Concept Design: Drawing Meaningful Interiors That Tell a Story

1. Introduction: Hi there. My name is Michelle Tiberius. I'm a cartoonist, illustrator and traveler based in Tampa, Florida. Over the years, I've met a lot of artists who seem to just dread the idea of having to draw in backgrounds. The common complaints being that drawing interiors is too time consuming and not as important as having to draw characters. To be honest, for a long time, I felt that way too. But over time, I began to re-frame my thinking. This was thanks to the help of listening to artists who do enjoy drawing backgrounds. We're able to see the importance of backgrounds as a storytelling tool. Just as in real life, interior spaces create a frame for the people that inhabit the space. Having a more detailed frame helps bring out emphasis to the bigger picture, which is, in this case, your main story. Some of the things that we'll be going over in this video of course, will include considering your space more deeply, asking yourself a few questions and considering the answers to those questions throughout the design and conception of your interior space. This class will be formatted something like a tutorial or a progress video, where I will take you from the very beginning stages where I consider the space and try to conceptualize what I want it to look like all the way down to the penciling, inking and final execution stages. As I work on the space, I will explain my thought process and my decision-making so you can get a better idea as to maybe what are the things that you should consider yourself while you're creating your own spaces. While yes, it might be true that it's a bit time consuming to create an interior space from scratch. I hope that through this lesson, you can see that it's worth it. That the various objects and props and furniture that are in a space help to tell the story, that the space itself is part of the story too. I hope that you will join me in this class as I share my love of interiors with you. Hopefully we can learn something together about making a rich, emotive and realistic space for your characters to inhabit. If you're ready to join me on this journey to creating interiors together, why don't you meet me in the next video. Thank you and I hope to see you there soon. 2. Considering the Space: In this video, we're going to be answering a few questions and we're going to be doing our best to conceptualize this place as though it were real, having at least a basic understanding of the place that you're going to be drawing before drawing it will allow you to make smarter choices during the drawing and rendering phase. If you'd like, you can go as in-depth as you want, but to start off, let's begin by asking a few questions. First question you want to ask yourself is, what kind of room is this? Some examples would include maybe an office, bedroom, library, kitchen, a cafe, or living room. Next question I want you to ask is, what is the room primarily used for? Some rooms could be used to entertain guests, to unwind or relax after a work day. Kitchen is for cooking and eating while a bedroom is for sleeping. The third question you want to ask yourself is, who uses this room? This answer could vary anywhere from one person to even 20 people. Maybe the room is used by a young couple or a whole family. If you're drawing out a library or a room in a cafe, various patrons of that establishment could be in and out at any time. The next question you want to ask yourself is, how does it feel to be in this room? I want you to think a little bit more deeply than just, does it feel good or bad to be in this room? Think of emotive words. Does it feel chaotic or soothing? Is it a place that's welcoming and loving or a place that is depressing or upsetting? I think it helps to imagine particular scenarios where you've walked into a room and immediately felt some sort of emotion. Now your goal as a conceptual artist is to distill that emotion into the room that you'll be drawing. Final question that I want you to consider is, what is this room secondarily used for? It's important to remember that rooms aren't always used exclusively for their primary purpose. Since human beings are complicated and emotional beings, oftentimes we assign new meaning to spaces. Say a living room has a secondary purpose of emotionally connecting with other people and fostering relationships. On the other hand, a room that is maybe isolated from other people could be a room that secondarily is used to escape the outside world. Let's also consider that maybe a character that has been told that they're a very good cook could consider the kitchen to be a place that enforces a sense of identity. Meanwhile, an office or workspace isn't just a place where a character gets work done, but it's also a place where they seek to find purpose in life. With this fifth question, I want you to dig deep. What are the emotional attachments that you've created to various spaces in your own world? This will add an extra layer of complexity to the space that you'll be creating. Since it's all well and good to draw a picture of a pretty bathroom that maybe a person likes to take a bath in, but it's a whole other thing to draw a bathroom that this character uses to seek comfort and escape from a stressful life in work environment. Assigning that new deeper meaning to your room will also make viewers care more about it as well. Here are my answers for the room that will be creating together for the rest of this lesson. First, I'm going to be creating a bedroom. This room will be primarily used for reading, sleeping, doing homework, and practicing guitar. The character that uses this room is a smart, yet lonely 16 year old boy. When you walk into this room, it should feel hopeful, peaceful, but maybe just also a little sad. Then finally, the secondary and more emotional functions for this room include daydreaming and fantasizing about a different life, a sanctuary from unresolved social problems and anxiety, and finally, as a place to relax after a stressful day at school. As you can see, these are simple answers. I've not written pages and pages describing every single detail of the room, but just being able to answer these five questions has helped made the space feel more real. Now that we've answered some conceptual questions, I think it's time to move on to the next space where we'll begin the room map and planning for what will eventually become our finished room. Thanks, and I'll see you there. 3. Room Mapping: Now that we've taken some time to consider the space, we're now going to move on to creating a room map. Room maps can be really useful. Although they're mostly seen in the architectural world, I feel that when it comes to concept, design and designing environments, they can also be really helpful for artists as well. This will help us figure out where furniture should go, where the windows and doors are. This will help eliminate some of the guesswork once we're actually creating a more three-dimensional rendering of this space. Most rooms are basically squares or rectangles. For this particular room, I want it to be almost square shaped, but more like a short fat rectangle. Don't really need to use a ruler since this is meant to be a rough guide. I think another thing that also helps is remembering that this room is not just floating in space, it's within a larger structure. In this case a house or an apartment. One thing that helps is getting a basic idea of where exactly the outside and inside begins and ends. Here is the outside and then everything below this line is indoors unless your space is maybe a shed or a studio, you're outside area is maybe only going to take up, one or two, possibly three lines. Since most rooms are indoors and part of larger structures within them, there's always going to be an indoor area to consider. It's important to keep this in mind because this establishes where windows should go. Now that we've established for outside area is we can go ahead and roughly place a window. I'm only placing one window or feel free to place more if you'd like. Even though I don't plan on putting in a closet in the final drawing, I think it helps to suggest where the closet should be and the rough size and shape of it so that the door that I place will be large enough to access the entire contents of the closet. Now you could use a rectangle shape like I've used for the window to denote the door. But the reason why I'm using this cone-shaped instead is because this allows me to visualize which way the door is swinging. That's important because I don't want to place any furniture or potentially another door here which could obstruct the entryway to the closet itself. Now that we have our closet door in place, let's go ahead and add our second door, which will act as the entryway to the bedroom. I've made sure that this new door doesn't interfere with the closet, even though they're relatively close together. I'm going to stop here. But if you wanted, you could add additional doors to lead into, say, a bathroom or a separate room. Now that we have are structural elements in place, let's go ahead and determine where the furniture should go. You want to start off with the most important pieces of furniture first and since we're designing a bedroom, the most important piece of furniture is the bed. We've got pretty good amount of space here. This is where I'm going to go ahead and place the bed. Since this is the bedroom of a teenager, let's see that it's about a twin size bed. You can adapt the bed size depending on the needs of your particular character. Now, I see that I'm running into a bit of a problem here. There's still more pieces of furniture that I want to add, but this bed is taking up quite a bit of space. I'm actually going to go ahead and extend the room to accommodate the bed a little bit better. That's why when you are mapping things out in this initial stage, be sure to use pencil so you can make alterations as needed. Okay. I'm happy with the extension that we've made at this point. The scale of the furniture doesn't have to be 100 percent perfect. Just get it as close as you can. Now that we have the bed and we have to consider what is maybe the second most important piece of furniture. This closet is a little bit on the small side, but I don't imagine this character having a ton of clothes either. Rather than adding a wardrobe or a dresser, let's go ahead and just add a nightstand so that he can have more storage options. Now this particular character is also a student. I think it would be a good idea to add a desk as well. I placed the dusk between the window and the closet, but there's something about the placement that bothers me a little. What I'm going to go ahead and do is erase this desk that I've just drawn and actually give this character a corner desk, which I think will use up the space a little bit more nicely, actually going to redraw the window facing the outside so that it's more clear that it's not interfering with the desk placement. Let's go ahead and also add a chair for him to sit on. The last piece of furniture that I want to add is a bookcase. Since I feel like this character is an avid reader, from this point, you can continue to add other details if you'd like. We can add this circle here to denote a lamp. I also like the idea of there being an area rug by the bed. We can also place, say, a computer and I'm going to put it slightly off to the side rather than center so that it doesn't interfere with the window and he still has a view from the outside. Now that we've finished our room map, let's continue on to the next video. Thanks, and I'll see you there. 4. Sketching the Room: In this video, we're going to draw the shape, which in this case will be something of a short fat cube that will act as the container for the room itself. This particular sheet of paper is 11 by 17. I chose a larger sheet of paper so that when it comes time to start drawing in different little details and maybe smaller pieces of furniture and all of that, it'll be easier for me to do so. Personally, I would recommend going no smaller than an 8 by 11.5 sheet of paper. Because the smaller you go, the harder it will be to draw in those little details. Originally, the shape of my room was a little bit different, but because I extended it to create more space for the bed, it's now more of a rectangular shape. I'm going to go ahead and leave the room map off to the side, off camera and I'll be referring back to it periodically. We're going to be drawing this from a bird's eye view. The rectangle is going to be thinner towards the back and bigger towards the front as perspective pushes the front forward and the back backwards. Now that we've drawn out our first rectangle, this will make it a little bit easier to determine what the rest of the shapes are going to look like. Since now we know that we have a wall here, and here, and here because we're essentially going to be drawing a box. This process is meant to be intuitive and it involves a lot of laying down lines, erasing and creating adjustments to correct as needed, which I think gives the room more character. And that's why I'm doing it this way rather than using rulers. Here is our box which will contain the room that we're going to be drawing in. I did this free hand and I did it by eye. But if you want to make this process easier on yourself, I definitely recommend taking a look at some reference images of boxes because that will definitely demystify where various plans should go and help with the perspective a little bit if you're really struggling. Since this interior is going to be a little bit more stylized, the perspective doesn't have to be 100 percent perfect. Just get it as close as you can. Now that we have our room in place, let's continue on to the next video, where we will begin blocking out some more shapes. Thanks, and I'll see you there. 5. Blocking in Shapes: In this video, we're going to start blocking in the doors, windows, and furniture. Based on the room map, it looks like the window takes up between a third and a half of the bedroom and it's placed along this wall, so that we have our window. Let's go ahead and place our doors, which might be a little bit trickier since they're so close together, but there is a good amount of space between this door and this corner here. Let me just and go ahead and place that one in first. That's fine. For now, let's go ahead and add the second door, which is closer to the corner. But since doors typically aren't directly on the corner, we're going to move it a little bit back. We also are going to add a trim to the door, eventually, and we want to leave there to be some room for that. Remember, since we're viewing the room from the top, these squares, which essentially that's all these shapes are, squares, are going to taper at the bottom since the floor is further away from us. Actually, I'm going to go ahead and do just that window as well since I feel like it could take me more. Again, if you have more windows or more doors, feel free to continue adding them on. I've decided that I'm going to actually shorten the window a little bit, and by shortening this window, this also gives me the option of creating a window sill, and I would like since typically floor length windows don't have window sills. Now that we have our window and two doors in place, let's move on to the furniture. Once again, we're going to start with the most important piece of furniture. A bed. I think that you'll find that being able to draw boxes is going to be really helpful with this particular exercise. We have our bed, some sheets have a little bit of volume to them, show that the sheet and actually just be slightly bigger than the bed. The pillow, of course, is also a box itself. Later on we're going to round this particular shape out so that it looks more pillow like. Now we're going to add our nightstand, which will be right beside the bed. I haven't decided on a design for the nightstand just yet. But for the time being, we will just create a box with some drawers, and then we can alter this. Make it a little bit fancier, a little bit more interesting later on. I'm actually worried that this window is still a little bit too tall and my interfere with the desk placement. I think I'm going to just a tiny bit smaller and actually use this line to create the corner desk. We're just going to leave that there for now and then focus on getting a more realistic appearance for the desk later. Again, I'm not going to get too detailed here with chair just yet, although do plan on making it a desk chair but just locking in some shapes here. An X-shaped for the legs. Actually, I think I want to toggle this chair at the desk. I feel like this particular character is a tidy person who would want his chair to be toggled in. That way, also, we're making sure that the desk isn't competing with the door, which is another thing that you have to keep in mind when he sorted or three-dimensional environment drawings to avoid tangents like this that can easily happen. Finally, we have our bookcase. Now if we take a look at my room map, the trouble with the bookcases, that if we're comparing the bed in the room map to the bed that we've actually drawn out here, it looks as though the bed is actually too short on the room map, and I've corrected that here. If I were to place a bookcase here, there would actually be very little room, bookcase would be here and there would be very little room between the foot of the bed and the bookcase. I think I do have a substantial amount of room between bed, here, and the door. For this particular case, I'm going to go away from my room map and instead, improvise and place the bookcase more here. This bookcase is going to be more short and fat than tall, which is fine, if that will work better. Now I'm going to go ahead and erase some stray lines so that I can hopefully get a better sense of what this might look like and hopefully open it up more. Erasing these lines will also make certain elements look more solid like this bed hopefully. Then I'm going to erase these top referential ceiling lines too. I accidentally erased some lines that I wanted there. Let's just quickly go ahead and add those back in. Now we have successfully blocked out our furniture for this particular room. Why don't we head on over to the next video so we can continue to flash this room out, and I'll see you there. 6. Architectural Details: In this video, we're going to start adding more detail. To begin that, I wanted to start by adding some simple architectural elements. But first let's start off by adding some base boards or trim to the bottom. Keep in mind that the base boards in this back wall here should be thinner than the base boards here. You could also add some trim up at the top of the ceiling here. But since I don't feel like this is a very fancy bedroom or home, I'm just going to skip that part. Our window is looking a little bit flat. To add some dimension, I'm going to add a line here to suggest an opening from the outside and here as well. Remember to flare this line out as it gets closer to the top. Hopefully you can see that just by placing a couple of lines, this square suddenly feels a lot more open and window like. Remember also that windows have frames that contain the panes of glass, so, let's go ahead and add those in as well. Don't forget to include a latch to actually open and close the window. This is a teen-aged boy's room, so I've made the window frame pretty simple. But if you wanted to add more architectural details, maybe some sort of mosaic or stained glass window type or some kind of more intricate frame design you could do that. Just remember to always refer back to the initial question of who uses this room and what is it used for? Make sure that all of your design decisions reflect the answers to your questions. Now that we've gone ahead and added some dimension to our window, let's go ahead and give the same treatment to our doors. This particular door, I'm going to draw ajar just to add some more interesting angles to the composition. But for the entry door, I'm going to actually draw this closed because I do plan on adding a few more details like an area rug right here, and I don't want to have to worry about whether or not the door will be competing with these additional elements. Since the hinges are on the right side, that means that the door handle and knob will be on the left side of the door. Doors usually also have a trim surrounding them. So, I'm going to go ahead and add that in now. I'm not sure we really need this particular line here, so, I'm going to just go ahead and erase that, since I don't feel like it's really adding to the composition. It looks as though I've drawn the door knob too high, I'm going to just go ahead and lower that. Another thing to keep in mind is that doors come in a variety of different designs and often times have insets or if it's a door that's facing the outside, it could even have a window. Definitely take the time to look at different pictures of doors in real life so that you can get an idea of what type of door you would like to design for your room. Of course, the same advice applies to any other type of architectural element that you want to incorporate into your room be it different types of windows, pillars, columns, say if you wanted to incorporate something like wainscoting. Okay. For our door, I'm going to try to keep things relatively simple. Let's go ahead and mimic everything that we've done for this door onto this one. Now that we have some of the architectural elements in place, we're going to move on to what I think is probably my favorite step, which is to go ahead and start adding more details and fleshing out the existing furniture that we have. Whenever you're ready, let's continue onto the next video. 7. Adding Functional Objects: In this video, we're going to start placing more personalized details in this room. All the details that we'll be adding in this particular room will be more functional and practical in nature. They'll be things that the user of this room will need. If we take a look at the room map, we can see that there are still a couple of details that I've not yet added. The first one that I can see is the lamp on the night stand. Now that I've roughly gone ahead and placed this lamp, it occurs to me that I haven't actually drawn in any power outlets. So I'm going to go ahead and roughly sketch one in. Not only do you want this room to be visually appealing, part of what makes a room believable is how functional it is. So be sure to keep those more practical elements in mind while you're drawing. I've now gone ahead and roughly placed in an area rug and I've also decided to lengthen the walls a little bit so that there's more space for a curtain rod. Just as we've discussed before with various architectural elements, curtains also come in a variety of different designs, and shapes, and sizes, and colors, and cuts, and you could even skip using curtains altogether and instead use something like blinds. The reason why I'm choosing this particular curtain design that gathers to the side is because the placement of the desk doesn't give access to the left-hand side of the window. Now going in and adding the computer on top of the desk. A lot of modern desks now have built-in holes for wires so I've added that to the desk as well, which also leaves room for adding another power outlet. The overall design of the bed looks a little bit too simple to me, so I'm going back and adding a frame. Initially, I started to draw in a square-shaped frame but then I thought about this particular type of rounded metal frame that my brother had in his bedroom as a teenager. I really liked this particular sort of frame design and it reminds me a little bit about my brother during his teenage years. That's another thing to consider when you're incorporating these types of design elements into your interiors. Since I have this positive association with this particular bed frame, adding it in makes me care a little bit more about the user of the space. I recommend adding these kinds of personal touches to your design, since it's the kind of thing that will make you feel more connected to the space that you're creating. Let's go back over to the desk since it's still kind of this rough, blocky triangular shape and could use a little bit more refinement. My partner has a corner desk and I've noticed that in his desk it has an semicircle opening that allows him to swivel around a little bit better. So using that knowledge from personal reference, I'm going to go ahead and block that in and just in general, do my best to add a little bit more dimension and shape to this desk. Another thing that a person might need, especially in a workspace, is a trash can. So I'm going to go ahead and add that in by the desk and even add a few bits of paper inside the trash can to give it a little bit more detail. Now that I've finished adding most of the functional details to the room, it occurs to me that in the next phase, where I'll be adding more decorative elements, that the walls are perhaps a little bit too short and this will present a problem for me later since I want to add a lot of detail to the walls and add lots of posters. So to fix this, I'm just going to go ahead and extend the walls slightly to give more space for that kind of detail. In the next video, we're going to start working on the more decorative aspects of this room. Thanks so much for watching and I'll see you there. 8. Personalizing the Space: In this video, we're going to spend a lot of time considering the answers to the five questions that we answered earlier. Now that we've created a space that's functional, let's spend a little bit of time adding some personalized details that will help tell us more about the character. I feel that having a lot of posters is something that's really appropriate, since the person using this room is a teenager, and teenagers seldom have framed artwork on the walls. That said, I am adding one framed photo and I would like to imagine that maybe this particular framed photo was a gift from a family member and maybe not necessarily something that this character would have chosen themselves. Now, I'm going to move over to the bookcase, and here I've encountered a slight problem. From this particular angle, the bookcase is back, is facing the viewer. Because we can't see the front, we can't really tell that it's bookcase. I'm going to attempt to solve this problem by having a stack of books resting at the top of the bookcase and hopefully this detail will be enough to suggest the function of the furniture that it's resting on. Next, I'm going to lightly add some lines to give the area rug a little bit more of a design, and since this bedroom is a place where the user goes to seek comfort, I'm going to go ahead and add some slippers to help make the room feel a little bit cozier. I'm also going to go ahead and add a few more wires to occupy the power outlets little bit more. Now, I'm going back to the bookcase. I really liked the idea of having mismatched furniture. I feel that's something that you see a lot in the bedroom of teenagers and I think it also shows that maybe this character doesn't really care too much about making everything absolutely perfect and matchy-matchy. We already have the bed frame that is metal, so what I'm going to do now is pencil in a loose wood texture to the bookcase, which will also work to give the otherwise plane bookcase a little bit more visual interest. I'm just going to go ahead and add a few more bits of paper that are randomly taped and tacked on to the walls, and I'm also going to go ahead and add an article of clothing draped over the bed frame. I don't think that this character is messy necessarily, but maybe just a little bit disorderly. Another thing that you want to consider while designing your environment are trends that are happening. I'm going to go ahead and draw in some potted plants by the window, since lately, I've noticed a resurgence in popularity when it comes to keeping plants. I'm now going back and adding a little bit more detail to the posters, which I think will make them more fun and interesting. I've mentioned in the answers to my questions that this character plays guitar, so that means they're probably a fan of music. Taking a little bit of time to consider maybe what music this character might listen to is a good practice. I feel he would have eclectic tastes. Another trend that I've noticed and I enjoy seeing is the K-Pop trends, so I'm going to just roughly pencil in a girl band on the poster. This particular character is not very religious, but I imagine them coming from a religious community and household. I want to find a way to reflect that in the design of this environment, and I'm doing so by creating a religious camp poster. I'm doing this because I feel it's a little bit more subtle than just say, putting a cross or crucifix on the wall and more appropriate for the character. Personally, I find to-do lists pretty helpful, so I'm taping one by his desk where he would be doing most of his work, and quickly also adding in a school flag. This could suggest that he is either really involved in his school through academics or maybe even sports. I've gone ahead and added a few more books in the corner here, and then I move on to the next detail. But then I realize that one of the primary uses of this room is to practice guitar, and I don't have a guitar anywhere in sight, so I go back and erase the books that I had just drawn and replace it with a guitar. That's why it's really important to continue to keep in mind the various answers to your questions, and since we're working in pencil, you can erase and make modifications whenever you need to. Now at this point, I've decided that I wanted to add a personal detail from my own life. This is a crouched stuff cyclops that my partner gifted to me a little while back, and I really enjoy seeing it in my home. I've decided to add this character on top of the bed. This personal detail makes me like the drawing even more. I highly encourage that you do this thing and add personal elements from your life. Now, this room is full of detail, much more lively than before and that's because we considered the answers to the question and we've personalized this room to the users or in this case user. Here's a close up if you want to see some of the finer details more clearly. Now, whenever you're ready, let's move on to the next video where we'll start inking our piece. Thanks, and I'll see you there. 9. Inking: Hi and welcome back. In this video, we're going to be applying ink to our finished pencils. For my piece, I'm going to be using two different types of pens that I picked up at my local stationery store. But if you prefer to use a brush, brush pen, crow quill pen, or pen nib, just be sure that when you work on your piece, that you pick a paper that will be appropriate for the type of tool that you're going to use. One rule of thumb that I think is pretty helpful when it comes to inking is to begin on the side of the page that is the opposite of your drawing hand. Because I'm right-handed, I'm starting on the left hand side. This is a good practice because this will prevent the ink from rubbing off on your hand and potentially smearing all over your page. Keep in mind also that your lines overall should be the heaviest towards the front of the room, the part of the room that is closest to the viewer. As you begin inking further back, your line weights should get lighter. By having your thinnest lines at the back, you can help show that something is further away from the viewer. You can make your lines thinner by applying less pressure to your mark making tool. That means of course, that by applying more pressure, you can make your lines thicker. While inking, you can also add additional small details that maybe were overlooked during the pencil phase, like for example these little wrinkles that I'm adding to the bedspread. Now that I have my thicker lines in place, I'm going to go back in with a finer tipped pen to get more details in. Make these fine lines stand out even more, I'm making the lines that surround it even thicker. This extra fine tip pen is also really great for say, small letters that you would want to add onto a poster, and it also allows me to get more detailed when it comes to drawing the K-Pop girls in this poster. When you finish inking, be sure to give your piece sufficient time to dry. Drawing times can vary widely depending on what type of tool you use. The pens that I used for this piece today dried fairly quickly. After about 10 minutes, I was able to go in and just erase all of the stray pencil lines. Then finally, I'm going in with a white gel pen to cover up any lines that I've made accidentally and don't want there. For this phase, you can also use things like white out, white ink, or you could even just remove the mistakes digitally through photo-shop. Now we have our completed inked piece. Whenever you're ready, let's head on over to the next video, where we will introduce color and start to think a little bit more deeply once again about the space, and see how we can use color to re-establish the space that we want to create. Thanks, and I'll see you in the next video. 10. Adding Color, Shading and Highlights: Hi and welcome back. This video is going to be a little bit different from the previous ones in that I'm not going to be showing you a time-lapse of my coloring process, but instead, I'm going to break down each step. Some of you might be coloring your piece in traditionally. I will key my explanation with that in mind. Coloring allows you to really dig deeply into the overall mood, and as you might remember, that's one of the five questions that we want to keep in mind while working. Let's consider what is the mood that we want to establish for the space. The three emotions that I want to capture for this particular space are hopefulness, a sense of calm and also a little bit of loneliness too. Keeping these three emotions in mind, let's move on to the first step, creating our base color. Now in my mind, I think a blue is the most appropriate, in that blue does convey a sense of calm, but it can also be a sad color as well. I've gone ahead and laid down a light blue face for the entirety of this room. By establishing this base color, this allows more of the components of the room to have a sense of cohesion. This means that any colors that you place on top of your base will have an undertone of the base color because we've reduced the opacity of this bright red to more of a coral or salmon pink color. It softens and becomes much less harsh as it picks up the light blue base undertones. The next step would be to start filling in the second largest space that needs color. In this case, I think that would be the walls. You may notice that even though these two colors are similar in tone, I've made the right wall darker. This is because I want to show that this particular wall is further back in space. At this point, the room is looking almost a little bit too dreary. I want to introduce some more hopeful colors, which in my mind are warmer and brighter colors. I'm going to do that by introducing the bed frame color. Since this bed frame is based off of my younger brother, I already know that I want this frame to be red. It's not quite the same red that I remember my brother having. I've adjusted it so that it fits in better with the tone and existing colors of this room. Whenever you're adding personal patches, don't be afraid to adapt them as needed. The pop of red is already a good step into introducing more of that hope and optimism that I want to infuse into this room. At this point I'm going to just continue adding more flat colors to the room. Now that I have my flat colors in place, I can go ahead and make any adjustments as needed. Now, there's a couple of elements here that are semi-translucent or translucent. Some examples of this would be the tape on the walls, the glasses on the nightstand, and this glass here on the desk. One thing you want to keep in mind is that if we're trying to portray translucence or semi-translucent, sometimes we introduce white. I'm going to go ahead and do just that. Even if you don't draw your light source in your space, think about where the light is coming from. In this case, I feel as though there's probably an invisible ceiling lights somewhere around the center of the room, and also natural light coming from the window. This is important because when you add your highlights, you want to make sure that the light is coming from the correct places. Let's go ahead and introduce some highlights into the room. Now that we've introduced the highlights, we can see that the bed in particular feels a lot less flat, and if you look in other places, you can see that there is more variation of dark and light. Now that we've added our highlights, the next logical step would be adding the shadows. We have our shadows and highlights in place. But I still want to imply a little bit more of a sense of depth. I'm going to go ahead and add a gradient in this corner of the room right here. Now that I've added this gradient, we get a sense that this corner is receding further back. If you wanted, you could stop the process right here and you would have a beautifully colored, shaded and highlighted room. But I went ahead and took it a step further by doing something called color holds. A colored hold is basically when you take these black lines and replace them with color. Now, I'll be honest with you, applying color holds is a time-consuming process, but personally, I think it's worth it and I think that it adds extra character and oomph to the room. This is what my room looks like before applying the color whole layer, and this is what it looks like after. If you wanted to do this traditionally, you could do so by using colored inks. With color holds, black is typically less common. When it is used, it allows the I2 dark from black space to black space a little bit easier. Another option that you have is simply inking your piece in a color other than black. Here is the same room without color holds. However, the original black, ink color has been replaced with a dark blue, which overall is a little softer and less harsh than the stark black that we used before. Now that you have successfully colored, shaded, and highlighted the room to your particular preference, your room is done. I'm very happy with the way it turned out. This is especially so because I feel as though this room is a good mix of the areas, emotions that I'm trying to convey, it's representative of the character that inhabit the space, and has elements that show its primary and secondary functions as a bedroom. Now that we've finished adding color, shading and highlight, let's continue on to the assignment video. Thanks, and I'll see you there. 11. Assignment: Welcome back. This is your assignment video. Your assignment for this class will be to follow all the steps that we've taken together throughout the various video lessons and use them to create your own interior space. You'll start off by answering the five questions that we've discussed earlier. First, you'll ask yourself, what is the space used for? What is the room primarily used for? Who uses it? How does it feel to be in this room? Then lastly, what is the secondary purpose of this room? Remember that it's important to keep the answers to those five questions in your mind throughout the planning, remapping process, to the pencils, and then all the way down to the inking and the finalization stages. Remember also that a smartly designed interior is part of the story. It helps assert certain themes and gives the viewer additional information about the character, about the setting. Personally, I find oftentimes that it helps to think about a room or interior space as almost like a supporting character. If you're able to not only personalize the space for the people that use it, but also a little bit for yourself by adding personal touches from your own life for maybe architectural elements or pieces of furniture from the past. It will also make you feel more connected and in turn, make your audience feel more connected to the space as well. Try to keep your interior loose and stylized. You don't need to use rulers. More than accuracy, what I really want you to focus on is getting the essence of this room right. The mood, the feeling. If you get stuck or if you have any questions whatsoever, please don't hesitate to reach out because I'm here to help you. I can't wait to see your finished interiors. Best of luck and have fun. 12. Closing Thoughts: Congratulations, you've made it to the end of this course, I hope that this lesson has helped you become better able to conceptualize interiors and helped you realize that they can be used as a tool to help further your story. I find that in a way, it's helpful to allow yourself to think of an interior as a supporting character in itself and one last tip that I want to leave you with is that going forward, I want you to make an effort to become more conscious of the spaces that you're in in real life. Whenever you walk into a room, try to think about how it makes you feel, what it's used for and why and does the room successful at its intended purpose? What are the secondary uses of this room? As you become more and more aware of the emotional and physical elements of the rooms that you enter on a day-to-day basis, you'll be able to create sort of a personal database in your head that you can draw from when you eventually create your own interiors and that will help make the spaces that you draw yourself feel much more alive and rich and real, and you can start right now by answering this question, what are some of the things that you like to see, hear, or feel when you walk into a room? If you can, give me an example from your own life, best of luck on your interiors and I hope to see you in the next class. Bye bye.