us to create a much more aesthetically pleasing color combination, not just in terms of that base color scheme that we initially established in the beginning , but also in the way we've rendered in those like that lighting the highlights and the shadows and the way in which they contrast with one another. So essentially, in order to lay in that overall warmer color scheme for the highlights themselves, I was thinking in very broad terms, just as I did with the initial rendering pass of the shadows again primitive forms, so thinking off every aspect of E as cylinders spheres, not really worrying about the complexity off the sub forms within the characters, design and Now what I'm doing isn't as I'm just adjusting some of the colors here. Some of the base colors, the highlight overlay, just tweaking the hue in the contrast in the saturation to really make sure of captured a nice color scheme here for the character. And because all of these different colors and the shading old the character has been placed on two separate individual layers. I'm able to go through each one when I need to and tweak it specifically toe what it is that I'm after. And I can use my eye as I'm adjusting the hue, sliders and the saturation, the brightness of the lease, different components that I'm making up the color scheme for A and I can adjust them just the right amount until I'm 100% satisfied with how she's looking. So now, just Azzan. The previous lesson, when we were rendering in the secondary forms into the major forms within these character design within her figure, I'm going through and I'm making additional selections throughout her anatomy in order to render in thes brighter mawr intense highlights on top and have created a new layer above the highlight overlay to do that and have labeled it the final highlight rendering pass. And again, you can think of this as building up the lighting in terms of layers here, in terms of different passes and with each puss, we give the forms throughout her design additional levels of depth as we intensify the highlights and bring those forms out further and further Now, the more we bring these forms out, the more we're going to push back the lower tones that shadowed areas within the form. And that contrast between the highlights and the shadows is what's going to give the character depth. Now I'm also going through, and I'm making more intricate selections throughout her design here with the last Sue tool . As I run over the top of those selections with the soft airbrush once more and pull them out said, This allows us to capture a greater level of clarity within the various assets and elements that make up these design and were able to describe them with a higher level of detail and accuracy. So it were essentially just doing what we did previously, except now we're working at a more intricate level. We're adding in the details on a guess in terms of the lighting, you could think of that as being so in the same way that we would render in the cross hatches on the inked line on. We're essentially going in and knowing, making finest selections around the forms around the different assets throughout her character design in order to articulate them and defined them to make the more vivid. And that's really what we're going to be doing throughout the remaining portion old. This lesson is going back through with this last suitable pulling out, for example, the shop and pinpointed reflections on the leather straps around her legs here and around her boots and her leggings as well, for that matter. But you'll notice that there is selections that are making with the last suit to a getting narrower and narrower. So we're not trying to run, the less you tool around the previous selections we've already made. We're trying to build on top of those previous selections, and so when narrowing in the area of dispersion that let light is going to be cast around the form, and we're trying to get it on another level of height there, and so the selections and the area in which we're running that airbrush through will be more narrow. Uh, and that's what's going to allow us to build up the form bit by bit, bringing out as we do the fine at details within it, the final intricacies that we're going to see. And of course, when you're dealing with, you know, for example, the areas of exposed skin where we can see her size there, you know there's no going to be a whole lot of detail there. It's a fairly flat and even surface, so we don't really necessarily want to be making a ton of different selections around that . We want to think about the forms that we're dealing with, both in the broader sense and also the secondary forms that carved out of those larger, primitive shapes. So you can see here on the back view that I'm going in and a making selections around the various costuming assets throughout her design. So again, with the gloves, I've got my less you tool and I'm starting to figure out where am I going? Toe have the most intense reflections of light within this particular costume element, and that's pretty self explanatory and easy for me to figure out because I already know what direction the light is shining down under the character from. I understand that. So it's pretty good to go all it is. Now is a matter of time, and this process can indeed take a little while for me to go through, because now I'm making a ton of different little selections around the entire character. And because of that, that's the pretty much the portion all the coloring process that is going to eat up most off your time. Because once you've made those selections, all you need to do then is take your airbrush and just run it over the top off those selections. And really, the forms and the the various sub forms that are within that larger area are going to be described in a self explanatory way. You might be wondering, Well, you know, if I'm just making selections and I'm running over the top of those selections with the airbrush Well, how does that describe the forms of materials that you're trying to depict within your illustration? Well, it actually does again assist. It's kind of depicted by Defoe just in the way in which you place those selections. And so it's kind of your informing of visually what's happening. It's all about elevating those secondary forms and elevating them to the right level of brightness in the right level of intensity as the light hits those areas. And if you can do that effectively, then it will simply look accurate by default. So it really comes down to the surface, all the form that you're dealing with and how broken up that is. For example, as I said before, we're going to see a lot more detail and had to make a lot more selections throughout. He's costuming. Then we will have to on her skin, which is fairly even as faras the surface the geometrical surface goes that we're dealing with. So now I'm going back through, and I'm making another render pass here on a new layer called speculative highlights and this particular render parts. It's what is going to help us to add shiny nous or glossy nous. True, the reflective materials throughout his character design, and most of them are going to reside within her leather gloves, her leather boots, leggings and her top and so these are pretty much going to be placed in in the same way that we just placed in the highlights. Except this time where once more narrowing down the selection. So we're getting shopper where making finer and finest selections here as we, instead of creating a broad highlight, shopping it up and intensify it. And so it's actually full it There's less over full off here to the highlight, because now we're confining it to just a small, thin strip of selection that we've outlined there in order to give essentially the form that we're trying to describe as we render it out its highest point value and at its highest point of value, we're going to really see just how intense the highlights will be as their reflected off of the surface. And it is these varying levels of intensity that help us to describe the materials that we're dealing with that we're trying to show into picked throughout these characters, and I'm presentation that will make them distinct from one another that will make the denim shorts appear to be made over different material than the materials that we're seeing throughout the leather clad portions of her body again on the leggings and the boots and her top. So this is much less to do with color and figuring out what colors you're going to use. Then it is to do with what you're trying to describe as faras, the form goes, and as far as the values, so you're not thinking in terms of color, your thinking more in terms off the light and dark for value. How much light do you need to add in around these forms in order to give them the right amount of depth and the right amount of elevation? And remember that that, in and of itself is also fairly easy to figure out because you've already established that over arching lighting scheme right from the very beginning. All this rendering process by placing in those broad strokes with the airbrush and defining whether last was sits in relation to the character and from what direction is projecting down onto them from so now focusing back in on the back three court of you off E. Here I'm going through and I'm making those final selections. You can see that they are smaller than the previous selections are made with the last suitable throughout her costuming there. And so the highlight at his brightest point at its most intense point will be narrow. Uh, then the initial highlight that we placed in for that particular portion off her costuming . So the more reflective and bright and intense the light is that narrow. It's also going to be. It's like a laser beam of light, essentially bouncing off the particular portion off the character. Now, in contrast to that, if you've got a more Matt material, so a material that the form is made off that isn't as reflective that doesn't reflect light At that level of intensity. You'll find that usually the transition from light to dark value around that form will be softer. It won't be a stock, so you can see here that I'm going in. I'm just pulling those final forms out Mawr and Mawr and as I do, those areas appear more detailed because now we're defining the intricacies now with describing them toe a much finer level of detail. So again, this is just a matter of going through and adding in these more intense highlights. Now his great example of how skin also is a little bit reflective and how, if you want to, depending on the kind of style that you're going for in a lot of the time, this does have to do with style. We're adding in higher levels of reflection to the skin, and you can see here that I'm adding some speculate highlights to her cheeks there and the tip of her nose at the very the pinnacle. All those forms to really get his skin toe have that glossy looking appeal to it. And that can work very, very well. Of course, in reality skinnies and this reflective, however, it does reflect a little bit. As I've already mentioned in a. The layering off oil and sweat across your skin will tend tohave this reflective effect to it and were really exaggerating that here in the comic book art form, as we create and present a stylized representation of the character, which is fine, you really do want to kind of take from reality, try to depict it as convincingly as possible and turn it up, make it more impactful. So now here we're going to be adding in an additional level of shiny nous to ease hair as we make final and final selections around it, just as we did with the previous presentations off her character design in the front 3/4 view on the back three court of you and essentially here we're going to be going through the same process with creating thinner, narrowest selections using the last suit tools. So we're getting pretty intricate now. This is again a very detailed portion off the rendering process where, where being very careful as to what we're selecting and what we're not selecting. We do need to cut back that selection at points using the haute key that will allow you to take away portions of the selection and again shift by holding down shift. You'll be ableto add to that selection as needed, and you'll notice that I don't just select one segment. For example, when I'm adding highlights to the hair, I'm actually adding in selections there for every part of the hair that I don't like to render out that I'd like to pull the light of values out off rather than just, for example, one one clump of hair actually going in. And I'm outlining with the last brutal the areas that I want to render out at once on that kind of allows me to create this consistent fall off of light across the selection, which is important because light does have a certain level of full off to it. You don't want those highlights, especially when it comes to the so forms to have the same level of brightness attached to them. You want them to fade off from light to dark as they hit that major form. And that's really how you should be thinking about the dispersion of light across the character. You want to try to make sure that it consistently fours off from light and into shadow appropriately, as as it relates to that initial lighting scheme that we established in the first place. So I'm going to add in some rim lighting now, and what relighting is going to allow us to do is a few things. One, it'll create a much more dramatic lighting set up for ease. Character design here, her overall presentation because essentially we're adding 1/3 light. Will a second light now coming in from the opposite side off the character. Now, this particular light won't be as intense as the primary light source of the highlights. The lightest areas old, the forms that are being lit by this secondary let will not have the same amount of intensity as the brightest points off the areas, all the characters that are being lit from the primary light source. So we want to just try to keep that in mind. This secondary light source will not have the same intensity as the major light source. It will have a lower intensity and we want to make sure that's clear so that again we can get an accurate read on these forms as they're being lit by these two separate light sources. Some going around the dark side now off each one off these forms and I'm adding in a strip of blue light around them. And what that's going to allow me to do here is to really add that additional level of pop and three dimensionality to the character, because now we're not only describing how one light source will react to and bounce off of her forms, but also how the secondary light will do the same thing. So now we've got a bit more toe work with here. It is only lot and shudder that allows us to describe form in the first place without light . Without shadow, we essentially just I left with the base colors that we initially started out with, which is why I really alway using here Is this light and dark values That's what's allowing us to be able to give these forms depth and to articulate them in the first place. So when you introduce that secondary line that rim live well, then what we're able to do is introduce some additional tones, some additional value to other areas of the form that helped to describe it on a to an additional extent, which is fantastic for us because we're always looking for ways to add more depth to our character. More clarity. Tuesday's forms now it also contrast really, really well with warmth off the major primary light source. You can see here that we're working with a cooler hue full, that secondary line, which allows us to add a greater level of aesthetic appeal to the scullers color scheme once more, where enriching the colors that is being painted with here and again, the more interest that we can add, the more visual appeal that weaken generate within the character, the better. This is all about presentation and how far we can take that presentation so that we can create a character which is memorable. That's presented in the best light possible, because this is whatever character you're creating for your comic books. When it comes to the way in which they presented that's completely up to you. That's really the end outcome. That final representation off who they are over your idea is all going to come down to the context in which you're coloring the men, lighting them within and even the line work that articulates them. So now we're adding that same rim light to her face. And when it comes to shading the face, you'll notice that I've made a very specific selection around the side off her jaw and cheek there, and you might be wondering, Well, why don't you just have, like, a consistent strip? Aww lighting around the face. Why have you lit up? You know it heart the side of that jaw, and the reason for that is because when it comes to especially shading the face, you want to try to think of it in terms of three dimensional geometrical planes. And so I'm not just lighting a thin strip of rim light around the outside of her face there , I'm thinking as though I'm lighting that side plane off her face in order to really describe the form in Anak Your it way. They can see here that I'm intensifying and I really want to try to get that geometry reading. Well, because this is all we have at our disposal to describe this structure off the faces, forms and all of that it entails. And when you're dealing with the facial features and trying to convince the audience that those facial features are just sitting on top of the face on the flat plane but that they're actually in built into it, then that's where the rendering and our ability to shade the surrounding areas of those features is going to come into play in a big way because how effective we are doing that will allow us to describe the faces of our characters with the inaccurate level of quality to them that makes the audience feel like the character you're presenting to them is believable again. What causes a character to look like they've been rendered or drawn, for that matter in an incorrect way is just the fact that maybe the forms aren't quite reading properly, especially in the areas of the character that are a little bit more intricate and a little bit more complex. But the face especially, is one area where you're going to find that people's attention is completely and 100% focus on that particular area of the character first because, as we've already mentioned, this is how they relate to the character in the beginning, how they get that first point off connection in order to be able to understand them. That their personality, their attitude in order to relate with them. Because without that relatability, that means that the audience is going to become disconnected and they won't be fully engaged with the characters. So no matter what point were at throughout the characters designed, we want to make sure that we've not only articulated at in the best way possible with the inks, but also when it comes to the coloring that we've described the forms that we're dealing with, not just in the face, but throughout the entire character in an accurate way. Now you can see me doing here is I'm just dropping in a little bit of a background. I've also got a few adjustment layers that have placed in on top Old the character and those adjustment. Lee has really helped me to just tweak the contrast off the coloring that I've done here, as well as harmonize the colors under one warm or cool tents. So in order to be able to do that, I've got a curves adjustment layer that I've created and a color balance adjustment layer as well. And those two combined a really the true adjustment layers that I will regularly use to just finesse the final presentation off my comic book character illustrations. So now it really just adding in the final touches here, as I place in some room lights around hell lips just to really increase the amount of reflectivity and make her lips lips look nice and glossy in a lot of the time. Facial features in particular, are going to be the portions all the head that had the most reflectivity, you know. So, for example, the eyes and the lips just because they're wet. So that completes the highlights four e and essentially wraps up the whole coloring process that we've gone through here for our character design. So next up, we still have one element left to render out, which is, of course, her overlaying trench coat, so we'll jump under that in the next lesson.
18. 17 | Trench Coat Colors: All right, So lastly, we're going to attend to the colors for ease. Trench Kurt. Now we've already got the base colors in there, so I'm going to create another color fill layer. Give that a nice purple de saturated Hugh, which is similar to the rest of the design, and that I'm going to go in over the top and start to pull out some of the major forms that we're going to see come through in the trench coat as it wraps around ease Body. And most of those forms will be created by her underlying body as the trenchcoat overlays around it. So we want those to come through, and I'm very much just thinking in terms as I knock out those major forms off how her basic underlying manic and model structure will pop through on the surface off that trench coat. So now that that's done, it's just a matter off using the last Sue tool to select all those smaller details and sub forms throughout the trench coats design, so that we can go over the top of them with the airbrush and pull out their forms. Give them some height as we apply some mid tone highlights tooth, Um, and you can see that immediately. They start to become more prominent just from the fact that we're going over the top of them with that airbrush. Well, lifting them out off the surface, off that trench coat and everything in between all the creases, all the areas that aren't selected will, in contrast, be pulled back essentially being pulled deeper into the trench coat as we pull out the heightened areas off detail that will be present throughout its design. So I'm just going to go through here and make all of these selections again, repeating the process. The process is fairly repetitive. All that is is is using that lasts you tool at this point, Especially now, as we mentioned before that we've already established the basic lighting set up how this trench coat will be lit and with the general direction already established, we know how this light is going to project down and cast across the trench coat. So the next thing to do is just to articulate the minor details within the larger forms that we're going to see throughout it. And as we do that, you'll notice that All of a sudden, those details start to become clearer, and the intricacy of the trench coat itself starts to come about in a more vivid way. Where articulating the details throughout it here and as we do, we're able to produce more deaths within give it more form in the areas that aren't necessarily determining the overall shape nor describing the overall shape. But it's certainly popping off of the primitive forms underneath. Um, so you can think about it in the way where you're always going to have a primitive form. You're always going toe, have a major urban rural shape to whatever it is that you're rendering out. Whatever it is you're lighting, it is going to follow a certain shape. And that shape that brought overall shape must have ah, light cast an opponent that shows how it falls off the costs across that overall object. In this case, we're talking about the trench coat, of course, and you can kind of divide the trench Kurt up into a few major forms. Of course, we've got the general body off. The trench coat that wraps around the upper half of her body is pulled in around her waist and then comes back out to hang across her pelvis, the bottom half of her body. But then, beyond that but we also have to consider is the cylindrical forms of her arms. And it is those basic forms that I'm shading. I'm laying in those overall or that overall lighting scheme for and so everything else on top of that is simply going to be shaded with the intensity, the appropriate intensity to the fall off of light that's being projected down across the major forms. And so, as I said before, they're all going to be lit it within the context of how the larger shapes are being lit. And now I'm laying in a funnel highlight pass on top off the trench coat, which is essentially just repeating the same process that we went through with the previous lighting pass. We're going back in with the last two selection tool, and we're creating Titus elections around each section. All the trench kurt toe once more give those minor forms those secondary forms an additional level of hide. So always be thinking in terms at a on a higher level, on a macro level off the major shapes that are going to be within whatever element it is you're trying to shade. And then, with that in mind, start to pull out the secondary forms within that, depending on how many old those details are going to need to be lit, are going to need tohave that hide applied to them in orderto have them stand out and to give them some form. I like to think old these secondary forms is essentially surface details of the major forms that they're built on top of. And in doing that again, I can make sure that they are placed in at the right intensity as I input their highlights . As I intensify, the is highlights to the appropriate level off height because the more I intensify those highlights, the higher those forms are going to begin to pop out. They're going to have additional levels of height applied to them. So you want to make sure that the amount of height that is applied to them is within reason as far as the major forms that they're wrapping around, because if they look like that, they're popping, popping out too much, popping out too much. Well, then What's going to happen is it just won't look as though they are part off those major forms. For example, if I pop out these belts and buckles off of the trench coat too far, it's going to look almost Aziz. They're they're just floating on top of it. Not actually like there part off the trench, Kurt. Not like they're built into it. Same goes for the folds and the creases throughout the jacket. You want to try to make sure that although you are trying, you are attempting to describe their form in and of themselves because make no mistake, there is some geometry to the secondary forms throughout the element that you're working on you wanted. Definitely describe that. And when you think about inner folds increases essentially, they're cylinders there, half cylinders that sit on top of the surface of the major forms that they're surrounding, that they're running across. And so you want to think in terms off. That way you want to think of them as formas well, but at the same time, those surface forms are really going to be shaded and rent it out within the context of those major forms that they're on top of that. There are part off, and so that's something that is always wise to be aware of. And it allows me to be able to ultimately, like the character with a sense of form that allows them to read in a much clear away that allows them to, from a distance, be able to easily be made out visually. And that can only come from being able to light the details and the his major forms with a consistent fall off off light from the main light sources of projects down onto the character. Because, as I already mentioned, if you're not able to do that and those larger forms don't read while from a distance, the character simply won't have the right amount of depth, they will look flat. And so it's really, at the end of the day, the major forms that have to read. First and foremost, it wouldn't even matter so much if some of these details weren't necessarily emphasize. Some of those surface forms weren't well it you could leave them at, and the character would still read as long as the major forms had that first lighting pass cast across them. So the details really come from those secondary forms. And that's what they're meant for their meant to fill out the visuals, to give the element that you're working on additional levels of articulation and visual interest and to help to emphasize the interior design. Yes, we have figured out the general forms, and we know roughly what shape the this particular element the trench coat is going to be. But from a distance, maybe we can't make out the intricate details throughout its design, such as the buckles and the belts and the even the folds in the creases. So we want them to read to an extent just to create that additional level of visual intricacy and appeal. And it's going to, of course, allow us to produce a design which is a little bit more appealing toe Look at interesting. However again, it's not the most important part, and in all honesty, the amount of which you pull out these different forms and you go through these lighting passes is really down to the amount of time that you got, because we could even go through and do another layer off highlights on top of what you see here. Now we're laying in the speculum highlights right now on top of this trench coat and you can see that we've got three. Essentially, we've got for four different shading passes there that we've added in on top of the we've got the shadow overly which report out the mid tones on. And then we've got the highlights above that. And then we've got the well because the highlight overly which gives the lighting some color. Then we've got the final highlight pass and then the speculum highlights and all of those combined, or what is allowing us to give her trenchcoat and the rest of her design that level of depth. So now I've added in a curves adjustment layer and the color balance layer just to make sure everything is tweaked and modified. All those colors are modified to the correct hue and saturation and lightness that they need to be at to ensure they tie in well with the rest of her design. And then finally, we're going to place in the well, we're going to adjust the buckles here and just to give them some additional hired as well . These are very small details, of course, and often times they won't even be noticeable, even if you spend the time on emphasising them. But still it is worth placing them in because every little detail that you do take the time to shade out will add to the overall presentation, even if the audience doesn't necessarily notice it completely. So again, I'm just going over the top here on the speculum highlights layer. And I'm really starting to just make sure that again those overall forms that the trench coat is conforming to is standing out. That's when zooming out here and looking at it from a distance. So I'm actually taking the airbrush there and making sure that those larger forms do read from a distance. Because sometimes that can be lost within the details, especially if you are spending a lot of time working in close. It can be easy to lose track off the overall character design and how they look from top to bottom. So you want to try to avoid working in one small section without from time to time at least zooming out to see how that small session you've been shading actually fits together with the whole. So I hope that you enjoyed this. Listen, that completes the coloring process for E here and also completes this demonstration. I hope that you get a ton of inside that you now know how to sketch up and design your comic book characters from scratch on, then inked, um, render them out and then color them up. So hopefully you've been following along here, and you've got your own character sitting there right in front of you. Thanks so much for joining me in this course. Keep on creating. Keep on practicing and a catchy next time.
19. 18 | Colors Assignment: well. We sure have covered a lot of content here throughout this course, but that wraps up the demonstration. So now it's time for your final assignment, where you're going to take the ink, the line work that you've done in the previous one and color it up. Bring your character through to completion, laying in the base color tones again. You want to make sure that they hosts it together well. Use the color wheel if you need to. But in general, just remember that cool and warm tones are usually going to sit very well next to one another. As long as none of those colors clash, you will be good to go. Remember that there's always the opportunity to go back and tweak and modify the huge saturation brightness or contrast off the colors that you're using throughout your color schemes composition. So there's nothing that you need to necessarily set in stone. Whatsoever. We're keeping all of these based colors on separately is precisely so that you can go back and modify them if you need to. Months, those base colors are down. It'll be time to shade your character, and this is kind of the tricky part of the process because we are using some unique layers here in orderto place in the shadows and pull out the mid times. That's probably the trickiest part, but that Phil Qalea really is highly effective for creating realistic shadows throughout your character. It's what's going to give them the color that they need in order to produce a more realistic lighting set up. Then, on top of the shadows, we're going to place in the highlight overlay, which will add some color twos, alighting itself and enrich the overall colors Game above. That will add another pass of highlights just to really pop the depth of the forms throughout the character and give it that additional level over dimension. And then finally will place in the rim Light, otherwise known as the back line, to give the character an additional cinematic appeal. That really makes them look that much more epic and then finally will place in the adjustment layers that are really going to allow us to tweak the contrast, the brightness and the color balance of the character to make sure everything is harmonized under the one warm or cool tent or mix of both so I can't wait to see what you come up with for this assignment. This is the final frontier. So you're really going toe? Want to take your time with it? Give it the time that it deserves. In order to make sure you're able to come up with the best presentation possible for your comic book character. I want the best for you. And I want you to do well. I want you to create something that you can be truly proud off. And I hope that you see some real results from the inside that you've taken away from the listens and the demonstrations that you've watched throughout this course. Thanks for joining me here. Good luck with the assignment and l see you soon.
20. 19 | Conclusion: Well, congratulations is in order. You finally made it to the end off this course. You've gone through all the lessons over the demonstrations and completed all of the assignments it has ever pat on the back. Because let me tell you, it takes a lot of confidence and a lot of guts to take the insights that you've gained from this course and actually put them into action and see riel results in your work. Thanks so much for joining me here. In this course, it's been an absolute pleasure to share my knowledge and experience with you. And I heard that it truly has been a benefit to your own artistic development until next time. Thanks so much for watching. Keep on practicing, Keep on creating and catchy next time.
Clayton Barton, Harness the Power of Dynamic Drawing
