Creating Human Characters for Beginners- Faces & Expression

1. Introduction: Welcome. In this class we are going to learn how to create human characters. More specifically, we are going to focus on the head and the facial expressions. The class is perfect for beginners, for those who really struggle with drawing heads. It is not easy to draw and illustrate the faces of characters. But in this class, we are going to start right at the beginning. With the basic construction of the head that will create a foundation that you can build later on. But we are not going to go precisely into anatomy. We will learn the basic proportions and then move to a more fun part where we are going to craft our own heads. We are going to also push it forward to express the emotions and the personalities of the characters through facial expressions and details and pros. Hello, my name is Alexandra, aka The Artmother. I'm an artist, illustrator, only dedicated with a master's degree in art education, and my superpower is breaking down complicated art topics for beginners. Illustrations tell stories, and the best way to communicate your ideas is through characters. Shape language, expression, and details all help us to convey our ideas and learning, and mainly practicing these tools will help us to visually communicate and it will increase the quality of your illustrations. After completing this class, you will have the foundation to further explore and develop the way you are visually communicating and to be really able to transfer your ideas to an easily readable art. In this class, I'm going to use an iPad and Procreate, but as it is a general art topic, the class can be followed along in any other software or even traditionally. But you need to be independent enough to translate the theory I'm explaining into the media you are working in. The class comes with a new brush set that I specifically created for this class. It also comes with some useful worksheets for you to stay on track. As a bonus, I will show you how to choose your colors and how to create your own brushes. The way this class is broken down will help you to easily follow along and to really got rid of the intimidation of the topic. All exercises and the resources will set you up for a successful class project. We will have so much fun. Are you ready to start designing? If yes, let's get started. 2. The Class Project : Hello. Welcome in the class. I'm so happy to have you here. In this video, I would love to talk to you about the structure of the class, the resources that come with the class, and the class project. The class is basically divided into three parts with two breaks so that you don't get overwhelmed with the process. The first part focuses on the basics: construction of the head, shape language, and how to draw different facial features in different styles. We will draw a lot so that you get used to loose catching. At this part, this is the key. By the end of this part, you will have six heads roughly designed. After a hopefully short break, we will continue with exploring facial expressions and props and details. We will learn about how facial features react to emotions, and we will choose one head from those six heads that we created in the previous parts and work on that. We will try to add different emotions to that head, so it will be a lot of experimentation, and fun, and play. After we have the right expression, we add accessories to enhance the character's personality. Lastly, after getting a short break, we will be ready to continue and get a clean linework, and we will be ready to start illustrating. In the resources that you can find below the video when you're on a browser, you click on the Project and Resources. There will be the worksheets that will help you to stay on track. They will include all my sketches that you can use for reference, or very beginners can also use them and modify them for their own work. These worksheets are not necessary to complete the class, they are just a bonus. If they, for some reason, don't work on your iPad or you're working on a different software, just feel comfortable with using a clean Canvas to complete the videos. Then you will find the brushes that I have created for you with all the functions. There will be a shaper, a shader, a drop shadow brush, then a detail brush, and there will be a brush for some cool details. Again, there will be a bonus video where I will teach you how to create a brush for yourself. I also created a color palette that I'm going to work with. You can use that, but there will be a bonus video where I explain how I choose my colors, and these will be a great guide for you to choose your own and build color palette for your final artwork. I will comment on my illustration process in detail and I will provide you my sketches too. Very beginners, if you are really intimidated, you can use the sketches, you can use my random arts and develop one from those, or you can just follow me really step-by-step and draw like me. But I encourage you to really be creative and add something from yourself to your sketches and then also to the illustration. If that will be different color palette, then that will make that artwork yours. But I am sure you can do this. The project for this class is to create a human character in a portrait format, the head and this part, in a frame so that we don't have floating heads and with some characteristic motifs that will make your illustration original and really pop out. Your character can be in any gender, any shaped head. You will see in the process what I'm talking about. It can be any emotion that he or she has on her face. The most important thing is that it has to be easily readable so when I look at that artwork, I know what's going on. If she is sad, if she is happy, if she is surprised, if she is angry, etc. Also, you have artistic freedom. The illustration can be created in any style. If you have an illustration style, feel free to apply it. You are also free to follow me step-by-step to create a similar illustration as mine. It is practice so you can just discover what you like from the process I'm providing you. Also you can go a little wild with this. The human character doesn't need to be a human. It has to be a humanoid because we are talking about human characters, but it can be an alien with a human face, or it can be a mermaid, or a robot with a human face, etc. Go wild with your creativity. Also the frame that the portrait will be in can be interactive. If you take a look on my final piece, there was a cloud from what? It is raining on to the person in the frame. It is so much fun that really you can get really creative with it and this is what will make this class so great. Finally, I would love to ask you for a few things. The first is that don't forget to post your project to the project gallery. I really love the output that come in from you guys. You are really creating and you always blow my mind with your creativity. You can also build your project up in the project gallery. If you go down below the video, you click My Class Project. You need to be in a browser to do so. Below the video, there's the Project and Resources, My Class Project. You just add the first image, for example, the first heads that you created or developed, and then the different emotions. There are different stages of the class, you just share what you created. You always need to add these plus images to the project in the same way. Just click that button and the original project will pop out and you can edit it and add it there. Also please share your thoughts, what you liked in the class, what were the eureka moments, how you felt during the process. This also completes your project, not just the image, but you because you are important, not just your artwork. So share yourself with us in this way too. The second thing is that when their review box pops up, leave me a review so that I can really see what you think about the class. It will be a great help for other students to know what they can expect from the class. Also follow me here on Skillshare to get notified about challenges, and new classes, and announcements. I think that's all for this video. Let's get into it. I'm so excited. See you in the next video. 3. Just A Few More Words: Let us take a look on how this class will look like. We're going to start with the construction of the head and we are going to learn how to draw heads of females and males, then we are going to do a little sketching practice and loosen up with this, a bit stiff drawing. Then we are going to define some random shapes and build heads on those. Then we are going to practice how to draw facial features in different ways and we are going to actually apply these into these heads that we are going to do here. Then we are going to take one head from those and work on facial expressions and we are going to play with facial features to create different emotions like happiness, sadness, afraid, or anger, etc. Then we are going to exaggerate one emotion so we are going to choose one head with one emotion and exaggerate a little bit these features, so that it is more easily readable. Then we are going to work on props and details, we are going to create a clean line-work, and then we are going to create a finished illustration together. Now, what I wanted to tell you with this, I went through this process so that you can really see that we are going to go from these not really beautiful drawings to wonderful illustrations. One of my struggles is that I usually want to put perfect drawings right away onto the canvas, but it just doesn't work like that, you need to be mindful that the first sketches, the first lines will not be perfect and you can develop these drawings which are really not nice, they might look interesting, but this is not a professional illustration, you can see that. But you can work through it, you can develop in baby stops and go from, for example, this drawing, this is a bit ridiculous, but you can take this and work on it and soften it. Actually also the second thing I wanted to tell you is that you don't need to spend too much time and too much of your creative energy to this step. You really need to keep these things simple, simple lines, simple shapes don't go into detail because you will lose a lot of your energy doing these steps you need to really work on those little things that you'd change, and then you can get to this point where you really spend time and refine it, make a nice sketch, make nicer shapes, clean it up, and then you can go into illustration. This is not an artwork that you just sit down and do. Actually, I'm not working like that. I really need these baby steps to build up my confidence that I can do it and I believe in you, you can do it. Yeah, we're going to have breaks so that you don't get too overwhelmed by the process. You can take a little bit of a step back and get back to the drawing process with the fresh eye. It is really important so that you really don't put that pressure on yourself and you'll enjoy the process and you can see like, I can go from A to B today and then I can go from B to C today, and I can go from C to D, etc. You can really just have these little stages and it will help you to stay on track and to build up something beautiful like this. I'm sure that your artworks will look amazing. Now let's talk about the project. We are going to create characters. We're not going to work on the background story, so who is it? What are the personal traits? We are going to build his characters from these random head shapes and work their personality up from there. That's a little bit different approach and I also didn't want to have just floating heads because this class focuses on creating heads and facial expressions. We are not really going to work on the poses and the overall body of the characters, just portraits. I decided to create this frame for the portraits so that it looks great. You can also play with these elements. As you can see, this is a snail girl, she has these snail things in her hair. I used this element to build up the frame as well and let's just look at these little beautiful glowing things around her, which adds to the magical sense or [inaudible] , I really love it. We're going to get to somewhere here by the end of this class. I'm going to build up a new illustration from scratch so these are the worksheets that I've filled in already. I have an empty stack, there are actually these drawings in it so that you can use them as a reference. You will also have the new drawings in them so you can find these worksheets in their resources. Let's just continue to the next video where we're going to work on the construction of the head. See you there. 4. Creating The Guide: In this video, we are going to take a look on the basic construction of the head of both female and male heads, which will create a basis for the more loose and free character designs. The basis of drawing heads, caricatures, and character designs is to be able to simplify the shape of the head before you start thinking about the individual facial features. Almost every human head can be broken down into basic shapes: square, rectangle, circle, triangle, or a combination of two shapes. Let me just show you these heads that I have drawn here already. Here is the male and a female drawing. Let's just create completely new ones. But let's just take a look at first to this guide that I have created here. You will have is in the worksheet so you can work on it. You will have this as a PDF. If the worksheet isn't working for you on your iPad for some reason, you can just screenshot it, put it into Procreate and work on it so you can help yourself out, like that. But I am going to also teach you how to create this guide. It will be really useful. I will create a new layer and turn one off so that I can show you how to draw it. Choose black, I will choose a 6B pencil. The easiest way is to start drawing the head with a sphere because it immediately makes you think in a three-dimensional space and helps you to imagine and draw the rest of the face around it, just like in a skull. Let's just start with the circle. Shape, circle. I will make it a bit smaller. Now, if you put a horizontal line to the circle at the half of it, you will get the hairline. Actually, it can be the below line as well, it depends on the proportions of the head, but let's just make it the hair line. Now, if you put a vertical line here, you will get actually the symmetry of the head, the middle line. This line, how long should it be? If you can see this is one third, this is a second third, and if you just count a third third to it, you will get the chin. Chin. Again, one third is this part. This is a second third, and this is the third third. Now we have the chin. Now, if you look at this third third and you make it half, you will get the mouth. Where this circle crosses this symmetry line, you will get the end of the nose. We have the second third here. Make it in half again. You will get the eyes. When you put this part to half, you will get the brows. Now about the ears, the ears start approximately at the eyes and at the jaw line, we'll talk about it a bit later. Let's just put a little ellipse down here for the neck. Now we have the guideline. This is a beginner guideline. This guideline is not perfect. This is not an anatomical precision in it. It is just a great guide to know the proportions and approximately have a head, and it is great for beginners for their first drawings. It will develop with practice. This is how you create this beginner guide for yourself. I will just turn it off. Let's just see you now in the next video where we're going to draw a male and the female head together. 5. Drawing The Heads: Are you ready? Let's just draw a male and a female together. Create a new layer above it. Get the 6B pencil and the black. I'll just start drawing. How do I start drawing a head? I start with following this circle. As you can see, I'm using lots of short lines because it helps me to keep the shape right. Actually, I'm creating half circle. Now, as we are in male, now, men have sharper jaw lines and wider chins. I'm going to draw a wide chin and sharp jaw line. I will just continue this approximately to here, and connect the circle with the sharp draw line and the wide chin. Let's just do it at the other side as well. This is coming up here, approximately, and here, like this. Remember, you don't need to be perfect in it. No perfectionism at this stage. This is the hairline, so let's give him a haircut, like this. Now with the hair, you don't need to follow this part, this is actually like if it was the skull. You can go with the hair above it, so you can really add to it. This is going to be the hair. Now, let's add the ears. The ears start approximately at the eyes and end about a jaw. Just take a look at your own head or just put your fingers to your ear and draw a line. The top of the ear is at your eye, and the bottom of the ear is a little bit about the jaw. I will do it here as well. This is how I draw ears. Now, let's add some brows. Men have thicker brows like this, maybe not perfect. Now the eyes, there is a golden rule in the eye so that you have to have one width of the eye between the two eyes. You can, again do this in your own face, just measure your eye and place it between your eyes and you will see that it is exactly the size of your eye. Approximately just measure, this is going to be where my eye is, so it will be like this. Don't go into details. Just note that there is an eye here. Now about the nose. The nose will end here, so I will note it. Maybe add a little line here and a circle of the nose. You don't need to, again, know how to draw this here like we're going to illustrate and these facial features can be also stylized, so this is not an anatomical drawings. Mouth, where the mouth line is, there you have the middle line of the mouth. Then you add the lips. This is a really cute guy now. Let's add the neck. I will add facial hair, so he really is a man. I will add the mustache here. You can play with this. Mustache man with some gray lips, and the little beard. Nothing perfect. Maybe I will darken his hair as well. Add the shoulder and some clothes. Here we go, we have a wanted picture, amazing. I will make it like this. Let us go to the female now, I will start the same, so I will start drawing this half circle like this. Now, women have rounder jaws and thinner chins. I will start with a thin chin. Thin, not sharp, like this and a round jaw, so you will not have this sharp edge there. Have a bit fuller face. As you can see, the way I'm drawing is I draw lighter line and when I'm sure about the shape, I make it a bit darker. Push the pencil a bit. Of course, you can always erase from your drawings. This is a nice head shape. Let's continue. We have her higher line, so we'll just add a little hair cut again to the girl, like this. I will add the neck like this. This part, this isn't the back, so this is the back of her hair. Oops. Like this. You can see her hair maybe at this part. She will have earring, and maybe you will not see her ear at this side. This will be this cute hair like this. You can erase the head shape and add some lines for the hair like this. Now, we have the brows. We women have a nicer thinner eyebrows with a shape. Now you can really play to be the fashion designer, to design the faces of these people. This is amazing, nice play. Now again, you need to have one eye width between the eyes, approximately. Then let's make her nose a bit longer. The nose doesn't need to end like here, it can be a little lower. With playing with the proportions, you really add character to the faces. Oops, the mouth like this. I will add her shoulders and voila, we have a nice female head. I will turn off this, and you can see we've already drawn two heads and I think it is amazing for beginners. We have the proportions, we know how the facial features are placed on the face. This is something that you need to know, this is the basis. With practice, with drawing lots of heads, this will come automatically, like where to put these things. This is what we are going to do in the next video. I'll see you in the next video where we are going to do some quick observational sketches that will develop our proportional library in our brain and some muscle memory. See you there. 6. Sketching Practice : As I said in the previous video, knowing the basic construction of the head gives you a base to build any head in the future. In nature and real-world, everyone has a bit different proportions, which gives us our unique appearance. We can play with these proportions to create really original personalities, but that is rather the next step. Before we start creating on our own, I would really love to suggest to do some observational quick sketches. Implementing this practice to your every days will really improve your artistic abilities. It is a fun and free exercise without any pressure. Drawing and studying heads will help you to build a library of simple shapes and proportions in your head. That will, again, give you a great source to reach out to when creating on your own. There is a website called Line of Action, it is a wonderful website where you have different images and different topics come up that you can use for reference when exercising drawing. Here's the faces and expression drawing, this is what you have to click on. What expressions you want to draw? All. What gender? Both. What kind of session? All the same length. Keep it like that. What time interval? You can choose 30 or 60 seconds. Now, I will write 45 seconds here because 30 is a little bit short, 60 is a little bit too long. Because I don't want you to go into detail when drawing heads, I want you to get the main shape. Circle, vertical line, then the main shape, and approximately place the proportions of the faces. These drawings will not be nice, this is going to be really quick sketches. Get to drawing. I am now going to pause it just for a second. Here is the first image. I will open Procreate, slowly slide up, hold down Safari, and place it there. I will have the image here and I can observe and draw right next it. This is just incredible that we can do this. Try to find faces that really are from the front, not in the side [inaudible]. You can skip images if your wish. I will just start. How do I start drawing? I start with the circle and I will create a new layer for my drawing. I start with the circle, I have the upper circle, I have the ear here, I have the head. Really not perfect, but you need to keep an eye on the time, you don't have too much time. Here is the nose here, you have the small eyes here and the mouth and ear. Great. I will skip this, I will skip this. This is a nicer facial expression. I start with the circle, here is this vertical line and start. Here's the face, try to outline. Look at the image and draw. Here is the ear, here is the head. I am just going to quickly add the hair. Oh my God, I'm not going to make it. This is really not my best drawing. Anyhow, let's move on. This is not a good expression. No, try front. Circle, symmetry. Approximately, here we have this round chin and the jaw, here is the ear, here is the hair here is the eye somehow like this, and then we have the nose. I overdone this. I will pause it, I need to finish. If you run out of time and you really want to finish it, you can just pause it. I'll just move on. Next one, I can pause. I will just place this here and continue drawing. Again, circle, jaw line, I mean, chin, like this. Hair, she has beautiful hair, it's coming down here. She has the eyebrow up here and the eyes, she's smiling, she has this nose here. Doesn't really look good again. You can stop when you have some drawings. I suggest you do at least 10. I've done now seven, they are not pretty perfect. What I can show you when I was not doing it on camera, it was a bit better, the things I've done. It is also about going into the flow and just losing yourself in the drawing and just trying really to observe, start with this circle, draw the vertical middle line, first and mainly, the shape of the head, and note the proportions, and facial features, etc, really loosely. This is the point of having the time frame, it will really help you to loosen up. The more you do it, the better you will get. Now that you have practiced drawing heads, let's see how they work in illustration and how shape language can be implemented into creating heads of human characters. See you in the next video. 7. Heads In Different Shapes: In this video, we are going to learn about shape language and practice creating hats of different shapes and proportions. The human brain perceives various shapes differently. Certain shapes evoke certain feelings and emotions. Shape language is a tool that we can use to manipulate the emotions of the audience and to build up the personality of the character. For example, round soft shapes are cute, friendly and positive, for example, in a young character, while sharp and pointy shapes are dangerous and negative, like in a villain character. Obviously, rules are there to break. I'd say only the dominance of these shapes are important. There can be nice, round, giant nose in a villain and a pointy ear in a little cute fairy. We already said that it is important to start with the main hat shape and within illustration we want to create characters that are interesting and eye-catching, so we need to exaggerate the shapes. A general rule in design is that the best designs work in their simplest form, so for example, a good logo design has to be recognizable when very small or in one color. It is true to characters too. They have to have strong silhouettes. If we would just draw their shadow on the wall, we should know which character is there. Just think about Batman or characters in Scooby-Doo. If I were to show their silhouettes, you would recognize them. This is the reason that we need to exaggerate the base shapes of our characters. As in this class, we are talking about hats, we will focus on the hat shape. Let me just show you what I have done while going through this process by myself. I have chosen different shapes for the hats. As you can see, these are really simple shapes. Then I have decided on the proportions. I have drawn three lines for the proportions approximately the eye line, the nose, and the mouth line. Then I have built some hats about these shapes with different facial features that we are going to practice in the next video. In this video, what we're going to do is to basically draw six different base shapes. As heads are symmetrical, these shapes have to be symmetrical, so we are going to use the symmetry tool. What you need to do is to create a new layer and hit Canvas, Drawing Guide, turn it on and Edit Drawing Guide. You need to choose the Symmetry down here. Then you will have the symmetry here. If you don't see the line in the middle, you can just change the color of this line so that you can see it better. If I'm going closer, maybe you can see that. I'm not sure if you can see that. Here is a line in the middle. I will make it pinkish color. Hit "Done" and choose a color. Now, I'm going to use this pink for it. From the character brush stat, I will choose the Shaper. You can find these brushes in the resources. We're going to talk about them later when we are going to paint. Now I'm just going to use the Shaper and actually you can use any brush. If you have my free illustration brushes, you can use their liner. You can download this from my website. There's brushes here. If you have taken any other of my classes, you already have those, but I have this new brush set for this class specifically created, so I choose the Shaper. I have this assisted layer, make sure that it is clicked, the drawing assist is on and now create a shape. Again, we need to think about shapes that are symmetrical, for example, a diamond shape. I just create a diamond shape. I will make it a bit smaller. It can have a top like this, a diamond shape. It doesn't need to be perfect. Again, this is going to be just as our base shape and this symmetry tool will help us to make the shape symmetrical. I will create a shape like this, then hit "Move" and put it aside. Now the next shape is going to be, let's say, an oval. Let's just create simple oval shape. You can do it on your own and create different shapes that you would like to. You don't need to do it as I do or you can create different overall shape as I do. Follow me, but do it on your own. Now I'm going to select this and put it, again, aside here. Now I'm going to create next shape, and it is going to be a rectangle. Let's create a rectangle. Again, it can be wider down here and thinner up here, etc. You can really be creative now, focus on the shapes, don't think about the hats yet. Again, you don't need to make these perfect. I will just select it around, make it free hand. It will be easier to cut it off and put it here aside. Maybe I will make it a bit smaller. Then the next one is going to be a combination of two base geometric shapes, like a rectangle with a triangle. I'll just make a rectangle and create a triangle below. As you can see, it is going to be a bit different than this one. It's going to be pointy at the bottom. [inaudible] choose it, put it down here, I will maybe make it smaller. Then let's do the last two. Let it be a big circle with a smaller circle. Let's say there will be a big circle and a smaller circle, and I will connect it. Here is the hat shape. I like it a bit smoother. I will just make it a bit smaller too here. The last shape is going to be two ovals, for example, in a mushroom shape, but doesn't have to be like that, maybe it will be now a little oval and a little oval like this, for example. You can make more extreme shapes. You can make pointy shapes as well as you can see most of my shapes are rounded because that's my style and I love to create cute things. If you want to create more of a stronger character, try to make more pointy shapes, etc. But now let's just try this like this and in the future you can create different types. We have the six different shapes and now let's add proportions to them. You can change them later in the sketch, obviously, if they do not look well, but add some initial free lines now to these shapes, one line for the eyes, one for the bottom of the nose, and one for the mouth. I'm going to create a new layer about these heads. Actually I can make it a clipping mask. These lines that I'm going to draw will stay within these shapes. Clipping mask and choose a different color. I'm going for orange color knew like this. Draw three lines, one for the eye, one for the nose, one for the mouth. I will make it a bit smaller. Eyes, nose, mouth. Play with the proportions. You can have bigger distances between these lines, so for example here I will have the eye here, I will have the nose down here, and I will have the mouth down here. Here, let's have all these three here like this. This is totally random and you can change it when we are going to draw over them. But it will be a great start to try out things. I will put the eyes approximately at the middle and put a little nose and the mouth down here. Really play with the proportions. I will, again, try to add the eyes here, the nose here, the mouth here. Let's go extreme, so the eyes will be up here, the nose will be up here, and the mouth will be down here. This is going to make our hats a bit more interesting. This is one thing you have to do now. Now let's progress. We have the base for our faces, but I allow you to try out different ways of drawing facial features. Go to the gallery and go to the next worksheet of facial features where we are going to take a look on different illustration styles and how we can add them to our human characters. 8. Facial Features: In this video, we are going to take a look on how facial features can be drawn, as there are plenty of ways to do so. At first, I will love you to just draw a simple face in your intuitive way, how you usually draw eyes, the nose, and the mouth. This is going to be your base and you will improve this. Maybe you have already to start and draw these things in and you do not want to change that, but I think it is always space for improvement. This stage will take a lot of research. I would love to ask you to take a look on Instagram on your favorite illustrators and see how they draw the face. We're just human characters, but any character. So this will be useful in creating any character. What shapes they are using, where are they using lines? How do they do hair or nose, etc? Take elements and redraw them. One of my favorite illustrators is Beatrice Blue, Salululuart and Diana_renjina. In a second we are going to take a look on their artworks. But at first just take the sketching pencil, the 6B pencil, and just create a new layer. I will just show you what I've done. We're going to draw an intuitive way and we are going to choose three artists whose artwork you are going to analyze how they are doing this stuff. You can really just take it as a base. As you can see, this is a really naive how I've joined this. But it will help me to think about, these things. I will just turn this off and I will create the first thing, one, intuitive. You can just draw different facial features. You don't need to do a whole face. But I just create a really intuitive drawing, how you draw eyes, nose, and mouth. The way I'm drawing eyes, is that I make this plum shaped shape. Then I add the circle to it, add the middle and add some other new lashes and stuff like that. Now, what you need to keep in mind when you're drawing eyes, is that, how you place the iris will define the emotions they are experiencing. Actually, when you're drawing an eye, you need to keep in mind that, there is this plum shape. When the person is in call, the upper part of the iris is blocked by the upper part of the eye, like this, and it is touching the lower eyelid. So this is the eyelid and it is this part, maybe 1/3 is blocked by the eyelid and it is touching this lower eyelid. This is not a rule in illustration, I just wanted to show you that you need to keep in mind and look for how these things are drawn in those illustrations layer. When I'm drawing an illustration, I usually draw it like this, the eyes. Usually I have also the pupil. Then when it comes to the nose, I usually start with a circle, and add these holes here next to the circle. Follow this circle, so that I have this shape and add this side parts of the nose and maybe add a line to it. When I'm drawing a mouth, I start with the middle line and add lips like this. Now, let's see an artist. I already opened Instagram and Salululuart who is one of my favorite concept artist and illustrator. She's creating your beautiful artworks. If you take a look, she is similarly creating the eyes as I do. But she has more rounded shapes, not these plump shapes. So without these edges. Round shapes, round eyes or iris, there is a pupil. There is a sharp or a thick line above the eye, which makes it great for creating lashes and defining the whole shape of the eye. If you take a look on the nose she doesn't even have holes. This is just a shape like this. This is a round circular shape and the mouth is just simply a little bit noted. What I'm going to do is that I do these observations and I try to create down. She creates more of a rounded shape. Thick line for the lashes and joined iris with the pupil. Yeah. Something like that. Then for the nose, it is just a round shape, without these things or the holes and the mouth is just noted without any middle lines and stuff. Again, you don't need to go into detail with these things, you can just note down. If you take a look on other characters that she does, I need to go out. For example, like this one. She again only has just this middle line. Can you see that? This little nose. You can also take a look on the ears. It just depends on you. Oh, this is what I wanted to show you. This character is so cute and you can see you don't need to overdo this detail. You can draw the eye just as a dot and then the nose just as a line and the mouth just as a line. The beauty of your artwork or your illustration do not really depend on these expectations if you can anatomically recreate a real mouth. You can just really keep it simple. So I will just add it here below. You can have just dots for the nose and the mouth and it is still beautiful. I will take a look another one. Beatrice Blue is one of my favorite illustrators. I had the luck to learn from her on her workshop in Rome. If you take a look on her eyes, she's not even taking care of the eyelashes, but still has beautiful eyes. The nose is just a simple line and a simple line for the mouth as well and it works totally fine. If you aren't okay with drawing ears, you can just recreate this, but you can stylize that as well. I will just create a rounded shape here. Circle, add an iris without a pupil. She doesn't even add pupils, like this. Again, a little noted nose and a little noted mouth. What I love that she does it in some of her characters, she has the mouth. So interesting. Let me find one. For example, I had this frog. Can you see that? She usually uses another shape and adds this middle line to it. I just saw characters take off her work. Sometimes, I just loved that. Now, the fourth thing is going to be Diana_renjina. She's a bit different. Can you see, she's using this plum shape; a plum seed shape. That's better, expression for the eyes. Uses similar drawing style as me for the eyes, but she just simply just notes the nose and similar draws the mouth. As you can see, the ear is again stylized. Here is just the line and that's all, and it is all incredible. What I want to point out is that you can do this simply. You don't need to overdo stuff. She also uses this line here. Yeah. For the nose like this and for the mouth like this. Now, when you have these observations of those artists that you like, you can just simply go to Instagram and write different keywords like character design or people illustration, etc. You can just observe these things. How to draw eyes, how to draw the mouth. You can see I really love also this the picture of the eyes when they're closed. Like this one. This is so cool. You can just go through this. It is important that you have your intuitive drawing, so that you don't copy someone's style. But you know how you do stuff and how you want to change stuff to make it like, for example, more stylized or to get confidence in, oh my God, she was doing it that way and it works. It's her illustration style, maybe it will work in my style too. I get to have this confidence of liking the way how I draw things. It is all about confidence and making things work. This will define your style. But you can change things for easier way. For example, I'm absolutely not satisfied with how I'm drawing noses. Now I see that simple line will work well and I love these pointy noses. So maybe I will add that. Actually, if you take a look on the final artwork, I have created, I added just a simple nose like that and it works fine. I also didn't use the pupil. I usually use it but now I didn't and it is just fine and cool, amazing. It helped me a lot to create a new fresh illustration. Now you have some resources to work with. In this video, you have explored different ways of creating facial features. Now let's return to our head shapes and add these features to them and create some cool human characters. 9. Creating The Heads: All right. Now the fun is going to start. We are going to build the heads with the resources that we have. We have the head shapes, these head shapes that we created. Then we have these proportions and now we practice creating different facial features, I would love you to combine these. Try out new things as well, it will make your style to develop better and just gather a little new, fresh things happening in your illustrations. One thing I want to tell you, is that you are free, you have this artistic freedom. You don't need to copy everything as it is there, you can change things. If you see that this eyes don't fit up here to that face, you can lower it, you can create it differently. That's how we will have fun. No pressure. Let just lower the overall opacity of these layers. I'm just going to lower the opacity here and here so that we can see what we are doing. Create a new layer, get black and the 6B pencil, now let's start. We have the eyes, the nose, the mouth, so we know where to put them. I will start similarly as I've done with the normal head shapes. I'm going to start with the upper part of the head, and it doesn't necessarily has to be this pointy. I will try to make it a bit rounder, but key this shapes so you can go outside this shape. I think it will be female because her chin is thin and and I will go up here, but it will be a bit creepy. 10. Facial Expression: Now that you have taken a little break and you can take a look at your drawings with a fresh eye, please choose one head that you would like to work with. Also, keep in mind that you don't need to stick to what you already created, you can change everything about it. I love to stay in my comfort zone because I'm creating in front of a camera so I'm going to choose this mushroom we had here and think about something in her hair. It will be different, I thought that she will have this long hair and something is going to be going on in it. As illustrations tell stories, as an illustrator, we need to know how to tell these stories through our characters. We have to find ways to express their feelings and inner personalities, and the best way to do so is through facial expressions. The overall shape of the head and the facial features help to show a character's personality, and their facial expressions show the viewer how the character feels. This is what we are going to explore in this video. What you need to do is to choose the head that you are satisfied with, choose the layer that you have sketched on, and select freehand, select around free finger slide and hit ''Copy''. Now, go to the expression worksheet. If you are working on an empty Canvas throughout the whole class you can just copy these emotions: so happy, sad, disgusted, surprised, angry, and afraid. Now free finger slide paste. I have the face here and I'm going to paste it six different times so I will just make it a bit smaller here, paste. Now that you have all the six heads, just select them all and do this and you will have everything on one layer. I'm not going to actually work on the hair right now, I know that I want to do something different with it, we will see. The main thing is to look for facial features to express these emotions that I have listed here. But first, let's just talk about the facial features. Facial features can be broken down into primary features and secondary features. Primary features are the eye area and the mouth area. These is the main things or main features that we can express emotions with, and these areas include eyebrows, eyes, and the mouth, and the area around them. Then the cheeks, the nose, the forehead are considered secondary because they only react to the positions of the primary features. Creating believable expressions takes a lot of experimentation and practice. It is helpful to research facial muscles to improve your understanding of how features move but also observing faces, expressing different emotions with quick sketches can also help. You can again go back to the website that we have already used and create quick sketches of facial expressions, actually, we've done it. We've already done this with the quick sketches, but our focus was to get the main shape of the head and the facial features the placement of them, that was our focus. If you do this exercise again, you need to focus more on the expression of the face, how these facial features are placed to express a certain emotion. What I suggest us to do, now I'm not going to include it in this class but you can definitely do that if you have a little time to just practice creating these expressions with the facial features. Another way to help you is to get a mirror and take a look at your own face, how it reacts to different emotions. This can be a truly fun exercise. Just sit in front of a mirror and smile, and then be sad, and then be disgusted, and then be surprised, and angry, and afraid, and watch what your mouth and eyes are doing. I have a description of these things, what our muscles are doing in these emotions. They are simple descriptions and we are going to try to replicate them in our drawings now. What you need to do is to have everything on one layer so it will be easier to erase. Let's talk happy. When a person is happy, the corners of the mouth go up, the cheeks go up, the eyes are narrow, and can also have this curve in the eye, wrinkles can form around the eye, and also tears can come if they are very happy. Let just try to do so. What about the eyebrows? The eyebrows tend to have this side position if I can say that. The eyes are narrow. The eyes can be simple like this and the mouth can be like this. But the eyes can also have this shape. But you know what I mean, this shape. You can note the cheeks coming up with this shape of the eye. I don't really want that now, I don't want her to be too happy. But I can open the eyes wide like this and, yeah, now we have a happy face. Now let's talk about the sad face. The corners of the mouth go down, the inner corners of the eyebrows go up, brows can wrinkle, tears can form, and head can point downwards. Again, let's have or play with the eyebrows. Eyebrow can go up like this, eyes can go really not wide-open, the mouth is just great now with this position here. We can also play with the head. I'm going to cut it around, select, and put it like this, so she is now quite sad. Again, you don't need to be perfect with this now, this is just a try to explore these eyes. I will add a little light to this eye, make it smaller. Now, disgusted, upper lip goes up, nose wrinkles, brow goes down, eyes are narrow, and head can lean away. Now, I will erase the mouth. Something like this, how we changed the expression with simple lines. Brows go down, I can do that like this, narrow, and the head can lean away. Again, let's cut it around, and let's add like this, so maybe afraid, nose wrinkles so maybe we can put up the nose a bit more. This is a disgusted head. Now, what about the surprised? In the surprised head, the mouth opens, eyebrows go up, and eyes widen, which means that we put the eyebrows up here. This is a suspicious face. We can discover expressions by trying. Eyes widens mean that when someone is really surprised the iris is not necessarily touching the lower part of the eye or even absolutely. I can do it like this and my mouth can be opened. But usually, I do it like this. Let's go for angry. She's already angry. When someone is angry, mouth narrows, lips can press together, or even have a yelling mouth, for example, eyebrows go down and pull together and eyes are narrow. The brows can be down in this position. She is angry. Maybe I can change the angle of the eye to be more like this. Doesn't look good. I will put these eyes a bit higher so that the brows are closer to it. I don't like the brows, let me erase it. The mouth is not going to be open, just lips pressed together, thin lips. She is angry. Afraid; mouth opens, corners of mouth go down slightly and stretch outwards, eyebrows go up and pull together, upper eyelids go up and forehead can wrinkle. I will go again with the eyebrows, something like this, mouth opens, corners can go down while the mouth opens like this. She's afraid now, forehead can wrinkle, something like that. Well done. In this video, we have explored facial expressions and got to know our character better. Now, let's move to the next video where we're going to talk about exaggeration. Now what you need to do is to choose an expression that you like the most and that works out the best for you. Usually, I choose the happy or the surprised because I'm comfortable with creating those emotions in my illustrations. But now I want to step outside of my comfort zone. The expression that worked me out the most is the sad one. I really love how she looks here. It is sad but we can make it a nice illustration. I will work on it, but you are free to choose any emotion that you like. I'm going to choose the sad, I will make it a really positive illustration with a sad sprinkle. Don't worry about your drawings head, these are really just basic drawings we are going to work on it a little bit more. What we need to do now is to select the layer that they're the sketches on. Select around the head with the freehand selection tool, free finger slide, copy. Now let's go to the exaggeration worksheet where I'm going to put it in, so paste. Now I have the head that I'm going to work on. See you in the next video where we are going to explore exaggeration. 11. Exaggeration: The truth is people, do not spend a lot of time observing our artworks. Usually, the first glance to them decides whether they like it or not. Therefore, we need to make our artwork easily readable. Exaggerating expressions and not just done by poses, gestures, and the making. The overall image dynamic helps the viewer to read the image quicker. To make more dramatic expressions, exaggerate the primary features by pushing their shapes and stylize some other features but try to find a balanced in the two. In this video, we are going to work on the face that we have chosen and we are going to push the expression a little. We are also going to clean up the linework, make a nicer sketch and build it a little bit. Okay. I'm going to mainly work now on the head shape. I'm going to lower the opacity, make sure that I have the sketching pencil and a black chosen, and now you will create a new layer above. I will speed this process a little bit up. I'm going to make it a cleaner linework. Okay. Again, I'm using more short lines and now I'm working with a little bit thinner pencil so that the linework is really cleaner. Exaggeration means also that you can make your shapes more dynamic. For example, with this nose, I'm going to make it a bit more expressing the sadness. Maybe I will exaggerate the eyebrows a bit and maybe I will play with the eyes. I will make them bigger and more pointing downwards. What you can do here is to read these descriptions of these emotions again and try to push them. For example, in the sad, I have corners of the mouth go down, they really go down. Inner corners of the eyebrows go up, they really go up. Brows can wrinkle, I can add wrinkles, I will not. Tears can form and that can point downwards. I will work with those as well. Maybe I will just make the mouth like this and you can also work on this body a bit more so her shoulders will also express this sadness. You don't need to make a whole pose. We are going to make that frame in the next video, but you can just note now how her shoulders will look like. Oops! Okay. I have the base head and I will keep the hair and the frame to the next video because, now we have a really expressive face and that was our focus in this video and it is easily readable, you look at it and you can see that, okay, she's sad. So make sure that you look away and you look back to your drawing and you immediately know what emotion is going on there. All right. In the next video, we are going to strengthen the personality of the character with some accessories. Let's make our character original. 12. Props And Details: The key is in details, they say, and it is true. For me, the most fun part of illustration is in adding details. They make the illustration look more complete and makes the viewer wander around the artwork a bit more. I also like adding accessories to the character as it strengthens their personalities. In this video, I'm going to think about this character a bit. It is useful to think about the background story and to create a mind map. But now I'm just going to spend a bit of a time just thinking about a character and choose free accessories that expresses her character and maybe even the emotion that she is experiencing. I also add things that I personally like. For example, earrings or headphones and tattoos. Maybe I will not add to her those things, but we'll see. What I'm going to do is to turn on the layer of the sketch. I have a bald head here because I'm going to work on the hair a bit more. I'm going to add the frame as well. I will click on the drawing itself and make it a bit smaller, and what I'm going to do is to draw an ellipse. Does it look really good? But maybe I could do it on a different layer so that I can place it. I will do an ellipse on a different layer so that I can place it there, it's selected and I can distort to make a wider or a differently shaped oval frame around her. You can also play with the placement of the person in the frame. As I already told you, I don't want folding hats. Let's create these cute frames around our characters. I will make it uniform and make it a bit smaller, and I will place her right here. The reason is, you will see, I already thought of some accessories. So, I will pinch these layers together and place it to the middle. Now, what I thought of, that she is really sad and we had in the emotion that tears can form. I thought that she will be a rain girl so she will have interestingly shaped hair I love spirals so she will have hair like this. Maybe it can mean wind or something, and somehow she will have rain in it, I'm not sure how. I will make her neck a bit thinner. Like this. She can have this headband on her head. You can also choose motifs. I decided to have this storm and rainwater of sadness around her. It will be connected to bad weather. With this girl, I had these spirals with this snail in fact. So somehow maybe I will add that here as well to the frame. Your task is also to include some of these elements to the frame so that it really fits the character that is in the frame. I'm going to speed this process a little bit up. I'm not going to comment on everything because that will bore you, and when I talk, I cannot go into the creation flow or I'm less successful with it. I will also try to exaggerate a bit. I will just get her head and maybe try to make her look a bit more down, like this. I will also cut her off from the whole frame, and play a little bit more with the composition of her in the frame. I will try to make her bigger. Now when I'm shooting this class, it is May, and we have such a bad weather here. In Slovakia, it is always raining and the wind is always blowing so maybe this is why this is in my mind now. I will cut this free fingers slide and copy and paste. Now hit "Flip Horizontal". Now I can make it symmetrical, so the same. Now I can see that I have to make this a bit rounder. At the background, I will have a pattern of these little tinder bolts. Maybe it can be here as well. I love this so much, did it in so much fun. Let us talk about what was your task here. We built the hat from a shape, then we practiced facial expressions and facial features and put that together to express an emotion. You had to choose an emotion that worked for you the best and what you want to depict. Then exaggerate a bit those facial features to make it more easily readable. Now, it is easily readable for me. I could've post those facial features a bit more. So maybe these eyebrows could have been a bit more down and the mouth can go really down like this, but I don't want that. This is enough for me. Make sure that you feel good about your drawing. It is yours and don't over vary. If you didn't push too much this exaggeration, you're, I guess, a beginner and it really comes with practice. Now I am sure you will do a good job. What I just noticed that I haven't put this drawing into the props and details to make it clean and clear that where we are working. This was the original drawing. I will make the opacity like this. I will turn this on, this sketching layer, and I will copy it, and go to this props and details part where I should have been drawing it, it is up to you. This is really just about making sure that you will know which part of the class we are. So I mixed it up a bit but doesn't really matter. Then in the props and details part, your job was to create a sketch with elements and motifs that support this feeling that you are expressing with this character and put it into a frame so that it is not a floating hat and that it has a base where you can put and compose your character in. In this part you can work on the sketch a bit more to make it a really clean line work. I think I'm fine with this. I guess we can continue. We arrived to the second break. Again, you need to sometimes step away from the artwork that you create. I usually do so before I start painting because I always find mistakes in my sketches before I start painting. Then when I'm ready to paint and just take a look on the sketch, and I say, Oh wow, this is not good, so I need to work on the sketch a little bit more. Then again, I have a break and start painting. These little steps, stepping back and coming back will really improve your artwork because you will not rush through it. That's the point you need to enjoy the process and be mindful of the build-up of your artwork. This is how we got from these initial ugly drawings to beautiful illustrations like we will do in the next part. After the break, see you in the next video. 13. Choosing The Colors: Now the most fun part is going to happen. As far as let me congratulate you that you have gotten to this point where you have a clean sketch and now we are going to paint it together. I'm going to create a square sized canvas because I'm planning to post this to Instagram and nowadays a square format works like a better. What we need to do is to copy the sketch. Go to the Props and Details, Copy. Let's go here, free finger slide and paste, and place it to the center of the canvas. All right. Before we start actually painting, we need to talk about color. I'm including only one color scheme for this class today and the one that I've been using. I have some skin colors here. At first I wanted to add color skin called fore skin for you to work with, but I think there's so many different types of skin color that will fit the colors that you choose to work with in the illustration that it would be pointless for me to put some skin colors here because they might not fit the colors that you choose for the rest of the illustration. What you need to think about if you are choosing more of cool colors, you might want to choose cooler skin color as well. If you are going to work with warmer colors like I did with this pink, and orange, and this magenta, then you should choose a bit more orangey or reddish skin colors. For example, let's say, you here. Maybe this skin color. Let me just show you. We picked a different illustration as you can see, but it is a bit pinkish. What you need to do about color, you need to choose the dominance of warmth or coolness in your illustration. If it is going to be warm, if it is going to be cooler. True skin colors. The usual way I choose my colors is that I choose three different colors for the same thing. If I need colors for the skin, I choose a light version, a middle version, and a dark version, so that I can darken it and enlighten it, and it will really be a great help when I'm going to paint. Then you need to actually think about colors for the background, for the frame, for the hair, and for the clothes. You know what? Let's just do this together. I will create a new layer now and just keep my sketching pencil here. Just identify for what parts of the illustration I will need colors for. I will need colors for the background. I will go for the sketching pencil, background. I will need colors for the hair. I will need colors for the skin, clothes, and a frame. Those are five things. Three colors for five things, that means 15 colors. I have 15 colors in this color palette as well. You don't need to be, again, strict with this. You can combine colors altogether. But let's just go to the palettes. I will create a new palette and I will start with the background. As this is going to be a dark rainy painting, I will choose an indigo and blue for the base of my colors. Make sure that the new plot palette is set to default. When you go to Classic, it is down here so you can add colors. I'm going to choose the middle blue. I'm going to choose this color to be as if the color of the sky when it is raining. I will choose a lighter color for the lightning, and this dark indigo that is going to be a bit, let's say violet, to make it for shading. Now, I need color for the hair. I'm not sure what color her hair will be so that it fits this blue. Just go to harmony and see what color fits this colors. Pinkish hair? Yes, that could work. I'm going to choose this color to be her hair. I'll go back to Classic and I will again choose a darker version. You can also slide a bit on the hue so that you get a greater variety in the color, not just the same color in the darker and the lighter version but you can make a better variety within these colors if you push a bit this thing. Don't forget you have the Harmony tool here and it is really helpful. I will maybe go for this kind of magenta and I will choose this pink to be the light coloring for the hair. I need to figure out what kind of clothes she will have. This is a raincoat. I thought that it will be yellow. I will choose again this pink and go to Harmony and see what kind of yellow fits in and I will just put it here. Wow, it looks really great. If you're not satisfied with these colors, you can start the color harmony so you can choose complimentary colors, split complimentary, analogous, triadic, and tetradic. I'm going to use a tetradic because there are so many colors in the whole illustration that I'm just going to work with two colors or three, but I will have four up on this skin. I will need more of this color harmonies. I choose, again, this yellow. Go back to classic, and I will choose a reddish orange color that is a bit darker for shading it. I will maybe choose very saturated light yellow for making it lighter. What about the frame? I already have yellow, blue. It cannot be pink because her hair will be pink. It cannot be yellow or blue, we just did these color harmonies. I will just go through these colors and see if I see a color that can fit there. As this is a frame, it will be a wooden frame because if you go back here to my final one, this looks like it is from gold. Let's make it a wooden frame. I will choose dark brown here. I did here. I will choose a lighter brown for making it lighter and a very dark one. I now have 12 colors and three are left for the skin. Now I have this light bagel color and it could work actually for the skin but if I make it lighter. As you can see, I have again, more warm colors here. These cool colors will balance it a little bit. Maybe I will change these blue to different ones while painting, I'm not sure. This is just a great base to start with. I will choose this color for the skin. I will choose an even lighter one and maybe a little darker one, but I will go a bit reddish here. This is going to be my skin color. Let's just do a recap on how I've chosen my colors. You need to identify at first what parts in the illustration you have that will have different colors. I have five and you will probably have five because you will have the background, the hair, the skin, the clothes, and a frame. You need to find three colors for each; for a middle tone, for light, and for the darker ones. You choose a color and you always push in the hue mainly in the darker ones because it is good to shade with a color that is next in the color wheel to make a bigger variety within those colors, and also choose a lighter version. Use your intuition and your taste, what colors you like. This is a more intuitive way of choosing colors. You don't need an algorithm towards that. If you have the colors that you usually use for your style, obviously, use those. If you want to create something new and fresh, use those. Don't forget the Harmony tool. If you are not sure what color you have or want to choose for the next thing, you just go there and click it around and just choose the color if you like it. If you don't like it, search for more. This is the way I usually create my color palettes. Obviously, I have the colors that I love to use the most, this indigo, this magenta, this green or yellow. I usually have the same skin colors. But this is going to be actually a great strategy for you, for the future as well, to know how to choose your colors. All right. There will be a bonus video where we are going to create a brush for fractals together because I've learned a new technique for that. All right. Now that we have the colors, let's talk about the brushes in the next video. 14. Character Brush Set: The one thing I love to do so much is creating brushes for my classes. Again, I created a character brush set. As you already know, if you have been with me in my other classes, if you haven't now I'm going to tell you. There are different functions that you need to fulfill with the brushes while you are illustrating. You need a brush for creating shapes, and we have the shaper or for that. Now I'm going to turn these layers off to show you what I'm talking about. I will choose this middle tone. I will create a new layer and just show you. With this shaper brush, you can create shapes. This is a textured shaper brush. You might need to go through over the edges to fill in the pixels that it left out if you are not painting the shape like this, but when you are filling it with color are okay. It will leave out little pixels around that will show, so it will be annoying. But I wanted to have a little texture around, so not just a hard-edged brush. I will alpha lock this shape, and I will choose a different shape, and that is the shader. Now I choose my darker color and shade over it. I created these brushes from marks I've created with traditional media. I love to do it so much. I will make it a bit bigger to have a nicer, smoother transition and I will choose this light color to highlight here, so nice. Okay. The point is that you have the shaper that creates the shape, you have the shader that creates the shade and the texture. You can of course, obviously use different textures. I have to drop shadow. Which brush is a drop shadow? I'm creating a new layer below it. I will just add with black the shadows. You can play with it. You can make different levels of shading here by picking the brush-up. When you're doing this, you will have one level because it is a transparent brush. Then if you add another level, it will be darker and on another level, it will be darker so it is a really useful brush. Then you just go to Gaussian Blur, layer, and just blend it and you have nice shadows. This shadow can be gray or dark brown or whatever color that you want to do it. If you take a look on here, I put these shadows below the hair so that it has this dimension then below the neck and around it, etc, with this brush. It is a really useful brush. Then we have the Detail Brush. It is a cute little brush that you can use for creating textures over little details like that. It has a nice texture as if it was a colored pencil so it will create really nice details for you. You can draw anything with it. With this shaper, you can also use it for creating lines. It doesn't have this texture. It is good for facial features actually for creating that. For example, if you look at this nose, I have created it with the Liner not with the Detail Brush, but the hair and these things, I created with the Detail Brush and it again gets all variety within the illustration. If I go further, I have the freckles. I have created a brush for creating freckles. It is so much fun to create them. Again, I will show you this on her so she doesn't have freckles yet. She has into different stock. Let's just take a look at it here. She has these freckles and so cute they add to her personality so much more and so much fun. As a bonus, I decided that we are going to create a brush together with the new technique I've just learned. Actually, it is a usual technique, just I got to know it. But anyhow, I made brushes differently until now, so I'll just create that. I will delete these things from here and see you in the next video where we are going to create a brush together. 15. Creating The Brush: In this video we are going to create a brush together. I will just now show you this freckles or how I created them. The first thing was that I got my concentrated watercolors, Hydrus, but it could work with any of them. What I've done is that I got a piece of one watercolor paper and I just splashed the color onto it. I let it dry. I also used a paper towel to soak up a little bit of this color so that it has this texture. It is going to be important because it will give us this nice transparency and texture within the shape that we are going to do. I'm just going to show it to you, maybe at the back of this one. What I do, I will put the paper towel here so that my iPad doesn't gush from this. I just open it, take a little bit and splash. Do it over and over again until you've got a nice shape. Then what is important is, let me just show you, just soak it up with a paper towel so that you have this little texture within it. It will create such a wonderful effect on the brush. As you can see, it is darker here, and it gets lighter in the middle. You can do it with several shapes. Now what you need to do is to go to the camera and take a photo of this shape, or you can also let it dry. It is good that we are now at a square-size canvas, because when you create a base for your brushes, you will need a square size. What I'm going to do is to "Add", "Insert a Photo" and insert a photo. Make it big. Now go to "Adjustments" and go to "Gradient Map", "Layer", and keep it in the gradient. You can set it. You can make it a bit darker, make it lighter. Maybe I will not make it this light and this contrastive, but I will try to keep this lighter part in the middle. Now go to "Curves", "Layer" and put this dot down here, and approximately here, bring it up. Now you have a nice light white shape here. You can set this as you wish, how detailed you want this texture to be. I will put this here. Now you can choose black, choose a brush, I'll choose the shaper from this brush set, and just paint over the freckles or these dots that you don't want to have in the base shape off your brush. I'll just clean it up. This is a nice shape. Now what I'm going to do is to select around it, hit "Select", free finger slide, and "Duplicate". Now make it smaller. You can go for the main shape here and make it a bit bigger. You can fill with this color, with black in the background. This shade that you cut off, turn it over. Don't make these shapes to be in the same direction. You can duplicate this again and make it even smaller and put it somewhere here. It looks great, right? I will also turn this around so that it is not the same direction, so it has a variety within this shape. Now I will go to the "Range" button, "Share" and "Save as JPEG". Now when you go into the brushes, create a new brush, go to the shape, "Edit", "Import", "Import a Photo", choose this one. It will be here, and you hit "Done". Now you have these shapes as the base of your brush, but it doesn't really look good right now. When you go to the Stroke Path, set the spacing, and also set a little jitter. I will clear the drawing pad here. Now I'm already creating these freckles. You can go to the Apple Pencil and decide on the settings for the pressure. If you put size with the pressure, you can change the size of it. You can set how much this will work. I already have the opacity set to maximum. If I don't push it hard, it is less opaque, then if I push it hard. Then I go to this Shape, and little bit play with the scatter. There is again a variety within these shapes. Maybe you can also set the rotation and create a drawing pad. I will set the spacing a bit more. Let's just see how it works. I will delete these and choose this color, create a new layer, and I have some interesting shapes for freckles. But this is the base. You can play with it however you like. This is the base that you can create these brushes on. This is too big, so I will make it smaller. This untitled brush looks good for freckles if it's made like that small. Let's go to her. She doesn't have freckles, let's give it to her. Create a new layer, and we'll make it a little bit less opaque. Maybe a bit smaller, and voilà, cute, nice freckles here. Looks so good. Let's just do a little recap on what we have done in this video, so how we created this brush. At first, we created a little splash with ink or watercolor or whatever paint you have, and sewed it up in the middle so that it has this texture. Then we created a photo of it, put it into a square canvas, change the setting, so I may make it gray scale with the Gradient Map, and then we [inaudible] we inverted it. So it will be black background with a white shape in it. Then we've chosen black, any brush to clean it up, so we cleaned it up. Then duplicated it to make a base shape for the brush that feel repeat. Then we created a new brush, set it as a shape source so we hit "Edit", "Import", and imported that image that we have. We have saved it as a JPEG, put it as a shape source, and then played with spacing, jitter, and in the Apple Pencil with the pressure of this setting of size and opacity. In the shape we played with scatter and rotation so that it is has a better variety in the shapes. Then we tried it out, and we had a brush for freckles. I think this is pretty amazing. I will just delete this Now that we have this patch, we have the colors, we have the brushes, we are ready to continue to paint this little beauty. I will turn this off. See you in the next video where we are going to start to illustrate. 16. Painting: Frame And Background: Lets get started. In this video, we are going to start illustrating and we're going to to work part by part. There are different ways to illustrate. First is that you block in colors, then add shadows and highlights, and then details, or you work part by parts, for example, create the background, create the frame, and complete them through the process. At first, fully create the background, fully create the frame, etc. This is what I'm going to do now. The reason is because I love to keep myself motivated, and it is always good to see how things get together part by part. What I'm going to start with is the background and the frame. What to do with the sketch, I'm going to lower the opacity of the sketching layer, and maybe start to multiply. This will help you to see through it if you put a layer accidentally above it. We're going to try to work below the sketching layer, and there is another layer that we are going to do, and that is the value check layer. That is, you select ''Grey'', fill the layer, and change the blending mode to color. By this, you will see the values in your artwork. You can see it in greyscale, and you can check if your values are working because, your design not just to have to look good and recognizable when it's small, it has to work in greyscale too. Just imagine that if you would print it on a printer that only prints black and white, you could see the artwork, and if you don't have the values right, you will not see the artwork well. You need to have these contrasts, but we are going to get there. I will turn off this layer and just rename it to value check so as you can see, and know what is it. While you check done, and go to the layer below the sketch, and choose the color of the background, and I've chosen this blue. I will choose the Shaper, and just fill in the shape. I'm not really paying attention to the main shape of this. I don't really want to make it perfect now, because I know that I will have the frame above it. Again, this brush is textured, so it will leave out pixels, so it is good to fill them. Make sure that this main line, this is in color and that it don't exceed the frame. Now I will add a layer above in, and choose the frame. I will choose this brown, maybe I will turn off this blue behind it, and I will just work on the shape of the frame now. I'm going to speed this up so that I don't bore you. I will make my eraser the same brush that I'm working with, it will make me great help. You might ask why haven't I done it different way with the quick shape function? The reason is that I want to keep the illustration really handmade, so I don't want it to be perfect. This wooden frame doesn't really have to be perfect. These elements above, the Ds and T cloud as well will be different colored, because I thought that it will be made of steel. You know what kind of thing I'm thinking about. Let me just connect this so that I don't have to worry about it later, the shapes don't match. I will Alpha lock these layers, and now I'm going to work more on the boot and then add the background to it. I have Alpha locked the boot, and I'm going to make it a bit lighter here and there, with the shader brush. I will make it smaller, and I will add this little effects to it lightly. As it will have edges, I will choose this really dark brown and gold from the outside, make it less transparent, and I will just work on the edges of this frame. You don't even have to make an oval frame, it can be a rectangle or something like that. I tried to shade it this way as if the light was coming from here, and I will add back to it a bit some ways here and there, so it has a variety within. What I love to do is to add these little spirals to it, and little lines to create this wooden effect. I will choose Detail Brush, and it's light color, and just go over it and put this little lines around it. Cool, it look great. Now I will turn on this blue, and I will again select the Shader, and it's darker version of the blue, and yes, I'm on the layer of the blue. I'll make it bigger and more transparent, and just go through it, at the edges so that it gets darker. Maybe I would get bigger to add a little bit of texture too in the middle, maybe a little lighter. There is a nice gradation. Maybe I will choose an even darker purple, these edges to have a little shadow for the frame, for example. I can also choose a little from this pink to add a bit of variety within the color, but I will need to make it differently. I will make it more of this color, and back with the blue. It will add the bit of a variety within it at back, to the site with this dark blue. Well, I have a frame and it looks pretty amazing. All right. In the next video, I'm going to continue with the character itself, and then continue with the detail. So see you in the next video. 17. Painting: The Character: Let's continue with the character. I will start with her face so I will create a new layer, and I will choose the middle tone for the face. I choose the Shaper and just fill in the head shape with the ears. Always make sure to have your shapes right. Sometimes just check it without the sketch. For some reason I think it is a bit too orange so I will go a bit lighter and fill it just like this. Again, you can work on these colors throughout the painting process. You don't need to limit yourself. Believe in your intuition. It is good how you want to do it. It is your artwork. I will go and create a new layer below the head for the neck and the shoulders. Now what I'm going to do is to Alpha Lock them both. Choose the darker tone for the head, choose the Shader, and choose the neck at first. Let's try it on it. I will lower the opacity, make it a bit bigger and just little bit go over it so that it has this little texture and just below the head, let's add a little shadow. You connect to the shoulders as well because there will be the cloak, and maybe here around. Go to the head and add shadows to the head. I will add a little shadow, really light shadow around the eyes because eyes are a bit inside. I will make darker this ear because it is all over, here will be a little shadow around there. I will turn off the sketch so that I see what I've done. Yeah, looks pretty great. I can get back with this tone a little bit for the face here. It is more round and also with this even darker one, I can add a bit of a shadow around the nose. Just a little bit. Maybe around the eyes. But we can add that back a bit later too. Put this to this ear. Looks pretty great. Let's add the facial features. I will create new layer, choose white, choose the Shaper, and let's add the eyes. Work on the main shape of the eyes, make them nice. Looks great. Create a new layer about the eye shapes. Click and hit "Clipping mask". You can add the eyes inside these shapes. What color her eyes will be? I haven't thought of that. Her hair will be pink. Her clothes will be green so only the background will be blue. You can see most of the image is blue, but I will add her eyes to be like the background so that it fits a bit more. I will choose the blue and again with the Shaper, I will just add that. As you can see with the Clipping Mask, these eyes stay their position. Now you Alpha Lock these eyes. I can see that this eye is somehow not there or not good. I need to do something with this. What I can do is to click, select around the eye and just move it around. It can be like this. I will turn off the sketch. I need to find a way that it fits more. Maybe this eye should be more down, maybe. Keep it like that. I'll turn the image back on. Work a bit more on this shape. Don't worry, it'll look good. Alpha Lock it. Again, take the Shader and I will play again with shading and making it lighter and stuff like that. This is too transparent. I'll maybe add a little bit of this violet into it. It was this color. I will need to turn off the sketch to see what I'm doing with these eyes. There is going to be a little violet. Maybe there's going to be this blue right here and also this dark blue at the edges. Also this really light blue maybe at the top. Maybe add a little bit of light into those eyes. They look great. Turn on the sketch, create a new layer. I will choose this dark brown and a Shaper to make the eyes look a bit better. I love to add this line here. I will make it smaller to this line. Yeah, looks great. Below this, I will add a Drop Shadow so hit "Drop Shadow". It can be with that brown. I'll make it a bit lower just a little bit. It will help you to add a bit of dimension to the eyes. I will also try to shade a bit this white because it's never that white. I will Alpha Lock it, choose a darker gray. Again with the Shader, just add to it a bit. Maybe even up here, also here. For fun, I will go to the luminance and choose my blue. This is going to be white, this is going to be blue. Let's try it. Looks great. Let's add the facial features. For example, this color would work well. I will create a new layer bow make it a bit smaller. Add the nose and the mouth. Turn off the sketch to see how that works. I need to work on the nose like that. Okay, looks good. I will turn back on this sketch and I add a light line here and here at the eyes. Let's work on the brows. I think it can be this dark, like this. What do you say? I will turn off the sketch. I think it looks good. Let's add the freckles and maybe some blush. I will choose this pink, maybe go a little redder, choose the Shader. I will create a new layer for this because I might not want to have it. I'll lower the opacity, make it bigger. Add a little blush here. Let's add the freckles. I will choose the brown, this one, and I will add little freckles here. She is so sad, but she looks so good. Maybe I will add little freckles to her shoulder as well. I will make it even smaller. I love freckles so much actually. It looks amazing. What do you think? I will maybe add a little Drop Shadow below the head so I will choose the Drop Shadow, maybe this dark brown and just add it here and Motion Blur it, layer. I can make it up here. Looks great. See you in the next video where we're going to work on the hair. 18. Painting: The Hair: Okay guys. Let's continue with the hair. I will turn on the sketch and create a new layer behind it all because she will have this headband. This is going to be the color of her hair. I will need a Shaper and just insert or add her hair. I will connect it down here and fill it, so I don't have an easier job. But again, you need to go over this edges to fill in those pixels. Cool. Now let's add the shading tab. Again, Alpha lock the hair. I will go with this dark and the shader brush and add first, add the shadows behind the head because I'm sure that there will be a shadow. I will add this really light color as well. Add some shadows again also hear. Add back with this color. I will turn off the sketch so that I can check it again. Amazing. You know what? Before you add the ears. I will just go back to the [inaudible] , choose this color, choose the Shaper and just add this ear. I will turn the sketch back on and choose this really light color for the hair and with the shaper or the detail brush. Let's use the detail brush. Over the hair. I will add this lines for the hair. It can be messy so don't worry about it. I will create a layer over the face and add some little hairs throughout the face so that she really has this messy hair around everything. I will put it above everything. What I'm going to do is to turn off the sketch. I will create a headband. I will need to add a layer above the head with this color. Again, I will need the shaper and the headband. I will turn off the sketch and try to make something with this headband. I will Alpha lock it, choose this orangey color and the shader and make it smaller. I will add a bit of this thin shadow below it. Maybe, and a bit of a texture to it. Let's take a look on the Value Check. Too much blending into the background. What I'm going to do is to place a darker shadow with the Drop Shadow Brush. Maybe with this brown. I will do then on a new layer. That can be a Gaussian blurry. I will add this shadow here, Gaussian blur layer. Hide as Value Check. It looks better. Now I will add with the Shaper and this light yellow, some patterns to it. I will create a new layer above, and I will add some patterns. But I will make it even lighter like this. It looks cool. I will turn on the Value Check. It looks good, but I will need to add with this light color and a shader to the headbands so that it is lighter at this top parts like this. How does it look like to you? So fun, right? Let's continue with creating the cloak. 19. Painting: The Clothes: I will create a new layer and choose the base color. This will be this yellow not this darkish, greenish yellow. I love this colors so much, but it blends too much into it. I will just create this new layer above the neck part. Turn the sketch back on. I will just start with the shaper. It looks so nice. I love this. I don't need to add shadows again around the neck. I will create a new layer above the neck and I will create a clipping mask for this shadow. I will add the shadow around this neck part, right here too. I will Gaussian blur it. I'll place it a little bit lower. It looks fine. What I also love to do is to choose this skin color and with the shaper, I will just continue the neck here. It will do this effect of that neck is drawn. Let's work on the clothes now. Alpha lock, cloak, choose this orange color. Choose the shader. Make it bigger and just add shadows. That shadow below the hands to the shoulders, and [inaudible] like here. I will choose this really light. We'll make it smaller and to the shoulders, I will add this so that it is lighter. I will choose which color? Maybe this orangey color. Let's see. Create a new layer above it. I will just draw these lines that you have on the clothes. Maybe I'll add this here and this line here. I will create a new layer below it, and continue maybe with this one and add this cloak or hoodie thing. Maybe this really dark brown is going to be here. Okay, looks fine. I will add this giant buttons now. I will create a new layer. Choose this really light yellow, and just add these giant buttons. I will just erase this dots from it like this. Alpha lock and now just play with it. I will add with this darker color these threads. Below that, I will add drop shadow again. Drop shadow. Maybe it's brown. I will Gaussian blur it there like this. Place it closer and it looks pretty amazing. Now what's left are the details and the elements on the wooden frame. Now you also choose a background color, a different one. Let's see. This would actually work. Yeah, it looks pretty great. I'll see you in the next video where I'm going to add some more details. 20. Painting: The Details: Let's continue with the elements. I will turn on the background. I will choose a lighter gray color and the shaper for the cloud. Alpha Lock it, the darker gray, and then the shader. I will just add some shadows around it. I will turn off the sketch so that I can see what I'm doing. I will also choose a bit even lighter, back to it. Maybe with a shaper, I will add some little circles over it or not with the shaper, by with the detail brush. I will create a new layer above it. I will add this. I will create a new layer and create with this light blue, the rain drops. I'll turn back this on. I will create some raindrops, like this. I will Alpha Lock them and again, choose the darker blue to add a little bit of dimension to it. I will turn off the sketch and just play a bit with it. Maybe I will erase this one. I don't like it here. It looks fun. Let's create a new layer and with the darker gray, and the shaper, and I will turn back it on. I will add these things here. Again, Alpha Lock and play with the shading part. Oh, so cool. It looks great. Maybe I will blend it a bit more. Maybe I will try to smudge it altogether. It will look better. Yeah, this is great. If you don't have nice effect that you wished for, you can always smudge. I think I'm finished. I will need to make this background a little bit different. I will select it and change the hue saturation, brightness. I will try to change the hue. Which color looks better? I like this turquoise. A little bit different blue. I will add this pattern to it that we have here. I will create a new layer above this background. With the detail brush, I will add this and this indigo blue. I will turn off the sketch. I will play with the blending modes. This darker color, it looks great. But I will turn it over. You can find elements if you wish, that you can implement to the background as if it was a tapestry. For example, I like these dots now, you can find it in a newsprint. You can also find a background on Google and just put it there. It is just really just because I don't want floating hats and floating frames either. You can make it as if it was for example, I can create a new layer and choose the detail brush and this light color. I'm on a new layer, and maybe I can create effects because if it was a tapestry, so you can freehand it, you can find brushes for it, etc. Like this, you can also check out how it looks like on different blending modes. Maybe you will find one that fits better. I love the lighter color and the soft lights, or the luminosity. I will keep the lighter color. Incredible. Again, congratulations on finishing your artwork. We have gone through a lot together, right? I'm sure your artwork looks incredible, like for real. I really enjoyed creating this artwork. I hope you enjoyed the process too. See you in the next video where we are going to do a little recap on what we have learned. 21. Final Thoughts : Congratulations, I'm so proud of you for finishing the class. I'm sure that your artwork looks amazing and I can't wait to see them. Again, make sure to upload your project to the project gallery so that we can enjoy a little beautiful gallery below the class, that can be a source of inspiration for anybody. We will have as if gallery of this framed faces, it we'll be so much fun and be proud of yourself, really you did it and it was amazing. Again, the usually rounds, so leave me a review so that others can see how much you like this class. Also follow me here on Skillshare to get notified about challenges and new classes and announcements. Also follow me on social media, on Instagram and Facebook. I mean so that you also can stay up to date. When you share your artworks on social media, make sure to tag me as theheartmother so that I can post that to my stories. I usually share all of your projects that you post on social media and tag me in them. Now let's take a look on what we have learnt in this course. We have learned how the human head is constructed, that we can play with proportions to create personalities, that shape language is important and helps us to communicate our ideas. We learned different ways to draw facial features and also how to draw these features to express emotions. We learned that exaggeration increases the readability of our illustrations. Then details and props help us to enhance the personality of our character. Then we created a final artwork that I bet you can be proud of. It was a pleasure to have you in this class. I hope that you enjoyed it and that I can see you in my other classes. I wish you all the best and happy creating. See you.