Design Outdoor Scenes for Picture Books

1. Introduction: Do you want to illustrate books but get stuck on drawing more complicated environments? How many ways can you draw a tree? Can you illustrate different times of the day? Drawing landscapes and complete environments is a skill that every successful picture book illustrator needs in their toolbox. I've created this class designing outdoor scenes for picture books to teach you elements of design and how they relate to illustrating picture books. By the time you're through with the lessons, you'll know how to create a focal point in your illustration and how to balance your composition. You'll know what point of view to illustrate from and how to light your scene for a maximum emotional effect. You'll learn how to use color, value and saturation to draw attention to or to unify an area. And how and when to take artistic license in your illustrations. By the end of the class, you'll have drawn a set of thumbnails to figure out a compelling composition, and then you tweak it, and in the end, you'll have a great, complete picture book illustration that you can use in your dummy or portfolio. Hi, I'm Mirka, and I'm an award winning author and illustrator, and I've worked with publishers big and small to create a range of books going anywhere from graphic novels to picture books and nonfiction and fiction. I'm passionate about kids books and love sharing what I've learned along the years as an author and an illustrator. This class is the first one in three on how to create environments for picture books. This class does all the heavy lifting, talking about compositions and principles of design, and we concentrate on drawing outdoor scenes. The next two classes will cover how to draw scenes underwater and how to do indoor scenes. This class is great for beginners who want to get into picture book illustration, and it also works for intermediate illustrators who might still feel a little bit wobbly on creating environments for their characters to live in. So do you want to illustrate amazing environments? Grab your pencils and let's go. 2. Class Project: Thanks for joining in this class on designing outdoor spaces for picture books. In this class, we'll spend a little bit of time in the beginning to go over basic design principles, and then we'll get to the practical part in the class where I'll give you the tools to start building the perfect environment for your book characters to exist in. I think basic design principles that we'll talk about in this class will work on any kind of an environment that you're going to be designing. That could be a city scene, a landscape with rolling hills, it could be an underwater scene or even outer space. What story you're trying to tell is going to be the jumping off point, and then you start building the environment from there bit by bit so that it's going to support the story in your characters interact. I'm going to be using the folk story of the Little Red Hen as the example for this class for all the exercises that I'm going to be doing. The text is provided for you in the resources section below so that if you are unfamiliar with the story, you can read it from there and use it for reference, or if you have your own story, feel free to grab that. It doesn't matter what story you work on for the effectiveness of the exercises that we're going to be doing. Don't forget to post the thumbnails from your exercises in the class gallery below as you go through the there are many exercises in this class, and they all are kind of short and they build up on top of each other. So feel free to post, you know, either ones from the beginning or the end or make a collage out of all of them to show your progress that you've made. I can't wait to see what you come up with. So let's get to our first video and talk about creating focal point and contrast in your illustration. 3. Create A Focal Point: So design principles are kind of like the foundation and the framing of house. So they're like the underlying structure that tells us how the space is going to be organized, how much space we have, you know, where different rooms are and how everything kind of works in the house. In a similar way, we kind of have a frame for a picture book where we have the size of the picture book, and we have the text in it and the text and the the actual size of the book will give us some framing and it is a frame to work within, but then also the design principles will be things that will frame your composition within the confines of the book. And in the same way as when you're done with the framing in a house, it gets covered up by, you know, layers of plywood and speckling and paint, wallpaper, and then you put furniture and all your stuff in the house. And then you don't notice the structure of the house anymore. You just kind of notice all the stuff inside of the house. And so in the same way when you're designing your picture book, um, when you're designing your picture book pages, if you have good basic design on your pages, they're going to look nice, they're going to look balanced, they're going to be pleasing to read. And so the design of your pages kind of goes unnoticed until you have bad design. And that's, you know, in a house where you're going to bump your head on on a wall that's too low or in the wrong spot or you're going to stumble in the stairs. And in the same way, if you have a badly designed picture book illustration, that's going to catch somebody's eye and then it's going to be distracting for the reader when they're trying to enjoy your book. And while design principles are universal and they can be used in any kind of art, I'm going to try to relate them how they specifically apply for picture book illustration. Then really quickly, I will use the word composition a lot. And what I mean with that is how the elements of your picture are arranged within the space that you have available. First, let's talk about contrast and creating a focal point in your illustration. Elements that are in opposition to each other will create contrast and will lead our eye into the focal point of our composition. So we read from left to right and then top to bottom. And as you're looking at the examples in this class, and as you're working on your own compositions and exercises, try to be aware of how the illustration is composed to lead your e. And so there's many different ways that we can lead an eye within a composition. And so one of the ways that we can lead the I is by line weight. And so if we had items in our composition, and so we have a light line weight, and then we have doesn't even have to be a different size, and then we have a dark line weight. The area with the biggest contrast with a different line weight is which is going to draw your eye. Another way that you can lead the eye is with shapes, and so let's say you could have a whole bunch of trees over here, it's the same thing, which one is the odd one out. And so if you have a whole bunch of angular shape and then you have a square shape, even if the shape could even be hiding, behind somewhere over there, that difference in the angles and then having a round shape is going to draw your eye to the round shape, or it could be exactly the opposite. So anything where it's an opposite. So the opposite of this would be, I could have a whole bunch of circular round shapes and then wherever there's a jagged shape that would stick out. And so let's think that we have some grass over the ear and we could add some texture to it. Viger. And so now we have all this texture in here and wherever we don't have texture, that's where our eye is going to go. Or you could even do that with even simpler texture wherever there's an open spot, now you can see that I've kind of created a pathway over here. And so that's another way to create a focal point and to lead the eye within a composition. Then another way that you can add a focal point is by contrast. So let's say we have a dark surrounding and so we can add a higher contrast like this. And so, obviously, if we have a high contrast area, so this would be our high contrast area. And then we add something over here, that's immediately going to draw our eye, or we're going to have kind of a gray, and there's going to be let's say we have some leaves over here. And so everything is kind of gray scale, but then all of a sudden and then we've got a character standing over here in the sunshine that's just going to create because this is where the highest contrast is in our illustration, that's where our eye is going to go. And the same works very much for saturation. And so the same illustration could be done colors. There we go. And then the opposite of green is going to be a red. Then obviously, our red item is going to stick out like a sore thumb. Let's say we have leaves over here. So this is just saturation. So this is very low saturated, and then we have our main character is a very highly saturated caterpillar, and it's even got some eyeballs. And so now we have high contrast and low saturated and a high saturated area. And so that will catch our eye. And so let's look at our example of line weight first. And so in this illustration, we have darker, thicker lines in and more saturated lines on the front over here, on everything over here. And then if you look behind at these trees over here, and even at this house over here, there are lines everywhere over here, too, but they are just much thinner and they're much more lighter. And that creates a sense of depth. So that's kind of an example of some line weight. And then I wanted to show an example of having different shapes, jagged versus smooth. And so we have all these trees, as you can see over here, and then we have a round shape. And not only do we have all the sharp shapes and then a round shape, but we have other things that are helping our eye. So we talked about the lines moving our eye. So you can see all these are almost like arrows. Pointing us this way. And then we had the texture versus no texture. So we have all this stuff black and white, things going on over here, and then we have big open space that kind of frames our circle over here. So it is really obvious that, you know, this is our focal point over here. And then we talked about texture over here, the houses create this texture, and then we have no texture here in this white area and so we have high contrast area over here that is then leading our eye. It makes a very natural progression for our eye to notice this and then we move here with our animals as they're taking their tree to the boat and leaving the overcrowded city. Then I wanted to talk about value with the highest contrast being the focal point. And so this is kind of similar as that first illustration we looked at with the trees. And so we have high contrast, high saturation going on over here, in the foreground, which is our focal point. And then the city that's in the background is all kind of pastel colors, all very light. And so it's not natural colors, and, you know, it also kind of melts in with the green over here. And so all of this just becomes kind of one area that fades into the back. Um, and then this pops nicely for us on the top. And then we talked about saturation, and so we have high saturation, low saturation, a very obvious, a very obvious play with that to create focal point. And then this is a little bit more subtle, but also really interesting. And so here we have the character is afraid of heights. And so we have everything that is on the bottom is kind of gray scale, and then we have everything that's kind of fun, exciting, happening at the top. And so you can see, you know, how he is scared and depressed, being afraid of heights compared to how his life used to be before. And so that's kind of a fun illustration. And then we talked about lines and converging. And so this was a very obvious example of that. Everything is pointing towards our main character. The text reads, and the stone was a throne. And so we have this link over here sitting on the stone as if it was a throne, and then everything else is pointing right to it. And so this is a little bit more subtle with all the lines. And so our main characters are over here. We have kind of muted browns, but then over here, we have brightest red, yellow, we have blue, green, we have kind of a nice spattering of color over here, and then everything all of our lines kind of converge over there. And we also have all these wolves kind of moving this way. Everything kind of comes to a point over here, which is our focal point in this one. So sometimes we want our readers to go on a little bit of a journey before they get to a destination. And so this could be with maps. Or when we're talking about kind of physical or emotional journeys. And so over here in this picture, you can see that, you know, when we first look at this illustration, we notice this first. We have a high contrast area over here, and we kind of follow the road, and then we get to the actual destination where the person has moved. And then if we look at this next illustrate. So here's the book. And so if we look at this next illustration, what you probably or at least what I notice first is kind of this area over here. We have a high contrast area with lots of little texture, and then we have this white stick, and there's actually people with red clothes on over here. And so you might either kind of notice all this first and I notice kind of this, and then I go back over here because there's a lot of details going on over here. But as you're noticing everything, you finally notice this little character that's sitting at the top of it here and um and this is kind of like the turning point in the book where the main character has been very angry and has been very frustrated. And now, this is kind of the turning point in the book where he's starting to think about what he's done. And so it kind of reflects as we're looking at this, we're noticing everything that he's collected. And so that's kind of like I feel like like a symbol of his mental journey. And so that's that book. And then another kind of category in that is these Where's Waldo type Sikh and Fine books. And so here's one that we looked at just a minute ago. We have character over here, but basically the whole idea is to confuse, and then you have to look where the characters in the book are. And then here's just another one. This is a book of There's poems on each page. And then, but it also is Sk and Find. And so over here, there is no focal point kind of on purpose, and what we're supposed to do is our eyes wonder you know, through the picture as we are, you know, the kids will look at the picture while they're being read the poetry, and then at the end they can find all the different things. And so there's different purposes for all and just being aware of the different ways that you can lead your eye and make people look at things faster or slower. Um, that'll make it more interesting for them to kind of look through the book. And so you might have a book where you want things to progress faster and you want people to kind of notice things or understand things faster. And then there might be times where you want a reader's eye to kind of journey through a picture and take a little bit more time. And so just be aware that you have the ability to do both of those. All right. And now that we've looked at all these really exciting examples, let's talk about balancing different elements out in the next video. 4. Balance in Composition: In the last video, we talked about creating contrast and focal points. And in this video, we'll talk a little bit about creating balance in your illustration. So when we're talking about balance, we're usually talking about how we're placing elements onto the page in kind of a visually pleasing way. So everything seems to kind of play together nicely. And some people have kind of a better innate sense of doing this and some people struggle with it a little bit more. And if you're just in the beginning stages of learning how to illustrate picture books, what I recommend highly is finding a critique group for yourself. So being in a critique group is kind of like a two way street. So on one hand, you're breaking down somebody else's work and you're figuring out what's not working with it and giving feedback on it. And then that way you are, um, you're honing all of your own sensibilities to figure out what's not working in somebody else's work and then that way you can look at your own work a little bit more objectively and with more of a critical eye. Then you're giving feedback on one hand, but then you are getting feedback from another person on another hand. And so when you're working on your piece, you might not always notice that something is wrong, and having somebody else look at it, oftentimes, they can pick things out, you know, things that are not balanced or things that things that's not working out. And then that way you're getting good feedback and you're able to make your work better. And so I recommend for you to get into a critique group in one way or another if you are not already in one. If you don't know how to get into a critique group, you can post that question in the discussion section below, and I'll give you some pointers over there. All right. But back to talking about balance and the point of this class. So you create balance with all the different elements that we talked about in the previous lesson. So that could be shapes, value, and detail. And in general, when we're talking about design, design can either be symmetrical where or, you know, a classic example, if you have a tree or a butterfly, and so a symmetrical design would be where both sides are pretty much even or the same. And then an asymmetrical design would be where the two sides are different. So let's say I have a you know, tree over here, and then there's some rolling hills and whatnot. So most of the time, I want to say, you know, 95 or actually more, probably 99% of the time. The designs and picture books or illustrations are going to be asymmetrical, and we get a better visual rhythm. You know, it's more interesting. With symmetrical design, oftentimes, it can be a little bit boring. But we'll talk about symmetrical composition here in a minute. And so then I really quickly just wanted to talk about different types of elements that you can use to balance your composition out. And so you could either think about this as, like, a you know, seesaw. But since we're talking about picture book illustrations, I will draw little. We can think about these as a square, and then there's two sides. And by the way, the symmetrical compositions, it can be either, you know, right or left. It could either, you know, it could be up or down, or it could be even diagonal or radio. Radio would be, you know, like if you think about a snowflake and then everyone's going to be symmetrical all the way around. And so getting back to our balance. And so the first thing between balance is we could create we could have an item that's, you know, between light and dark. And so if we have something that's a very, very dark item, then having a light item, this seems a little bit having the same size, it would feel like this side is not quite balanced with the other side. And so then if we create an object, something like that, then it might feel it would be a little bit more balanced, and I feel like visually maybe something like that. And so now we'd have the two sides balanced over there. Then another way that we can have things balanced could be saturation. And so then we're dealing with color. So let's say, if well, let's just go with green since that's what we have over here. So if we have something that's very highly saturated and then something that's much less saturated. In general, the side that's much more highly saturated, it could even be a little bit darker. This is going to draw our eye more. And so in the same way, if you have something that's more or less saturated, then you either want more of those items or you want it to be bigger, like in this instance, or you want the things to be more complicated. So whatever it might be just to create a visual balance between the two. So maybe there's something like that. Then another example, what we can do is we can do size, and so obviously, it's going to feel a lot heavier than compared to something that's very small. But then if you have many items that are small, then you can visually, you know, have the same weight as on the other side. And you could also do it with a variation. So let's say I have one piece over here, and then instead of it being the size, it could also just be size variation or variation of textures or it could be variation of shapes or it could be variation of saturation, whatever. So I'm just going to do variation in sizes. And so we could have something like that. So now I have kind of a big middle or big small and medium sized one over here, and then we have a big lump over there. So that could be a different way to create balance between different sides or different parts of your illustration. And then we can also have variation in the complexity of your shapes. And so you could have a very simple shape, and then you could have a very complicated shape, and then whatever is more complicated, you know, that has more visual weight to it. And so then that area can be much more smaller. So before we talk about symmetrical designs in picture book illustration, I wanted to really quickly just talk about focal points or some good places to place your object of focus in your illustration. Would obviously be in the middle or one of the places would be in the middle. But a lot of times, if you stick your main focal point in the middle of the page, it can be a little bit boring. So a lot of times it's nicer to put it on a third. So you've probably heard about the rule of thirds or the golden ratio. And so the golden ratio is it's this kind of spiral, where it goes and elements get, you know, elements get dissected smaller and smaller. But what I find easier to think about is just dividing your picture plane into thirds. And a lot of times when you're looking at illustration, you'll find the most important pieces in that illustration, so it can be either vertical, it can be horizontal. And most of the time, you'll find the most important pieces in that illustration to be in one of these points. And placing it off center, a little bit off to one of these corners makes in general for a little bit more of a more interesting and more exciting composition. And so when you're working on your composition, I want you to think about different ways of creating kind of balance and harmony in it, and then not only in just the general composition, but also it with, like, items in it. So just one example that I could give you really quick would be, let's say I'm working on a little landscape and everything's, you know, looking great. There's some clouds in the sky and the sun shining down. You know, and then so these are all different elements in there. And then but then if you have, let's say I'm building a house over here, and it's got a door. And then but then all of a sudden, if I'm starting to do a window, and it's got a teeny tiny little roof in it or let's say, one of the walls is all wonky or something like that, And, you know, and so in this one, I'm trying to draw a house, but, you know, things are quite not in proportionate. Things are not very well visually organized in it. And so we have an imbalance between the roof and the building itself. And so not only think about items in the way that you organize them in your composition, but also think about individual items in your composition if they're a little bit more complicated to make sure that they are balanced, as well. And another example, let's say if I was drawing a tree over here, it would look weird if I had a huge tree, and then let's say that it just had a teeny, tiny little trunk of the tree or something like that, or if you had two items and then they were they were not very well balanced with each other. So let's say I had a house over here. And so let's say this is our nice balanced house, but then my character is a bunny rabbit. And then my bunny rabbit is this big next to my house, then these two items are not really great balance because how is this bunny going to, you know, live in that house? And so just think about, you know, balance and composition and balancing different elements in your composition out. And so all these are kind of the main points that I wanted to talk about balance. And then I wanted to show some examples of symmetrical compositions. Like I said, we get a lot of asymmetrical compositions on almost all the illustrations that we're looking at in this class are going to be asymmetrical. But I have a selection of books that have symmetrical compositions and I want to just talk about when to use those and when they're going to be effective in your picturebook design. 5. Balance Examples: So in general, when we think about something being symmetrical, we might think that it is something that's kind of boring. It has an even rhythm, and it's kind of used to show that something is very proper and grounded. But when you sparingly, we can use it to kind of heighten the emotional drama in a book. So let's look at a few examples over here. So in this book, The Little House. Oh, and by the way, a lot of times book covers may be symmetrical. A lot of times they'll have a character or something on them. And so this kind of excludes book covers. There's a lot more symmetrical book covers than there are inside illustrations, so these are just a couple of illustrations. And so the book cover is symmetrical over here. But then when we look at the illustrations on most of these pages, you'll notice that, you know, starting from this page, it's kind of very symmetrical. And so as the seasons are changing, the composition is very similar. And with this one, we have the same compost or it's a symmetrical composition. It's the same composition on each page. And when we have this kind of similar thing that's going through every page, we notice what changes. And so, you know, over here, we're noticing the seasons change. H one. And then you'll notice when they start building the city, even between here, it's still kind of symmetrical, where even though, you know, this has, you know, the text kind of balances out the top over here, but, you know, if you put them together, they're still fairly symmetrical over here. And so that's a good example of also balancing, where it's almost symmetrical. So we have, you know, this part that matches this part, but then obviously this part needs to be balanced out with something. And so the text kind of balances out. And so that's one example of that. And then we have this book. It's a little bit of an older book, but you see the whole spread is symmetrical. A lot of the pages are, you know, very symmetrical. And this is basically one of those kind of seek and find books where there is something different on each spread has something that you're supposed to find. And so that's one example. And so over here, we have the two pages. It's pretty symmetrical. We have a big main character. We have two lamp posts, and we have these people going this way. These people going that way. You know, we have bicycles and things, and then we have the orange character, which kind of pokes out. And then we have a very symmetrical composition over here, symmetrical composition over here, you know, only just a couple of little things with the birds, and then the main character is obviously the focal point over here. And as we go along, let's see when he goes off. And so you'll see lots of, again, symmetrical compositions. So when we get then to the part where he finally breaks free, then you notice, you know, the difference between the two sides of the story where we have this very even symmetrical, everything is boring, and then he goes out into the nature where everything is, you know, much more exciting and it's green and there's colors, you know, even the sun is on this side of the page. And so there's a nice buildup where everything was boring on this side of the book to then, where he goes wild and he goes out into the nature. And so that's one way to use symmetrical compositions. And then I just wanted to show really quick this spread from Scarty Squirrel. I don't have this book on me right now, but here's a picture from Scarty Squirrel, and you can see we also have a very symmetrical composition over here, and it's the story of a squirrel who's very scared and he wants everything to be very structured and very safe. And so the symmetrical composition supports that, the only thing that's kind of changing is we have these two elements that balance each other out. So this one's bigger and it's brighter, but this one has text, and it has more detail. And so these two things kind of balance each other out over here on both sides. And it's getting us into the story of where something's starting to happen from here. And then we can have two illustrations that are symmetrical on the page, and over here, we notice the one thing that's changed is the kids looking out, and we know that something's about to happen on this spread. What can you do? And this is a brilliant book by the way, it's Met the Dollards Sarah Pennypecker and Danielle Salmieri and then lastly, I have book by John Klassen and Mac Barnett, and John lassen, he does a lot of these symmetrical illustrations. They're very kind of deadpan. And the illustrations can be symmetrical from page to page, or they can be very similar from page to page. And then the only thing like in the meet the dollars, the only thing that's kind of changing in there, it's just the direction eyes or, you know, something very little changes, which then creates the humor in the book. So, for example, over here, we have a very symmetrical composition, but, you know, we keep noticing that they keep missing these diamonds that they're digging forth. And then we have this spread over here where they spread out. And so over here, you know, they've just missed this big. They just missed that diamond. They missed this amen and then, hey, like, let's split up to improve our chances. And then they go their different ways, and now they're missing this one. And between this page and this page, you can see these two spreads are also symmetrical just between each other's. And then the humor is in what they're missing. Hopefully that gives you some ideas on where symmetrical compositions might be helpful in your book Illustration journey and also ideas on how to balance your composition out. And in the next video, we'll talk about creating movement in your illustrations. 6. Movement, Variety & Unity in Compositions: In this video, we're going to talk about movement and how lines and elements in your illustration move the eye through it. And so the first way to move the eye through an illustration is with pattern and repetition. So when we're talking about patterns, we can talk about just something that's a repeating object. And in the same way as we talked before, if there's one, that's a little bit different than that's one that our eye immediately goes to. Or if we're repeating, you know, this is also repeating, but we can repeat an object in this case, lines, and that will catch our eye and have it follow it. And in a similar way, repeated elements. So obviously, repeated elements over here, but repeated elements in the way that you repeat them, creates rhythm in the piece. And so if you're thinking about a forest or something else, you might have elements that are all like that. And you could think about the rhythm and the way that you read this could be, you know, very dum, dum, dum, dump. But if you have but you could have objects all over the place. And now all of a sudden, it's still, you know, lines. But now, if you think about how this would sound, it's 22, two, two, two, two or something similar to that. And so we have a very much more of a chaotic rhythm between these two, and you could even think, you know, anytime in the same way as over here, as you're creating dum, dum, dum, dum, d, dum dum, you know, and so you just changing some things a little bit can change the way that you read the illustration. Then let's talk about variety, creating variety in your illustration. So you can create variety with different colors. And so obviously having different colored objects in your illustration is going to create variety in it. They could be the same shapes, but having different kinds of colors in your illustration will create variety. And then in the same vein, obviously, we have colors, different shapes, but having different shapes. So you could have a some skinny rectangles, and then all of a sudden you have some circle and an oval and then maybe a triangle. And now that's creating ity in our piece. We can also create briti with different values. And so values was between light and dark. And so now we've created ity with value, and then in the same way with texture, we can create variety with texture. So let's say we have a couple of different balls over here. One can have stripes, one can have dots. And then, let's say, one can have a check pattern in it. And now we have variety within textures. And so, you know, if you're illustrating, this could also be something where let's say we have some grass, and then we have a little character over here. Let's say it's a bunny. And so then we can create a texture for the grass with a bunch of lines on it, and then we can create more of a fur pattern for it. And so it's still kind of lines, but now the lines are lined up differently. And so then we have more of a fur pattern over there. It's very small, I know. And then different ways that we can create unity. And so in the same way that we can create variety with all these things, we can create unity with the same thing, as well. And so if we have a bunch of different kinds of objects, let's make this big again. So we have different colored objects. And so now we've created the grouping. And so with all these other different colors going on over here, with everything that's colored, those pieces kind of belong into one grouping. And so we've created unity with color, and then we can create unity with the pattern. So that's kind of similar to what we were doing above. So we can create. So let's see, were doing some grass. And so now we have a unified area that's on the outside and then a space that sticks out in the middle of it. And then we can create, you know, repetition and pattern. And then we can create unity by grouping items together. And so that's very similar to what we did right here. And so it can be whatever color. But let's say, um, if we just put them, put all these characters close together over here. Now, all these things look like they go together because they're all grouped. And so now we've created unity between these pieces over here by grouping them close together, and so they're in close proximity to each other. And so these pieces would seem like a unified group. And then, lastly, continuation. And so this is what we were also kind of talking about earlier, where there will be two elements kind of continue each other. And so let's say we have a flight of something, and so we have a ball over here. And so now we have a continuation of this going here, and we're imagining the ball going over there. Or it could be other elements. Sometimes, you know, can you could have characters hands. And so if I had let's say this character's moving this way, and so let's say it's also holding its dress and then even the legs are going this way or something like that. And then you could have motion lines or you could have other elements in the illustration. That all connect your character so that it's looking it's creating a movement going one way. One way or over another. And then, you know, there could even be a table or something else over here or another character, so that we just visually create a line going this way for our character. And we'll look at some examples over there in a minute. So lastly, I want to talk about adding different sized objects into your illustrations. I know I've talked about this in making picture book dummies before. And so with that one, what I'm talking about is creating objects. So if this is a landscape, creating objects that are, you know, big, so maybe we've got bushes in the front. And then let's say we've got landscape over here, and then we've got some trees or something clouds in the sky. And then we've got a horse. So now we've got some kind of small, medium, large objects. In here and maybe there's a fence or something. And so just creating some different places for your eyes to look at and so having big and small and medium sized items in your illustration makes them more interesting to look at rather than everything being kind of the same size. And so, next, let's look at examples of all these. Alright, so we got a huge stack of books over here. And so let's look at some of those elements. And so, over here, have unity that's been created by kind of a unified pattern. We have similar colors on the whole page. Even between, you know, the two halves of the page, this is kind of a yellowish tone in the same way as the lemurs. And then the only thing that we're looking for is which lemur is looking down. And so pattern with unity and we've got pattern. And because there's no kind of central focal point, our eye, it's like that you can find our I is now kind of wandering. There's not really any focal point, so our eye is just kind of jumping around and going all over the place trying to find the item that we're trying to search for. And so that's that book. And then we have kind of lines that are creating movement for the eye. So over here, we have these concentric circles that are all kind of moving towards the middle. And so that's creating this sense of kind of chaos or, you know, like the Oh, as he's falling and, you know, he's mentally, you know, kind of spiraling. And so that's a great example of that. And then over here, you can with if you look at these lines, they're creating, you know, that effect of ding, you know, right, as he comes up with this idea. And so we have a very kind of symmetrical, in a way, composition between these two. But then what's happening around the character is kind of what's really changing over here. And so that's creepy carrots. And then over here, we have repetition. We want things to be boring, so everything is gray, boom, boom, boom, boom, what we were talking about. And then we have our main character looking very upset over here. Mmm. And then when we get to the wild, where he's going crazy, now there is everything is still, you can see that he's using very kind of geometric shapes over here. So things are still there's still rhythm. But now instead of everything being straight, we have big, you know, I talked about the small, medium, large elements. So we have large elements like this big grass, a big tree. Big areas of water, and then we have medium sized elements. And we also talked about grouping with color. Even though there's a lot of elements over here, everything is kind of green, and so there's kind of a unity and harmony in the way that the colors are. And then the way that we're popping our main character out is we talked about high contrast before. There's high contrast over here. He's inside of kind of a big shape. And look, the shape is also creating kind of arrows pointing towards our main character. And so there's all these visual devices that the illustrator is using in this illustration. And so this is Mr. Tiger Goes Wild. And then talking about the lines. And so over here, this illustration is talking about the text says, Here, cars rush, crowds collect. Etsy says, This is not our rhythm. And so this is where, you know, they live in the city. They don't like it. It feels chaotic. It doesn't feel like they're home. And so you can see that echoed here in this illustration where we have lots of movements with the people. Things are not, you know, in the previous picture, we had a city, but everything was very, very up and down. Over here, everything is all jumbled up. We have you know, a highway scene looking straight down. We have a scene into a tunnel. Like I said, we have cars. And so we get this idea of the hustle and bustle of the city in this one. And so that's a great way of creating this kind of chaotic rhythm with all these different lines and everything. There's kind of nothing straight up and down. Everything is very diagonal and moving at all these different ways. And so we can kind of hear the city from there. 7. Movement, Variety & Unity Examples: But that's not. And then we talked about patterns and textures. And so this is by Brendan Wenzel, and I feel like his illustrations are always almost pulsating to me in the way that he creates a lot of kind of texture with his mark making, and some of this is collage. And so over here, we have all these kind of jagged lines. We have all these dots. So the stone was rough, and so we have kind of a slippery slug that's very kind of smooth, and, you know, the lines are kind of going very smooth lines, and then we have the that's got spatters, it's got texture, and it's got all these jagged edges. And then we have it. So it was rough. And then the stone was smooth. And now we're contrasting the texture in the porcupine with the now we've zoomed out from the rock, and now for a porcupine, the rock might feel smooth. And so that's a really fun contrast between these two pages and creating texture and contrast between the character and the main character of this book, that's the Rock. And then I wanted to talk about for this book, I love this is sweep illustrated by Yulia Aarda. And we are creating kind of visual our eyes. We're drawing the eyes kind of diagonally first this way. You know, the text echoes it very well. We have this almost like dot, dot, dot. We're following the eye this way. Then the eye follows this way, and we're following these people over here, and the eye goes this way and the text goes with it. And so that's a great kind of visual way to move our eye on diagonals. And then in this one, you can also create rhythm and movement not just within a page illustration in itself or spread in itself, but also between spreads. And so I wanted to show a couple of examples of that. And so over here, this is one of my books, how the forest feels. And with this one, there's a segment about water, and I wanted to create this kind of a wave texture with the water. And so over here, the text helps with it. And so we start with the white kind of section in between with the lines going this way and the lines over here going this way. And then on the next page, you know, we obviously have the waves in the water and then the text as we follow it. And then on the last page on the last segment in this one. So we are moving, and now we're moving, you know, up and they are climbing onto a rock under a tree. And there's a rain cloud. And so not only did we have the wave pattern of the three spreads going from one spread to the next, and in this spread, we can see the way the rain is illustrated with the lines kind of on a diagonal. And the characters running this way, we can see the rain almost, like, pushing our characters under the tree where they're now kind of safe from the rain where they're, you know, putting their shoes back on. And so that's one way of going from one spread to another. And then in the same way in this book, my friend Earth. In the same way we have wind over here. And so this spread, the wind blows, and it's talking about fierce autumn winds sweeping limbs of trees. And then we still have the winds going and things floating to the ground, and then all of a sudden, the snow comes, and then it's whisper silent. And so we had these two spreads where we had wind coming and things are moving, and you can see all these visual lines with everything kind of moving around over here until now we're very silent. And there's still some elements of, you know, almost like little dots of things moving, but now all of a sudden we're still everything is kind of lumps and circular and kind of more quiet elements on the page than surrounded by white. And so that's kind of like another segment of the way the Illustrator has used and then everybody's eyes are closed too. Used movements and lines in repetition and rhythm. And then over here, I wanted to just look at a couple of illustration where we have those kinds of implied lines within an illustration. And so over here, we have kind of the visual lines coming. And then we have these two characters that are looking up over here. So we have almost like an X, and then it's going. We have these elements going out over here. And so it's really great where it's coming. And then there's, like, this explosion as we see the bus going on the page. And so I love that one. Oh, and also with this one, we looked at that illustration before over here. So creating unity, we have a unity created for the background over here where it's not too busy because everything is similar colors. There's less variety between the values in here. Everything is just kind of very light. And so that enables us to pop the background elements and make the, you know, give us a focal point for the illustration. And then over here, kind of similar, we have kind of like a triangle composition over here. And so over here, and the big, small and large elements, also. So these are kind of our main characters, and you can see the illustrator has left a big open area around them. And then as our eye moves, you can see that these characters are looking up over here. At this squirrel, and then we have our eye kind of moves from there down the tree, and we see this squirrel who's looking back over here. So it's kind of nicely moving our eye between the tree and having this tree over here kind of keeps us from moving that way. So we're visually kind of staying in this area and kind of our eyes are wandering around the illustration. And then over here, there was a gonna show another spread. For example, over here, so we were talking about big, small, big medium and small. So we have very big, kind of open visual areas over here with the sky and the grass. And then we have some busier areas over here, and having this texture and the color creates a unity kind of for this area. So instead of being super busy with all the separate leaves over here, we kind of have, like, this unified area of this grass that we then have our main characters over there. And then the same way, we have this line that takes us visually over here. Then this tree takes us back over here, and then it points us back to our main character. So we're creating a nice visual circle so our eyes don't fall off the page over here. And then we talked about, you know, the dot dot dot lines. So this is a very, you know, obvious example of that where we want our eye to follow. And so over here, obviously, our eye is going to follow, and then we notice all these little details as we go along over here. This was Gingerbread Man Loose at the zoo. And then, same thing with Beco by Dan Santat. He's also created a visual line for a dot dot dot line for our main characters, and he's illustrated our main character multiple times over here as he kind of goes through the scene. And then I wanted to talk about this. This is in this story, it's talking about this village, and everything is kind of very proper over there. Everything has its own place. So you can notice everything is very vertical, very horizontal. Everything is very kind of structured over there. And then we're creating unity for all the so there's a lot of business kind of going on over here. There's a lot of different patterns and things, but everything is light blue. So we're creating kind of nice unity for the background elements, then the castle that's important. Has more color to it, and then the most important element, we follow our eye over here, and then everything's pointing us up to our main character who's over here. And so that's just kind of fun. So there's a lot of pattern going on, a lot of pattern. If you look at the trees in the background. They're not maybe as traditional of trees, but they all kind of have the same kind of texture to them. And so that way, they kind of and they're also lighter, and so they kind of go fall into the background a little bit more. So that's kind of fun. And then I wanted to kind of look at and so this is Bear and Wolf by Danielle Salmi. And I wanted to look at just several illustrations through this book just to kind of look at all the different ways that he's chosen to all the different kind of scenes and the devices that he's using to compose. And so over here, we have very straight trees, but then if you look at the line that these trees make, it makes kind of a V shape right here. And then we have the main character, and we can see his eyes looking at the bear. And we have also receding, so we have big things in the front, and then things are receding into smaller in the background. And then we were talking about the visual lines. And so we have all of our lines pointing this way. The owl has a lot of texture, so it sticks out, and the owl is also looking down at our main characters, and we have a nice open area around the main characters. And then we were talking about texture versus no texture. So we have all this texture area over here, no texture in the circle in the middle. Also very symmetrical. And then we see our main characters over here. And so they stick out like a sore thumb through everything that's kind of this very even, even regular texture with all the trees. And it gives us this great sense of depth and space, the way that it's illustrated. And so we have some bigger things over here, and it kind of recedes as we go in the back. Then we have kind of a really busy scene where this is kind of their scene of wonder. And so over here, if you look, you know, all the other pages in this book are fairly, you know, muted colors. But then we have this big kind of rainbow scene, which is this experience that they have together, which is kind of fun. And so everything is so there's a pattern over here with all these different colors as the fishes are kind of swimming around. And then we have repetition. We have rhythm. We can see how the, you know, we have visual lines, so everything is pointing our eyes towards the horizon over here. The main character is drawn many times, so it gives us this idea of time passing as he's going and looking for the caribou in the wintertime. Um, so there's a lot of really fun designs over here. And then, lastly, this is the queen in the Cave by Yulia Sarda and you can see that the illustrations over here are a little bit more detailed than in the other books that we've looked at. And you can see there's a little bit more text. And if you compare these illustrations to maybe some of the other illustrations we've looked at, this book, you can see, it's maybe illustrated for a slightly older audience than some of the other ones that we've looked at. It's a little bit more of a sophisticated illustration style than some of the other ones. And so over here again, we have kind of these upright nettles, and you can see this kind of path that they're climbing over here. And so there's really fun designs over here. And so over here, they're marching to the beat of the drum, and you can see, with the flowers on the top and the way that everybody's moving and the way everything is very up and down, you can almost hear them and the beat of the drum as they're walking down the hill. And they're kind of traveling into this kind of underworld place. And so, where we had organization and very, like, an even drumbeat, now we have kind of chaos. And so, over here, it literally says, My sisters beat loudly on the drums. And then over here, their hearts are beating wildly. And so now they're kind of running. And so we have much more of a chaotic scene with colors and textures and, you know, these little bursts of yellow. And instead of doing a horizontal, we're now going on a diagonal. Our characters are running, and we have this big open space, which then encourages us to turn the page and see where they're going. No. And then I'm just this is the last piece I'm showing over here. We have also kind of a very symmetrical design over here. They finally kind of get to this underground kingdom, you could say, and then we have the main character and then, like, her underground counterpart, and they meet each other, and you can see, you know, her and her sisters over here, and then and then the, you know, characters over here. And you can see the bugs on the top, and then we have this element of these trumpeting. You know, you can almost hear the music over here with the trumpeting of the little I guess you could say insects over here. And so we have this nice tension between the two sides as they meet each other for the first time. And so, hopefully, this has given you some ideas on the way that you can use design elements for your illustrations. In the next brief video, we'll talk about shapes and how they convey feelings. 8. Shapes = Feelings: Shapes convey feelings. We went into this pretty deeply in the character design class. And so if you want to kind of do a deeper dive into this subject, pop into that class and check out that video segment. And so over here, we're going to gloss over it a little bit faster. And when we're talking about shapes in design, in general, when we have round, kind of oval circular shapes, those convey kind of softness, ease, happiness, safety, you know, like with moms. And so, you know, that could be if our tree is very round. Then if we have square and rectangular shapes, that's something that's very kind of rigid and grounded and organized. And so for that one, not only does the canopy could be rectangular, but also the tree branches could be rectangular. And then, lastly, we have triangular or kind of jagged shapes, and those ones could convey scary or something being kind of dangerous or off kilter. And so I drew kind of a dark little jaggedy tree over there. And while shapes in nature kind of are generally the shape they are, like trees or houses or rocks, but you can still think about elements within those shapes or within those items that you could maybe tweak a little bit. Like maybe like said, the branches could be a little bit more square or angled. Maybe can it be a little bit more pointy or sharp? And so there's still ways that you can either design elements or that you can combine elements to create any of these kind of general shapes in your composition. So in our story that we're going to be talking about within the context of this class, which is the Little Red hen, think about how the house that little red hen lives in would be different, for example, like a wicked witch's house. Like, how would the shape language be different between those two different houses? And then as some very obvious examples of trees, since that's what we're talking about over here, I just wanted to show you three examples of trees. And so we have very rounded shapes of trees, and this book is about Mother Earth, and it's all positive and happy and kind of warm fuzzy feelings. And so we have these very rounded shapes for trees in this one. Then we have, again, Mr. Tiger goes wild. Here we have very angular, very rectangular trees. And so it still kind of goes with the houses that are in the city, even though he's in the wild. But, you know, especially in this illustration, now he's kind of upset. He's unhappy and, you know, it's raining. And so with that kind of flattening of his mood, I think it's great to have these kind of flat angular trees with that, too. And in this everything in the world that Peter Brown creates over here is very kind of shape oriented, as you can tell. And then lastly, we have this illustration from ulasarda from the queen in the cave. And we have this illustration where they're thinking about going into a cave and it's a little bit dangerous and they're not quite sure. And so you can see the shape language over here. We have very jagged shapes of all the flowers. We have the jagged shapes of the leaves. You know, it's almost like little teeth on the edges over there. There's things seeping out, and then we have a big black element in the middle. And so we're able to create this kind of a circular it's a circular design, but there's all these elements that kind of hint at some danger that might be coming up ahead. And so, just kind of quickly to sum up, just think about how you can change little details in your composition to hint at different feelings in there, too. And I wanted to include this book in this section because I think it does a really great job of conveying that danger. And so in this book, we have a little ghost who is kind of scared of everything. And in the beginning, the ghost is very, very scared. And so we have all these. We have a lot of pointy things. Everything's very sharp. And then we have this little hole, and so he's very worried about what's going to come out of this hole, and we can see a little hint that maybe the thing that lives in that hole might not be as scary as what the little Ghost thinks. And so not only do we have all these pointy objects and they're pointing towards here, but they're also pointing us in as we read from, you know, top to bottom and left to right, they're also pointing us down this way so that we turn the page. And then as we turn the page, now we have this character that pops out. And so in kind of like the next section that he's wondering what's happening, we still have these triangular trees, but now they're not quite as scary anymore. They're quite a lot smaller. And now we have this element of this journey going on over here. We have much more rounded shapes now in between. So the circles, round shapes got a lot bigger, and triangular shapes, scary shapes got a lot smaller. We're also looking at colored. And so over here, red, pink, you know, colors of danger, yellow, and now all of a sudden, much more happier colors. And then as we get to the end over here, let's see. Now we get to the end. So you can also see it was the arrows pointing this way. Shapes, and now we're kind of opening up into this area. And now the triangular dangerous shapes fall away, and now we have this party that's happening, and now the ghost isn't going to be afraid anymore. There's kind of nothing for the ghost to be afraid of anymore. And so you can see this kind of going from, you know, one, two, three, as the danger keeps getting less and less in each illustration. And we go from having a lot of pointy things and sharp things and dangerous colors to now having all this happiness going on over here. So I think this is also a great great lesson on design. Um, from Bob Shea. And in the next video, we'll talk about creating depth perception in your illustrations. 9. Creating Depth: This video, we'll go over depth perception. We went over this in the picture book layouts class a little bit in detail, but I wanted to cover it in this class, too, because we are going to be using the same principles once we get to our exercises a little bit further down the road. And so we have visual devices that create the perception that something is either near or far. And so to make something look like it's close, I've made a list over here. It is usually darker, it's higher in contrast. There's more details to it. So imagine if you're looking at somebody close up, you can see their eyeglasses, you can see their eyes in their mouth. Poka dots on their clothes, but if they're 100 yards from you, you know, the farther they go, the less details about that person you're going to be able to see. They're going to be more saturated. And this one, if you're kind of doing sometimes you see it in illustrations and sometimes you don't when we look at nature, if we look at mountains that are far away, though anything that's super far away, we get the atmospheric effect where things are going to colors are going to be looking less saturated and they're going to be lighter because there's molecules in the air that are impending so that we can't see that far away. And so sometimes you notice it and sometimes you don't a lot of illustrators use that even in illustrations that don't have really long kind of depth in them. I just wanted to contrast compare and contrast these two illustrations. And so here, we have a landscape, and in this illustration, we have, you know, there's a sky and there's mountains and these things are you know, if we think about physicality, these things are pretty far away, you know, hundreds of yards, and then we have things that are close up. But there's not much of things or even these trees over here. And, you know, the saturation, the lightness compared to, you know, the trees up, you know, between over here, there's not a huge difference. Things are still fairly kind of the same. You know, maybe some of the lines are a little bit lighter compared to what we have over here. And so there's not a huge difference in lightness or saturation. But then when we compare it to this illustration from the bunnies on the bus, it's a fairly short distance. You know, this is probably not even 100 yards or maybe right around there, where the furthest buildings are, but there's a big difference between what's in the back and what's in the front. And so I just wanted you to be aware that even though these are these are some devices that you can use to create a perception of death in your illustration, they're not necessarily hard rules that you have to stick to. They are just devices and tools that you can use. Alright. And so, details saturation. And then when something is lower on the picture plane, and that makes it closer. And then obviously if it's closer, then it's larger. It looks larger to our eyes. And so in the same vein, to make something look like it's far away, it's going to be lighter in color, lower contrast, less details, less saturation, it's going to be higher on the picture plane, like, comparing these two, and it's going to be smaller, of course. And so these are kind of our basic tools. And then on top of that, we also have layering. And what I mean with layering is if you have your picture plane right here, and let's say we have a person, right here. Think of this as a scene like in a theater play or something. And so we have layering. Alright, so there's a tree over here, and then maybe there's another tree over here, but I'm layering things and things are kind of in front of each other. But now that I'm layering things, that also makes things go further out. And it can be very, very simple. So I don't even have to use any other device than just something like this. So these are all kind of the same height. They're on the same picture plane. There's no difference in saturation or color. So even just adding layering will create an illusion of depth. And so I just wanted to use this illustration as an example so we can see two trees in this illustration. So we have this tree in the front. We have a tree in the back over here. And so we can see the layering effect. We have a tree. We have a house, and then a tree is behind over here. This is darker. It's more saturated. It's got more details. Then we have this tree back behind over here, which is very much lighter. It's very wispy and it's behind everything. It's lower on the picture plane, higher on the picture plane. And so those are all the different devices that I'm creating a perception of depth in this part of the illustration. And hopefully that'll explain a lot of the different tools that you can use to create a perception of depth in your illustration. And in the next video, we will actually get into our first exercise. I'll see you there. 10. Exercise 1: 5 Thumbnails: Now we've talked and gone over a lot of the design principles and elements that you use to create order and focus in your piece. And that's all very general advice, and it applies to pretty much any illustration that you were working on. And so let's put pedal to the metal and actually design something. And so while it feels like this might be a little or it might be a little overwhelming with all the things that we just talked about and all the principles and all the options, I do want to assure you that it does get easier, and as you illustrate more, you start developing a language in the same way as when you're writing with your hand, you have a distinctive script. Your handwriting looks like you're handwriting. In the same way when you're illustrating, your illustrations will end up looking like you eventually the more that you do it. And so you can look at any established illustrator, great examples, current Illustrators like Dan Santa, Lewin Fam. If you look at their illustration. They have a very specific way that they draw people, that they draw landscapes, you know, that they just draw everything. And you can go in a bookstore and you can scan a shelf of books, and you'll be able to pick out, Oh, that artist did that, that illustrator did that because they have a specific way of illustrating. They have a specific shape language that they use. And so in that sense, in the beginning, you have to make a lot of decisions, but then once those decisions are made, you can kind of lean on those in the same way that handwriting becomes automatic after a while. You don't have to think about, you know, is there a curve at the end of the H or whatever. It'll get easier, and it'll get more automatic, and then you don't have to make as many decisions anymore. And so let's get to our actual first exercise. And so we are going to as I said earlier, we're going to be using the story of the Little Red hen. And so in the story of the Little Red hen, there are some side characters, and it's usually, you know, either a cat or a dog or a pig or a mouse. But basically, all you can make them whatever animals or even people if you want. And the gist of it is that all those animals are very lazy. And so the little Redhead she wants to plant the wheat, and then she asks, you know, anybody want to do that or help me with it? Everybody she goes to says, No, I don't want to do it. I'm doing something else. And so she says, Well, I'm going to do it then. And then she goes, anybody want to collect the wheat from the field? And then everybody says, No, and then she ends up collecting the wheat. And so she ends up doing all the different steps herself in collecting the wheat and making the wheat into flour and then baking the bread. And then when it comes time to actually eat the bread, now all of a sudden, all these lazy other characters want to eat it. But then the little red hen gets the best last word, and she ends up eating the bread herself. In some stories, she shares it. She wants to bake the bread for her chicks, and then she shares it with her chicks, but not with all the other characters who kept kind of sliding her through the story. So I picked a very simple passage from this book or from the story. The passage reads, carrying the sack of wheat, the little red hen trudged off to the distant mill. And so at this point, the little red hen has harvested all the wheat, and she's got it in a little sack and she's carrying it to the mill. And so for this exercise, we'll start with creating five different thumbnails, and they'll be, you know, make them fairly small. If you're drawing on actual paper, make them pretty small, maybe about an inch. By inch or something like that. They can be horizontal. They can be vertical. If I'm thinking about this passage, I'm thinking that it probably wouldn't be a full spread illustration, but if you have your heart set on making a horizontal illustration out of it, feel free to make it horizontal, too. And then just draw out five squares or rectangles that you want to work inside. And then I want you to think about kind of internally, kind of rummage around, think about think about this scene and what the organization of the space could be. Think about it as a scene in, like, a theater. So, will you have something in the foreground? Will you have something in the middle ground, something in the background? Maybe you'll have small, medium large objects in there. But I don't want you to spend a ton of time. We're not doing any kind of details. They're just going to be very, very loose sketches. And so what I want you to do at this point is just after this video, I want you to take a pause in the class and do your five thumbnail sketches. Spend maybe ten, 15 minutes on them, no more than that, and then move on to the next video after that. 11. Point of View: Alright, so hopefully you have your five thumbnails done. In this video, we'll talk about camera angle and choosing your point of view. So some of the obvious points of view are going to be where the camera is looking from above, down below, and those kinds of scenes are great for story openings to set a story where you're kind of showing the environment that the character lives in or showing the passage of time or showing a big feeling. And so I wanted to show a couple of examples of those. And so over here, we have the picture from the Gingerbread Man, and it's showing in these kinds of pictures where you're showing passage of time, oftentimes the character is shown multiple times in the illustration, and this is kind of looking down at the zoo. Then we have this piece over here from the bear and the wolf. By Danielle Calmi and in this one, we also have kind of a big expensive view, and we're talking about feelings. And then this is from Good night Good night Construction Site. And over here, this is in the very beginning of the book, and we're getting a scene of what we're what the book is basically about. So we've got all the characters in this book, and we're shown kind of a big scene of the construction site. And then this is from Up high with Matt Hunt. And this one this is kind of in the middle of the book. They are going into a park. They're moving from one place to another. And so this is kind of giving us an idea of where our characters are moving into. Then probably the most common point of view is the middle ground. And this is kind of what I think of, like, the theater view, where we are kind of at eye level. We're at the same level or close to being on the same level as our characters. And that makes us feel like we are part of the action. We are moving with our character. We're kind of one with our character, and we're participating in what's happening. And so if we take pretty much any of these other books, let's see if we flip just one page, backwards or forwards. And a lot of these, we'll notice that, you know, even though it's kind of a picture of up on high, but we're still kind of at the same level with the character. Let's go this way and over here, same thing. Now we're at the level of our character, and we're kind of looking at everything over there. As we move from here, we are now at the level of our trucks, and we're looking at our, you know, construction vehicles, and we're looking at the same eye level is them, and we're in the action with them. And let's see what happens over here. So over here, we actually have a scene looking down. Let's see what's going on over here. This is also looking down. So it's a little bit more unconventional over here. And so here we're kind of kind of a close up but looking at our characters. So there's a lot of kind of interesting points of view over here over here. We've got the same thing, theater kind of setup. We're at the same level with our characters. When we are looking at a close up, then oftentimes illustrators will use close ups to kind of that gets us, like, into the mind of the character. We're really close to the character, and we can feel like we're feeling the same things with them. Then we also have looking at something kind of down, and so looking at it from kind of below and looking at it straight up. And so that one can kind of give us, like, a sense of wonder or a feeling of being small. There's a great example in this book. As we see this character, we're down very close to him, and we're looking up, and we can kind of see that he's not happy and he's feeling very small. Even says it in the text as he's looking at his dad in this big, busy building. And then also In this one, this one is kind of for that scary feeling we're feeling very small. We're at the level of this kitty cat, and then we're looking up at this big, big house that's looking a little bit scary, and, you know, text obviously reads haunted on the other side. And so, you know, it's given us a little bit of a scary vibe on then kind of the last one is extreme points of view. And so this one could be, for example, if it's straight from above or straight from below or things where things are very distorted. So kind of like what we were looking at with this over here, things are fairly distorted. And so those kinds of views often add drama. They add variety into our illustration, and they can also highlight a moment if you're thinking that we're moving closer to something that's like a bump, bump, bomb and then you show something really big at the end. And so they can be used as almost like punctuation in your illustration. And so I just want you to kind of be aware that instead of always drawing something kind of that theater point of view with everything the same distance from you to think that maybe you could move the camera further. Can you move it up? Can you move it or can you move it closer? Can you move it up or down? And how can you change it so that you're not showing us the same point of view, every spread that we're looking at in your book? And then I wanted to just look at a book as an example. So I wanted to look at Beakle as one example of this. And when we look at Beakle, the way that we're starting is most of the views in this book are going to be kind of fairly pulled back. We're going to see a lot of background, and we're not really close to our character. Some of them are more from above. Some of them might be from about the same level, but everything is kind of pulled back. As you notice in the beginning. And so everything is kind of hap. So in the book, you know, everything is kind of happening to our character or happening around our character, but, you know, our character has not kind of found their person. They haven't found their spot. And so we're really, you know, here, we're under the water looking up, but we're still pulled kind of far back, even, you know, all the way in this one. Eagles over here. And then we get a little bit closer, but still not super close. We're still showing a lot of kind of environment, a lot of things going around. And then when the kind of the change happens in the book still everything far away. But now he meets this girl who's going to be his person. He's this girl's imaginary character. And now all of a sudden, we're up close and we're personal, and these two characters are going to build their relationship. So all of a sudden, they're big. They're in the middle of everything. You know, it's all about these two characters. We don't have a lot of backgrounds. And so these two it's, you know, these two characters are building their relationship. And then now they have their relationship and they've gotten to know each other, and now they get ready to add other people, you know, kind of, like, into their network. And so now we pull the camera back out. And so I think this is a really great kind of lesson on point of view and a camera angle and how you know, this is one device that Dance ATAT is using to give us, you know, show us this emotional story that this character is going through. And I'm not saying that this is the only way that he could have illustrated or drawn this story, but, you know, it just adds great effectiveness into his storytelling. So whenever you're looking at books and studying books and looking at illustrations, don't just study one illustration because when we're illustrating books, we're illustrating a whole story. We're illustrating, you know, several spreads and pages all at once. Look at how the story flows as a whole. A lot of times, what I'll do is I'll take photos of every spread, and then I'll squish make everything small and put them on one page, you know, like one document. So that way I can look at everything together. I can kind of look at it and see, like, how are things moving from one page to another? How is it, you know, a spread, and then some spot illustrations, and then maybe half a spread or something like that. How are the illustrations kind of sprinkled out? Kind of points of view? What kind of color language is the illustrator using? What kind of designs? Like, where's the focal point in each illustration? You know, is there some kind of flow from one spread to another? And so there's so many things that you can pick apart and so many things that you can learn from researching other illustrators and how they've illustrated books. And so, you know, I talked earlier about being in a critique another great way to learn is to study what other successful illustrators have done. Try to look at recent illustrators and then use ideas from their books and their illustrations to then carry over to yours. And then talking about these extreme points of view and regular I just wanted to take the folk story of Jack and the Beanstock and just do a really quick illustration of how the point of view changes the story. So if we're talking about just our regular, you know, your middle ground, we might have Jack is over here, and then he's just planted This is the ground, and he's just planted a beanstalk. Whoa, it's really big. Maybe he's looking up at it, you know? And his mouth is open or whatever, and we've got leaves going on over here. But this isn't really exciting, is it? And maybe he's got a house over here or something like that. And yes, this is how we could illustrate a scene in Jack and the beanstalck. But then you can think about if we take, you know, one of those extreme points of view. So could we maybe if we wanted to think about, Oh, my goodness, how amazing this beanstalck is, and so it could be really thick, and then it can get progressively small until it dwindles down almost to nothing. And we have big leaves over here. Let's see, they're going to get smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller. And then we have little Jack over here, just super tiny looking up at the beanstalck. And then we kind of are in the shoes of the giant, and we're looking down. And he's, you know, he's this teeny, tiny, puny little ant that's underneath over there. Or then could we be in Jack's shoes and Jack is over here, maybe he's looking up and he's amazed. And then we'll have beanstock over here. And then it's kind of the same thing, but now we're in Jack's shoes. And now it's really big over here, but now he's looking up, and maybe it's completely disappearing into the over here. And so now we're looking at, you know, Jack's point of view, and we're looking up at the tree, and how does that change our emotion when we change that point of view in all these three pictures of imagine being the viewer and being in Jack's shoes. So over here, where Jack and things are looking amazing over here, Jack is looking puny, and over here, we're just getting kind of your average everyday view. That doesn't uh, you know, it's not really, you know, this or that. And so think about how your camera angle can change your feelings about the illustration. And so now for kind of the exercise, what I want you to do is I want you to draw five more thumbnail squares. 12. Exercise 2: 5 More Thumbnails: So now for kind of the exercise, what I want you to do is I want you to draw five more thumbnail squares. So we have five thumbnails already. Now we're going to add five thumbnails more, and now think about the point of view and think about, is there any way that you can tweak the point of view just for fun. Just try a high point of view, low point of view, you know, close up point of view, and see if there's anything that you can do or maybe make it a map where little red hen is going through. To the distant male and see if there is something else that you can bring to this illustration by changing the point trying a different point of view in five additional thumbnails. And so you can pause the class over here, do your five thumbnails. Again, don't spend a ton of time on this. They're going to be very small, about an inch by inch or something like that. Maybe ten, 15 minutes, and then move on to the next video where we're going to talk about lighting. 13. Lighting Your Scene: Okay, so let's talk about lighting. So lighting can add a lot to your piece. Some manuscripts will be very specific with what time of the day or what time of the year it might be, and some manuscripts might leave it completely open. And then it's up to you as an illustrator to decide what time of the day, what time of the year the events in the book happen. And when you're thinking about making adjustments to an illustration, the different times of the day will change the way lighting looks. And so I made kind of some general notes about the way lighting is. So when we have something that's happening in the morning or an event that's happening in the morning, usually the lighting is kind of cool. You know, you kind of think about, like, cool, hazy, light blues, cool shadows. And because the sun is still kind of low, you either if the sun is still behind, you know, the horizon line, then you have no shadows, or then if it's just coming up, there's going to be long shadows. Then if we're thinking about just during the daytime in sunlight, the sun is high, usually up above us. And so we get kind of short shadows, so the shadows are not long. They're kind of directly underneath us or they're kind of short. They don't go far away from the main body. And then usually I have the light coming down as yellow or sometimes I do blue, too, and usually the shadows are blue. And then on a rainy day, a lot of times because the sun is behind the cloud, so we don't really have direct sunlight, so the shadows are a little bit more blurry or there might not be shadows. The colors are a lot more muted and it'll be cooler tones than what you get. And the reason why we get cool tones and more muted tone is because wherever there is sun, we see a full spectrum of light, but where there is no light, we see less colors, and we see less contrast. And so everything will be muted and less saturated the less sunlight that we have. And so then when we have sunset, sun is low, then we have long shadows. We got more purple light and then warm shadows. And then when we are all the way at nighttime and the sun has set, then we usually have kind of purples and blues, and we have very low saturation, almost no saturation. You'll see a lot of illustrators will just use shades of blue and purple. And then there's no shadows unless you have a moon or some sort of a source of light, and then you have the shadow will be cast by whatever, or you might have multiple sources of light, and then you'll have to figure out how to do multiple shadows. So these rules are kind of like the basics that I use to create different times of day. And then not only do you have to create the time of the day and then the lighting and the shadows to go with it, but then also think about remember we talked about the foreground in the middle ground on the background, how creating lights and darks within that space within the depth of your space also makes sense. And so I made just three little thumbnails over here with a very simple landscape. And so over here we have, you know, the foreground is the lightest we have the middle ground is kind of the medium lit part, and then the background is the darkest. Over here, foreground darkest, middle ground is the lightest. And then over here we have the background is the lightest, and it gets progressively darker as you come forward. And so you can think about how each of these lighting scenarios might affect the scene that you're working on. Usually we see something about like what we have over here where we have things that are closer kind of dark, and then it gets lighter as you go further out with things most lit being in the middle ground where our characters are. But sometimes it might be interesting to have maybe there is something in the background that's good and bad or evil and good. And so maybe, you know, if you're in the dark, maybe you could be sad or it could be something not good happening. And then where the light part is, that's where the hope is. So there's symbolism with light and dark. And so when you're lighting, you're scene, just be mindful of where the lights and the darks are. And then, um, before we look at those examples, I just made a simple little chicken illustration that I wanted to look at with you. And so with this one, we just have a chicken, and it's walking. We have a white background, and it's just kind of plain colors. And so let's change this to different times of the day. And so the first scenario I created was, if we have a nice sunny day. And so if we have a nice sunny day, then we were talking about having those warmer kind of where sunlit areas, and then we have cooler shadows. And I've done that very simply with two different, um, two different layers over here. And so I have the sunlight, which I did draw with the blue color, but I used the I used the divide, which then makes it lighter color on my illustration. And then for the shadow, I used also kind of the same blue color, and then that just adds some shadows. And I added some more specific shadows that are a little bit darker in places where I get cast shadows. And so that would give us a nice feeling of a sunny day, right? And so then we talked about having rain. So I created kind of a rainy sky in the background over here. And then we've got what we talked about. So I've got some rain drops over here. I have some blue. So this blue, see how everything especially right here is saturated. Oops. And when this is turned on, now it's less saturated. So I'm bringing saturation down. We have less sunlight, and then I'm adding a multiply layer of blues. And these ones, you could you know, if you wanted a really gloomy day, or it could be maybe this is towards the end of the day, it's darker. Maybe it's more during the sun. You know, depends on the sun, you can adjust these different layers. And then I just have a little bit more extra shadows. Remember we talked about having kind of blurry or more softer shadows. I've added some softer shadows over here for the rainy day. And then we have our sunset. And so we have a beautiful sun setting over here, turning on the sunset over here. And so here I have a couple of different layers. I have just a general overlay of a pink. That just creates kind of tones all the colors in in my layers to be more of a pink color. Then I have this is just all my highlights. That's just a normal layer. And then I have some of a little bit more of the extra highlights. Over here. And then I have two different shadow layers, just adding a little bit extra death in there. So this one was the first shadow layer that I created, and it's kind of orange orange colors, warm colors, and it's a little bit messy, but you kind of get the points, so we're getting longer shadows. And then I added just those extra extra higher shadows to make it a little bit more silhouetted as we're looking at it. And so this is our sunset. And then lastly, we have a nighttime scene. So I've created a nice little starry sky over here. And then for our character, this is what it could look like. So I have two different blue layers. One is a blue layer that is just toning. It's basically making everything a shade of blue. So you could turn it all the way over here, and it could be blue or purple, but, you know, it'll tone all your colors to a blue color. And so we'll keep that somewhere over there. And then I have a blue layer that's on multiply that, you know, I don't want it to be too dark. You want there to be contrast in your nighttime scene, too. So you want to be able to the reader to read your nighttime scene. And then there is I have I felt like this white apron was still a little bit too contrasty, so I made a contrast layer to bring down the contrast just a little bit. It doesn't have to maybe be, so A. And then a lot of times when we are thinking about nighttime Sky, you just want to make sure that you have contrast in your piece. So I also created this to make more of a silhouette. So now we have the things that are in the foreground are dark, and they're silhouetted against the night sky and kind of, you know, technically, I guess the moon could be shining or something like that. And so these are just some different options that you can play with when you are creating scenes that are happening at different times of the day. And then we'll look at some examples really quick. So let's look at some examples in lighting. And so for this book, what I had to do was the text in this book goes all the way from sun from dawn in the morning until sunset at night. And so in the first picture, we have the sun rising and we have very cool colors. And then from there, I decided we're moving to kind of warm colors, daytime colors, more saturated. And then when there's a storm brewing, the colors start getting desaturated. We have a very dark scene with the storm, and then the storm passes, and then we get to our sunset with the colors dimming until we get all the way down to the end of the night. And if you compare the sunset, where we have warm colors, then we have kind of cooler colors for the sunrise. And so I just wanted there to be a difference between the two. Then in this next book, I just wanted to show a daytime scene, so you can see over here how there's these beautiful, saturated colors. Everything is very warm. We have some shadows and everything is, you know, very bright and colorful over here. And then we get to the scene where it's wintertime and things are a lot more they're still colorful, but everything is a little bit cooler and blues. And then if we compare just even this building with itself over here, you can see how much more warmer and yellow it is over here compared to over here. And then this is just another example of a sunset. We have some warm kind of purply shadows going down this way. We have long shadows being cast down this way and from all the trees. Oh. And I was also going to show we have a piece where there's a lot of rain and they're running from the rain, so you can see a lot of kind of very darker color muted colors over here, and then a little bit more where we get you know, a lot of times when it rains, everything looks a little bit more vibrant. So we have the yellows are kind of vibrant, but everywhere where we see sky or some muted colors or blues, then all those are still kind of muted and more blued out. Then we have Good night Good night construction site. And for this one, we have this sunset scene that's all purples and pinks. And then compare it with a nighttime scene, which is all blues, and there is some more saturated yellows, but, you know, it's fairly little and everything else is kind of cool colors. In this one, and then the same thing happening over here, we have a nighttime that's mostly just blues, and we get a little bit of warm for where the fire is, and then we get a cast shadow from the moon with the dragon. And then this book, in general, has pretty muted colors, anyways. But if you compare this daytime scene, it's mostly kind of yellows and reds and browns, and then we have the nighttime scene where it's more blues. And there's a fun contrast in this book 10 Minutes to Bed Little Unicorns Christmas with illustrations by Chris Chatterton. And so the front end pages are all, you know, warm colors, and then we have the nighttime scene, which is purples and blues. And so there's a fun contrast between the two in the way that they're illustrated. And then, lastly, this book happens at nighttime. BokharuNs you. And with this one, you have all these um, blues and cool colors in the background. We have warm colors, not super saturated, but still saturated enough that we really have this foreground pop and then the background seed. And so it is a nighttime scene, but compared to some of the other ones we looked at, we are still getting some nice colors. And this whole book happens at nighttime. And so if you're doing a whole book in the nighttime, then it is nice to add some extra colors in there and do pops of different things because otherwise, I don't know how many kids would want to just read a book that's just all blue and purple, and there's nothing kind of exciting to look at. And so Um, with this one, Sir Shu has done a really great job with adding these fun pops of color and making even though everything happens at nighttime, it's just a really pleasant book to look at as far as the color scheme goes. And we'll move on to the third exercise in the next video. 14. Exercise 3: 5 More Thumbnails: So for our next exercise in our class, what I want you to do is you have ten thumbnails that you've created so far. I wanted you to pick your favorite thumbnail that you've worked on, and then I want you to make five variations of that one thumbnail. And you can start they can still be small and just use blotches of color and start kind of figuring out where is your foreground, background, middle ground, what's going to be light, what's going to be dark, and then think about some color schemes. So I want you to make another you can take your favorite piece and then copy it five times if you're working digitally or if you're working if you're just working out with pencil and paper, we're working very, very small, so you can just redraw the same composition five times and then think about coloring and shading and lighting those five thumbnails and make five variations of it. Alright, so over here, I've done my different values, and I've tried to alter, put things that are in the front, make them darker, make the front dark, make the middle ground darker, front lighter, just trying different ways of lighting, and also kind of thinking in my head, about time of day and seasons and things like that. And so basically, this is kind of happening towards the end of summer, but not quite like fall yet. This is kind of harvest time where the little red chicken has gotten the wheat. And so I figured now she's got the wheat and she's going off to the mill. So I figured it's not a good time to make it like a nighttime scene or anything like that. So I figured it would be a daytime scene for her to go to the mill and then come back. And so I really liked kind of these two sketches over here. I liked having this light area kind of frame the cats. And then I had the option of, you know, one side where I have darker for the lake and one where it's a little bit lighter. And so I thought I would play with that a little bit and add a little bit of just color. And so these are really messy. They didn't take me very long. And I was just trying a couple of different things with colors, and it's actually nicer to kind of look at these small and then look at the colors. And so there's one. So I feel like with the middle one, the the water is just a little bit too saturated. It's sticking out too much. And so I like this one where we kind of have same color, but then after doing this one, I was still thinking how much I like this light area behind the cat character over here. So I made a different one, you know, basically, kind of copy of this where I lightened the water and then lightened the the grass behind the chicken and I thought, you know, one of these two on the edges might be the one that I go with final illustration. And so here you can see a little bit of the process of coming up with some different ideas and then picking one that you like, and then testing out some lighting ideas. And you kind of never know where you're going to get until you start testing these things out. If I was just going with my first or second idea, this illustration would have ended very differently. And so you can pause the video and work on your exercises, and then we come back to the class, and then we will talk about levels of abstraction and taking artistic liberties in the next video. 15. Artistic Liberties: Level of Abstraction: So I have this kind of section in the class that's titled Artistic Liberties. And in this section, what I wanted to talk about is how we take references that are all around us. We might be looking at references for trees or nature or buildings, whatever you're drawing in your illustrations, and how you take that reference and how do you translate it into an illustration. So I have two examples over here. I have a picture that I took this morning on a walk down into the woods. And if you look closely, you might be able to notice that there's a little path, and if you keep, the path kind of goes over here, and then there's a clearing and, you know, trees all around. Over here and it's going a little bit of an uphill. But when we're looking at when I'm walking down the path, it's easy for me to judge distance. It's easy for me to see where the path is. But a lot of times when I'm looking at a photo, everything gets really jumbled up because we're just looking at a two dimensional object. Same thing over here. This is just a screenshot from Helsinki, and you can see that, you know, when you're looking at it, there's every single brick on the street. There's all the bricks on the buildings. There's all these details in the buildings. And so the photos from both locations are really, really busy. And so it's a great skill to learn how to start simplifying those things, especially when we're working for smaller children who are still learning how to visually decipher images, illustrations. And so we want to be able to kind of simplify the elements down in our illustrations so that somebody who's younger can understand that they're looking at a tree or they're looking at grass or, you know, a mountain. And so let's put these away for just a minute. And just look at some examples. So, we also talked about levels of abstraction in our character design class, and we talked about, you know, we can in this case, we're looking at trees. You can have the simplest, you know, t being basically a stick in a circle on the top, a person, it might be stick character. And then at the other kind of end of that spectrum, we have a photograph of a person or a photograph of a tree, and then that's a very, very specific representation of a tree or a person. So one end, it's a very abstract. It's almost like a concept of a person and a tree, and then the photograph of a person or a tree. And then everything in illustration kind of falls somewhere in between. So there's not really a rule that says you have to draw trees like this in children's book illustration or characters like this in children's book illustration. And so these are just some examples that I wanted to show you on doing different kinds of elements. And so looking at kind of the most abstracted things, we have some very simplified. They're not even natural colors. These trees over here, they're basically just kind of shapes. Same thing over here. This is almost more looks like a leaf to me. There's several different trees. Also not realistic colors. And then we have these abstracted trees over here. Some of them look a little bit more like trees than others. This is actually a piece of, you know, some sort of patterned fabric or paper that's been cut up into the shape of a tree to make this tree. And then this one's more there's a little bit of shading on it, but it's basically a flat color, and then it just has some dots in it. And so many different ways to abstract a tree. And then when we start kind of going from there and getting a little bit more realistic, we have a couple of trees over here that have really heavy outlines, and so this tree has some curly, you know, lines in it or these lines could just as well be actually in water, but they're in a tree, and we have a fir tree in the back that has some dots in it, and same thing with the bark. And then we have a tree over here, and over here, all the leaves are actually kind of drawn out. And it's kind of flattened out and very kind of designer looking. But if you also look at the way that the characters are drawn with the way that the trees are drawn, just whenever you're doing your character designs, make sure that the characters fit the environment that you're drawing them in. So you're not doing realistic looking or realistic looking characters, but then you're doing, you know, stick trees for them to go with unless there's kind of a point that you're trying to make or it's something very specific where it needs to look like that. Um, always make sure that the environments and the characters that you're making go well together, that they have kind of like the same level of abstraction. Then we had this one was from Mr. Tiger with Peter Brown, and we have a very also very kind of abstracted tree that doesn't have any outlines, but it's also kind of very regular shapes. You can see other palm trees in the background, and there's all these look like little kind of snowflake, but they're in the nature. So I guess you could think that there may be bushes or something. So there's very abstract. And then the bottom layer over here or bottom line is a little bit more kind of naturalistic looking trees, perhaps. But this one is still very designery. Everything, you know, has kind of a specific look to it. You can see that not all the leaves are drawn. Some of them are drawn, and they have these kind of it makes it look kind of like these rounded shapes. Then we have this one. This is from era Brosko's book, and this one is getting a little bit more natural looking. This one is you can see it's just paint strokes and it's got some lines in it, but we're starting to get kind of some more natural looking shapes. And then this one is very loosely painted, but it gives us kind of it has nice energy in it, and it's very loose, and it's been scanned into a book illustration. And so these two are definitely hand painted, probably these ones, and then hand painted, and some of the other ones might be a little bit more digital. And then lastly, we have this tree over here. That's a lot more kind of realistic still, it's not a photograph of a tree, but you can, all the leaves have been drawn on it. There's a lot of details on the trunk. And so that just gives you some ideas of how you could be drawing trees. Then let's look at I had some rocks as ideas for you. So in its most general thing, we have a flat plain shape. It doesn't even need to have an outline around it, but this one has a black outline, and then it has extra little lines inside and some dots. Then we have these mountains that are illustrated with almost these kind of diamond shapes, and you can see that the colors are going kind of from darker and they get lighter towards the top where they have these snow topped mountains. So very abstracted mountains over here. And then we have this is from the same illustration where that tree was. We have rocks in the kind of water over here, and you can see that, you know, it's just a curve with some curved lines inside over there. And then everything on the bottom, most of them are kind of a flat color that has some sort of spatters on the inside. On all of them, this is from Mr. Tiger Goes Wild. And so they're fairly similar. Some of them have more shadows or kind of different looking shadows than the other ones. And this one has a little bit more of a complex spattering on it, and then it's got the little line from where the snail has gone. So just some ideas for rocks, they can literally be a flat area of color or they can have some texture on it. And then lastly, I just put some pictures of buildings. And if you're doing buildings, like we looked at that photo just a minute ago, there's a lot of there's a lot of details in this photo. There's every single brick on every single detail. Over here, all these ledges go out and they have structure and they have dimensionality. And so when you are drawing, your illustrations of houses, you have to decide whether you're going to add all those details in or are you going to simplify. And so here's just a couple of examples. These are all fairly abstracted. And what I was trying to say about the bricks is you don't necessarily have to draw every single ops, every single brick, like over here, you can you can kind of show us that it's a brick wall by drawing some of the bricks in and having variations in color and then leaving some of the background empty. But a lot of these examples, it kind of depends on your style. This style is a little bit more three dimensional, and it's a little bit more realistic, whereas in some of these other styles are a little bit more flatter. And so then the drawing is a little bit more flatter, too. And so over here, we have at least a little bit of variety in the bricks, and we have some dots in it, and these ones are very sketchy lines over here, and these ones are not even even. And then this part is actually just collaged on top. It's a photograph from brick wall that has been cut and pasted over here. And then this is an illustration from Christian Robinson's book, Leo. And you can see that they're very simplified shapes. It's all collaged, cut out that then has a little bit of drawing with just one color on the top. And then we have these ones. So depending on your illustration style, the buildings don't even have to kind of line up. And so you can see these are a little bit wonky and things don't quite match up in their little wobbly wobbly and some of the details are there and some of the details are not, for example. So these two buildings exist on the same page in the illustration, and you can see that over here we have a little bit of shading for the building. But then if you or, like, the sides of the windows, but over here, the sides of the windows have literally just been drawn in with kind of a red line. Um, and so that just gives you some ideas that, you know, every time you draw a building, you don't have to, you know, have a panic attack thinking that you have to exactly draw what you see. You can take some artistic liberties and simplify things. And I split this video into two, and in the next video, we'll look at a few more examples before we get into the next exercise. 16. Levels of Abstraction: Examples: Alright, so I just wanted to look at a couple of different examples of some architectural element. So in this one, we have some outdoor scenes, and you can see over here that a lot of the details have been drawn. And so this illustration is a little bit busy when you look at it, but the illustrator is creating a nice contrast with having this big cat, which is going to be our main character. So in this illustration, we're contrasting that this is the cat, and the cat has a very busy life. And so we're giving the idea of business with the textures and all the details that are going on in the background. And then for this book, I just wanted to talk about that flat illustration style. And so over here, everything is very flat. It doesn't look super three dimensional. And so it is just a choice that you can make with illustration. So things don't have a lot of you notice that there's not a lot of shading. Everything is just kind of flat. It's got pretty heavy outlines. And so everything there's just a lot of texture and everything is kind of equally wonky or, you know, things are tilted and not quite drawn in perspective over here. And then we have this book. And I just wanted to show the outside how fun this illustration is. So we have everything over here. There's no outlines over here, but everything has been it's digitally drawn, so it's fairly easy to get things fairly upright and straight. And then we have this great building with all these different colors on it. And one more thing that I wanted to highlight with taking those artistic liberties is with this book, if you think about, you know, windows on buildings and each window and then there's, you know, a little bit of room above, you know, up to the ceiling and below that goes down to the floor where you're supposed to be standing. And so if you think about this building right here where the ceiling, if you think about just looking at this window, like, Okay, the floor where this person is standing would probably be around here. The ceiling would probably be somewhere over here, but Lewin has added made the windows really big, so we get all this kind of fun character in this building rather than having a big building with a lot of empty space on it, and then small little windows, like we usually in buildings, she's able to add a lot more kind of interest and detail into the illustrations. So this page kind of the same thing. And so if you think where she would be standing or he would be standing, his feet would be over here. And then we can also look at the city map over here, and we have this fun curve of the road, and it goes underneath over here, but it's a library book, so I quite get it all the way open. But you can just see everything's a little bit wonky. It's not super straight, and we have these lovely, kind of big details on the houses. And obviously, color palette is very muted and kind of a simplified color palette. And so that way, we notice all the characters and all the fun little details that are going on in this illustration. And you can look at all the different devices that the illustrator has used to kind of create this scene and make it interesting to look at. And then there's just a couple. I just wanted to show kind of two landscape books. These are with watercolors. This might, I think, might have some guashes in it, too. So we also have a building over here that's blobby, brush strokes, simplified brush jokes, especially with everything else that's around it. The tree over here in the background is just, you know, blobs and sticks or lines. And then, for example, we have this illustration over here where they're in the garden, and it's really just layers of green paint or kind of blobs of green paint, and there's kind of nothing super detailed in there when then we contrast that to Jason Chin's illustrations where they're extremely detailed, and they're very realistic looking. And so when I was talking about the photographs, these are very specific to the location. And there are some areas which are nice where we have so much detail going on over here, it's always nice to have an area where the eye can rest in both of these illustrations. So we have a lot of details going on over here. And so just some very different ways of illustrating, and there is no I want to stress that there's no right or wrong way of doing this. When you are working on outdoor scenes where you have a lot of depth, you can consolidate details in the landscape into larger shapes as far as kind of tone and value so that it's easier to read the image from far away. And so in this image, we do have a lot of detail. We have, you know, all the little details in the car. We have all the little details up here. But then as we're moving further out, things get kind of consolidated. And instead of drawing every single leaf all the way down to the back over here, Jason has consolidated this whole area into just one unified strip similarity of the mark making. And so if we look at what's going on with the girl, we have high contrast. We have the colors, and we have actual letters, and so our eyes are drawn over here. And even so we do have a lot of things going on over here, too. But if you look at the type of mark making, you could say in some ways that it's more boring that it's more repetitive. And so there's more of even rhythm, and it doesn't draw your eye to it as much because we've kind of seen one part we've seen it all, whereas over here, there's a lot of different a lot of differences, a lot of contrasting colors. And so this calls for our eyes to wander and look around over here a lot longer than what our eyes need to look at over here. So this could apply for if you're drawing buildings, if you're drawing tree, whatever it might be, you could still have details in the background as long as they're kind of repetitive and they're kind of all within the same tonal and value range. And then that way, they're not taking our attention away from where we want the main. Focus of our illustration to be. And in the next video, we will continue with our exercises, and we'll start adding a little bit more color and detail to the sketch that we were working on in the last exercise. 17. Exercise 4: Full Size Sketch: Okay, for this next exercise, what I want you to do is you worked on, if you haven't done any color sketches yet, then don't worry. Pick one of these black and white ones or kind of the grayscale ones. And for myself, I'm kind of torn between these two. I think I'm going to start with this one. And so I'm going to copy this one. And put it onto its own little canvas over here. And I'm going to blow it up. And so take your little sketch and blow it up a little bit bigger. And in my case, I'm going to now sketch on top of it. So for this exercise, what I want you to do is I want you to take your favorite sketch from the previous exercise and put it on a different canvas or start a new piece of paper and blow it up bigger, so it's closer to the final size illustration that you want to create. And then what I want you to work on is adding some more details and adding more colors to it. It doesn't have to be your final artwork, but I want you to start making it closer to the final and starting to hone in some details and getting it closer to a final sketch. Okay. 18. Artistic Liberties: Creating Organization: When we move around spaces, whether it be indoors or outdoors, we perceive organization in them. Even when things are kind of chaotic or when things are busy, like you're in the forest and there's lots of leaves or you're in a busy garage, you may not think about it, but you are not perceiving every leaf in a tree or every brick in a house all at the same time. And so our eyes and our mind are able to focus on whatever we're looking at and then everything else that's kind of, you know, outside of our main focus of vision, we can see that there's things there, but we are not concentrating on everything all at the same time. Now when you compare that to a photograph, the photograph will capture everything that's before our eyes exactly the way it is. So the photograph will show every single leaf, every single brick, every single you know, whatever it might be that is in your space. And another way that taking a photograph or looking at reference photos changes our experience is if you've ever been outdoors and you've looked at this beautiful giant moon at night or an airplane in the sky, and then you go and you take a picture of it, and in the picture, the moon is you know, a size of a pin prick. It's so teeny, tiny, and it's not your experience at all. In this segment, we already talked about a little bit before, but I wanted to kind of go over how you can change things in your reference photos or from what is actually going on outside to make it work for your illustration and to add more of a kind of a feeling in it, add more of a focal point in it, and make it easier for somebody to read the illustration. And so some of the different ways that we can do this is by we can change the objects shot size. So as I just said, you know, if you take a photograph of the moon, it's always teeny, tiny. But if you look at illustrations, most of the time, the moon is kind of big in the sky over there. And so we can change object size. A lot of times I will change the sizes of trees or it could even be individual things within objects like we talked about the sizes of windows earlier within a side of a building. And so you feel free to take liberties as long as everything still kind of works and looks, you know, realistic. Feel free to take liberties with that. Another thing that you can change is the details in it, as we said earlier, we when you take a photograph or when you focus on it, there are individual leaves on a tree, but when we're doing an illustration, we don't need to draw every single blade of grass and leaf on the tree. And so you can either add list details or take details away to make things more legible. And in the same way, when we talk about silhouette, if you think about the way that a tree is, you know, it's very complicated. There's all the edges and leaves, and there's holes in it and, you know, things that are in front and back behind. And in the same way, you can simplify silhouettes of things if things are too complicated and they take up too much attention in your illustration. Feel free to simplify silhouettes. And talking about the grouping, you can kind of lump things together. So instead of drawing individual trees in the forest, you can meld everything together. And make it into one cohesive area in your illustration instead of all individual trees. And then you can also create elements in your illustration. And so if you're looking at photo of a forest or it could be the beach or somebody's house, there might be total chaos in the way things are organized. And so what you can do is once you figure out where your focal point is in that illustration, you can make everything work towards that focal point. And so you can create visual lines. You can move things around to make them point or make them go away. You can use colors, textures, all those things that we talked about in the beginning of the class to simplify and create visual organization in that space in order to make it more legible and more pleasing to look at. And so I have this photo that we looked at a little bit earlier, and so it is this photo of path in the forest that goes back behind into a clearing. And I know it's a little bit hard to see, but there's actually kind of a little tree over here. There's another little tree, so they create this archway almost that you can go through if you look at the how they're lined up. They're not actually lined up perfectly. So this side is a little bit closer to us, and this one is a little bit further away. And then there's other trees over there. And so then what we can do is when we create our own illustration in it, we will look for different ways to simplify it and make it more legible so it's not so chaotic. And first, if you can either work with pencil, you can either work with lines and draw things or if you feel more comfortable in just starting with colors, you could also start blocking colors out and kind of figure things out that way. And we can do a little bit of both. And so over here, I've just put some questions to ask, so think about where your point of focus is and then think about how you can make all the elements in your illustration to work towards that focus. How can you create a foreground middle ground and a background in it? Is there a way to simplify shape, simplify colors? Do you need to maybe change colors in your illustrations? We'll talk about that in the next video, and then you can also change the size of things and move objects around, like trees or whatnot. And so we don't have to stay true to this illustration. And so let's see. We have a little bit it kind of goes this way, and then it goes a little bit this way. So we'll do something like this. And then it kind of disappears, something something kind of like this. And then I know there's kind of a clearing that I want to create over here, and so this is kind of where our road is going to go. And then I can create bushes. And so I'm still kind of designing. I know that there's going to be I want there to be trees, so I might create just kind of a tree line in general over here, maybe there's some openings. And then I know there's going to be trees, also. So I'm just adding kind of my own trees. I am referencing here, but I'm also kind of doing my own drawing over here. So my tree trunks are going to be a little bit thicker and I don't want to do I don't want to do too symmetrical. And then if I want to do this kind of archway and create that, I don't know if that's going to add or detract, but maybe the archway goes above over here, so maybe I'll add a little bit. And so I'm kind of feeling my way around over here. And my first sketches are always kind of messy. I know it's not looking like much yet because it's all a little chaotic still, but I'm just trying to start starting to work on creating some detail. I'm seeing some layering going on in there. And then when I start actually, if we start adding some colors, so this is kind of the general way that I want things to feel. Then I can start adding some colors in here, grab a bigger, some sort of a bigger brush. It's nice to start with a big brush and just start blocking in color. I could even add some extra if there's some sun spotting in there. I don't want to get too complicated with it. And then we'll start adding some Brush. And now I would decide, do I want to have my foreground lighter or my background lighter? I know there's really light stuff in the back. So maybe I want this to be the brightest spot. And then I'm going to make it progressively darker as I'm coming. It's going to be darker on the sides over here, wherever we don't get any of the leaves. If you're interested in my process, I've kept this process video in here of me working on this piece. There might be things that you're interested in learning from it, and if you don't want to see the process, you can skip to the very end to see what the final piece looks like. And in the next video, we'll move on to our last exercise for the class. 19. Artistic Liberties: Colors: Colors are something that we respond to on an emotional level. And when working on an illustration, you don't always have to have the colors of the items or objects in the illustration exactly as they are in nature. Sometimes tweaking colors or using unnatural colors in your illustration can be a great way to either simplify your illustration or tie different objects in your illustration together, or it could also be a design choice that then helps to affect the emotion, to either make things more dull or to heighten emotions at certain times. And so let's look at some examples of those. So in this book, my friend Earth, we have most of the illustrations, they don't have natural colors, but they do have colors that lean towards nature. And so, for example, on this spread, it says, so it's about mother nature, and so she's always kind of big, and then we have these kind of wide landscapes in this book. And so we are talking about filling streams, flowing mountains, fields, and rivers and then to the sea. And so we have mountains drawn over here, and you can see just the design as far as design goes, the mountains are just these kind of very even looking bumps. We know mountains don't look like that in natural world. And then also, we there's all these design elements in here like dots or different kinds of lines. And, you know, obviously that's not in nature, but the illustrator uses those as kind of design elements throughout the book. And then the colors are not supernatural. But if you look at this illustration as a whole, you'll notice that everything kind of with the way that the colors are everything kind of flows together really well, and then it's easy to spot our main character over here. And you'll notice that on every page in the book, the colors might not be supernatural. This is snow, but it's kind of pinkish color. And then we have almost like an orangish, reddish color or a mountain over there. She uses kind of a wide color palette, but everything is muted tones, and there's a lot of unnatural colors in between. And so you'll notice that even though the colors are not all supernatural, they lean towards how they are in nature, but it's kind of a limited color palette, and she uses the same colors kind of repeatedly through the book. And so it creates kind of a feeling and kind of a unity within the different spreads of the book. Then we have this book that we've already looked at a couple of times. And so we have a daytime scene where everything is lighter. And then we have this fun nighttime scene. And through this whole book, the Illustrator mostly uses blues and kind of primary colors. You'll notice a lot of these books will use a lot of primary colors. And so we're using red, yellow, and blue. There's a little bit of kind of purples and a little bit of greens in the background, but it's mostly those main colors, and it creates this nice background for then when the main dragon comes who's big and red, he really kind of pops out with all the other colors, we can see it. And some of the other spreads. And there's red elsewhere in the book, too, but you notice there's not really there's barely any hints of green or purple or anything like that. And so it's just really nice, kind of a limited color palette that we see in this book. And then we have creepy carrots. And then with this one, we're basically just using gray tones and then the oranges and a little bit of yellow for the eyes. And it has this great film noir feeling and all the illustrations. There's grainy, like, old time horror movies, and then we just have a little pop up color for the carrots. And so it makes for really effective storytelling in this one. And then we have this book, Good night Everyone by Chris Cotton. And so he has a whole series of these books, and they all have very limited, very unnatural color palettes. And so over here, it is It says Sun is going down and everyone is sleepy, and we do have kind of blues and purples, but everything is very kind of bright neon colors. And we have those all through the book, we have this one spread where we have some greens and some oranges. But most of the spreads in this book are extremely bright colors and darker colors, and everything is this kind of collage, paper cut, very simplified shapes. And I think when you're using these very simplified shape language, the bright colors work really well with that. And so that's a design choice for him. And then we have this book. It's called Last stop on Reindeer Express by Carl James Motford. And with this one, we also have very unnatural colors. So it kind of goes through all these different phases, and so we have a lot of red and kind of green. And then we go through the portal, and then we have all these kind of greens and yellows and kind of warm greens. And then we get to the city, and it's all kind of these crazy reds again and very bright. And then we get to his father's place, and then we get, a different color scheme again. So you can see that, you know, not only the colors are fairly unnatural, but also there's a very distinctive design language going on over here. Lots of very angular designs and shapes and patterns. For example, over here, instead of doing black outlines and black windows, we have light colors used for the details in the building. And the buildings are basically just a box of color, a section of buildings. We have red, and then behind it, we have a green section of buildings that have a little bit of texture on them. So really interesting design choices in this one, and then we'll look at a few more. Um, we've got Hagasaurus with Chris Chatterton, and in here, we are using color to change the mood. So Hagiaurs is getting very upset. He's very sad. So we have this blue background over here, and the Illustrator hasn't done more than just given us a little bit of a suggestion of a background and then otherwise, it's just clean. And then when he gets hug, then all of a sudden everything's better, and you can see the difference in the colors over here. And same thing, there's no background except for just a little bit of suggestion that they have some trees around them with the leaves on the top, but then the whole background is is yellow on this one. So you can use colors for emotions. And then with this one, we have a creature of habit who's this kind of imaginary creature. And in this we have a lot of I guess you could say surprising design choices. Everything kind of goes together. There's a lot of different textures. You can see the sky is pink instead of blue. There's just a pattern on the pineapples. We have pink and dark red leaves over here. And then we had this other scene where we have white sky, pink clouds. And again, we have all different kinds of colors of plants. And then we have a scene that happens in the water, and there's some textures in the water and talking about interesting design choices and thinking about, you know, out of box viewpoints. So the text says, instead of saying hello to the fish, he went for a swim with them. And in each page, the main character is kind of horrified at what this visitor is doing. And so, but what a fun way we see the reflection, the feet, only the feet, and then we see the reflection of the main character as the little guys going for a swim and the fish are just indicated with very simplified shapes over here. And then if we look at John Klausin's book, most of his books have a very, very limited color palette. And so if we flip through this one, it's mostly just everything is very muted. Everything is very brown if we flip through it really quick. The diamonds are all kind of colors of brown and pink, and then it's just getting darker whenever they fall asleep. And then when we get to the other side, you know, everything is back to the browns again. We earlier talked about he has this kind of dead pan humor. Everything is very symmetrical, and the limited color palette works really well with his artistic kind of simplified style. A we also looked at the night owl earlier, and a lot of illustrators do blue and yellow are kind of the main colors for this book. And so you'll see on this spread, almost everything is kind of just a tone of yellow. And we were talking about, you know, designing a space. So we have a foreground over here with our little main character owl and see how he's created a cloud to go around the owl to really kind of spotlight him over there. Then we have this dark area with the knights, and they have very low contrast. I don't know what the color the horses are. They're just kind of a dark, almost a black, gray color. And then we have our very, very light background. Over there. And then as we looked at earlier, then when we get to the night scenes, everything is just shades of blue over there except for just some pops of yellow. And in a very similar way, we have Good night Good night construction site with Tom Lichtenheld, and all of this illustration, it's mostly red and yellow and blue. And so there's a really great contrast on most of the pages between the yellow for the daytime and then the blue for the nighttime. And so it has the section for each truck and, you know, what they're doing during the daytime. And then they go to sleep, and then the next pad is yellow, and then the next one is blue. And instead of having a white color for the pages, all the pages have this kind of yellow tone to them. So it's a very kind of you could say two tone book over here. And so that's another way to design a book. And then we looked at this one earlier the Bo Crew Needs you by Surchalu. And with this one, all the colors were kind of those greens and blues and some purples, and then most pages have some pops of orange and pink on them. It is kind of a limited color palette, but it still feels nice and colorful with just the bright pops that are placed on top of the more cooler colors. And so there's some nice design choices over here. And then we'll look at two more books, and we have being home by Mikaela god, illustrated. And so in this one, you'll see that the cover is very pink already, and it's got these silhouettes of some characters on it. And you'll notice that pink is kind of a unifying color through all the different spreads. So it's used as almost like you could say an accent color on each page. Some pages have more, some pages have less, and we'll just kind of skip around just to look at a couple of spreads. This page over here where we have these flashes of color, and then the text is pink, and then we have the characters are all silhouetted in pink over here, and we see their journey as they get home. And then this is an interior scene, but again, you can see pops of pink as they go as everything goes all throughout here. And you'll notice in this spread, it's an outdoor scene. We've got some trees. There's grass, but you'll notice that pretty much everything in the nature, we have tree trunks over here, but everything is just different shades values of green. And then we have this kind of busy table in the front, and then the pops of pink containing all the people over here. And so there's kind of a fun there's a vibrancy putting these really bright pinks and greens next to each other. And so it's a fun choice that the Illustrator has made for this book. And then this one is the City tree by Lorena Alvarez, and this one's a little bit more sophisticated maybe with the color palettes. It's not quite as noticeable as in the last ones. And in this book, we get a lot of kind of purples and pinks are kind of the undertones, and then we looked earlier at the different seasons. And so as we get we have the same, basically background, but with every season, she's changing the tones just a little bit to change for the seasons. So in the spring, it's kind of a brighter colors and a lot of pinks going on in here. We're also getting a lot of details everywhere. We have the background is very plain, and the buildings are drawn, but they're not super super detailed. But then we have the tree, and, you know, these plants, all these other details are really kind of the life force in this book. And so she's put a lot of effort into drawing a lot of the leaves and all the illustrations. And so in the summertime, we get it's still kind of the same, but we're getting a lot more warmer tones, kind of oranges. And then we get into the fall, and you can see it gets a lot cooler. Even just this building right here, if we look at all these three different pages, we have kind of a light pink for the spring. We have yellowish, orangish color for the summer, and now we get to fall, and it's this cold, cool, pink and purple. And then we get to the winter, and then, again, you'll notice that it turns much cooler and a little bit more gray. And so we have the same tree, but just the tones change according to the different years. And so kind of it's a little bit more subtle, but it makes for a great effect when we're reading the book. So let's jump into the next video, which is going to be another exercise video, and it'll be the last exercise before we finish this class. 20. Exercise 5: Final Illustration: Okay, so let's get into our last exercise for the class. So you should have been working on this illustration up until now, and hopefully you've added a little bit of color in there. You've figured out kind of where different elements are and how you want the final illustration to look. And we just talked about all the different liberties that you can take as an illustrator, tweaking sizes of things, tweaking colors, moving for better placement. And so I want you to just take a look and make any adjustments that might be needed. Do you want to change any colors? Could a different color of some sort add more emotional intensity? And then if there's not, then you can continue with this and start working on your final illustration. And so add some shadows, if you want to add shadows and just finalize and kind of make everything look nice. And then for the Class Projects gallery, this phase right now before you start working on it is also a great one to post into the gallery to ask for any kind of feedback. Ask for a critique for it. You can ask me. You can ask, you know, other students to critique it. And that way, other people, like I said earlier, when other people look at your illustration, they might find some places where it might be a good idea to tweak it. And then that way, you might get some fun feedback that might be helpful for you before you move on to the final illustration. For myself, I usually try to be on Skillshare at least once every two to three days, maybe in the summertime, a little bit less, but I usually reply to everybody's posts within a couple of days. And so you'll be able to get feedback pretty fast, at least from me in the class. Thanks for following along. I can't wait to see the illustrations that you create. Don't forget to post them in the gallery below, and I'll see you in the next video, and we'll summarize what we talked about in this class and talk about some next steps. I'll see you there. 21. Encouragement & Final Thoughts: This might seem like a lot of work to put into one illustration. In some ways, you're right, making great illustrations is a lot of work. But on the other hand, a lot of the decision making will get streamlined the more you work. So if you're thinking about illustrating books as a whole, it's going to be a lot of illustrations and it's a lot of work. But at the same time, you are trying to be consistent within the book. And so the way that you draw grass or the way that you draw trees, a lot of those individual decisions that we were making for this one illustration, you make that decision once, and then it's going to continue and be the same for the whole book. You also won't be making full spread or full page illustrations for the whole book. You're going to have some spot illustrations and some vignettes, where you're going to be putting a lot less background into it. And so when you think about it like that, it does go a lot faster when you're working on multiple illustrations that are all part of a bigger group. To me, the thumbnailing phase is the most lengthiest and kind of the hardest part of creating a picture book that's the time when I spend the most amount of time just brainstorming and trying to come up with the different spreads and how the illustrations are going to go from one spread to another. I'm thinking about compositions. I'm starting to think about color palette. And so that's kind of where the bulk of the decision making is going to be. And once I finally get into the spot of working on the final illustration, that's when things all the decisions have kind of been made already, and so everything is really fun and it goes a lot faster than in the beginning phases where I'm making all the decisions. And so with that, I hope that you have enjoyed this class and you feel inspired and you feel empowered with lots of new tools in your toolbox to start creating amazing illustrations for picture books. If you love the class, it's really fast to leave reviews on Skillshare. You can just go down below, and it's just a click of the stars. You can write a couple of words if you feel like it, but even just giving it stars helps. I highly encourage you to post some of your work in the project section down below. It's a great way to ask for feedback not only from me, but other students in the class, and it's a place where you could maybe even ask for people to be in a critique group. It's an encouragement for everybody in the class when class projects are uploaded to see what other people have done. I'm usually on Skillshare, if not every day, every couple of days, and I'm always coming back and commenting and looking at what students have posted, and I love seeing you work. If you're posting your pieces on social media, feel free to tag me at Mica Hookin or at Mica Draws on Instagram, and I love to come and comment and like your pieces. Have a whole series of picture book related classes, and this is just one of them. This one will be followed by one that talks about creating interior scenes. But there's classes on creating characters, how to draw consistently, how to create dummies for picture books, and doing research for picture books. And all those are really helpful if you are new to picture book illustration and trying to figure out how to get your foot in the door. You can see my work on my website at merca.com, and I look forward to seeing you in future classes. Thanks so much, and I'll see you in the next one. Bye.