Transcripts
1. Draw Characters 109 New 1080p: Hello and welcome to
draw characters 109, line art, finishing and inking. Once we've established a great character drawing
and character design, we're going to want to finish
them to a higher level. Line art as well as inking has specific rules and
techniques that we can use to enhance the 3D, the cleanness, the
professionalism, and the finisher
of our drawings. In this module, we're
going to go through everything to help you finish your drawings up to a
professional level. As usual, I encourage you to
go through all the lessons. First, get a feel
for the content, and then go through them
again and do the assignments. Looking forward to showing you how to finish your drawings. Well, see you in the lessons.
2. Creating Clean Lines and Line Art for Finishing Drawings: Welcome to Module nine. And in this first lesson, we're gonna be
looking at creating clean lines of creating clean line art as we talk
about finishing our drawings, bringing them up to a
professional level. In front of us. We have a rough
drawing of a girl. She was busy doing tracks, you're jogging or something. And suddenly she's summit of fireball of some sort, Chicago. And she's in a
state of shock with quarter at the moment
when she realized she has this ability and the
force of it's blowing her hair back and she's a
little bit stunned at this. Alright, so we have our rough
drawing here and we want to bring it to a place of
clean, clean lines, right? We want to the lines
so nice, clean state. But before we do that, we need to take some
notes and follow some guidelines
before we get there. The first thing I
want to reiterate, and you've heard me say
this countless times throughout the
course is looseness. Looseness. There is perhaps
no greater boon to your drawing abilities
than being Luce. Alright, so in order
to do clean lines, we need it to be very
loose with our arms. We need to draw without arms, not without risks necessarily unless it's a very small area. Get the lines being
nice and smooth. They get that smoothness
from the speed, and they also taper nicely
at the ends from that speed. We want looseness and
also loose lines are dynamic lines to dynamic lands appear to have a sense of
directionality to them. And a dynamic line is appealing, or a static line that's drawn
slowly is not appealing. Alright? So Lechs appeal and it's one of those elements of the
buffalo so to speak, right? We want to use this as
another thing to use. We want to use all
of the things. Use all of the Buffalo, as Bradbury says, and really
get our lines nice and new. So even the very lines
that we draw with, we want to apply
our shape theories two of looseness and dynamism. All right, so looseness
is extremely important. The next thing I want to
reiterate in our notes is that rough and refined
stage thinking, right? And the Mindset, module five, less than one, we will
discuss rough and refined. And I talked about good food
being made in a kitchen. It's not very neat in
there, it's very messy. But when you receive
it at the restaurant, it's beautiful and it's tastes nice, the presentations good. We want to have
that same sort of mindset when we're
doing a rough. Rough is about
planning and refined. It's about being loose and free, a little bit more creative, but we want to focus now on
cleaning up and detailing well and keeping things neat
and clean and presentable. So you want to change gears
when you're moving into doing clean lines or refund
lands on your piece. Then the next thing
that I want to mention is that we want to
do baselines first. This is non weighted, non weighted lines, so we don't wanna do the
line weights here. We just wanted to baseline is. And then we want to move into lawn waiting perhaps on
a separate layer if you're working digitally or
after you've done the basic lines on your
drawing on traditional, right? We do the line waiting often
end up tying into all of this is that we want
to draw thin lines, are fairly thin lines. And the reason is
it's much easier to thicken the line than
it is to thin a line. Right? So these are these
are basic guidelines. These are our basic
guidelines when it comes to creating clean line art. Now, you're going to find, let's get into this. Now. You're going to find that
you may not be super good at doing this initially when you wants
to create clean lines, freehand and doing it freehand is the narrow
gate, if you will. It's the road less traveled because it's really
hard to do clean lines freehand without quite
a substantial amount of practice moving your hand to
get those lines very clean. But it's certainly the
more rewarding road. And at the end of
the day you will be much more efficient
than someone perhaps using Illustrator
or someone doing 1,000 billion undoes to
get each line perfect. I will still are still
personally undo a lot, but you will undo for less and you'll be far more efficient
at jointly nons freehand. So what I'm doing is I'm
creating a layer on top. Let's call this
layer clean lines. If you're on paper,
you will want to have a nice refined rough. This is a little bit unrefined and you wanted to have
a more refined rough. And then you went to
simply do your clean hands on a new piece of paper on top. But here we're going
to do the clean lines on a layer on top
of our rough lines. I'm going to drop the opacity
of our rough lines quite substantially here so that
we can see the clean lines. And using our notes,
Let's infect. Bring our notes, scale our notes down so we can see them
while we're doing this. Right? We're going to end digitally
working digitally. It's peace dependent, but
usually on a three-page, I'm working at
about four or three line thickness in
terms of the pixel, the brush waiting on the line. But you'll want to work
with thinner lines, right? Always remember thinner lines. We want to do our baselines first and then align
waiting after. So that we can have some
control over our line waiting more control over alignment
if we draw thin lines. And additionally, if
you're moving into painting your piece or
coloring your piece, thinner lines are
generally preferred. Of course it's based on
the style you might, you might want to
do a style that is really ludicrously
thick lines, right? So of course go for it then. But generally speaking,
if you wanted to look painterly afterwards or whatnot, you want to consider
thinner lines if your intention is to make the lines disappear, right? So what we're gonna
do here is very loosely draw in the
side of her head. And the movements that
I'm doing is that I'm using my arm to
draw, first of all, and I'm making sure
that I'm trying to draw quickly and being using
a single struck, right? I don't want this to
look like a rough, clean line work which we will
cover in the next video. I want this to look like clean, clean, clean, clean
line work, right? We want it to be
very clean and have a look of precision and
confidence about it. And so what I do is I try as much as possible to
use a single stroke. I'm very quick, uh, try to be quick with the lines. You can see what I'm
doing here because I want that effect of
the land tapering. Alright? And let me note as well that
similarly to traditional, I'd be using a
brush in Photoshop here I'm using my own brush
called inker flatter, which is really just
a solid color brush that has size on the
pin pressure, right? There is no opacity change in my line work here
in the actual ink, that it's always black. No matter how hard or soft
oppress it stays pitch black, much like an inking pen. Nevertheless, I tried to move very quickly and I'm going to just very quickly get
these details in. Let me just say I change the structure a
little bit there. I'll just draw it again. And I'm focusing
on moving quickly. Right now when it comes to our eyes
here because it is quite thick in the rough, I'm going to thicken
up my brush. And I will be a little bit stroke key if I can say are a little
bit scratchy. Just because the
eyelashes teens to have little bits of details
poking out of them. The little lash lines and
little hairs and things. And so if the upper lid line
is a little rough looking, it's not the end of the world because it kind of
matches, right? As well as the load
line to some extent. Because you've got those
little hairs poking out. Alright? And you can see up quite thick, thick waiting on the eyes. But that's generally
the only place I would have slightly
thicker waiting. Otherwise, the
rest of the areas, we will return back
to our thin lines, straw in the nose. And once again I'm
back to one stroking. Alright, I just want to
one stroke everything. But don't get it to
undo and try again. Let me say while I'm doing this, I am working on a webcam, it's antique tablet,
that means I'm drawing on the display. And this will be
particularly hard for you, especially if you're a beginner, if you're using a webcam tablet, because the hand-eye coordination
is not as accurate on those devices as
it is when you're looking at it and drawing it, drawing on it as if it's
right in front of you. Now, don't be discouraged
because fortunately, Photoshop has made advances
in the last few years. We've included a, the ability
to rotate your canvas. But in Photoshop's rotation
tool is R and you can just simply click and drag
if you're on tablet. And I also do it very often
on this particular antique. That is a useful tool to helping you learn
not quite quickly. Will join her lid line there
and our lead line here. And so we'd move
through the piece, drawing in each of
these elements, trying to be as
accurate as possible, trying to be as
quick as possible. Using our arms to draw and
so on and so forth. Alright. Then we'd move on to
the line waiting phase, which we would put
on a separate layer. I see ever done half
of this and the notes layer, it's not
the end of the world. But then on a separate layer, we would do the line waiting. And I'm going to
rotate this page here to do the line waiting. And the beauty of doing you're waiting on a separate layer is that you can then control the weighting much more
easily for first of all, where if you make a mistake, you can easily erase
just the waiting and not actually touch
the base drawing which you've hopefully
already completed in terms of its
baseline waiting. But additionally, when you do the line waiting
on a separate layer. You are able to be more
efficient at waiting. Because when you look at
the base work unweighted, you can decide the key areas
where you need to wait. But if you're waiting the lines as you're
doing the cleanup, you end up perhaps overweighting some areas and the whole piece seems equally weighted
everywhere almost. And you've, you've, you've added line weights and you've
spent time adding line weights to
places that probably really didn't need it or it
really didn't matter much. It's also more efficient
to wait after you've done your baseline, your
baselines. Alright? And so this is basically
the process we want to use. Now you might be saying, Well, I'm really bad at drawing
these smooth lines. I'm still new and I
need lots of practice. So how can I get clean
lines if I can't do this yet without doing 8,000 undoes and you're gonna get
hand cramps when you do that. Many undoes, right?
Well, first of all, I would say practice is the
best medicine for this. You really want to
just keep doing it. Keep practicing. Try and get your hand and your arm used to having
the arm doing the lines, lock your wrist, let the arm do the lines and you can get
some great smooth lines. Ultimately, a lot of drawing
really is just S curves, C curves, slot curves. And that's pretty much
it in straight lines. So it's not like
there's thousands of different ways to draw the lines are just kind of combining them. But I know that perhaps you may be Nc and you wanted
to get straight to it. So I do have a solution for you, some software out there. And the software I'm
gonna show you today is Clip Studio Paint has the ability on their
inking tools, right? So here I've chosen the
pane on the left hand side. This is Clip Studio
Paint Pro over here. And I'm using the turnip pen, but many of their pens at this option had the ability here for stabilization,
line stabilization. Now, at its current setting, it draws very much
like Photoshop. It will require me to use my alma lot to get smooth lines. But as I ramp this line
stabilization value up seconds to something
really high like 17. What it does is it draws in the line a few
milliseconds up to, I think a few seconds after you've drawn
the line and it's smooth the line out and it kind of follows where
you want it to go. So you can't see my hand moving on the tablet
as I draw this line, but effectively, as I draw this line for the
side of her face, I'm finished drawing
the line before this application
has ended the line, I'm already finished drawing it and it draws it in afterwards. And it makes drawing
clean lines very quick and easy without you having
to do too many undoes. So this is also a very good
solution for efficiency. But also if you find
that you're really struggling to get
those clean lines, get an application like
Clip Studio Paint pro. I think open, not open
canvas Paint Tool. Sai also has land
stabilization and a few other applications have
land stabilization in them. So check to see the
features set of that Clip Studio Paint is
actually really nicely priced. So I must second
highly recommend this. You can see here it really, I can just get these
all in one go. Perhaps I'm being a purist,
I would still advanced, striving to develop the ability yourself to just freehand
very clean lines. Now, before we end, let me show you one
more great thing you might want to
consider doing, particularly if you're
working digitally and when you're creating
your luck clean line art. Over here I have a picture of
my piece called grandiose. And her land weighting is
done and her line OD is done. And she looks pretty cool. But there's a problem
with digital. Digital tends to be very sharp. By default, everything is
very sharp and very edgy. And it takes a bit of a natural
look away from the work. But there is a wonderful trick you can do when you're working digitally that I can say traditionally almost
comes by default. Traditionally inks kind of bleed at a micron
level on the page. You can't really
see it that much, but there's a vibe of it
of what we're about to do. So here's the final
lines on the layer. And what I'm gonna
do is I'm going to duplicate these lines. So now I've got to
funnel lines layers. Let's call this 1 s layer. Okay, So there's two fine lines. You can see the piece
got really dark. I'm going to put the second
layer behind the first layer. So there's the
final lines layer, they're just putting that L. I'm going to put this
second layer here. And I'm going to now go
into the filter menu. And many applications
have this capability. I'm going to go to
the blur menu here. I'm going to select
a Gaussian blur. It may be different
per application, but you can play around with it and see where that option is. And what I'm gonna do
is I'm going to apply a slight blur to the lines
below my main lines. Alright, just a slight blur. And here I'm just, I'm really just playing with the slider. So if I take the blur off, you can see how sharp and AG, my clean line art
looks, maybe to shop. But as I blow this lower layer, I can add a gentleness or
a softness to my lines, making them look
exceptionally professional. This is one of my top tricks, one of my top secrets. Sometimes they'll even
lower the opacity a little bit if I don't want the
effect to be too strong, but I still want it there. And let's see when we
take it off and on. Very sharp, much softer when you look at the entire
piece in its entirety. Well, from that distance it
doesn't seem that appealing, but believe you me, it makes all the difference
in the world. And in terms of
lighting as well, if you are familiar
with Latin terminology, what it does do is, in a sense, it almost adds a sense of ambient occlusion
to your lines. It really softens the
lungs up with it off, with it on, with it
off, with it on. And when you get to coloring and makes all the difference
in the world on the piece to have the land's not so razor sharp like this. The sharpness kind of
looks cool in a sense. But when you start coloring,
it just looks so digital. And if you want to just to look a little bit more natural, you can soften those
lines in the background. That is the end of the lesson. I hope it's been useful to you. Please practice it and I'll
see you in the next lesson.
3. Creating Rough Clean Lines and Line Art fo Finishing Drawings: Creating clean
line art is great, but what if you want to have a bit more of a sketchy look on, more of a traditional
look in your work. Well, the two options that
you have available to you, or one using a textured brush digitally or to being a
little bit more rough, but in a controlled way. So in front of us, we have
Clip Studio Paint here. I've chosen the
textured paintbrush. And if we compare that e.g. to the gel pen brush
or the turnip brush, you can see that the
textured paint brush is a little bit more
rough on its edges. Let's just zoom in a
little bit there to see that what we could
do is we could still follow the
exact same principles of creating clean line auto, creating good line on that
we saw in the first lesson. But we're just going to
use a more textured brush. And of course,
these brush packs, this comes with Clip Studio, but however, for Photoshop, you could find it thousands
of brush packs available online for free with
all sorts of textures, for all kinds of pencils, every pencil you ever imagined, probably you could just
carry on in that same way. But let's take a look at
a different approach. If you don't want to
use textured brushes. Moving to Photoshop here, one strategy I've found
when you want to get, but a more of a traditional look is to use a very thin brush. But instead of doing a single
strokes for every line, you sketch it a little bit more. So in this instance I'll double line vet and I'll come
down hand sketch that. I'm taking care to still stay loose and
on the same track. But I'm actually drawing additional lines in where
I need them. Not too many. I don't want it to
look too crazy, but I'm taking a
little bit easier in a sense on myself in terms of
getting those clean lines. And now because I'm
using a thinner brush, you don't notice
the floors overtly. You're not seeing these
crazy lines and thinking, well, I don't think people generally will
look at your work and go, Well, look on Tati is even though you are
he or she shall say, even though you are putting
in these additional lines. But it has quite an
interesting effect to double the lines and be a
little bit more sketchy. But you're actually doing clean, sketchy lines in a sense, right? And that can give your work
a nice traditional look as well and see how appealing
that looks as well. If that's the look
you're going for, perhaps you're not
intending to do some crazy level of super painting or
something on top of it, we need perfect lines. Then you can just
sketch in these lines keeping those same
shapes, being loose. But you can see how easy it
is to achieve that effect. The key here being thin lines, you need to use
thinner lines do this because you're gonna be
doubling the lines up. And really, that
is all there is to creating slightly
rougher line art. That's it. I'll see you
in the next lesson.
4. Character Composition When Drawing Characters: Let's now take a quick look at basic layout and
spacing of your work. You've finished your drawing, you've done your line art. The drawing is complete
and it looks great. And you want to make sure that the land on the
page has done well. The first thing we
want to be thinking about is page composition. So when we're putting stuff
on a page to display, we're bound by the rules
of that page, right? We're bound by the
borders of the page. And this is called
page-based composition, where the borders of
the page are in fact an element of the design
themselves as well, right? So when I'm putting
a single character on a page or painting in an environment painting or a landscape painting or
doing a portrait painting. The actual borders
of the page are actually part of
the design as well. And so we want to use
the negative space. We want to be thinking about the shapes of the
negative space, and we want to try and
design in the snap. Fortunately, there is a system
called the rule of thirds that it helps us easily
layout our content, our drawings and
paintings and whatnot in a logical fashion that is balanced just following
this simple rule. And you've probably seen this on your camera before,
your phone camera. What it is essentially is
a grid of three-by-three, where the page is split
equally into these non spaces. And what we want to focus
on is these areas here, the intersecting points of these lines for our
rule of thirds. Now, this of course, depends on the type of
composition you're going for. So a third spaced composition would put the focal
point of your character. Usually their head would try to keep the focal
point of the character, your number one focal point
in one of these zones. So we're looking at a portrait, a portrait orientation
page here. And if we were going for a
third spaced composition, we would want to put this character, her
name is go India. We'd want to put grandiose
head or focal points close to this number one in the area of this number
one or any of these, but at least one of them, right? We want the focal points
to be at one point yet, however, that's great. Perhaps you've got a character
that fits in an L shape or something with that
would make logical sense. But a lot of the times we're
drawing our characters, perhaps in a way where they're just a single
character on the page. And so what we wanna
do is another type of composition still using the
rule of thirds, though, called iconographic composition,
where we try to keep the bulk of the character in
the middle blocks, right? So that's kind of grindy
as composition here, but she's not properly or well composed on
the page just yet because there's something
else we have to take into account a part for the
page-based composition. And that is the space
around the character. Too many times people will draw the characters kinda partially
off the page, right? Or too big or really too small, which is often
occurrence as well with it is this tiny little
character in from the page. And what you want to do is try to ensure that when you're laying
out your characters, you're laying them out with
adequate space around them. So imagine them in a block, almost like this Photoshop
block, for instance, where there's adequate
space around them that will frame the
character. Alright? It's basically highlighting
the character of the space is how long the
character for the viewer. And it's making the
viewer feel like things aren't going too crazy, that they've got space to
contemplate the piece, that there's space around the character that is
helping us focus on the elements of the character
and not worrying about us reaching the ends of the page. Once again, remember the
borders of the page or in fact, design elements of the page. And so is the spacing, it's a design element. So you want to see it as
a thing that you want to try to use to
enhance your piece. Right here, we've adjusted the spacing
around going there, and she looks much more evenly spaced now than she was before. She was a little bit big. And then last but not least, you will want to probably put your signature or some kind
of information on there, maybe the date and whatnot. And my advice here
for you is try not to have your
signature be too big or too small and try to put
it in a place that is not overly highlighted or that is not overly in a
focal point, e.g. you don't really
want to put yours. I wouldn't want to put the
signature here inside of the loop of the hair braid
because they have read itself, is creating a focal point
out of the signature. And you want the
signature be seen, but it's not really part
of the piece, right? So put it somewhere where
it's kinda out of the way, but it can be near the piece, but somewhere where
it's not going to necessarily be a focal point, I would avoid generally putting it interest
in the corners and things like that in these
types of illustrations. Where it really is going to
be more beneficial if it's closer to the piece
like that and it makes the piece look more complete
and more professional. Will write. And that is pretty much it for our layout basic lab in
spacing of my characters, we want to remember the
rule of thirds composition, iconographic composition, keeping good spacing
or anti characters, and then also ensuring that
our signatures on not being, becoming focal
points in our p.sit. So signatures around
moocs and what have you. And let me say one final thing. If you are posting your
work online or digitally, I would certainly
recommend putting your website down at the
bottom of the page here. I'm just tapping on that yet. And putting it
somewhere on the page. Because of course, in
today's digital world, we've got two people
downloading and sharing and saving to the hard
drives and various things. And having your website address
there, your link there. Especially if you're
looking for freelance work, you want to get noticed in the industry, whatever industry, the film industry or
the game industry, It's good to have a
website on there. Once again, make sure it's not a focal point and I would
keep it fairly light. Just, just a way for people
to know who did this. Even writing your name next to your signature
is a good idea. Alright, that's it from
me for this lesson, and I will see you guys
in the next module.
Scott Harris, Illustrator, Painter | Character Artist
