Draw Characters 102 Drawing Fundamentals

1. Draw Characters 102 Introduction: Hey guys, welcome to draw characters, one or two, Drawing Fundamentals. In this part of the course, we're going to be taking a look at some key drawing fundamentals that you really need to know and learn in order to draw well from the start, looking at things like land weights, penmanship, as well as how to use reference images and many other key topics. As usual, I want you to go through this content twice, watch it through the first time, and then go through it again and then do the assignments. I think you're really going to find a huge amount of value. Even though this module is fairly straightforward, some of the concepts discussed often not clear to beginners. So I think you're going to have a great time doing this part of the course. Awesome. I'll see you in the course. 2. Warmup and Penmanship: Welcome to Module two. And at the start of this module we're gonna be doing warm-up and penmanship training. I'm gonna show you a warm-up exercise that is really designed to help you improve your penmanship. How you basically draw lines and how you can basically get a good way to loosen up, draw with your arm. And it's great exercise. You can do it digitally, you can do it traditionally doesn't really matter. So let's get right into it. So the first stage of this is to really just draw a page of circles. And notice how fast I'm drawing them. I'm keeping my wrist kind of locked and using my arm and my elbow to draw these. So all you have to do is basically say, okay, let me draw circles without moving my wrist. And I also want you to pay careful attention to how loose I am being. You can see that here and here and here and all these areas, the circles don't necessarily close properly. Now, you want to strive to have good, perfect circles as perfect as possible, but not at the expense of drawing slowly, right? Or anything like that. And we don't want to draw slowly. We don't wanna do anything like that, right? So just be very loose. Lock your wrist and move your arm and do a page of circles, right? I'll try and be as perfect as I can here. And what I'll often do is just put circles in the circles, smaller circles, not using my wrist. Once again, don't use your wrist. So that's what we wanna do as the first exercise at any layer or get a new page. And what we wanna do after that is draw some ellipsis. Now, what does an ellipse? An ellipse is a circle that if rotated slightly, is now in perspective, right? So it's basically still the same circle, it's the same little, let's pretend it's a dish. For example. We just rotated in perspective, That's what an ellipsis. You know, your ellipses are good. If you can cut them down the middle here. And this is called the minor axis for your theory nodes out there. Whoops, what am I saying? I was going to have mine a theory and minor axis. If you cut it through the middle, right on the minor axis, the major axis is not important to us. That would be cutting it vertically and you're able to fold one side over the other and they, they match fairly well or perfectly, right? This one's pretty okay. Also point to note, just a side note, the minor axis will always point to a vanishing point in perspective. If you know a lot about perspective, right? Nevertheless, what we wanna do is a page of ellipsis and just kinda get that all motion of drawing ellipsis. And you can vary the degree of the ellipse, that is, the spacing in-between an absurd degree of rotation is happening to the circle. So you can do very thin little ellipsis where you can try to do your kind of bigger ellipsis. The whole thing is to ensure that both sides really are the same as each other. Right? Now, what you can do after you've done a page of ellipses is just run through and check them and just put a tick or a cross if you felt it was a good ellipse or bad ellipse, that one's not super good. This one is reasonable. Ones, reasonable too. Bad. This one's okay. That one's bad. And once again, I want to reinforce loose, just being loose, physically loose in your own right. Now, less than coming up called looseness and dynamism will really go in depth as to what it means to be loose in terms of physically loose in your arm. So that is coming up. But nevertheless, I want you guys to start doing the warm-up exercises already. Alright, let's see if we go to the EPS is no big deal. It's just a warm-up exercise. Will rise. The next thing that you guys should do on the warm-up exercise and penmanship training is really draw straight lines as straight as you can freehand very quickly, not slowly at all, and try and keep them as parallel as possible. This is especially useful when you're trying to do obviously straight lines in your work. If you're doing any kind of industrial design drawing. I would just generally do this a couple of Tom's top to bottom, bottom to top. Just doing my best, putting the lands. And very quickly you can see how quickly I'm drawing this, locking my wrist and trying to get a straight line as possible. You can see here I kind of veer the lines are not perfectly parallel. They taper a little bit. Tapering, tapering. They're kind of converging, hitting to convert some way. But it's a great exercise. And I'd probably just do about three pages, two or three pages where I'm just just constantly training my arm, moving quickly. And you'll see the more you get into, the more you focus the bidder you get as time goes by. And I usually do one of these entire exercise workflows, warm-up exercises in about five minutes just before I start drawing. And it helps to really loosen up the arm because getting nice smooth lines really requires the looseness of physical looseness. And then last but not least, is the point-to-point exercise. The point-to-point exercise really is you put about 67 dots on the page. And what you want to try and do is ghost alone. If you have two, let me make the cursor a little bit bigger here so you can see the kind of you want to try and have a straight shot is straightest line as possible, joining these two points together. And so I go to the line. Basically I don't draw, just hover my hand to try and make the shot. Try and go for it. Didn't quite hit it, but the line is pretty nice and straight. And then I'll try the next one. Now if you're on paper, feel free to rotate the page Photoshop you can hit R and you can then rotate the page like that because I find that I draw straight lines reasonably accurately from bottom to top. Ghosting, trying to hit it. Here I will go to this one as well. Okay. Hit it but I'll overshot a little bit. But the lungs finished striped. And the overshoots on the end of the world, you're really just trying to train yourself to draw very straight lines, okay? And then once pretty reasonable, right? So in summary, the workflow for the warm-up and penmanship training, and I recommend you do this every day before you start to draw, is do a page of circles very loosely. A page of ellipses very loosely. Don't forget to measure them down the middle to check the accuracy. A page of lines, straight lines, or two or three pages if you wish, if you're pretty quick at it. And then a single-page of point-to-point where you want to connect the lines together with as straight a line as possible, connect the points together with a straight line as possible. That's the end of this lesson. Let's move on to the next lesson. 3. Drawing in 3D and Drawing Through: In this lesson, we're going to look at drawing in 3D and drawing through forms. And we are realist artists. So we are drawing things in such a way that they can be believed to exist in a 3D world. And as such, we need to move our minds away from drawing simple shapes, right? And instead toward drawing forms where the viewer can perceive multiple sides of an object, right? So in this example here we've taken this square shape, squarish shape and added some sides to it. So now we have a front side and a bottom view of the object. And it is much more believable looking three-dimensional in a sense, right? Even if it's very simplistic, 3D. Drawing in 3D helps us convince the viewer and persuade the view of the believability of what we're drawing. Now this method I've done here is kind of a shorthand for getting something to look 3D very quickly. You can take any simple shape and add an additional line to it. And it gives it the perception that it has multiple planes, multiple sides. So on the so-called, this might be a button. We've turned the circle Enter button by giving it a front view and a side view. You can also use this method for other objects, multiple objects, such as a rock, no one would viably believe that this is a rock. However, if we take this particular shape and we simply give a, another line to it, for example, through here. Now we're indicating additional planes, right? That the viewer can see more sides of the object. Let's arguments save it. Say that's the front and the side. And when you then detail these types of shapes a little bit more, they become quite convincing in their portrayal of what they're supposed to be. So I'm kinda be raised the line a little bit, put a little shape there and dots, some dots, and maybe give it another little plane. And it becomes a fairly convincing, if slightly cartoonish looking rock. So this is a simplistic method where you're simply saying to yourself, I don't want shapes in my piece. I want forms. You're taking simple shapes that you may be drawing and just adding additional planes to them, bringing them into a 3D world. Okay, so that's the first basic way that you can understand how to move from someone who perhaps sticks to very 2D flat looking work. How you can kind of start bringing that work into the 3D wrong. But I wanted you guys to know this, but this is not the primary way. I want us to think about drawing in 3D. Primary way I want us to think about drawing in 3D is what is called drawing through, or drawing through forms. In the real-world, there really aren't such things as 2D flat shapes per say everything's 3D to some extent. Even stickers, stickers are completely flat. But if you look at them with a microscope, you'll see that they do have a width, hot length and so on. And there are three-dimensional. Nevertheless, drawing through, drawing through, drawing through forms is really imagining the other sides of the object as you attempt to draw it. Over here, I'm imagining the other sides of this box. And drawing these elements in helps me feel out all the different sides of the box. So here we can see all six sides of the box, 12345 and the front 16, right? So we can imagine all six sides of the box. And similarly with spheres as well. This is just a circle, but by drawing a contour line. And this would be done in your construction phase, right? It helps us as the oddest to feel out the three-dimensionality of the object that we're drawing. You can add contour lines on the surface of the objects, as well as drawing through the forms to help you figure out the volume metric, kind of mass of the object or the object fields in 3D, right? Not the exact mass. Obviously. A very popular shape for drawing through and helping you, especially in character odd is the simple cylinder. So to draw a cylinder effectively, I draw two ellipses, kind of connect them. And this would be the background drawn a through line. And when I do the final clean drawing, I'll only keep the sides that I wanted to see, right? So it would be that bottom section and that top section. But let's just say this is the bottom and it's just say this is at the top. But drawing through as helped me establish a convincing outer edge here. Because I've used an ellipse to guide me. And so I have a really appealing 3D cylinder shape. Alright? When we start adding dynamism to this, which we'll look at in the next lesson. So we take a cylinder and then we add some dynamism to it. We can start getting much more complex forms. So here are some contour lines help us understand, and I've drawn through the shape. So here we can basically see both entrances to the horn. It looks like some kind of horn, right? And so that's possibly going down. But ultimately, these contour lines help us imagine the form. So this is effectively what drawing through is your drawing through forms. You're imagining objects in three-dimensions. Now let me say this. There are very few things that are really going to push your brain as much as trying hard to, especially if you're a beginner, move away from this two-dimensional idea of drawing and forcing yourself to think sculpture really incense and to think about forms of objects are basic shapes that you want to draw a basic 3D shapes. And you really have to get your mind around this. And it does take some practice. Although it doesn't take too much time if you're doing the practice exercises, we start getting used to it. And the great thing is when you can imagine multiple sides of an object, right? When you start thinking in 3D and also looking at the world around you and imagining all the planes and all the different sides of objects, right? Getting a deeper view of observing the world. You're then able to easily rotate objects around in the virtual space of the page. So take a cylinder for example. Let's just assume this is us directly looking at the Senator from the bottom, front on view. On that note, front views and direct front views. Indirect side views are things we do not want an odd let me reiterate that we do not want direct front on views. We do not want drink soda abuse, unless they're specifically being designed for the purposes of blue printing or character spec sheets or something like that. But generally speaking, for an appealing piece of artwork, you don't wanna direct front or side view, especially in illustrative work. But nevertheless, this is our cylinder. It doesn't look like much of a cylinder right now. Let's rotate the cylinder slightly to the right. Just flattening I'm doing is I'm drawing through here. And this is becoming the lips can't be a circle anymore because it's rotating in perspective slightly. And through drawing through, I've rotated the cylinder slightly to the right, slightly to the left margin. So it's rotated that way. We've moved it that way. Let's do more of an extreme rotation. And I'm going to draw through again. And here is me rotating the cylinder to even more of an extinct left or right. And eventually we'll probably end up with a side view that looks something like this. Right? It's like that would be a direct side of you. And we've continuously rotated it. And we can then take that further and basically do the opposite of number two here and rotate it even more lift. And that will have us, have our cylinder kind of going backwards now. Will rise. And that's not quite as rounded it shouldn't be, but nevertheless, it has rotated even more in that direction. And then we can kind of bring it back to a slightly, just a very slight rotation. It looks a little bit strange, but nevertheless, and as we doing this, we're drawing through the forms except for the side view. I mean, don't really need to draw through that one. The direct side view, same as the front view. And we are getting a sense of the dimensions of the object, right? Just putting this dot on the side to help us feel out the planes that we're seeing as the cylinder rotates, right? So effectively that's what drawing through is. The concept is pretty straightforward, right? The concept is pretty straightforward. To get it ingrained in your brain is going to take some practice, especially if you've never done this before, right? I'm gonna do a cube here, one more term or a box, it's just sandbox. And basically I'm just drawing through, I'm imagining all the sides and I'm just connecting them together. Another key thing before we end this lesson, another key thing to realize is that all of the complex forms, you imagine arms, you imagined legs and hands and feet. And these things just seem immensely complex. And there's anatomy and this skin surface and muscles and skeletal systems to take into account and so on. But really fundamentally, most of these things are really just made of boxes. They're made of cylinders and various kind of triangular forms, but very basic triangular forms. They don't make anything super complex. And what we do as artists, as realist artist is we have a workflow that we follow, a structural workflow that we follow to build things from shape into form, into details. And that is how we get our completed rough, which we can then refine up to completed piece of work. So we use these kind of basic types of shapes, whether it's any type of cuboid shape, any types of cylindrical shapes. For example, we may bend the cylinder as well to get certain limbs, right, but still drawing through to feel that form, putting contour lines on top of it to feel the forms out if we need to. We're not perceiving it well enough, right? Using spheres to connect joints and other things and to draw heads, for example, my Droid cranium as a sphere, then attach a jaw section to it. Right? So we're constantly thinking about forms and drawing through the forms and imagining the volume and the mass of the forms, right? So that's drawing in 3D and drawing through forms. Please definitely engage hardcore into these particular exercises. Because once you get this, the basic, basic foundations of drawing in 3D will be installed in you. That's the end of this lesson. 4. Looseness and Dynamism: In this lesson, we're going to take a look at looseness and dynamism in character drawing. And this theory really forms part of shapes. So you want to think about this in terms of the shape category. Alright, so you may have found that when you're drawing something may tend to look very stiff and may lack dynamism just in its field, right? And so there are two kind of categories that I want to talk about and want to teach you that the one would be looseness and the other is dynamism. And they're both, they're both applied in different ways. So let's say when looseness first. Alright. So looseness is very physical. It's just write some notes yet and looseness. And I'll put dynamism on the other side. Okay. Looseness is about physicality. Okay? And what I mean about that is literally your arm. Physicality. And dynamism is about movement and flow in shapes. Okay, so that's the basic theory of it. Yeah, let's stick to the looseness side. So when you drawing physical lines, like when you're physically drawing lines, when you draw lines slowly. So for example, I'll draw a line slowly here. Okay? Versus when I draw a line quickly, there is a fundamental difference between the two lines. Now apart from straightness, right? That's the obvious difference. The one line has directionality and the other lens doesn't. So if you look at the ends of this line over here, kind of just aims first of all, and second of all, because of its sort of wonky path. Because I've drawn it slowly. It doesn't really appear like it's going anywhere. It seems very static, right? So this would be bad, right? We want loose lines. So in terms of looseness, what we have is a taper on each end. Alright? A kind of a more OCT, appearance of the land, whether it's more or less straight, it doesn't matter. It's just very smooth. And what this means is that loose lines and that therefore lungs drawn quickly. They have a sense of directionality. So the lungs seems to be moving this way and that way even more so when you start having curved lines drawn loosely, right? Versus curved lines drawn slowly. While you have now achieved a sense of directionality in the slower line because of the curve, right? You still lose the directionality at the end tapers. And then also this, these little bumps and mux and crannies along the way, the kind of disrupt the viewer's understanding of the flow of the line, right? Versus obviously these kind of beautiful tapers that you have on foster drawn lines. And just a really smooth flow and uninterrupted communication. So looseness is about drawing loosely, physically not you may have heard advice about people saying, draw with your arm, don't draw with your wrist. And this is good advice, right? So definitely try and draw with your arm more for the biggest shapes, but of course, smaller shapes are going to need to use your wrist. But the idea is that you don't pander to the lines in a way where you're kind of like hyper sketching like this, which this is called chicken scratch lines. You don't want to draw like that. Nor do you want to draw really slowly like this. Because you're losing dynamism, right? Well, sorry, you're losing looseness in the lungs. You want to really just kind of like be as quick as you can. I'm using Shift key there, but doesn't really matter. And yes, whilst you are having these overlaps, the shape feels more dynamic overall, right? And more appealing and also more professional-looking. And that is one of the ways that people get a professional look in they work is by having very loose strokes. Now, incidentally, this also applies to painting, although depending on how your painting, not necessarily the tapering part, but just being loose physically lose. So when we talk about looseness, we're talking about physical looseness in your arm. And one of the key tenants of that really is drawing fast, okay? So I'm just going to write it down here. Draw fast or foster, right? If you're not that fast, faster and really kind of be loose. It can be hard to understand, but it's basically be physically loose. Loose, draw faster. Okay? That is basically the theory of looseness. It's not hard to do, but you're going to need to practice this. So there will be practice exercises for looseness. Dynamism, on the other hand, is a completely different topic. It's not got to do with physicality. It's got to do with theory and understanding the difference between something that is static and something that is moving, right? You just take that away. It's bugging me. Okay. So when we're talking about dynamism, right? I'll give you an example. Let's draw a triangle. Let's just pretend this is a perfectly symmetrical triangle, right? If I had to ask you what the directionality is in this triangle, you would probably say, well, it seems to be pointing out in all of these different directions, right? Which, you know, technically speaking, if that is indeed the case, it's not moving anywhere. It's kind of just staying here. This is kind of its center of motion, if you will. Or it's, you know, it's just, it's not really moving into its static. However, we took the triangle and we gave it a definitive direction, right? And notice how I've curved these sides, right? But more than that, we've given this triangle a definitive direction. It's definitely moving in that way. That shape has gone from being static, right? To a shape that has flow or movement. Some people will use the word energy. Or it's gotta kinetic, kinetic energy. Right? Now, you might be thinking, well, this isn't saying how does this even apply it to character Dory? So bear with me here when you think about a character, well drawn character in say, a three-quarter angles so they're not facing the camera frontal side that kind of slightly rotated. The shapes that make up that character are largely asymmetrical. In fact, most of the time they're all going to be a symmetrical. And asymmetrical basically means that though, while we understand, say, human beings being symmetrical from left to right, for example, that when they're put into perspective and rotated, there is no symmetry in the shape. So understanding particularly that we want to have all of our shapes, our basic shapes, to read in this way that they have directional flow is extremely important. So let me give you a brief example. Let's use a cube. Let's say we decide and we'll do this more in the anatomy section. So you'll see me doing there. Let's say we decide, okay, we want to have some basic building blocks for the form of a human, right? So we circuit, we're going to make the chest a block like this, right? So we're gonna make it a square. So if you can imagine with me, we might draw the head and that's a bit weird proportionately, but anyway, and then we might draw some joints for the arms and have some spheres for the arms and stuff. But anyway, bear with me. We're going to, this is like the whole care. But anyway, we're going to have the square. So we decided, okay, we're going to use this cube, sorry, as our base for the chest. That's all good and well, because we're getting the forms down, we can see that there are three sides to this cube and that's great. But the problem is that this former now right, legs directionality in its shape. So when you look at its shapes, which would be its different sons, there's no directionality. Now, don't get me wrong, Don't get me wrong here. I don't want you guys to build the forms in a way where you're trying to turn each side into a directional shape that would be weird. Know, what you want to Raul to do is take that form and kind of start bending the form overall. Okay. So like you're curving the sides and you're adding bind to its sides. Okay, here we're going to see the bottom of it instead of the top. But nevertheless, the same thing applies. And you're getting a kind of a directionality, a directional movement through the form because you're bending the sides and you're adding movement to it, right? This is what dynamism means and what dynamic shapes mean that you're in, you're ingesting life into the shapes. Now, you might say yourself, while where does the supply, does this apply only to living things? Generally speaking, in the natural world, I would say differently. And when I say living things, I don't just mean things that can move. It applies to trees, plants, anything that's alive already has some kind of directional flow. Things like mountains and things. You do want them to have directional flow in them because they were formed in some way via energy, right? I know that's kind of, but like I said, esoteric and a bit out there. But nevertheless, the idea is that to a viewer, when they're seeing static shapes, it seems Dell and without laugh, when they're seeing dynamic shapes, right? It seems to be alive. It seems to be moving like there's life there, like this motion. Okay? So let's just write here dynamic shapes and static shapes. So the idea is that you want to make sure in your art, ninety-nine percent of the time, you're working with dynamic shapes all the time. Now obviously this will differ if you're doing a direct front view of a car, for example, you'll still want to dynamic shapes, but obviously they're gonna be mirrored left to right. Same thing with the side view. Grant. Granted, the side view generally has no parallels, I mean, no mirroring in it. But hopefully you understand this concept of dynamism. And we're going to be talking about this a lot as we move through and you'll see how dynamism defines how we're going to draw all of our forms, right? We're gonna make sure everything has done it all the time that obviously this is a character design course. So we're going to really be focusing and doubling down on her dynamism, applause, character design. And if you think of your typical human being, apart from when we're sleeping, although even when we're sleeping, but typically, we're always moving. We're always balancing and counterbalancing. We're always experiencing the force of gravity and fighting against the force of gravity. And that then allows inside of us, we have this idea. What am I saying? What that means is that we have energy and directional flow moving in us all the time, but it's been kind of bouncing. And so we need to, as artists, draw dynamic shapes all the time, right? So once you guys to think about dynamic shapes and understand what makes the shape dynamics that it has a directional flow to it, right? So for example, just a square, just reiterating here, this, this has no directional flow. But if we'd been the square in a weird way, suddenly it gangs directional flow is more interesting to look at. Okay, That's it for looseness and dynamism. Let's move on. 5. Showing Depth in your Drawings: In this lesson, we're gonna be talking about tangents and what tangents really are. Or when lines touch each other and prevent the viewer from distinguishing what is in front of what is behind. Or it creates a really weird looking shape to them. So I'm going to use a very familiar shape here. Perhaps it looks like an M or a logo of a popular food franchise. Let's assume that these are supposed to be two mountains. Because of the way the lines touch in the center here, It's very difficult to tell what is in front and what is behind, right? We don't know. But when we use overlap of the lines, take one line and have it overlap another. Suddenly to the viewer, it becomes quite obvious that this must be in front and this must be behind. So tangents are any instance where objects touch each other in such a way as to create a single shape, or should I say we're lines touch each other in such a way as to create a single shape and make it unclear to the viewer the spatial positioning of elements or lines if you wish, or edges. So in this instance, these are two pieces of paper. And let's give them some text. And perhaps it's an open-book seen directly from the top or something like that. But let's assume it's two pieces of paper and one is definitely in front and one is definitely behind. To the viewer, their brain is going to see this entire rectangular shape, not even the smaller rectangles inside. They'll eventually get there. But they first, the first understanding of the shape is really this large rectangle. And our problem here are these two tangents, right? We can't tell what is in front and what is behind. But if we start overlapping certain lines, we can get a very convincing effect to add depth, even in very flat 2D kind of icon of graphic designs like these pages. So now that I've overlapped some lines, it's very clear which pages in front and which page is behind. The things that we're dealing with, all that really the tangents are bad. Okay? Tangents are bad and overlaps or good. It seems, I think, a very simple concept. But often I see this in student work. We're really just something as simple as not having a line overlap causes things to look flat and to be easily misunderstood by the viewer. It's changed our headline here to tangents and overlap. All right, so that we're pretty clear about what we're talking about. The great thing with overlaps, let me take this away. The great thing with overlaps is that overlaps can imply depth and create a sense of depth. So for example, if I were drawing a leg with the knee at the bottom. So this is just a leg design here. As I get to the nice section, I ensure that the knee lines overlap the back of the leg. And this gives me a sense of form. Right? So because of these overlapping lines are occurring here, I can happen in many different ways in simple forms. If I have a sphere and then I draw a cube behind it, and then I draw a cylinder behind that. Whilst I M thinking in a form, since I also know that these overlaps of these lines help the viewer to distinguish what is in front and what is behind. And so here we have the line of the sphere overlapping, the cube formed. And the lines of the cube clearly overlapping the cylinder form. And this is in a nutshell. What overlapping lines are there lines, it's simply overlap. They extend slightly past the other objects to show that the object is in front. Let me say this. It's something we want to be very intentional about. Do you want to constantly ask yourself, do I have any tangents? And if you do have tangents, you need to be like a sniper and eliminate them. They need to go because tangents really have no place in our art. This is the lesson on tangents and overlaps and the importance of overlaps. Let's move on to the next lesson. 6. Avoiding Parallels: Alright, in this lesson, we're going to look at parallels. And what are parallels? Why do we need to know about parallels? Why do we need to avoid parallels, et cetera, et cetera, right? So parallels really, and I think I like the double L here. It's a good memory tool. I'm really are parallel lines when you're drawing or in terms of the visual communication of a piece, even the symbolic communication with peace parallels can also be parallel objects. For example, a character's standing and their arm position. Even though it's at a three-quarter angle there on position is basically the same on both sides. So this is a visual parallel. Sometimes this is called mirroring. And then parallels are also equal numbers of objects in a piece. So for example, you have a scene and there are some trees in the background. If you have two trees, that's considered parallel, and it just feels too balanced. And balanced in a bad way. It feels to engineered, right? So there's sort of two trees in the background. And so what we want to be constantly doing in our work is making sure that we are breaking the parallels, right? So obviously what is the opposite to a parallel? While it would be something that converges, right? And in this instance where we've got these two lines next to each other quite parallel. The difference between this parallel and the converging lines is that the converging lines have a sense of directionality, right? They have a sense of directionality. Now, that's in terms of a literal parallel where maybe you've drawn a leg. For example, let's imagine I'm drawing the leg here. And I've made the lines on both sides of the leg, even though there's directionality in these lines. This is a literal parallel between the actual shapes, if you wish, or the lines so that they really mirroring each other and creating parallel. So this fits more into the mirroring category. Say here, one is a literal, parallel literal too is mirroring. And then three is, I'd say this is more symbolic. It is actually symbolize symbolic parallel. This is mirroring. A lot of this is taking not a literal nurturing because literal mirroring would then be a front view. And you have this really literal symmetry that you're seeing in the piece. Nevertheless, in general, I'm sure you'll start getting the idea of what a parallel is. Not just in character art, in all kinds of art, you know, you have two mountains in the background of a piece and dividing the page equally like this. Something like that. It's very, I'm distracting to balance, awkward to engineered for the viewer. So we want to avoid parallels. At all times. We hate parallels. Parallels must not be in our piece whether they're literal parallels, whether they're symbolic parallels, for example. Another example of symbolic parallels is, let's say you're drawing a character and the character is wearing a shirt. And you might think, well, this is crazy like how can you say what he's about to say? Well, you'll see, let's say he's wearing a shirt here to collared shirts and ask colored shirt and you're putting the buttons down the shirt. I'm saying definitely don't put eight buttons. 345678. Okay. Maybe a little hectic. Let's bring that number down to six, right? I would say definitely don't do six buttons, do seven or five, right? Because odd numbers are more interesting and because odd numbers can't be divided equally, they are not paralleling each other in a sense, right, in a symbolic way. And so the piece feels more natural. There is a saying, I don't know where the name comes from, so I do apologize. There's a saying that goes with God doesn't draw straight lines. So things that are natural, they're just on strike. They aren't balanced, that aren't mathematically equal to them in the natural world, really, everything was formed by natural, in natural ways, in terms of the world and so on and so on. I mean, what I mean to say is there was energy behind the formation of these things. And so things, you look at mountains and mountains of very random in a sense, although they have a sense of directionality to them and probably from the energy that formed them, but they are really kind of random. There's nothing like exactly four mountains. Now, of course, there are instances where there are exactly four ounces or exactly two mountains and those are usually tourist destinations because it is unusual, right? It's, it doesn't seem natural, it seems unnatural inserts, there is an appeal in that sort of thing. But when we're trying to make a natural looking scene or natural looking character, we want to avoid literal parallels. So we definitely don't have a one out. Arms are our limbs or clothing or anything to have literal parallels in it like this, right? And we definitely want to avoid mirroring. Why have both of the characters arms down at the same angle? Y have the same pocket on both sides of a shirt, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, you can really do that if you want to. But you have to ask yourself, does it feel to balance, does it feel to engineered, or does it feel natural? End cool, right? So we want to change the direction and instead of mirroring it, we have one arm that way and maybe the other arms reaching out for something or on its, on the hip or something like that. This way we achieve a nice natural field. Okay, so this essentially, this is essentially is what parallels are there. Parallel literal parallels, mirroring parallels, symbolic parallels, and the opposite to parallels really is asymmetry. We want asymmetry in everything that we're doing. And we'll look at asymmetrical shapes again later on we have covered a little bit, we'll look at it again later on, just to drive the point home over how much we need to avoid parallels in our work. Alright, that's the end of this lesson. 7. Line Weights: Welcome to the lesson on land weights. In this lesson, we're going to learn and understand more about why we need to learn. Wait while we should learn, Wait, what line weights are and where land waiting comes from the concept of land waiting. The first thing that I want to teach you about is something called atmospheric perspective. The concept is pretty straightforward. Basically, in the real-world, air builds up between two objects, right? So there's just a bunch of air between the two objects. And this happens to varying degrees. Obviously when things are very close to us, there is air there, but the buildup is not much. Further back, things go, things tend to build up a little bit more. When the air builds up its teams to lighten the values, that is the brightness and darkness of the object as it goes further back in the distance. And you see this when you're looking out on top of, when you're sitting on top of a mountain, you're looking out on a city. And you see that the further back things go, you can kinda see that atmosphere. You can see that air. And that, that perception of that air buildup helps you gauge the distance back that those objects are. Because the further back we go, the latter they get. And conversely, the closer things come to us, the darker there get, right, the more contrasting they get. And you could also say the more detailed they get because they're not being blurred out by the air in between the objects, right? In a nutshell, that is atmospheric perspective. Let's call this one, close, this one far. And then just to kind of push the point, the far object would be somewhat lighter. Alright, so the air builds up. And that is what atmospheric perspective is. I see, I forgot the c here. It's going to pop that in there, right? Atmospheric perspective. Closer objects are darker, further away, objects are lighter. And we're going to use atmospheric perspective to inform how we come to understand line waiting. Line waiting isn't just something that we want to use an inking stage. We want to try and implement line waiting all the time. So let's talk about line weights. Okay? Lan weights or line waiting, right? So, so far we've learned about few techniques for achieving a 3D look, right end. One of those techniques is drawing through, right? We want to draw through objects when I imagined the other side of them. And the other technique that we've learned is overlapping lines, right? So even in 3D shapes or 2D shapes, when we start overlapping lines, we can achieve a sense of depth. And what line waiting does in many respects is it enhances the overlaps and introduces atmospheric perspective into the piece. So line weights really are degrees of weighting of the lines. Thicker lines come forward and thinner lines receipt. Okay. So thicker lines come forward and thinner lines recede in back into the distance. Pretty straightforward concept, I think, right? And so when we're drawing something in the foreground and we have an object in the background. What we can do part from the overlaps, apart from drawing through the forms to help us imagine the forms and the structures, is that we can wait the lines where they overlap on the foreground object, make them thicker and make them darker. To reinforce that this object is in front of the object behind it. What we can do is we can even darken just slightly the origin of the background points line to kind of hint at a bit of, a little bit of a shadow that's happening there from the overlap. Okay? So the basic rule really is that if an object is in front, it should have slightly thicker lines, then the object behind it. So for example, an arm crossing over chest, even in a rough view like this, Here's the arm crossing over the chest. This arm would be thicker line and have a thicker waiting to it. In general. Then the lines that it's covering, for example, there are some short lines here would be lighter, etc. Now another tip for this as well is to keep inner details for the smaller shapes, the details things like shirts and buttons and creases and folds and things in details usually keep them at thenar lines and keep the bigger shapes, the bigger forms having thicker darker lines. But nevertheless, the fundamentals of line weights really are that foreground objects have darker, thicker lines and background objects have latter lands. Now, I don't only just have this theory for you, I want to show you an example. This is an arc piece that I've done. Here you can see a multitude of varying land weights in the piece. Let me get a red pencil here, and let's deep dive. The line weights a little bit. So here we can see inner details like those little tattoo marks, the little hairs on his chin and his muscular lines of the sternocleidomastoid there. And many inner details have quite thin lines and also quiet lad lines, right? And then the bigger objects such as his head, for example, which is overlapping his neck, you can see that there is a thicker line waiting applied. Just in general, as these elements overlap, overlap the objects behind them. Thinner lines in the background elements, thicker lines in the foreground elements. Another point as well is that foreground objects generally being darker means you can use darker lines in the foreground objects and you can press lightly on your pencil to get thinner and lighter lines in the background objects. So here you can see how even though this line is, then over here, it kind of tapers off and goes pretty light as it comes to the edge here. I mean, that's not a general rule that things get louder as they go, right. But I'm just acknowledging that there isn't a more lightness here. That's basically also really just implying detail to the viewer. This isn't a main focal point of the piece. You just let it be, let it be thin, little bit loose, but it's okay. Here is we have the hand coming into the foreground that's holding the sword over here, that the line weight is emphasized as we move around. This particular form, right? And so it's whole age is made thicker and much darker to help the viewer realize and understand that this is in front and the other objects are behind. To add depth. Line waiting also adds a very nice sense of character. The piece. It makes the piece look quite professional, makes the piece look quite slick. And so you want to always be trying to engineer line weights, stacking the theories on top of each other. Second form with line overlaps. So drawing through, making sure you've got line overlaps and then making sure your line weights are reading that foreground objects have thicker lines, that background objects have thinner lines. And then remembering always also to draw loosely so that you get these nice type is at the ends of your lungs and that lands are looking natural and they have directionality to them. Alright, that is the end of the lesson on land weights. 8. Drawing Thinly and Lightly: Welcome to the lesson on drawing the knee and lightly. Now, usually when we draw, sometimes we can be pretty heavy-handed, right? We may use a very thick lines. We may press really hard on the page and get very dark lines and what we're doing. And this lesson is really about encouraging you to lean towards drawing thinner, lighter lines in general. In general, drawing thinner and lighter. For example, I'm going to press really lightly here. I'm going to draw a head using thin lines and as light lines as possible. And what this does is it gives me the freedom to make corrections. First of all, by pressing harder where I need to. So let's say I misaligned the ear, No problem. I'll draw another ear and press harder. And because of the increased contrast and the darkness, in a sense, my brain no longer acknowledges the latter lines and it's as if they don't really even exist anymore. And so drawing thinly in that sense helps me to make corrections and not have to erase as much when I'm busy trying to work out a sketch, right? Workout the rough of the sketch. Secondly as well, drawing the knee helps me control the line weights more. It's very hard to make a thick line that you've drawn thin. So if I drew this line over here for the chin, for their jaw really thick, and then I decided that I actually wanted a little bit thinner because I wanted to enhance the line weights. It's quite a lot of trouble to drive the eraser. Make sure that I'm on the right type of brush and then kind of trying to come in here and thin the line and then I'm ruining my line flow and the nice looseness that I had in the stroke. And it's just, it's not something you want to have to struggle with. Vs. drawing it firmly in the beginning allows me to, Let's just erase this whole length, allows me to control the line weights. Much better. So let's draw this in again. I'm going to use a nice thin line. And now I want to control the waiting and I want to say, okay, fine here by the neck where it overlaps, I want this to be a thicker, darker line and let that kind of taper off both sides. And then perhaps here where the jaw kind of comes and curves around over the neck. I want that to be thicker and you can have a lot more control over your lines when you're leaning more towards drawing thin, thinly and drawing lightly. So that you can easily modify your construction. So that you can easily control the land weights and thicken them where you need to. So in a nutshell, that really is what drawing thinly and loudly is about construct with thin light lines and then enhance your line weights and have more control over your line weights and easily adjust without having to erase too much. You just press a little bit harder. Okay, that is the lesson on drawing thinly and lightly. So really I want you guys to remember this. This is an often ignored lesson and then we end up with these really hectic the doc drawings. And they just look very crazy. And even I myself don't always remember to draw thin and lightly, but let me encourage you. Please lean towards the knee, drawing lightly. I'm obviously talking too much. This is lightly over here, drawing thinly and thin knee joint the knee and lightly. I will see you guys in the next lesson. Draw thin enlighten me, please. Thank you. 9. The Importance of Drawing Fast: Alright, if you are a beginner, you probably struggle to draw quickly. And that could be related to not being loose. There could be related to fear and struggling with how to draw first and what to draw first, want to think of and so on. Nevertheless, in this lesson, we want to talk about the importance of drawing fast. And really I'm just going to give you a few key points that just to help motivate you and help you to think about why drawing faster, faster is a very, very good thing. So first of all, when I say drawing fast, I literally just mean, go for it, be loose, go for it. Go crazy with your roughs. Draw really quickly. Just draw as fast as you can and always try to draw quickly, not at the expense of accuracy, but to try and go as fast as you can and be as accurate as you can at the same time. And when I say accuracy, I don't mean accuracy as in micro little details. You know, you're busy kind of getting a little accurate details now I just mean accuracy in terms of making sure the shapes kind of read in an accurate way. But try and be Foster about it, right? And that fastness is gonna be very useful to us when you're drawing quickly. One of the great things is that speed usually equals looseness, right? If you're struggling to be loose, just draw a little bit faster and you can't help but be loose when you're drawing at somewhat of a faster pace. So that's the first to speed equals looseness. And looseness is very good because it has a nice natural look to the piece. And as professional look to the piece, there is no fear and slow little crazy lines. They are just loose, beautiful lines. Okay? The second is that drawing fast is an asset. And the faster you get a drawing, the bidder. So drawing fast is an asset. And the reason it's an acid is because the faster you draw, the more drawings you do, the faster you draw equals more drawings. And the great thing about that is that if you're doing more drawings, That's right. You're making quick progress and you're advancing your skills and your aunt level much faster. Okay? So drawing fosters a lot of things behind it, right? And the more progress you make, the sooner you will reach your goal. And it's crazy. How much of this is really related to drawing fast or drawing faster? So I want to encourage you draw faster, be more free beam or loose. Correct. And your refinement stage, and we'll talk about rough and refinement just now. But really encourage you to draw faster, draw fast for these reasons, right? New drawing fast. Give you more drawings. And more drawings will mean you'll progress quicker and progress and quicker means you will reach your goals and the level you want to reach Foster, okay? And at the end of the day, you then also get many more drawings. So it's really a win-win to draw fast. I don't encourage you again to draw quicker, drill fast. Don't draw slowly. Let's move on. 10. The Two Stage Workflow of Rough and Refined: In this lesson, we're going to look at what is called the two-stage workflow. And it's not a workflow that you're immediately going to do, especially if you're a beginner. But it's important to know right now at the beginning of the course, while the two-stage workflow is and how you eventually want to be working when you're creating your drawings. So first of all, what is a workflow? Workflow really is just the order and the steps you take in order to get the work done, right. So step one, step two, step three, step four, until you get to Step ten maybe, and you're finished. Now this two-stage workflow really involves two parts. The first part is called the rough and the second part is called the refined. And this and this is in regards to the rough drawing and the refund drawing. And the rough drawing really is the phase where we want to make sure that the foundations are solid, right? The foundations are solid. That the bulk of the theory is being implemented. And I've got some examples, so we'll look at some examples just now. And it's our planning or our blueprint phase, right? Planning or blueprint phase. Okay, just a way to think about the rough phase of a drawing. It's also very loose and it's very carefree. Carefree. Let me also say that the rough stage is usually very ugly. Okay. And that's important. It's okay for it to be ugly because it needs to check some boxes. That's its goal. It's not its goal is not to look pretty, it's not to look like a good sketch. It's meant to be ugly. It's meant to look like a construction site, right? All the stuff that happens with the construction side is very different to what happens to the building. In this example, when the construction is finished and in the interior designers come and the gods who design the facade come and they make it look beautiful on the outside. But really you can't do all of that stuff which then would all fall into the refund stage, right? You can't do all of that stuff unless you have solid foundations in bulk of your theories in there, you've got the planning and the blueprints. It's loose, it's carefree. It's ugly, but it works, right? Everything needs to work. It works. So everything works. Just move this page up a bit. This is the rough stage and how I want you guys to feel in your hearts or your minds or both when you're working and doing the rough stage is to really just be carefree. Please don't worry about what the work looks like. Now you might say, well that's, that's kinda crazy. Like, isn't this a drawing? Isn't supposed to look good. The good looking part of it does come in the refund stage, right? But the rough stage is really planning, making sure everything is in its proper perspective. Yeah, I'll get to the examples just now and it'll make more sense. Nevertheless, the refined stage is really about professionalism. Neatness, professionalism, neatness, cleanliness, I guess, right? Neatness, neatness and cleanliness. Good presentation. And really the, the general prettiness of it. The general prettiness. Applying filters, smoothing out the lines a little bit, doing clean lines, doing inked type of clean lines and stuff. None of these things can be done without the rough, so that's always primary. But really the refined stage is where you make the work look good, right? This is where you make the work look good. But more important than making the work look good is this is really the stage where you can be the most creative, right? So you can be free and be the most creative, that you can be. Be the most creative. And the reason is because when you've built this rule system, if you wish, or the solid foundation, or imagine you were building a house, you built a structure of the house. You built the wall, you built the floor as you will put the doors and everything's in. You can really be free in your decorating of that house. Choosing the color, choosing the pain, choosing the furniture where you're going to hang the pictures. You don't have to worry about structural Suffolk technical things anymore. You can just worry about creative things, cool lines, trying things with the colors, trying things with how you might paint it, or might do the lawn waiting a different way or trying some new things, right? And so the refund stages, we really where you can be free and be creative. And so just as I spoke about the posture of the rough stage where you're not worrying about the prettiness of it, right? The refined stage is where you can worry about the prettiness of it and you're free to do the fun, creative, decorative things to the piece where you, where you know that you're building this stuff on the solid, rough So as we move through the course, you'll learn to distinguish what makes it rough, good and right based on the theory. And then how to refine and refine. And really, I mean, if we have two triangle that rough and refined, It's gonna look something like this. Everything is done in the rough, all the theory is done in the rough. Everything is pretty much done in the rough. And then the refiners, like just finishing it off. Ironically, this takes 20% of the time and this takes 80 per cent of the time to do, right? So that's the 8020 rule. In terms of rough and refund. Hopefully we're pretty clear on this two-stage workflow of rough and refined. So let's take a look at a few examples. And this is going to shock you, I think. So here is a piece I did of a blood LTE top of mage. And on the left side you can clearly see my super beautiful rough just going to mark it out there. And then my super beautiful refined version. Alright? And you can see, well, probably it may look crazy, especially if it'd be in the middle. Crazy like how did I go from this to this? Like that just doesn't make any sense in your mind. How did that happen? And we'll cover this through the course. But in terms of the two-stage workflow, this is pretty much what a two-stage workflow looks like. You have rough structural drawing where everything is in its place. Over here I was marking out the spell because I've painted that in. This ended up being a painting, not so much of an illustration per se. But here everything is just rough, but everything's in its right place. I've kind of worked out the technical details of things, in the positioning of things and the structure and the forms of things felt out. And I've applied all the theories to make sure that this feels right in a structurally right. And I know that once this is done, it's actually quite easy for me to come on top and kind of do what? A lot of big dinner stopped doing. Kind of adding the nice lines, adding the detailed eyes and the details and the nose and stuff. But generally, if you start with a refund stage, it's just bolt on really weak foundations and it just horrible, right? It ends up looking bad. And then the oddest can understand why the work looks poor is not working yet. You're doing the line waiting and all the cool things you see your favorite artists doing. So that's one example of referred refund. Here's another example. It's just a portrait and it's basically the same thing, right? It's basically the same thing. We've got rough on the left side, refund on the right. And we'll go through what I'm about to say in more detail. But what actually is key to remember here is when we think about the shape, form, detail, structure of how artists theoretically structured. And it's going to Example mode on that. Right. The structure of how we think about ares shaped form in detail, actually implies a workflow, right? It implies a workflow in that we will start with shape. Well, that we have shape and form and detail. Kind of structurally placed. And then we move onto refining all of these together, right? In really a refinement workflow, we're, we're still thinking about all of these elements, but our mindset is different. So what I mean by this, if that was a little confusing, is that our global category or I global workflow is rough and refund. Sure. But as a beginner, you're not gonna be able to do this off the bat because there are actually a multitude of theories that needed reapplied the rough stage. And we will go through definitely great solid workflows on this is actually made up of a few stages itself. And these stages are broken down into shape, form, and detail. And then we move on to the refund stage, which has its own theories, but they're nothing crazy like what is found in the rough stage. And then here we talk about things like gesture, which we've got entire module and gesture to go through. And form involves anatomy and the structure of things. And gesture going back to shape also has got to do with character composition. That's both symbolic and rural composition. And then details is really detailing. Detailing things, start stylizing of things, etc. Even though some of the stylistic elements are also in the shape stage. So hopefully this isn't too confusing for you right now. But just know that the rough stage and the refined stage or the global workflow. Once you've had a bit of practice, you'll be able to do all of the theoretical things in the rough stage and then work them up and make them beautiful in the refund stage, just as we see in these kind of demos. So while it may look like kind of pretty rough. And although you know that structurally everything's in its place, there is a lot of theory happening in the rough side of something. A lot of theory, in fact, pretty much all the theory. And that's a lot of what the course has. God is all these theories that help you build a good, solid rough. Because generally speaking, I want, I don't want to say there's a global rule, but it's quite easy to finish up something that is fundamentally strong, right? You can't finish up something that's fundamentally weak because then it's still weak. Alright? So that is the rough and the refund workflows. And we'll get more into it as the course goes on. But I wanted to introduce it to you now so that you start thinking about the stage of drawing. And also that as you're doing, as you're drawing, that you strive to work in these two stages. And that you all feel us and crazy and are not holding back in the rough. That once you're happy with the rough, then and keep it rough doesn't need to be crazily detailed. Then you can go into the details stage and build on it and make it look beautiful. So always working in these two stages. Let's move on. 11. What is Style?: In this lesson, we're going to answer an age old question. What is style? Particularly if you're a beginner at Arts and you may well be style, could be something that you're worrying about, your personal style. Do you have a style, how you're gonna get a style? And it's, it's very common question. It's a very common question. What is style? How do I get to style? Should I be working on my style, etc. etc. And the truth is the answer to that question is really, don't even worry about it. We're going to look at it when we talk about style. What is style? You really get two types of styles. You get stylistic genres, right? Stylistic genres. And then you get your personal style. Your personal style, or even someone else's personal style. But nevertheless, it's their personal stuff. And we're talking about stylistic genres. We're really talking about a proportional rules and some design rules that make particular artwork look a particular way. So for example, an example of a stylistic genre would be Disney. The Disney style has a very distinctive look to it. There are certain proportion size of the head, so the eyes and measurements that would make something look Disney. And we know that when we see something Disney, we acknowledge it as being Disney because of its style. Alright? Another example of a stylistic genre is manga. Now, obviously there are many subsets of the manga style. It's not just one style, there's no one manga style. But we do get a sense of an aesthetic that seems very authentic, very Japanese are very mango like. And again, it's going to come down to proportional rules and design choices. Now they're not all the same and you have the ability to make your own style within these styles. But we do recognize manga as being a sort of stylistic genre. Let's do another example. Which would be, let's say American comic book, be very specific. American comic style. Once again, it's the same thing, right? It's, it's a stylistic genre. And it has certain proportional rules and design choices that make it look a particular way. And a lot of time we could look at a Marvel comic or a DC comic and say, well, that's American comic book style. We look at some manga and say, well that's Japanese manga style. And look at some Disney movies are some Disney artwork in books and things and say, well look, that's very much Disney style. So these are kind of stylistic genres. And in a general sense, really style can move along this line of realism. Like super realism, realism all the way to what is called a super deform. I'm just gonna put it in ASD, yeah, but it's super deformed. These styles all tend to fit somewhere along the line. And for example, something like Dexter's Lab, which is very flat, is more on the super deformed side of a stylistic genre. And then sort of photo realism is right on the realistic side or when you're doing drawings and such that are very realistic. These are stylistic genres. So you want to think of style in terms of stylistic genres. Now in terms of personal style, this is really something that develops on its own, right? So it develops on its own. You don't even have to think about it develops on its own. And really it's going to come from things that you'd like to draw, things that you'd like to draw. Now, assuming you like to draw in the Disney style or a manga cell or a comic book seller would ever saw that you really like. Or even if you want to make up your own style. What ends up happening is that you start putting part of yourself in a sense into that style. That it's unmistakably a stylistic genre. And yet unmistakably your own style. Or if you've made your own stylistic genre where you've defined certain rules, sets and things you want to follow, then it's all fully yours and you have your own stylistic genre and your personal cells in it. But assuming you really liked isn't even really want to work at the comic book industry or the American comic book industry, or you really want to be a manga artist, you will inherently insert your personal style into that. Even if you're borrowing and borrowing and taking things from different artists are different art styles, different genres or hybridizing, end blending styles together. But the main key here is that I want you to realize that your personal style is really just going to happen. Anyways, you're going to do the art that you like to do, the art that pleases you. And your personal style is just going to naturally grow and come from that. And you'll start forming habits of the way that you perhaps tend to draw the eyes, the way you obtained to draw the hair, the way you tend to draw the ears. And it may or may not fit into that stylistic genre or a set, particular set stylistic genre based on what you wanna do. And so the key here, really in many senses is, don't worry about your personal style. And in terms of stylistic genres, if you want to work in those genres, do so. If you don't want to work in those genres and make up your own style and way of doing things. But nevertheless, you don't need to worry about it and worry whether you have a style, you inherently will always have a style. Things that you draw because you've drawn them, have a piece of you in how they're implemented. So ultimately, that is what is style. But now, when we think about style in terms of theory, let me add one more point to all of this. And that really is, that style is a really thin little layer, right? A very thin little layer of the massive cake. That is fundamental theory, right? So let's say fundamental parts theory style is really just a thin little layer on top of the fundamentals. Because when you know fundamental art theory, you can draw in any style. You can adapt to any style because you understand what style actually is. And it's really some tweaks. In a nutshell. It's really just tweaks to proportions and certain design choices with design trends that are being adhered to. So it's got a lot to do with proportions and design trends. For example, how law not maybe done, how the line waiting maybe downwards, more thicker lines, thinner lines, etc, etc, etc. And that's really what style is. But please know it's this thin, thin, thin layer. It's not a massively important crazy thing. The fundamentals are very, very important. So that's really is a summary of what a style. I hope it's been useful to you and let's move on. 12. How to Use Reference Correctly: In this lesson, we're going to deal with and talk about how to use reference, right? It's a very contentious, some people feel it's cheating. We're going to talk about these topics and also really cover in depth what it means to use reference. And we're going to talk about it in two ways. And talk about it in terms of design. And I'm going to talk about it in terms of study or learning. Let's first talk about study and learning first, right? When we talk about using reference in terms of studying or learning, usually that involves copying and observing. Copying and observing. What we're doing is we'll look at the reference. And here I have this reference image of this girl in class. And we will really just perhaps, let's say we want to learn about values and we want to learn about lighting. We want to learn just about the structure of the composition of the shot. We would then copy the entire piece exactly as it is. And as you know, this will then form it fall into observational art. And what we can do by copying is we will learn certain elements of the structure, certain elements of the anatomy. We can look at the anatomy, copy the anatomy shapes, and commit to memory these things that we're learning by copying and observing when we can use reference for studying and learning, right? But we don't want to use reference, right? We definitely don't want to use reference to be the artwork, right? The artwork or the basis of the artwork. Where someone can tell that we used, that we really just painted over photo drew are traced or something like that. These are things we don't want to do. This is not how we use reference tracing as well. This is not how we use reference. So these are things we don't want to do. That's not a good use of reference. So when we're using reference in terms of studying and learning, we're using it. We're using it to copy it, to learn something about the reference or the object in the reference image. And we're also using it to learn to see, see better, to observe, better to make notes to learn. Then copying is fine when you're using it for studying and learning. But it's not fine too presented as artwork, the basis of an artwork or even tracing of it, right? Which is basically the base of an artwork or using it as an artwork. But anyway, so when we're using reference for studying and learning, we can observe these various things, right? And particularly you will use a lot of reference in terms of gesture drawing, in terms of drawing anatomy and learning to draw anatomical elements, musculature, skeletal system, and so on. And we will literally just copy the reference and do a million different versions of similar references and different camera angles so that we can learn the structure of that anatomical thing. But the primary way that we actually use reference is for design. When you're referencing design, it's a completely different way of looking at the reference. No longer are we concerned with copying what we see, but rather we're looking at things in fundamental and structural ways. For example, if the top of my head we could reference from this image the colors. They're very pastel like and light. Let's kind of semi color here of the book kind of matches very well with this kind of Latin minty green color. So we could reference the colors and say, well, you know, in that reference image, I really like the color. I want to reference the color. We could reference her expression, for example. And so we're not going to copy this exact expression on our drawing in this exact pose. We can just kind of reference her expression and say, Okay, she's got a cheery smile and interested smile and who won eyebrows down and other ones up. And we can replicate those things in our work. But we're not copying, we're referencing, right? We're borrowing if you wish, from the piece. You could certainly referenced the pose, right? Reference the pose. And by referencing the pose, maybe your character is tired after a hard day at college or university or school. And you really just borrowing and the structure of the hand under the chin and the arm, the torso at this angle and maybe the other arm on the desk. You could reference the pose, you could reference the composition. You may dislike the whole composition of this lady in the background and another lady there and then the main character here, and just the whole general composition of everything. So you can reference the composition. And depending on what you're drawing, if you're drawing mechanical objects are man-made objects. You could reference mechanical operation, you could reference design choice. You could reference so many elements, so many theoretical elements that you could arguably reference when you're painting and stuff. You can reference values, that is the bright and dark values on the piece. You could reference the camera lens if you wish. Camera lens. So here they're using a very low f-stop lens to get that nice background blur and sharp foreground. So this is what really, when we talk about reference, most of the time, is what we're talking about when we're doing creative work or imaginative work. And so referencing for design falls solidly in imaginative, creative work. And referencing the study and learning is really on that observational OT, side of things. Where we were observing, to learn, to study, to grow in our understanding of the world and of how light works and how the anatomy works and so on and so forth. But when we're referencing design, we're borrowing elements that we appreciate that we like and we may mix with other elements and thrown out own designs. And when you're referencing for design generally speaking, and hopefully this should be the case. 9.99 times out of ten. If not ten out of ten times, your your work looks nothing like the work you've referenced from or the pieces that you're using for reference the multiple photos or objects or trees or backgrounds or what have you. Because you're referencing design elements, you're not referencing the actual image itself. And so that really sums up this lesson on how to use reference. And I think that's about it. Let's move on. 13. Visual Library Development: Welcome to the visual library development demo. Visual library development is an exercise we do to grow our visual library. Helping us to not need references when we're drawing, but rather they were able to pull the visual information we need from our minds. It's something that should be done pretty regularly, especially if you haven't done a lot of drawing or you're super new to drawing. And essentially visual every development drawing involves two observational drawing studies from reference, followed by one imaginative drawing without any reference using your new knowledge on the object. All the drawings are done with a two-stage workflow of rough and refined. Then they're laid out on the page and numbered 123. Generally, number three always refers to the imaginative drawing, which is the drawing from your head. In this demo, I've taken to Top Hat photos, which I begin to draw it roughly, and then roughen them before moving on to a third drawing from my imagination. Visual library development, or vl di, is a great way to both grow your visual library and also get a good warm-up drawing session and watch till the end of the video to get the gist of VLT drawing and then feel free to engage in a given VLDL assignments. So at this point of started the refined stage of this first Top Hat drawing. And I'm busy adding in land weights and showing the overlaps. Before then when I was doing the rough, I was drawing through just trying to grab the big forms, both the three-dimensional shapes and trying to get the two-dimensional shapes going. Here, I'm doing my second visual library development, drawing over the top hat and trying to be as accurate as possible. I'm pretty messy personally when I draw. Sometimes I totally break the thin and light rule. But it's definitely always best to try and strive to kind of draw us than me and lightly as possible because it makes adjusting things a lot easier. Nevertheless, there I managed to get more or less get the form down. And I then start doing the refinement on top. Doing this on paper, you may want to use a light box or a kneaded eraser to lighten your rough lines. Once you're happy with your rough digitally, you can just put a layer on top, lower the opacity of the bottom layer. And then literally just put your top lines and you'll clean lines on top of the rough. Of course, one of the great advantages of digital is when you mess up a really long stroke or a very long smooth line, you can just undo it. So with traditional media like pencil and paper and so on, what you already want to do is make sure your rough is more more to a refund level before you do the final lines so that your final lines really are just almost tracing your original drawing, so to speak. So here once again, I finish up the second image. And you may notice that I haven't really put a lot of shading or shadows into these collaborative and drawings. And there's a reason for that, particularly one because this is a drawing course I want us to refocus on drawing, not painting and rendering. And then secondly, it's also because that does take additional time when you're doing visual lab redevelopment drawings to then turn your brain into value mode and start understanding rendering concepts. So here I go into just doing my own imaginative piece. Relatively imaginative. I'm sure you've seen a similar Top Hat design some way before. Nevertheless, just go ahead and just use what I've learned from drawing the top at the two top hats before and just engage in making my own version. And then once again, I'll go into the refinement stage using two layers and kind of just doing some line weights, making sure that overlaps read and finishing it up. And then I basically end off by laying them out of the page, labeling them. And that would be a completed visual library development exercise. 14. Theory Stacking: Welcome to the last lesson of module two. And in this lesson I want to talk about something called Theory stacking, or at least that's what I call it. And as its name implies, it has to do with stacking and implementing multiple theories, particularly in the right order. Now the way that the course has been structured, it's being structured in a way that the kind of fundamental theories are built first. And all little theories stack up together at the base and you implement them all in your drawing at the same time or whatever as piece by piece. And as you learn more advanced theories, you start stacking those theories up as well as you move through the art theory triangle, if you will. And so on and so on until you're really building a finished piece, which is really built up of many different theories, right? So an example of theory stacking based on what we've learned in module two, is if I were to draw something very simple like a box, I would take my first approach after I've warmed up to really kind of get some 3D going drawing through. I'm going to draw packaging box like from moving company or something. So here's my box. And I'm drawing through and I'm thinking about the workflow as well or rough and refund workflow. And so I'm okay to be messy, I'm not worrying about anything. And then thinking about well, what are the boxes? Do I need to check? Yeah. Oh, yes. Looseness and dynamism. I think I'm going to have to be pretty loose in my refined stage to have these very nice, clean lines that have mass directionality to them versus slow static lines that have no directionality. So that's something I'm thinking about as I do this, thinking about tangent parallels. Well, a box really is for the most part, pretty parallel. So the parallel is going to have to stick in this case. But if I wanted to call tuna for the box, I might decide, well, let's add some directionality to the sides of the box and make the box look a little bit more dynamic. We can do that. Also want to think about line weights while I'm drawing this box, drawing the knee unlikely, which I'm clearly not doing here. I'm drawing lightly and then a little bit more darkly on top of it. Then of course, drawing fast. I have started drawing fast and also thinking about that two-stage workflow. And so what I'm doing is as I'm drawing out this box and then we do the rough, I'm stacking theories as I move through it. Maybe there's a flap here, another flap here. But I don't want them to, Marisol draw them at different angles. And I'm thinking about those parallels and it's been to these lands as well. It will make it look a little bit more cartoony. You don't have to go for the cartoon Look. You can have parallels in man-made objects. And really do my two-stage workflow. This could be the rough. And then on top of it I'll do the refund. I'm just going to do a lot erase of this and then work in all these theories. So here I'm going to try and really be nice and loose. And you definitely saw some of this as well in the visual language development demo video. And here I am just kind of being very loose with my arm movements. And I'm playing the theory of being loose to this. Alright? And I won't need to draw through on the box because the box is not see-through. Alright? And obviously if this were on a separate layer, I would have a very nice clean box instead of the rough in the background. Nevertheless, this concept of theory stacking is very much a, and for lack of a platinum Sorry about that, is really a checking the box thing. As you're drawing, you want to make sure that you're checking the various boxes. For example, asking yourself the question, am I drawing loosely? Do I have dynamic shapes? And all of this stuff is rough stage stuff, right? Do I have dynamic shapes? Am I doing the two-stage workflow? In how I'm working? What about, what about, for example, parallels? Am I checking parallels? And so on and so forth. And you make sure that as you're doing your drawings, all the theory you've learned, which is really fundamental theory stuff in module two, you make sure that you're checking the boxes as they say, right? Checking the boxes. Okay, I'm doing the two-stage workflow. Great. Okay, I have got dynamic shapes. Awesome. I'm definitely being loose with my arm. I'm drawing thinly and lightly, you know, all the elements that we've learned in this. So as we move through the course, make sure that every theory that you're learning is being integrated into the work you're doing. Don't do work and leave out theories. And so it may be very useful for you as well to build your own boxes to check if you feel you need something that's very granular and very specific like that to make sure that while you're drawing, you making sure, Okay, This theories in this theories and the theories in this, there isn't. Let me save this as R. In this lesson, you can trust in realist art theory, you really can. The rules really allow your creativity to be free and to be implemented well? So really make sure you're implementing the theory. Stack the theory. And as we learn more theory and higher-level types of theory, you'll just kind of continuously keep stacking the theory and keep continuously implementing it all all at once almost. And as you get better at art, you just start doing things naturally. You don't do things more out of desire then out of necessity because it's becoming a part of you. That's the end of this lesson. And if you're ready to move on to module three, I'll see you there.