Creative Illustration: An Introduction to Fantasy Art

1. Introduction: Hey, my name's Ira Marcks. I'm a cartoonist from Upstate New York. My illustrations and comics, they're all about exploring other worlds. I like creating images that make you curious about what you're really looking at. A lot of my work is really inspired by the odd characters in strange worlds of fantasy art. I love the colors and textures this style of storytelling really brings out in a visual artist. Today I'm going to take you step by step through the creative process behind one of my fantasy-style illustrations. This class is to look at my complete process beginning with my early inspirations in fantasy book art, then we'll look at my sketching process and the way I develop concepts for an illustration. Next, we'll look at my favorite digital tools and round that out with some tips on how I create meaningful color palettes and textures, and mood-setting vibes in my final art. I hope that by following along, you'll learn to work with your favorite drawing app, to turn a quick little sketch into a full-color illustration that looks like it just fell out of a lost and forgotten fantasy book. Let's turn off the real world for just a little while and start exploring some other worlds. Fantasy illustration. 2. Class Overview: Welcome to the class, thanks for coming. Before we get started, I'm going to give you a brief overview of what to expect from this course. If you're new to my Skillshare channel, you might find my teaching style a little unique. Now, I come at it with a three-stage process. First, I like to present some context for what the project is and the themes that surround it. After that, we move in to the concept of the Art, which means also the composition and the narrative built into it. Then we create the final illustration. We don't just jump right to the drawing. In the first few chapters of other worlds, I'll be introducing you to my personal relationship and inspiration for creating fantasy art. Since I consider fantasy art a narrative art form, we'll be using a story inspired theme to guide our class project. Keep your eyes and ears open for the phrase "Moment of Discovery." After that, we'll jump right into creating sketches in Adobe Fresco. You can join me with Adobe fresco, or another drawing app, or with a pencil and paper. Is fine. Whatever tools you want to use, you'll still be able to follow along with my creative process. I'm very influenced by the principles of graphic art, and I'll be showing you how I use them in a composition to play with the viewers perception, as well as engage them with the simple narrative. To me, sketching is the journey we take to find a meaning for our final image, and it's my favorite part of the whole creative process really. The final section of the class is focused on turning our conceptual sketches into a final image using the digital tools or traditional tools we have on hand. If you're working in Fresco for the first time, that's totally cool. With no prior experience, you'll learn the basic tools for sketching, inking, coloring, and creating effects in this really cool app. Now, I hope this class inspires you to create an illustration of your own. We'll wrap the whole thing up by finalizing our art, exporting it, and posting it on the Skillshare student project page. That's this class in a nutshell, let's get started. 3. Looking at Fantasy Art: Making fantasy art is all about plane with perception. At least that's how I think of it. When I'm making an illustration, my goal is to create something that catches the eye but doesn't reveal its true self right away. I want my art to have a fun instant appeal, but also give you an opportunity to look a little deeper and discover the story behind the image. Our goals as artists come from early influence in relationship with different forms. My work is heavily inspired by narrative art, images from books, and stories. I like stories about characters whose view of the world is challenged when they find themselves in surreal situations. For me, there are two distinct stages to developing interesting narrative based illustration. First, there's the concept. The way an artist uses visual principles to create a composition. The way basic artistic elements like form, line, shape, color all come together to create a unified whole. The choices I make influence how the final art is perceived on an emotional and conceptual level. On the foundation of concept, I build the final artwork. In the final art, I begin with a sketch. I build out the composition, refine details of character and setting in my mind and on paper. On top of the sketch comes my pursuit of style, the way I ink, and use color, and line, and texture to create a final image. I think the job of an illustrator is to introduce their audience to an idea in a fun and engaging way. To do that, the illustrator needs to engage the imagination of their audience. Fantasy art, one of my biggest influences, uses the unfamiliar to get our attention. Once we're there, it connects with us on an emotional level. I think this combination of emotionality and surreal imagery is what makes fantasy art so cool. My first experiences with this form of visual narrative come from book covers, interesting paperbacks I found in the back corners of libraries, or in the $ bin at the used bookstore. Things created by master illustrators that get discounted is lowbrow, simply because they're attached to a commercial mass market industry but there's so much to be learned from book art that you're not necessarily going to get from a traditional art history class or a visit to a museum. So what makes these covers work and why do I find them inspirational? Well, first of all, each of them serves a distinct purpose, and that's to spark the imagination. I think that's a noble pursuit. These book covers get us asking, what is this place where looking at? Who are these characters? What dangers await them? How will they make it out of this situation alive? Each of these compositions was carefully planned by an illustrator to provide clues about characters, settings, the environment, cultural aspects of this imaginary world, hopes and dreams and fears that make up the themes of this story. By evoking interesting questions, the illustration is leading us into the story before we even opened the cover of the book. All of the drawings I'm sharing here are inspired by narrative moments, many of which feel universal, pulled from story archetypes and tropes. Once you get yourself thinking like an illustrator, you'll be able to translate any type of story moment. For the sake of this class, we're going to focus on a particular story moment that's very common to fantasy world building and narrative. I call these parts of a story, "The moment of discovery." 4. Moments of Discovery (Part 1): What is a moment of discovery? On first glance, it's an illustration that shows a character encountering something, a person, a place, or a thing, that takes them out of their familiar reality and places them in a fantastic situation. Now, to look a little deeper, a moment of discovery is a once in a lifetime encounter that lead a character on a journey that's going to fundamentally change how the world sees them and how they see themselves. A moment of discovery is something for better or worse, you couldn't turn back from. For example, in the King Arthur legend it's when the young squire Arthur pulls the legendary sword from the stone and takes his place as the rightful king of Britain. Arthur's discovered that he's not the loser kid he always believed himself to be. He's special, and now that everyone knows it, there's no going back. In the Wizard of Oz, the moment of discovery is when Dorothy's house lands on the Wicked Witch of the East. Suddenly, Dorothy isn't just a kid from Midwest America, she's a hero. From here, a character must now embrace their role in the story they have entered into. A moment of discovery is exciting because it's the beginning of an adventure. Let's look a little deeper into how illustrators throughout history, have created moments of discovery and how their point in history influences their symbolism and artistic message. We'll look at the way each composition guides our perception of the final image. Now, the Renaissance had such an impact on Western storytelling. It's very easy to find illustrations and images or tapestries in this case that give us iconic moments of discovery that we see repeated time and time again in narratives even to this day. The Unicorn is Found is a beautiful tapestry by an unknown artist or a group of artists, and it was the first in a series of narrative tapestries from the Netherlands dating back to the end of the 15th century. In The Unicorn is Found, we see a group of noblemen out hunting along the woodline borders of the French countryside when suddenly they discover a legendary unicorn. Let's find the symbolism in this piece. Now, the image was created by artists living before the age of exploration and scientific discovery. To them, much of the world outside of their castle walls was a total and utter mystery. For many 15th century Europeans, the unicorn was a symbol of the untamed wilderness. It was something untouched by humankind. A pure and graceful being with the power to purify poison water and heal the sick. Clean water was a giant problem in the 15th century. This tapestry asks, what does it mean to discover a symbol of hope wandering in the forest right outside the kingdom. Let's look at the composition. To understand the compositional choices made in this tapestry, it can be helpful to break the scene apart. Let's start way in the background at the horizon line, we can see it's very high on the page, which gives us the sense that we're looking down on this scene. The background to the left, we have the castle, a clue as to where these characters came from. The castle represents their familiar reality, and here in the foreground at the bottom of the image, we have their discovery, which in this case is the unicorn who is enchanting the waters of the fountain in the center of the tapestry. You could say this scene has a very stage-like feeling. It's very theatrical with the characters all in a line facing us, the audience. It's not very dynamic and while it reads clearly, it's very stiff. It's almost like we're looking at a bunch of kids in their first play. But hey, this was the 15th century and illustrators and image makers still had a lot to learn about how to engage an audience with their visual storytelling. This is an illustration from the pages of the Jules Verne novel, Voyage to the Center of the Earth. This moment of discovery tells us there is more to this world than what we can see. Now, we've jumped ahead with this image to the mid 1800s, and we find that science has grown by leaps and bounds and scientific fields of discovery like geology and botany have really captured the imagination of the people. We're digging under those kingdom walls and traveling below the surface to learn the origins of our world. Jules Verne was clearly a fan of science and in this 1864 classic of science fiction, he follows Professor Lidenbrock and his companions as they enter in Icelandic crater in hopes of discovering a route to the center of the Earth. We see characters as they enter a vast underground cave and discover a forest of giant mushrooms. This moment of discovery speaks to the culture of the time through its symbolism. It shows how the storytellers of this era were using works of geology and botany and science to spark the imagination of their audience who would already be wondering about the same topics and ideas. Cultural relevance can make it so much easier to engage with your audience and take them on a fantastic adventure. De Neuville was a very well-known Illustrator at the time, and his compositional techniques are still influencing modern illustrators. They were a lot more dynamic than what we were seeing in the 1500s and centuries before. They're more cinematic, in a way, the horizon line is much lower in this scene, which allows the illustration to express the scale of the mushrooms. This world feels massive and to create a sense of context, we're placed behind the characters. We see their tiny silhouettes here in the middle of the image. A lot of moments of discovery use a sense of awe and scale and vastness and contrast of size to introduce us to an unfamiliar world. In the next chapter, we'll look at two more examples. 5. Moments of Discovery (Part 2): This is the cover from a recent edition of the children's book, "The Secret Garden", illustrated by Inga Moore in 2008. But the story itself is much older. "The Secret Garden" is set during the last Cholera outbreak in the United States in 1910. The story follows an orphan girl named Mary, who has lost her family to the all too real pandemic, and descent to live with her wealthy uncle at Misselthwaite Manor. In the wake of her troubled past, where everyone Mary knows has died. Mary becomes rude and sour in her new setting. But a series of magical occurrences lead her to discover a secret garden. It's here that Mary finds new purpose as she begins healing the plants inside, and then herself and then her friends. The Secret Garden isn't a story that's clearly said in a realm of fantasy or science fiction, like the other two works we've looked at. But the symbolism of hidden worlds, and magical healing powers found in nature present themselves here in the same way, making this story not too much different than the ones we've looked at. It's a fantasy story in the way that it offers a bit of escapism at a dark point in American history. Now let's look at the artist's composition. I picked this version of the book cover because the artist, Moore, really captured the feeling you get from reading this story for me anyway. There's a joy that comes from imagining yourself surrounded by walls of greenery running through this maze, the shade and the sound of leaves overhead, and bright colorful beds of flowers looking up at you. Perspective is pretty useful when creating fantasy art because it gives you a sense of depth, and lets you add more visual elements to the scene, and a higher level of detail. The way the illustrator composes this scene lets us discover the garden along with Mary. A sense of depth and hidden details and contrasting color palettes like the green, and the red we see here are all tricks used by the illustrator to build a fantasy world. The thing that makes them fantastic is what they represent to the story. For example, the vibrant red bird here is not just an aspect of nature it's the character that leads Mary to her moment of discovery. It introduces her to the garden. These guiding characters, like this bird or like Gandalf in "Lord of the Rings", are story tropes that we see in fantasy art. The "Secret Garden" may be set in a real world, but it's sense of wonder is definitely in the realm of the fantastic. This is an illustration from Shaun Tans book, "The Arrival" from 2006. It's a story about an immigrant seeking a better life for his wife and child in an unknown country. We see a ship arriving in a harbor. This looks like Metropolis from a parallel dimension. From just this one image. It's not hard to understand that Shaun Tan story is an allegory for an immigrants' experience. He uses symbolism in a really unique way by replacing the familiar with fantasy world building elements that have a very primitive geometry. We can understand what it must be like to arrive somewhere for the first time. Being fascinated by peculiarly shaped animals, wandering among strange buildings, and architecture, and being confused by the forms of an unfamiliar language. This is truly a story about cultural perception. To communicate with an audience without using words, an Illustrator has to find clever ways to mix and match visual elements and principles. In this illustration, Shaun Tan is helping us discover that being somewhere new means you can't take any of the things you know about the world for granted. There's a lot to think about in a Shaun Tan composition. He clearly is drawing inspiration from classic fantasy adventure illustrators. He is using a sense of skill and dramatic points of view. But Shaun Tan also brings a very primal graphical sense to his compositions. He surrounds his human characters with unconventional geometries inspired by the abstract, and surrealist artists of the 20th century. This moment of discovery is so engaging because it's the beginning of a journey, and to what it means to find a place somewhere where you just don't seem to fit. In each of these four examples, we see characters whose beliefs are challenged by magical occurrences. The story that's about to happen is going to show how they change and grow. The moment of discovery is the first look into that ongoing story. Now I'd like you to make a list of your favorite moments of discovery from the memorable stories in your life. Once you have your list, think about the images from the book or the movie, or the video game cutscene that represents that moment of discovery. Behind that image is an artist or group of artists who were tasked with visualizing that scene. Each of those images is using compositional elements and principles to influence the audience's perception, and communicate an idea. There are just a few visual principles that can help us achieve this effect in our own work. Let's get out our drawing tools and explore the unexplored. 6. Sketching with Adobe Fresco: This chapter is a quick introduction to the tools you'll need in Adobe Fresco to sketch along with me. If you're using another drawing program, like Photoshop or Procreate, stick around anyway, most of these tips can be applied to all three. I'm going to start by clicking the Home button in the top left-hand corner and setting up a new document. I'm going to click original draw canvas, which is 3600 pixels by 3600 pixels. When I'm doing a sketch just for fun or for a class, I often work in a square format. The only reason for that is it's easy to share on social media, and sometimes a landscape or portrait really influences my composition in ways that I don't really like. I'm going to keep it square. Thirty six hundred by 3600 pixels is a good resolution if you someday plan to print this image, that means you could print it, and it'll look nice and crisp at up to 11 by 11 inches. Smaller than that, you can still get a decent print from it. But if you shrink it down too much, your image is going to be pixelated and then it's just stuck in digital form for the rest of its life, which can be sad. So 3600 by 3600 works well for me. I'm in Fresco now. I've got this nice option here to adjust my view. I'm going to zoom out just so we can see the whole page. I'm just going to review a couple of the basic tools that I'll need to sketch. On the right-hand side, we've got the Layers menu. The white layer is the background, and I'm going to draw on the checkerboard layer. Checkerboard represents a transparency. I never draw directly on the background because then my line work and sketching and everything is fixed to the background paper, which means I can't move it around the page. Often when I'm sketching, I like to take the elements I've drawn and shift them around, put little notes in the corner, and if I'm drawing on the background, I can't do that. I'm always working on a transparent layer. On the left-hand side, I'm going to click the pixel brushes, and you've got all kinds of options here, for now all we need to know about is the sketching. We've got pencil and pen. I'm going to use a pencil. Next to that you see this little star, that allows you to put the current tool in your favorite section. Now when I go to pixel brushes, it's right there and I can select the tool easier. Now let's go down here to settings. That's this little gray box. First, let's talk about the size of the brush. You'll notice I've got it set to 40, which gives me a line that looks like this. That's the side, and that's the point. You see. That's a setting for a brush that's a lot bigger than the default. Maybe the default is more like a 10. In fact, it's a lot bigger than you achieve with the pencil unless you had a really dull pencil you were working with. When I'm sketching, I like to have the option of filling in shapes really quickly and getting a sense of the relationship of positive and negative space. That's something you can't really do when your free hand drawing. So take advantage of it if you're working digitally. If I have a little tiny skinny pencil, let's say this is my page and I want to experiment with a big triangle shape. Maybe it represents an ancient alien temple. I can get the outline, but I can't easily and quickly fill it in without creating like a big massive texture, which is super distracting anyway. So give it a shot. Set your pencil up to something like 40, and see if you like having that much variety in your line. If you're not confident with using a pencil, lowers probably better for you. But I can get a lot of different effects by just shifting my hand in little ways. Below that, we've just got the setting for flow. If your flow is really low, your pencil is going to be light. That's fine. We're sketching a light pencil can be good. But let's make another layer here. If you set your flow up all the way, you have potential to press down and get a really hard line. So let's say you're drawing like a little alien face and you're working out the details here. You settle on some elements that you really like and you want to just define them a little more. If you have your flow set all the way, now you can press down harder and make some of those lines pop and get a sense of what it might look like in its final ink stage without switching to another tool. If you have your flow set lower, you can't quite get those hard dark lines. So again, the flow just gives you more variety with the current tool you're working with. I'm going to go back to set it high. Below that, you've got smoothing. Now let's just look at the extremes. If you're smoothing this all the way off, you have a very natural luck in line that reflects your actual gesture. That's probably a little lumpy along the way. But if you have your smoothing set all the way up, the computer takes control and makes your line work just a little more elegant. The problem with that though, is the line starts to drag. You'll notice, which personally I find extremely distracting when I'm just sketching and trying to work out ideas. I don't want to be trying to work out a thought and having my line drag and having to wait for it to catch up. It's only a fraction of a second, but that time really adds up. If you're trying to work out a concept like how long it's taken me just to sketch something like stars in the sky. If you're smoothing is all the way off, I can do this sort of thing a lot faster. The faster you can get an idea out of your head and onto paper, the better at this stage. If you do want a little bit of computer control, maybe set you're smoothing to like 30 percent so you can get cleaner, longer lines if that's how you like to work, but I wouldn't recommend setting it up too far. It's going to slow down your process. Next, we've got brush settings. I'm not going to really change any of that stuff. The only settings I've changed really are my size, my flow, and my smoothing. The only other tool that I might use at this stage of sketching is my transform tool. So again, drawing on a blank layer when I grab my transform tool, a common tool in any drawing program. Now I can move those elements independently and flip and rotate them as I need. I love to take advantage of layers even when I'm sketching and just throw little thoughts up into a corner and just make a new layer and create shapes and forms. Then I just throw them around, see how they work with other elements. Rarely do I merge layers or even delete them. I keep everything around just in case I need it. So take advantage of your layers, use your transformation tool and get your pencil where you like it. Now we'll begin sketching for our final project. 7. Sketching: Exploring Perception: Let's do a quick recap on our definition of a moment of discovery. There's what we show the audience, a character encountering a person, place or thing that leads them from a familiar reality into a round the fantasy. But then there's also what we know about the story. A character on a once-in-a-lifetime journey, making an encounter that will change how the world sees them and how they see themselves. If you can lead with a strong concept, your final image won't have to do as much heavy lifting. The message will connect even if you don't have a lot of fancy skills as an illustrator. But to spark the imagination and evoke questions with your moment of discovery, you got to understand one important thing about human perception and that's that we're always looking for meaning in a drawing. We're taking the forms and shapes and colors and textures within a defined space and we arrive at a unified whole in our mind. That's the reason we see faces in random dots and dashes. We prefer answers in our images. We can't help but see the unified whole even in the most simple composition. This is the letter A. No one looks at this and sees three triangles and a trapezoid. Now this theory on the way we perceive a unified whole in a drawing is known as the Gestalt principle. Well, in fact it's six different principles. There's continuation, closure, similarity, proximity, symmetry, and figure ground relationship. All of these principles speak to our pursuit for meaning in the images we see. We're willing to follow a curved line around a page because we want to understand its path and its resolution, where it was and where it ended up. We look for patterns in a drawing and we fill in gaps and information with our imagination if an image feels incomplete. In fact, it's kind of crazy that our imagination is willing to do all that work. That's why the pressure is really of the illustrator if you know how to exploit these principles and in fact, I really think the Gestalt principles are a great tool for fantasy storytelling. Let's go through each of them. Learn a little bit about how they work and sketch some moments of discovery along the way. Hopefully by the end of this exercise, we'll all have a bunch of moment-of-discovery concept sketches and one that's good enough to turn into a final illustration. 8. Sketching: Developing Concepts (Part 1): The first principle I want to play with is similarity. It's an easy one to understand. Similarity is the way we perceive elements as being part of a group. For example, a series of triangle people feel unified by their shape. They could literally be a family. You can imply similarity using shape. You can do it with size, so there are some children and here's two parents. Then of course you can do it with color. Brother and sister, partner. These two are in love. You can create similarities within a group of all types of levels of complexity. Let's take that a step further and say, well now what happens when we place an anomaly in the group. Triangle, triangle. In fact, we've got a whole colony of triangles and suddenly a circle arrives. Now you've got a story. Much fantasy artists rooted in ideas like a legendary artifact, a unique being, a mythical creature, a singular occurrence that interrupts the pattern of normal life. The unique presence creates a sense of expectation. This is likely to be the protagonist we're following, but is this singular thing a good thing for the system or is it a bad thing for the system? Fantasy and sci-fi loves that stranger in a strange land trope. It's a way to explore relationships with hope and fear. For example, we can go even further with this. We can sketch one emotional human who has just arrived in a world of emotionless telepaths. Brain waves. This character is the anomaly in the system. This is the moment of discovery for both groups and from there we can speculate on what might happen next. This time lets look at proximity. Proximity follows similarity and that it makes things related. It occurs when you place elements of any kind within close proximity to each other. Whereas similarity focuses on the objects themselves, proximity is about the boundaries. The intent behind the arrangement of the things. Proximity implies an outside force. These shapes seem to be under military rule. Therefore, proximity implies a force of power. Here's some water given proximity by the unseen banks of the river. Since we're talking about fantasy art, let's look at proximity as a supernatural force. Here's, lets say two magicians. Now lets say magician number two has more power than magician one. Lets use proximity to show their control of their magical talents. Magician number one is floating a bunch of shapes around in space, but they have no relationship to each other, so he doesn't seem like he's in control of his talents. But magician number two, if we take the same type of random shapes and we plan things out a little more carefully, lets clean some things up along the edges here. Sometimes taking away is just as important as adding. Now magician number two has clear control over his powers, where magician number one doesn't. I guess magician number two is the chosen one and he has to fight the evil Lizard King who has taken over the wizarding world. Good luck magician number two. We're seeing here that proximity can be character-driven. We can even use it to show emotional relationships. Lets say we've got a big cool dragon, who seems very terrifying and deadly. Can anybody possibly control this beast? Lets add another layer, and let's draw a young girl. Lets take our transformation tool and move her around. If she's over here, she doesn't really have proximity with the beast, she's standing on her own, facing it, looking at it. But if we put her in front of the creature like that, now they seem to have some relationship, and we can play with that. If she's standing on his head, they've got a playful relationship. If she's standing here in front of the creature, clearly the monster is not going to attack her and it evokes the question, how do these two know each other? Why is the monster not violent to her? Does she have some telepathic connection? Who knows? Brainwaves, brainwaves. Proximity. In the next chapter we'll look at symmetry, continuation and closure. 9. Sketching: Developing Concepts (Part 2): Let's look at symmetry next. Symmetry occurs when a form is reflected in another part of the composition. Obvious thing is here, a butterfly is symmetrical. Symmetry is something we're attracted to. But it's not just about being beautiful. It's more than that. It's about appeal and its relationship to our sense of vision. Symmetry can feel peaceful, it can feel natural, it can feel elegant, and it can feel powerful. I've always been really fond of that William Blake poem, the Tyger Tyger, burning bright one. Basically it says that how can something so beautiful and so symmetrical draw us in only to threaten us? That's what I mean by symmetry is more than beauty. It's appealing, and appeal can also be a dangerous lure. Symmetry implies there are two sides to something, and both are required to see the whole. Symmetry can be reflexive like that, reflected over a line, but it can also be radial. That means it pivots around a circular form. Radial symmetry opens things up because the two shapes feel unified and somewhat reflective. But there's also more to the relationship. They're bound together. They have a sense of movement and we can see an aspect of order and chaos at play. If we want to tell a story with symmetry, let's create, let's say water, a reflective surface. This is our line of symmetry. Let's say a young woman approaches the magical pond, and then in it she sees a reflection of herself. Now we've got a moment of discovery. We've posed a question for this character to answer. You've seen the evil twin trope a lot in fantasy work. It's very thought-provoking because you have to imagine yourself being connected to something, being drawn to something familiar despite knowing that it's trouble. Continuation occurs when the eye is compelled to move through one object and continue to another. Let's say we have a lifeless desert planet, and we have an explorer on a journey. Your eye follows the ground and then travels up into the character. The principle of continuation is so strong. We can break the flow of the past and still rest assured that the viewer can follow the story. Let's chop away this bit. That's some spires and rocky crags to the landscape. We're still able to follow the path of the character without thinking too hard about it. Continuation can present a sense of motion and a passage of time in a still image. The length of a line determines the length and duration of the journey. The longer the line, the more time passes. Our eye looks for a beginning and an end to an idea. But in fantasy art we can play with expectations and use this principle to catch the viewer in a loop, making them question the rules of reality, space, time, physics, whatever you want to talk about. Surprise I'm a big fan of M.C. Escher, and he's all about playing with our expectations of continuation, and that's what makes his art so cool. Closure is a variation on continuation. It asks the viewer to follow not just a visual path, but to use all of the clues provided to arrive at a mostly self-determined conclusion. Here's a hole. You can evoke a viewer's need for closure by drawing a part of something that implies a hole, like an arm. This bit of detail asks the audience to use their imagination to complete an incomplete concept. Here's the thing. Evoking a viewer's imagination is the most powerful skill an illustrator can develop. But it's not easy to do it well. You have to present a compelling case for the audience to even bother following your idea. This arm is not very compelling. Using a sense of fear might be a lot more compelling. In fact it's the best way to get somebody's attention. What if we use a big scary monster tyrannical, dripping with other wildly sludge? The thing from beyond is a popular fantasy and horror trope used to lure the imagination of an audience to places beyond comprehension. To be frank, places beyond where the illustrator could even go on their own. Abstraction is another way to evoke closure. The less you say, the better. A silhouette can be more impactful than a fully rendered image simply because of what it doesn't show and our minds need to fill in the gaps. That's closure. Withholding information and presenting questions is how an illustrator plays with a viewers perception. Now let's go back through our sketches, see which ones really suit the moment of discovery concept, and pick one for our final project. 10. From Concept to Composition: A good composition should read from a distance. So as I'm browsing these and deciding which one to pick, I'm going to think about a couple of things. First, I want my narrative for my moment of discovery to be more character-driven. I connect more with the Secret Garden, type of story than I do with a journey to the center of the Earth, which is more about the science and theory and sense of wonder of the time where a secret garden is very much about the characters and their experiences. This one reads really well on its own. It's pretty straightforward. You can almost get the message without any text or me explaining what it is. This balance of good and evil, something you see and fantasy art, things like Star Wars, you see the conflict of good and evil a lot. But there's a lot you can do with what types of characters you use to show this relationship of balance in contrast. Let's jump back into fresco and start a new document, 3600 by 3600. Let's zoom out here a bit, I'm going to grab my sketching pencil and I'm going to scale it down just to touch. On each layer, I'm going to lay out some of the basics of the composition. First is this idea of the pond. Let's just fill it in so it's a shape. I'm not going to do a perfect circle, I want it to feel a little organic. Let's add another layer, and here I'm going put my main character. For some reason, the first thing that comes to mind with this is the character looked childlike. So let's go with a little kid, and the only way I really need to distinguish that right now is with the proportions of the body, especially if you have a cartoon in style like me. When you're drawing a kid, usually their head is a little over sized. That's the one defining factor, and they're going to be kneeling down. So there's the toes so, here's the legs bending behind them, and I'm going to put their arms down on the ground like this, here's some hair. I'm going to give them a bit of a distinguishing silhouette. I'll work out the details of this character a little later, but I want aspects of them to feel unique. So when I reflect the character in the pond, I can create a more sinister looking variation on this. So in cartoon art, usually shapes like the classic Mickey Mouse body shape is soft and friendly. Whereas a triangular shape feels a little more aggressive. This is your hero shape, that's your villain shape if you want to be completely simple with it. So if this is the order character and then the water is the chaotic character. This character is going to have the software edges to its design. Notice again, this isn't about getting anatomy right. It's about using the right shapes for the project. Notice that I accidentally drew some of this character on this layer, you got to be careful with your layers because I lose a bit of that detail. So I'm just going to erase some of this. The cool thing with fresco is you get this little shortcut button which switches your brush to an eraser. I'm going to duplicate this layer, and then I'm going to use my transform tool here, and I'm going to put this character and the water. Here's where you can really see the benefit of putting elements on different layers. I'm going to keep shifting these things around till the composition feels right. Let me first add in my background. So I have got a little kid, what would be a good setting for a kid? That could be in their bedroom, but I guess you wouldn't have a pond in your bedroom, so they're outside for sure. They could be at school, maybe it's recess in this girls on the playground, and the idea is that she walked to the edge of the playground, saw this pond, maybe she feels isolated from her peers. So she's wandering alone, she sees the pond, and in the pond is a reflection of herself and she realizes it's an alternate version. Then we get a glimpse into what that world looks like. Behind her, I'm going to put the playground. I guess the nice thing about a playground is it feels kind of driven by fantasy world design. You've got these little towers and there's a slide, rope, ladder. The design of a playground lends itself to storytelling because it's a place for kids to exercise their imagination, works perfectly. I'm going to let that sit right there, and now I'm going to shift to these elements around as if their props and characters on a stage. So I want my background to sit around here, my horizon line's low. I like to overlap visual elements, but I'm going to center this character a little more. Maybe scale her up just a bit so she's more of a presence in the composition. Let's clone this and flip it, and tourists drop that in the background. I'm going to lighten this layer, I'm going to open this up, which is the layer properties, lighten that a bit, and I'm just going to merge all of these together. Now I can't overthink it. 11. Sketching the Details: Now you might be happy with your version of the sketch. For me, I do a sketch on top of the sketch, just to loosen the whole thing up a bit. So now I'm going to develop the personality of these characters a little further to find some of the landscape and the setting. I'm going to scale down my brush just a bit and maybe shift the smoothing up just a little. I want to point this character's face at the other character and to do that, you really got to start with the nose of the character. Maybe we'll give this character a pair of glasses to help define their eyes. Let's emphasize these a bit. They seem to be her defining visual trade at this point as a character. He doesn't have a whole lot of personality. Maybe she's first or second grade kid, a loner. Has a big imagination. I want her to look like she's leaning over the water a bit. So I'm going to push the body back, put the arms forward like this and I'm just going to erase a couple little stray lines. So I got a sense of what's overlapping, where. The cool thing about cartooning is it's really easy to make characters very expressive. So take advantage of that. So there's the above, the water girl. Let's again add another layer for the background. Let's work out the secondary character before we move into the setting. I'm going to flip this whole thing around. This character is going to resemble this character, but be a little pointier and more aggressive. So maybe we'll start with the pointy nose. She's got a menacing grin, possibly vampire teeth. Just cut the same hairstyle roughly. Maybe it points up just a bit, kind of an Elvish demon. This character, maybe it has a little bit more agency in their world. So maybe their outfit just feels a little more formal. Like they could be royalty in their land. Maybe they're in charge of something and that's part of the draw for this character. Let's turn off that layer and get a look at these characters. I think that's a good enough contrast. They both have a kid friendly feel, which is a style I like, but you can see the difference in them. The real world playground should feel softer and friendlier and then this dark alternative reality might be more castle inspire like more rocky. Here's our background element. We can say this is the mid ground and then the true foreground is going to be this line of the water. Well, let's see here. Let's define the edge of the banks. Maybe over here we see some rocks and grass poking up. Like I was saying with the secret drawing illustration, part of the law of that composition is the way it uses one-point perspective to bring you into the same. So much of that story is about getting immersed in the garden. So you can add visual elements to draw you into the composition. So much of the fantasy art I was referencing earlier does that, the line in which in the wardrobe cover with the one-point perspective, some of the book covers early on, I was showing you how the characters in the foreground, and they push you into the design with some like little visual elements. I could even add some ripples to the water. Maybe they intersect with this character so we don't get a full read on them. They are in an alternate reality that we haven't entered into quite yet. This is just the moment of discovery. Now, the nice thing here again is that I have these things on different layers, so I can shift this character down just a bit. I really want her on the banks of the river and I'm going to push this character whip around as well. Shrink her down just a bit. When I move into my coloring and inking stage, I can create some visual effects that make this seem like a reflection and make this seem like the real world. So that's all for the sketching stage. Let's move into the final artwork. 12. Inking with Fresco: Let's talk about the types of brushes we have at our disposal here in fresco.You probably have something similar in your drawing program if you're using something different. I'm going to start by adjusting the Opacity of this layer, putting it down to about 30 percent. I'm going to ink with black. If my sketch is also black, it's going to be hard to distinguish the lines. I'm going to make a new layer to practice on. Let's jump to this character's face and try out our brush options. Pixel Brushes got all kinds of inking tools. I'm going to stick with the Belgian Comics pen, which simulates a traditional nib pen. Something that's very popular in traditional hand and comic art. The cool thing about fresco is it's really good at simulating traditional free hand drawing tools. So you've got some great ink options. I'm going to hit the little star there and now I've got my Belgian Comics pen in my favorites. I'm keeping the ink black, I'm keeping my brush size to about 30, and I'm setting the Smoothing just down to about 20. So there's a little bit of control. There is no friction in the way there's paper friction when you're drawing traditionally. I need a little bit of Smoothing. Otherwise, my pen is moving faster than I expected it to as someone who is so used to drawing traditionally. With a little bit of smoothing, I have more control. If I set this all the way down, it's just a little too scattered. So just a bit of smoothing helps. With the pixel brush you get a nice traditional looking inking effect. If you've inked with nibs before they have a metal point so as you're moving them across the paper, they are cutting through the pulp of the paper of that. Which gives even a clean line a little bit of grid on the edges that ink bleeds out. This inking tool simulates that. I like this nib. It's got a bit of humanity in it, it's loose, there's a lot of texture. If you've got some good hand control or you like a sloppy look this nib, the Belgian Comics brush, is going to work for you. But if you want a cleaner effect, you can either up the Smoothing. But again, you still have this pixel noise. Let's try the Vector Brushes, which is a couple of tools down right here. I'm going to scale this down a bit because this line has a totally different effect. This is a Vector tool artwork. It's not making pixel art. It's making some algorithm based line. The benefit of that is you can scale it infinitely. You see no matter how far I zoom in, the ink retains its crisp effect. In fact, check it out. When I zoom in on the pixels, you can see the grid of the pixel here. I can draw within a single pixel with this Vector tool. If you love detail and you love clean, smooth needle point line work, this is the tool for you. I do like this effect. But for this project I want to keep things a little looser. I want it to resemble a more traditional free hand illustration. I don't want so much control over the line. That is beautiful. 13. Inking the Characters: I'm going to jump back to my Belgian brush and I'm going to start inking my characters. I'm going to start with the protagonist of my story, this young lady. Because I'm so confident in the composition of my sketch. Thinking really frees up my decision-making. I can just go in here and have some fun working with style. I slant my drawing a bit, so I can get some nice curvature in my line, and I'm going to work fairly quickly because inking looks best when it's loose. Unless I really blow it on a line, I'm not going to redraw. When you're drawing simply hair is when are your opportunities to really define a character, and their personality through just a visual. So I spent a bit of time working out the details of the hair. In this case, it's extra important because it represents part of her silhouette which I want to play against in the evil, chaotic version of her character. I'm going to give her short sleeves. She is on a playground. I wanted to have a more casual look about her. Something I can also play against in the other character. It's even put her in a pair of summertime shorts. There we go. There's our main character. Create our antagonist. While this character is round and softer, this character is going to be a bit pointier. Must have her aspects reflected, will have just a bit of variation that adds some richness to the story. So right off the bat and we're going to do a pointier nose. Again, pointy feels more villainous and dangerous. Her eyes seem happy, but they also have a bit of point to them as well. I'm actually going to leave out the teeth and just give her a bit of a devious smile if she does have vampire teeth. We don't know about them yet. Now the arms, this character is not in short sleeves. Maybe she's a young princess or even a young queen of the castle. We get a sense that she has more of a formal costume. There we go. We've got two opposing versions of the same character. 14. Inking the Setting: Let's jump to the background elements. I'm going to flip this around and start with the playground. I don't want to add too much detail to the background elements. Detail draws attention. The main characters should keep our attention. This is just extra flavor for the story. I'm going to keep the line pretty simple, like for the roof, I'm just going to do a couple little scallops. I'm just going to establish the basic framework. The playground is very geometric. Hopefully it's got just enough detail to let you know what it is without drawing too much attention to it. Okay? Now, for the castle here, it's going to have the opposite type of effect. The silhouette is going to be similar like the swing set is reflected in the volcano. The main slide element is the castle but the line work is just a little more menacing. Almost like a creature. The smoke of the volcano is an atmospheric effect. I'm not going to ink it, I'm going to leave it for coloring stages and my fantasy effects chapter to show you some more of the cool tool options we've got with this program. I see an opportunity to create a face here and of course, we always want to mess with viewers perception. Let's do it. That kind of a castle gray skull thing going on. We've got the main characters, the background elements, and now let's work on the foreground here. Again, these elements serve a purpose in the composition. The grasses and rocks are designed to frame the character and lead us into this scene. The same way the illustration from the secret garden drew us in with kind of a one-point perspective. These visual elements are going to push us into the design. Let's add them on to a new layer. Start by bringing in some of these rocks. Rocks are scattered around the shoreline. Now, right in here, there's an opportunity to create too much tension. Like if we do too much line work in here that draws the eye directly to those intersections of line. That's not good. We want the attention to stay on the character's face and we don't want to obstruct this connection. Now let's do a bit with the grass. I could ink all of these individually but again, that might be too much detail. So I'm just going to do more of an outline. He's grassy bits are going to show us the edge of the water. We need just a little bit but again, we don't want to intersect too much here. All right, I'm pretty happy with it. This is our basic line art, not a lot of contrast in here yet aside from the eyes. In the coloring stage, I'm going to think about how I can push the story forward, show the similarities and the opposing personality types, after that would create some visual effects in the water, separating the fantasy world here from the real-world. 15. Coloring the Characters: Before I start coloring, I want to make sure my layers are all in order. You can see here that I've put all my layers in one folder. In Fresco, you can do that by grabbing a layer and dragging it on top of another layer. Now they're all collected. You can shift them around and put them in order if you need to. You have a similar function in Photoshop or Procreate or any other digital drawing tool. Now that those are grouped, I can create a new layer to start my base colors on. My base colors are just going to be solid color swatches that establish the color palette. Later, I'll add texture in effects on top of that because Fresco has some pretty sweet texture brush options. For now, I'm just grabbing my pixel brush, and you can see in my favorite section, I added the Classic Comic Nib. I found it in ink, Classic Comic Nib. Let's take a look at why it's a good fit for just a base color brush. It has a solid opacity, meaning that I can layer it up, without creating variation in the color. It has a little bit of texture on its edge, which is nice to give it a bit of a hand-drawn field. Plus it works like my nib or a paintbrush and that the harder I press down, the wider the line. So it makes it easy to color in all one gesture without switching my tools. I'm going to start by coloring the main attributes of the character in order. I'm going to focus on the character's hair first. I don't want go too vibrant because I wanted to feel like she's in the real world and the other character in the water will be vibrant in another worldly. I'm going to pick a purple, but it's going to be kind of a greyish-purple, so it feels more grounded. I'm just going to lay down that base color. Now, to create an iconic color palette, I like to work with this theory called the triadic color theory. It's something I talk about in my class, World of color. That's a good way to create a palette, a simple, refined pallete that makes your character very distinguishable because the colors are all in high contrast with each other. Now I'm going to create a skin tone for this character. Skin tones are based right around here in the orange-reddish zone. Don't go to yellow because you're going to get really dull, kind of muddy skin tones and don't go too far into yellowish-green because then you're going get kind of strange olive colors. Start with this zone. Then just shift around till you get a skin tone you like. Next, I'm going to add some of the details. Let's look at the hair here. I've got this nice purple and a compliment to purple is yellow. So let's make her little hair ties bright yellow. I want the eyes to stand out from the skin tone. I'm going to use a light blue, very pale. So we get a sense of the glass, but we don't want too much color in them. Now let's do her shoes. Maybe she's got some fun bright red converse. This kid loves red. I'm going to use a really pale pink for the sock. There's a pretty realistic looking kid. I'm just going to go through and touch up some of these colors. In Fresco if you hold with your finger, you get the eyedropper tool so you can sample your colors. I'm going to sample the red of the shirt, touched that up, and just clean up a couple of spots in the skin and the hair. Now when I go to color my character in the water, I want her to feel more supernatural. So I'm going to use really vibrant colors with her. Our warm colors are above water and our cool colors are going to be below. Let's see. Let's start with her skin tone. I'm going to go with kind of a shade of green. One of my favorite color schemes in fantasy art is purple and green. That's something that was popular in 70s, color art for world building like monster design or planetary atmosphere. Supernatural colors and fantasy art often have a lot of green and purple. Here we go. 16. Background, Shadows, Highlights: Let's get creative with our approach to color in the background. Of course, there's the option of just grabbing the paint bucket tool in, filling it in with one-click, creating this big block of solid color. That's not the worst idea in the world, but sometimes an easy solution like that distracts us from our other possible options. While the page itself is a square, within that square, there is an opportunity to use form to play with the viewers experience of the scene. One of my biggest influences when it comes to composition is the Art Nouveau Movement of the late 19th century and early 20th century. It was an era of experimentation, especially within book arts. Some of the more interesting artists of the time, were integrating the color and texture of the paper itself into their printed composition. Here's an illustration by one of my favorite illustrators, Aubrey Beardsley. His composition shows the magician, Merlin, trapped in a portal carved into the book itself. Now, think about how this framing style changes your perception of the scene. I talk more about Art Nouveau illustration and graphical experimentation in my class, illustration by design. If that's a topic you're in to, check it out. But this approach to composition and the world of book arts continue to pop up in fantasy and Science fiction is static, especially in the '60s and '70s. Look at the way negative space, color in form within these backgrounds change our relationship to the scene. It brings a bit of surrealism to an illustration, and it's a technique you may or may not have noticed happening in some of the illustrations of mine that I shared earlier. I'm going to put that technique to use in this scene as well by creating a portal for us to observe these characters in their moment of discovery. By adding this simple graphical element, my whole approach to coloring this scene is really changed. Instead of just defining the sky and the ground by applying a horizon line, I'm going to create a hazy wash of transition behind the characters. To get that effect, I'm going to need to make some broad gestures with my brush. Because I don't want to worry about going outside the borders of this frame I've created, I'm going to lock the transparency of this layer. When you lock the transparency, you prevent color from seeping outside of the range of pixels you've already created. Transparent pixels will remain transparent. Next I'm going to my pixel brushes and selecting the gradient soft round brush. It's got a bit of a airbrush effect. I'm going to transition from daylight to grass, to water, to the night sky of this imaginary world. Without adding the form to my frame, I wouldn't have come up with this idea so, give it a try in your composition. Next, I'm going to define some of these simple background elements, using the same approach I used in my base colors on my character. I'm grabbing my classic comic nib and using a slightly duller color scheme and the background elements, so they don't distract from my character. To help these elements blend with my background, I'm going to set their layer property to darken and bring the opacity down to about 60 percent. They seem to sit on top of the background, but also be integrated with that color scheme. I'm going to flip the drawing around and do the same thing for the castle. I'm going to come up to the surface and add some dull green to the plant matter and some gray to the rocks. Now that I've got my whole scene colored, I'm going to start creating atmospheric effects to bring a bit of realism to the design. Before I add shadow and highlight, I'm going to merge my base color layers all the way down and stop right before I get to my background. I'm going to leave that separate, just in case I want to move some things or apply different textures and effects to the characters and the background. In a new folder, I'm going to create a new layer and put it above my base colors. I'm going to add shadow and highlight. First, I need to decide where are my light sources. Let's say it's over the left shoulder of the little girl on the playground. My general approach to shadow is to pick a deep purple color. Make sure you're on a new layer. Set that layer property to color burn. You'll notice when you lay down the color, it interacts with the colors below it. Right now, the opacity is too high on this layer. I'm going to set it to about 30, and now it blends in a more subtle way. This is a quick way to create shadow without jumping through a bunch of colors. Because the sun is behind the girl, my shadows are very prominent, especially on the plant matter. This is an important time to create some strong contrast in your design. It enhances mood and makes your illustration more appealing overall. The shadows are also add a bit of texture to the composition, something we'll get into more later as we add visual effects in the next chapter. This illustration doesn't call for a lot of highlights, but I'm still going to go through the process. I'm going to make a new layer, and this time I'm going to set my layer properties to lighten. Once I create all the highlights I could possibly want, I go through and assess which ones I really want to keep. I'm going to grab my eraser, set the flow really low so it's soft and knock out some of the intensity of some of these highlights. I don't want a completely plastic look on these characters and setting elements. I'm happy with the illustration to this point, but it still feels a little clean. I want to create more of a sense of atmosphere and add some texture to give the illustration more character and push the sense of a fantasy world and this underwater setting. We'll get into that in the next chapter. 17. Fresco Brushes and Effects: All of the texture and effects I want to add to the scene needs to be restricted to the wobbly frame. So to do that, I'm going to create a mask. Now, there's no magic wand tool like in Photoshop to select white and build a mask from. So what I have to do is I'm going to clone the background layer. Then I'm going to mask the layer contents and that creates a mask based on that layer, which you can slide back and forth between the mask in the actual layer. I'm going to use the eraser, and first I'll turn off this other layer, and erase that layer. Unlock the transparency now anything I put in here will abide by that mask. Meaning I can create effects and so forth that only are seen against this backdrop. Let me creates another one of these and save it for later. Something I'm anxious to play with in Fresco is the live brush tool. They built this great brush engine for simulating watercolor effects. Back when I worked traditionally, I used watercolor exclusively. It's my favorite medium to paint in, but there hasn't been a good digital equivalent for watercolor, something that lets the pigment flow through water and a natural way. But this thing comes pretty close, so we are going to try above the background layer. Let's grab a shade of blue and let's adjust the blend to multiply. Let's see how this looks. Let's look at the settings here for a second. You can adjust the amount of water in the brush as well as the Brush size and the flow. Less flow, less pigment. I'm going to turn the flow down a bit, and I'm going to bring the waterway up. You can see you get this nice watercolor style bleed. Now you can switch the opacity of the color down to transparent and get a nice fade. I'm going do the same effect in the sky above the girl. Let's clone this layer again, so I have another one. This one is going to be one colors. The imperfection of watercolor is it's coolest attribute. But sometimes you end up with a bit more than you bargained for, that's too much orange. A little trick in Fresco you could do, which is a similar shortcut and procreate, two-finger undo, three-finger redo. I'm going to keep that little accent there, it's a nice little strangeness in the design. All right next, on top of everything, I want to create a sense of glassiness above the water. So let's try, the watercolor brush, on top of everything. Effects are a major part of fantasy art. It's a way to take reality and turn it on its head. But it has to abide by some guidelines. They can be odd colors, but they have to feel like things we've seen in the real world. Otherwise, the reality that we're creating, it doesn't feel like it could exist. Next, I want to add a little bit of texture to the above-ground world. I'm going to make a new layer, set it to multiply, grab and have a purplish color. Let's try splatter. 18. Wrapping It Up!: There you have it, my final illustration. I hope you're out there working on a drawing of your own, and if you are that means soon you'll be posting it in the class project section. If you're working with Fresco, here's how you go about exporting your work to post. With your final project open, click "Publish & Export" in the top right-hand corner of the Menu Bar. The Share menu will pop up, click "Export As", give your project a name. Switch the format to JPEG, if it's not there already. Set your quality to high and hit "Export". Now export the file by simply clicking "Save Image" and adding it to your tablets Photo app. So you can access it directly or send it to a cloud-based service like Google Drive or Gmail. If you're using another drawing app, the process is probably pretty similar. If you're working traditionally, take some pictures of what you're working on. Also, if you could collect some of your creative process, that means sketches, notes about inspiration and how you got to the final art. I think that stuff is really important, and student participation enriches my classes in a way that I could never do by myself. So it really does mean a lot whenever I see new projects appear in my classes. Of course, once you post a project, I'll share my thoughts on your work as well. I check the class project section at least a few times a week. I hope you enjoyed my other worlds class. If you want to learn more with me, well you're in luck. I have over ten other classes on my skill share page, right now. If you want to learn more about fantasy art, checkout my class Drawing Imaginary Worlds. It's a real deep dive into creating concept art and illustrating an evocative setting for a story. If you're a World Builder, you'll really like my class on creating Fantasy Maps. In it we make a really unique medieval style map inspired by the real life adventures of childhood. If you're a Lord of the Rings fan, this is the class for you. If you're an illustrator looking to level up your skills, check out my class Illustration By Design. It's a really unique core structure inspired by the graphic artists of the art nouveau movement, which has an influence I briefly mentioned in this class already, check it out. Now if you're curious about trying your hand at making comics and cartooning, checkout my beginner's guide to drawing comics. It's a two-hour big fun course on my favorite topic, and to help you develop your cartooning skills to make better comics, I've also got a few classes on drawing better cartoon expressions and body language imposes. It's a whole curriculum package on comics basically, take a look. If you like what I do, you can support me over on my Patreon page. You'll get access to Sneak Peeks, and things I'm currently working on. Longer process posts and two projects I have in development and behind the scenes looks at illustrations that I've shared through my Instagram. It's kind of cool. I hope you really enjoyed this class. I love making these courses. Thank you for watching them. Share a review, say some nice things if you want, and I look forward to seeing you next time. Bye. 19. Go Further with Fresco: