Draw Characters 110 Complete Drawing Demos

1. Draw Characters 110 Intro: Hello and welcome to Draw Characters 110, Complete Drawing Demos. This module is specifically focused on showing you full character drawing workflows and will be updated regularly with more workflows so that you can see the start to finish production of a character drawing. Some demos we'll use the full workflow, and others will use the two-stage workflow. But it will give you a good overview of how you can approach drawing your own characters from start all the way to clear finish, and implementing all of the theories that we've learned up to this point. As usual, please watch through the Demos and then move through them one more time and do the assignments. I look forward to sharing my character drawings with you. Many more Demos to come. I'll see you in the Lessons. Cheers 2. ChronoViper Timelapse 30: Welcome to the Timelapse and commentary of ChronoViper. This particular character is a female snapper that has the capability to teleport to three separate places. That's basically the story of her. She's drawn in a little bit more of an American comic book top of style, or what to call my normal kind of solver, our teams, the style AT teams to draw in naturally, I suppose. And here you can see me drawing out the forms. And really from the very beginning, thinking about the tilts and thinking about the gesture. Also doing some foreshortening with her gun, which is over her shoulder, and then hiding her left arm her right arm in fact, behind her form, giving us that nice overlap. And also just an opportunity to show off the little teleport module that she's holding, which is kinda one of the focal points. By putting an object in the hand, I'm creating another focal point apart from the head. As we know, the hands are usually the focal points. And then what I really wanted to do was give her two plots in R here and then have the plates both kind of swing out into two really long sort of plateaued pony tails in a sense. And it's just pause there for the moment discussed this. So the reason I want to do this was two-fold one because I liked the idea of having these two platted ponytail is coming out. But the other idea was that I wanted some kind of element of the piece to also create a beautiful graphic shape to give the entire silhouette and very interesting look. And as we move through the piece, you'll see that I decided to take out one of the pony tails because it just wasn't working there with too many of them. And it actually ends up working out quite nicely to just have the single circular one cell moving around the piece. Now, the reason I'm mentioning this, the reason it's important is is that you and your pieces, you will want to think about both the design of the piece, but also the overall silhouette look of the piece, right? The overall silhouette, but also the overall sort of graphic nature of the piece. As we have this circle coming behind her. In a sense, we also have this snapper ruffled, breaking the parallel of that circular shape of the ponytail happening. And as for the drawing workflow itself, I've started as usual with just basic dynamic forms, but roughing them in and adding a few little features here and there. Nothing overly descriptive. Trying to get the basic shapes, the flat shapes to read and the silhouette to read. But still I have to think about form. And so you see there's a lot of this duality happening. We're thinking about shape and form simultaneously and sometimes we're adding in details. Just because of the detail may affect the shape of the former. And everything of course is going to come back down to shape. Do the shapes read well, do the shapes look good? Does the silhouette read? As we know when we think to our triangle shape takes the biggest part of our Art fundamentals, right? Let's move on here. And I really very similarly to a lot of the Demos you will see, strive to get the big forms to read, to get the anatomy to be correctly proportioned into read well, so that her legs and her head and her body all seem to be in the correct proportions. And what I did here is I don't really draw a lot of industrial design stuff very often. And so I wanted to create some kind of initial idea for myself of what the weapon might look like. It didn't actually work out. I went with a plank in the beginning. I just kinda imagined a plank and sit to myself. I'll just kind of bold, interesting forms and shapes onto that plank to get that weapon to read. And she has a sniper rifle saw nude. We have a long barrel and needs to have a bunch of some sort. I'm not really a weapons expert, but I was just using my general creativity. Now she's called ChronoViper, the vapor pod, really just alluding to the fact that she's a snapper and that she's going to be snapping people. And the corona pod referring to the kind of technology, time-space bidding technology that had teleport pads use. I wanted to emphasize the teleport pads. And so we have two of them additionally on her right leg here. And I mean, of the topics I'm talking about at the moment, we switching and bear in mind as you watch this to think about what category of topic am I referring to when I'm talking about, for example, showing that teleport pads. I'm really talking about character design oriented things, not really drawing our intent things. But when I'm talking about roughing in shapes and doing forms, then we're talking about character drawing really things are workflow related things. Is that work-related thing related to shape or is it related to former? Is it related to, to detail? As we move through the drawing of the gun here, I use a straight line just to guide me to make sure that I'm keeping everything kind of very parallel. When you're dealing with man-made objects. Ensuring that your straight lines are parallel is crucial. If they are a little bit skew or a little bit off the entire industrial design, whether it's a weapon or in some kind of machinery, a car, a vehicle just looks really, really bad. It looks really badly drawn. And so keeping the straight lines parallel to one another, obviously where they need to be parallel to one another is quiet, pivotal and quite important. Because I feel I have a very strong foundation to the piece I've rotated ahead slightly, I've tilted her head slightly. We're doing more of a bus shot. Yes. We don't have her entire body in as well. It's much easier for me to go in and add details. And a lot of the last stages that you're seeing of the rough ER is meat trying to finalize elements, finalize the big details. Okay, So she's got the teleport strap and she's got a bullet strep and she's got to teleport thing in our hand and she's got her weapon behind and she's got a ponytail, and then she's got her head and her body and her legs and all those things gesture incorrectly. Do I have the horizontal tilts and vertical tilts, the MR. Twisting, do I have foreshortening? I do a little bit in the gun, a little bit in the hair. Because the solid foundation is there. You'll see that a lot of this section that we're looking at now is really just adding in details, in fiddling with design things, not really drawing things. And I played with the idea of having a top a little bit open, but I kinda felt like I wanted to keep her more of a body suit tub and makes it look a little bit more serious like ever suits, not open. It means that she's actually ready for business. She's ready to go out there and snaps and bad guys or whatever the case may be, where the shot looked a little bit. Casual. Suit was open. I suppose you could do it. That's just my personal feeling on it, but yeah. I was just roughing in the basic shape, therefore, the platted up, up do hairstyle. And then also playing around with some ideas to modify the silhouette on her back, maybe giving her a teleport, a pack or something. When I was using some kind of piston designs, one of my favorite artists tends to use piston designs quite alanine is working with, tended to use it back when he was doing certain games. But anyway, then the hourglass shape, I know it looks like a black widow shape. I've implemented a few terms just now, just in the weapon design and stuff, but I raised it. But I was trying to seal the idea of we've got pose, we've got expression, and then we've got the advent and accessories. And I wanted to seal the theme of the world in, by adding a clock or adding in those. And the symbolism for the hour glass and things like that to try and just kinda reinforce her name. She's called ChronoViper. She's a sniper with time-space warping portals. Is there a way that I could emphasize this particular theme in her design, but obviously not do it in too much of a cheese way. I didn't want to put clocks everywhere. I didn't want to integrate a clock into the gun, for example, or Viper teeth everywhere. And you can see way back in the beginning of the Timelapse and you'll see this in the full dimmer as well. I drew an entire sort of head unit on her. Right. So that heads via teeth. But I just felt like I wanted to take it a little bit more subtly. If you start doing things in too much of an obvious or overt way, then she ends up looking a little bit Fisher Price, a little bit kitty like to, to, Easy to read, too easy to understand. The viewer doesn't even have to think too much, but you kinda bring it into the world of realism when you're thinking about more subtle ways to integrate this. And so they you've just seen me just checking, doing my checks, checking my tilts, checking my overlaps, and so on. I also do sometimes I do form check. So I'll actually just put a layer on top of the rough layer and literally just drawing the basic forms, the head form the torso, the stomach, the pelvis and the legs, and also checking the lines of action. And this is something I would recommend you do as well. Check, check, check. As long as you're in the rough, you're free to fail, you're free to make mistakes, you're free to make changes. The only thing you have to realize is that when you go into the refined stage, it may become a very difficult for you to make structural changes because you're trying to now be neat and think very creatively and be very loose. And when you're doing that, you're trying to add the stress of all the structural thinking to try to be neat as well. It becomes too much, it becomes too overwhelming. So make sure that you're iterating freely in your rough. But try to make sure that the RAF is very, very solid and you're very happy with it compositionally in terms of the shapes phone-based, and making sure that the anatomy is wrapped the proportions of correct. The hands or the size of the face, generally speaking, the head in the body proportions makes sense in the style that you're working in, so on and so forth, that logical things happening the piece, if there's wind blowing, everything is blowing in the same way, for example, that she is in fact, or your character is in fact balanced, right? Don't forget the things we've learned about balance. There's all these things to take into consideration. Just carry on here. So what I do, do with this piece is there I'm busy checking overlaps. What to do with this pieces. I use digital tools quite a bit in terms of getting the platted hairstyle down quickly, I could hand draw it, but it's going to take a lot of time for really no good reason. The plots are these two shapes we did covered in the hand design section. And to replicate them along that long strand of hair accurately, especially in our advanced age, was going to take forever. So you will see me using digital tools basically just select and transform of a pattern that I make to get it in very quickly. And it's pretty cool that you're able to iterate and create stuff. There's quickly and design and add in these types of details very rapidly. At this point, I've got in the basic Formation of her face, the basic proportions or in basic design of a faces. And I felt it was a little bit pointy, so I'd change that later on. Also to keep in mind that head was tilting down, which means that her ear would move up slightly. I was feeling like the piece was a little busy. Now, now that I look at it, post the final, am, I feel like it probably wouldn't have been the end of the world to have that second piece of hair. And it looks quite interesting. She looks a little bit octopus like I suppose. But nevertheless, I did take it out just for the case of simplicity. And there are tried to subtly indicate the fangs of the Viper with the two sort of tattoos under her eyes, which I'll go on to expand a little bit later as well. Here I'm toying again with changing the silhouette of the back area. But the negative space shapes are pretty cool. Anyways. There are add a, a bayonet, I think it's called a Burnet to the front of a gun, which at one point I decided is too large. So I'll make it smaller. And then when it's smaller, I realize it's not very useful. So I create a railing that it can actually slide on to punch forward, to stab the enemy or what have you. And so at this stage, I am actually utilizing the ponytail. You can see I've raised the second ponytail. I'm utilizing the ponytail shape to create a dagger at the end of a ponytail. But compositionally, I'm creating a pointer that points to her face, right? Because when you initially look at the space, you kind of go head. And then or other hand is kind of Slotnick, kinda pointing you not quantity the other hand, but it's, it's kinda creating a barrier. It's pointing into the other hand. And then you kind of the hand with the teleport and you kind of drifted down the piece. Look around, you see the belt strap and then you move over to the dagger on her her ponytail and then of course points you've backup to the head. The Snapper awful while they're an important element, is not a compositional, it's not a compositional focal point. It's definitely a kneaded element. Of course, she's a snapper. Snobbish needs a sniper rifle, but it's really holds us in the piece. Its angle holds us in the piece of the circular nature of the piece of how we containing her body in this circular shape, which makes great, makes this type of piece good for a graphic loud, like maybe a cover or something like that, right? Where you want a very strong graphic image than less of a narrative image in terms of like a comic book panel or something. Alright, let's move on. So I'm making final tweaks and adjustments to the drawing. I'm adjusting some tilts because I just feel like that the detailing is killing the gesture. I was a bit worried when I was doing this piece that perhaps the tilts were a little bit too strong in her forms. So I did flip it quite a number of terms and just made sure that she's still seem to balance that you didn't seem like her back was talking too much. You really don't want to characters back to OK, beyond obviously what is humanly possible. And just out of interests and trivia, I was really struggling with my tablet at this point because it kept disconnecting my pin for some reason. And so that's why these particular frames while the footage is actually moving, you can just see little flash of things. Had to fix my pin there. And so there I did a form check Just double-checking the forms. I wanted to make sure that that ongoing back could actually do that in some kind of reasonable way. It pretty much could. It's a little bit of a stretch, but it's not hectic. And as you know, when you see that the RAF gets lot, we're gonna be moving into the refined stage, or what I like to call the drawing stage. This is where we're going to be drawing the drawing because we've done the planning of the drawing. So now we're going to draw the drawing. Now before we go into the Draw, the drawing stage, let's rewind right back to the beginning again and just take another look. Just because I want to be super clear on this workflow. Just like the other workflows, I want to be super clear of what is actually happening when I'm conceding the initial drawing. 2 h 12, that's on the actual speed. That's where we've stopped at there. So it took 2 h 12 min roughly to get to the point where we're going to do the drawing. The drawing. So she was quite a long planning, I must say. She was quite a long planning. She has lots of little details. Let's go right back to the beginning. Here we see that I'm basically building the forms. I've got quite a must say, more detail than usual on that hand. And I think I probably did that. The reasons that I drew this two or three days ago, I can't quite remember exactly why did that, but most likely I drew that a handout because it's so close to the face. I knew there was important for it to read well, even in the basic form stage. And so I drew it out in quantity complex way here we, It's quite clear what then hand is doing. The rest of the pieces that really is just the head. Some markings for the proportions, some indication you can see are indicated the sternum. There So already it's done. I'm sorry. It's the top connection point of the clavicle while the sternum is just below it. But nevertheless, that's thereby the collarbones where it meets in the middle. And that helps me as a marketing point of where to place the breasts. And then I also know that the other hand is going to be in the scene somewhere nearby. And how I measure the other handout is from the bottom of the ribcage on know that the elbow of that far side arm needs to be near there. So I'll just start really drawing out the hand. Then I use the same basic shapes that we learned in module three, basic forms that dynamic forms to draw in the legs and draw in the pelvis and the stomach. And so here I've been rough in over that using anatomical knowledge, which you need to gain from drawing, of course, the actual bone structure, the musculature, the skin service structure, and of course, doing your gesture drawings. But particularly anatomical gesture drawings can help you advance it very quickly in this. Let me just say before we move on, you don't need to do thousands of anatomical gesture drawings. Do 100 and you will already have leveled up 2345 levels to hundred and you're pretty much there. So don't think that you need really need thousands of drawings. Just really pay attention when you aren't drawing work very intentionally and be very focused and Mary mindful when you're ordering so that you're absorbing, you're learning, you're paying attention to the details of the anatomy. But please don't get caught up in anatomy learning than the fundamentals. Good, good at the fundamentals. And you'll see that anatomy, as I've said previously, is really just rotate learning. Right? And at this stage I'm transitioning into detailing based on this foundation. So the guns forms were really in there, but the body's forms are pretty much an end. They don't change much as we move throughout the piece. And we slowly move into a detailing rough stage where we're just adding an extra elements and I'm figuring out what elements are 100 body. And you can see there I'm deciding if she should have some kind of teleport button on her or whatnot. Nevertheless, Let's move into our refinement step here. Whereas I'd like to say drawing the drawing. And I'm gonna once again, and I'll probably reinforce this every single demo. If I remember too. We want to remember that when we get to this stage, we have a mindset shift. We shift our minds. We're not in a constructing phase. We're going to use, in a sense for less theory in this phase and we're going to be more free and more loose in the space. And a dare I say more creative. You can make creative choices yet and you can make some changes. You also don't stick necessarily 100% to the plan that you've laid down. Here's where you can really mess with it a little bit. Not the structure obviously, but the look. You can mess with the look and you can get creative with the hair and you can get creative with the lines and the line waiting. And so we'll move into the stage. And with Character work generally speaking, we wanna make sure that the eyes are perfect and that their head really reads as well as possible. The head and the hair reads really well. Here I was just making some key binding changes. And we move into the eyes and the head refinement stage or the drawing of the drawing stage here. And you'll see me in most of the Demos. And indeed in this demo as well. Going back to the eyes, changing the eyes, adjusting the eyes, adjusting the pupils, making sure that squinted center that she appears to be looking at us. Even add some line waiting in while I'm doing the head at this stage because I really want to make sure that hit is right before I go and move on to what is effectively the easy part, the rest of the pieces pretty easy barring the hands and the details of the gun, the rest of the pieces, Just a couple of loose lines. It's pretty straightforward. It's not too complicated. And so here are kind of religious to use my intuition to build up those hair overlaps. Thinking about the here theory and just doing some basic lines versus a piece. This is maybe a little bit quickly. But I'm sure you'll get the gist of it. Now, something to note about this particular piece is that I do the general stages, we do the basic lines, and then I go in and do the line weights. But additionally, I bring in a bunch of textures using knowledge that I have of lighting. And this I've done really because I wanted this piece to just be a little bit more textured. She's not really going to be painted or have in-depth Coloring on her. She's gonna have a very simple coloring when I eventually do that. And the idea was that perhaps I could use these textures to really bring in a sense of shadow and a sense of light on her. Now we haven't covered light in this particular course at all. And that's because lighting of course, is its own giant bag of theory and fundamentals and things like that. So we're moving quite rapidly through the refinement stages here. And really just putting in those lines, thinking carefully about the positioning of elements. I remember that finger was just deciding that was physically possible, which thankfully it turned out to be. And I'm just going to slow this footage down just a little bit. And what I'm doing here effectively as a bolt that shape you see on the left. And I then duplicate it multiple times. Just get to that area I duplicated multiple times and then I use what is called Perspective Warp in Photoshop. And Perspective Warp allows you to literally beamed this basic flat design that you've made and conform it to the shape that you want. So I've bended all around so I can get the plant really quickly. Now of course, if this were done, traditionally, would have to go and draw each in each and every individual plant. I was already, I think, rocking around 3 h at this point. Nevertheless, wherever they are digital tools that make your life more efficient and you are very aware of the fundamentals of how to do something, go ahead and use those digital tools. At the end of the day, particularly in the working world, everything is about efficiency. I'm not talking about copying other people's work, stealing other people's work, tracing, overwork, know rather I'm saying if a tool can help you and help you be fostered in, definitely use that tool. Because at the end of the day, the drawing is not about in this instance, about the plate's, right. So go ahead and use digital tools in this way. And of course, let me know if you want a guide on how to use this particular type of transformation tool. If you're a Photoshop pro, you probably already know how to do this. But if you're not, if you're new to digital or you're generally working traditional due let me know. I'll be very happy to make a tutorial for you on that. So as you can see here, I'm bolding these strands and then I'm using the Warp tool to get all of the little plates in there. And I don't think that took very long, maybe ten, 15 min tops. You look at the layers panel on the right side, you'll see that I have. Then I will often sometimes draw a piece of something on another layer just so that I can erase the original drawing underneath so that that piece makes sense. So that's what I'm doing there. So once again of privilege you have of digital, traditional, I would have to just basically draw it in and erase. So there are add the final gun details. And now I'm designing those teleported pads and design one and I use copy paste to duplicate it. And I decided to not go with an overly themed design here, putting in an hourglass are o'clock or something, could have been a wasted opportunity, perhaps perhaps would have been a good place to do it. But I didn't want to have too much focused on the teleport pads. I wanted to just really keep the focus on her hands, on her face. And I guess that's pretty much where I went with that. One of those, that's the link area for the third one, probably connects magnetically. And then I decided it would be quite cool to give her some kind of I wouldn't say a ribbon. I can't think of the word that I want right now. But it starts with like an S, but anyway, it's kinda like a belt thing that's made of cloth. I go and add in the little details and making sure that asymmetrical. And then I use the liquify tool there just to adjust the angle. It actually didn't work super well. So I basically just went in and redrew the pony tails at the top or the platter, the top. And the reason I did that was a really founded quite hard. I don't think I've ever drawn this type of hairstyle before. And so I wanted the plate's on the top of her head to read really, really well, especially the outside silhouette. And you'll see when our learn weight, the section of a hit as well. I'd take care to make sure that you can see multiple bumps on the top of a head so that those plants actually read quite clearly. I've labeled that layer learn weights. And so we move into doing line waiting here. Know that the plant has to read pretty clearly. And right now I am thinking primarily about what are the big elements in front? The hand is in front of the gun, the head is in front of the neck and the gun, those guys need some good lung weights. The overall silhouette of a body needs a nice the gland weights so that it's well perceived in the negative space. And of course, the hairline here that I'm working on a do end up changing a little bit. Also needs to learn weight. Lift legs in front of the right leg. Give that some line waiting. The belt of bullets is in front of the leg. So I'll wait that up and so on and so forth. I move through the piece doing these various line weights. And here's where I'm really focusing on those halon weights. And I do think I come in here at some stage. I'm not sure if it's now. And I just kinda clarify the overlaps in the middle parting in her hair because I think I may have done that already actually looking at it. Course, the lower part of that belt needs to be darker. And of course, all the increases in the plants need to be done as well as the little braid holder, things that familiar with the names of these things that hold the hair, but nevertheless So what are finally do ending off here, I think I'm gonna get there now is this is where are basically draw shapes, shapes for light and shapes of shadow. This is very comic book inspired way of doing. I really like it. I think a lot of my future work is going to include this. I've only really just started to do this type of work, but it gives the piece of nice texture. It is more of an implied detail, not an explicit detail. So I've only drawn the very basic level of lighting knowledge here, although I do have some reflected lining and whatnot, but basically empty shapes are in the light and the darker or the shaded shapes are generally in the shadow. And because she's kind of in war or whatever, it really does give her a bit more of a gritty look. And let me say this as we near the end of this demo, really that the core of your work, the bulk of your work, you want to make sure that you're getting all of the foundational stuff in, in the rough in right? You want to the rough to be your focus, the rough to be where you're thinking. Anybody can technically finish a piece, well, right? More or less. Obviously this is the most glamorous part of the work, even to a secondary viewer. This is the most glamorous part she's looking. So I don't know superhero we or snobbery. And she's looking great and clean and finished in the lungs are wonderful. And I've even done the soft, the land softening effect there that are taught to you guys. And as glamorous as this is, if you want to be hardcore, you want to be serious, you're serious about your work. You have to look at this phase of the artwork as trashed to you, right? Look at it as meaningless trash worthless to you. And know that you need the fundamentals to get to here. Alright, taken very seriously. Take what I'm saying very seriously. Do not focus on creating pretty work. You know, all the various gotten instead of giving you through the course has been foundations, foundations, foundations. And I don't want you at this point to be overwhelmed by the refinement stage or the drawing of the drawing stage. The planning of the drawing is where it counts the Bolding of the building, the cooking of the food to use those analogies. That's where it counts. No one wants to eat uncooked food, right? No matter how well it's laid out in plate. Raw meat, raw chicken for exam, it's gonna make you sick. It tastes disgusting. It's kind of another analogy. So foundations build strong foundations. Then you can enjoy the fruits of doing all this detailing on those strong foundations. Don't polish it. 3rd Guards. I didn't want to have to use that phrase again, but don't polish towards makes sure that your rough is really well drawn. I do hope that you guys enjoy watching the long version of this. You'll see all the multiple different decisions and roots that are take while I'm drawing this, it is quite a long Demo. And so once again, definitely put a movie on in the background or listened to some music while you're watching that. But it's definitely a worthwhile Demo to go through because it follows the process is quite in depth because I took this one a little bit slower and that's why the Demo is a little bit longer, right? Thanks for watching guys. I hope you've enjoyed this demo. 4. Carmi Timelapse 20: Welcome to this Timelapse Demo of Kami, which is the magic girl. And we're going to take a look at her now. And we're going to really move through the piece, posing it points just to kinda take a look at what is happening during the workflow. As I've started working here on her. Usually I always start with the head and we would want to start at the head usually because it's a good at measuring tool, we can get the proportions down. So I started measuring out. This piece ended up being a lot more rough than usual for me. I don't know what mine space I was in, but it was extremely rough at the beginning. And design wise, it was gonna go with spectacles on the character. It's important to note this particular character was inspired by a, another character. She was designed as marketing Art for a mobile role-playing game. This particular character was designed to have a bit more, a slightly more Western look to her, just to appeal to Western audiences in a particular marketing of that title. Here, in terms of the head shape, you can see I initially started with a round shape. I moved to an S curve over her forehead and then wants to bring in a nice bit of asymmetry into the hats to eliminate any kind of parallels in that shape. Just felt that those red better. In terms of the drawing, shares quite a revealing cleavage area that was actually slightly modified in the final painting, this character when all the way from drawing through Painting, just because we felt she was a little 2-AG. And so I went in there on the final painting and added additional strips. And it actually kind of brought her edginess down just a little bit sometimes based on if a project you're working on. And also while you're drawing, you're trying to achieve something and you'll kind of exploring, look while you're doing it. And I think sometimes you may be edgier than you intend to be just because you're thinking about the anatomy, the structure of the anatomy, so much. Otherwise, of course, some people obviously are being sag as they want to be, depends on the purpose of it. But, but this particular piece, my goal was really to bring in a cute character that had a little bit of sexiness to her. But I didn't want to overdo it because the particular video game is not really a hectic kind of video games, more of acute style role-playing, top of game. And so here I move into doing the leg anatomy and then putting in the stockings and another S-curve there for the skirt bottom. And you'll see me do this quite often. It's nice to use as curves in that way because there's no parallels. If you just use a C curve one way or the other symptoms, you can look a little bit flat. And just kind of solidified structure of a pose. I do a slight rotation here. Using the selection tool, selecting the whole form, hitting Control T to transform and just rotating a little bit. And you'll see throughout the Demos where I use selections to turn elements or to add in those horizontal and vertical tilts. And really that is one of the strong points of digital. It's saved so much time. In terms of making these tweaks, making these adjustments. There are a lightly erase in comic book terms, this is often called ghosting. You kind of erasing your lands to very large and drawing over them yourself, still only working on one layer there in the bottom-right. And actually suddenly moved into a refining the rough stage, even though this is falling under the umbrella of just rough. And just looking to solidify the pose and the forms. And then adding in the relevant details to her clothing, getting her outfit looking right. It's another rotation there. And we want to remember as well at the stage that if you don't exaggerate your gesture as you add details, the details teens to have this effect of killing off the drama of the pose. And so you'll want to constantly be tweaking the tilt specifically because the tilt suffer a lot in the lines of action, suffer a lot from detailing. Constantly be mindful of that. And so at this stage I'm pretty happy with the pose overall. Her stance, I'll probably end up rotating or a little bit more. I think she filled in selection you steroids it a little bit to the right. And I just proceed with just adding in just general details things to complete her look, make an adjustment to that hand there so that's easier to render, want to get to their cleanup phase. And you'll see I'll also work on the right-hand as well. Just so that when I do get to clean up, I will be able to draw more quickly without having to struggle. I think as well as you want to keep in mind to draw everything in 3D. If you look at the little men, a potions and things on her belt Here, particularly this one, you can see that it has two sides. We can see a little bit of the bottom and a little bit of the side here, necrosis? Yeah, a little bit of the bottom the top lit area. And suddenly with this button on her head, it's intentional that you can see the front side of the button. You can also see a little sliver of the side of the button. And as much as possible, you want to try and draw everything in 3D. It goes back to that using all the buffalo mantra. So try as much as possible to draw as many elements as possible in 3D or show multiple sides of those objects. Moving the lung. And now I'm getting to thinking about the expression a little bit. Getting a bit of an idea of the face shape in here, I wouldn't call it the final phase shape, just placeholders and getting the hairstyle in a little bit, a little bit more as well. And then I'll start working on that hand. Thinking about the position of the hand way with the pinky be, and the pinky usually has pinky drift, right? We don't forget about pinky trip to kinda its own mission and wants to do its own thing. Alright? And so at around this point, I do my own checks. I have a checklist in my mind. Actually, before I talk about that, here, I put this scarf piece which is coming from her. If she had a cape or it's actually just a scarf piece though. It's kinda coming off the back here and it's intentionally having multiple levels of thickness. So it starts kinda thick and it goes a little bit thin and a little bit thicker, and then back to thin again. It has a nice AS curve and striving for that asymmetry and also giving that sense of secondary action, right? Is there a wind blowing on her that is pushing this scarf at? And also in a sense, having these belts traps flying off the gloves, right, so that there's this feeling of life in the piece. Anyway. So I go and I check, particularly things we've learned in module six, those five key elements of character posing, I'm checking lines of action of kicking object overlaps. Do I have enough? I'm checking for in which I don't think this piece has any foreshortening and you don't always need it, but it didn't have any in it. And of course, twisting as well. Who hit is of course it's rotating in a slightly different angle from her chest and even a torso seems to be I mean, her pelvis seems to be rotating a little bit of a different angle. And so what I'm doing here is I do the rough at whatever size. It's not an important thing. But then when I need to do the final drawing, I get a much larger resolution page. So this is actually an A3 size page, probably more than likely. And I've been proceed to do the clean lines on top. Here we go, usually in all the workflows and all the Drawing Demos, you'll see at some point, the drawing will get really light like this. The rough will get really light. And I will go into doing the roughened stage. And the key thing here is shifting your mode of thought. So you're not super worried about structure at this stage. You're more worried about having your line overlaps, read your object overlaps. Read your lines being loose and clear and clean depending on the look that you're going for of course, but always loose. And also going into more of a symbolic design or graphic design, MSF being a little bit more creative, having FUN with the shapes that you're putting down. But always thinking about the shape, the shapes that you're making, or they're asymmetrical, or they Dynamic, do they read well? And so I like to think that cleanup tool a lot of the time is really a rinse and repeat stage because you're really putting down clean lines and depending on the workflow you're using, but generally speaking, you will do all the basic lands first and then go in and do your line weights on top of that and whatever style you're going for. As I do the Rs here, I will always spend more time than necessary or more time as much time as I need should I say, making sure that the eyes read and that the eyes look good. I think in this piece, I got lucky in that. It didn't take very long to get the basic I looked down that I wanted. But a lot of the terms I would work even 20 or 30 min just on the US. Not even worrying about the risks of the piece because the eyes have to read well, they absolutely have to read well, they've got to be exactly right as you want them to be, right. If you mess them up, will mess up the whole character. And so I spend as much time as I need on the eyes getting them to look the way I want them to look. There. I'm using some move adjustments. And let me say this point as well on this particular piece, I'm using a very thin lines. You can see I'm drawing in one pixel lines here in Photoshop. And the reason for that is because the aimed goal of this piece is not just to be a lined Illustration, she's meant to be painted. I will want to paint over the lines and make them disappear. They don't completely disappear, but to make them not really that visible. So The actual line on itself, it shouldn't be that visible. But I also really like a clean lines to work with. So I wanted to do do thin lines so that can make them disappear a little bit later on. And I certainly a little bit. But she was drawn in as using such thin lines because she's gonna be painted, not colored. She's, she's not going to have simple character Coloring like Manga or comic books. She's going to have actual painting over happening on the actual figure. And as I work here, particularly with the hair, looseness is absolutely pivotal. And it's so crucial and the overlaps as well, I need to draw them quickly. I need to be loose with the overlaps and the chunks of here, the volumes need to make sense. To you can see I go back to the eye and really just trying to make everything read. I'm moving them, the pupils a little bit closer. And I'm doing a stylistic choice yet, but almost adding to irises, it's not quite to irises is actually any one hours in one people. But there's this extra circle in the eye. That's my personal stylistic preference. There's 1,000 ways you could do this, and that's my way I would like to think of doing the eyes. Also notice how I zoom in and out constantly and read the distance is something we want to be very aware of. If you constantly drawing very close up and zoomed in and you're not zooming out to look at the overall picture. Does the overall picture read? You might find that you tend to make a lot of weird mistakes or the drawing, this doesn't look right when you zoom out. And it can be an issue. So constantly vary your zoom. Zoom in when you need the accuracy would constitute zoom out to the reader distance or the distance that the image is meant to be read at or looked at and check that it reads well there because that's ultimately what matters most no matter how well, you may have drawn an eye up close. And so on that button, I used copy and paste of an ellipse that I had drawn to really build that other side out very quickly. Again, that's the advantage of digital. Now, the thing is, as well as if you'd like traditional all we're gonna, and I love traditional drawing. The workflow. Tricks are a little bit different, but ultimately it's the same thing. I would do a rough on a clean piece of paper, write, rough it out, and then I might use a second piece of paper to do a refund rough. But when it does come to doing final lines, you want a very finished and clean, refined rough. So you might do a very finished, clean, refined rough. And really you're inking stage, if you will. Clean land stayed on another piece of paper using a lightbox underneath is usually really just about tracing. Tracing on top of that refund rough less than it is about. As you can see in this particular workflow. This is about designing the elements so much because you will see that a lot of elements here very rough right there undesired. And I will put a gym around her neck just now in that elliptical section. And that's been designed as I draw on top of this rough. And suddenly you can do this tradition as well as nothing stopping you from doing it traditionally. It's just going to mean that you're going to need an additional phase with a super clean, clean up where you can combine this and to clean up and drawing on traditional, I mean on digital. But granted, the better you get it. Traditional, which I just mean in terms of the practical application of drawing, your drawing skills as you become more accurate with drawing lines and being very accurate with your pins and things like that. You'll be able to do it as well. It's just a little bit different. One of the downsides to using Photoshop when you're doing clean lines is it doesn't have line stabilization. There's nothing to really help you get these clean lines. And so the way I've grown into doing these green lines is practicing really, just really practicing constantly using sweeps, doing undoes where I need to. And I've practiced quite a lot, To be honest, that I probably require less undoes now than I used to. So for example, perhaps two or three or four years ago, I was undoing, do a line for an arm or a line for a piece of hair. And I do it ten or 15 times. Now I'll probably do it three to five times because I'm more accurate now in my handout coordination has improved a little bit just in terms of getting the smooth lines. Another thing is, let me just remind you as well. Drawing is not about being good with your arm. Obviously, it's about applying the theory and the practical in combination with each other. But it's not it's not really much reliant. Can you draw on Yes. Can you draw a curve and S-curve a C curve? Yes. Well then you can pretty much draw. So it's really so theory heavy. But in terms of cleanup, you do need those clean lines and it's going to take practice to move quickly and get those sweeping lines down So I'm going to move our footage a little bit further along here. I basically continue to do the thin lines stage. Will my basic lines stage. And once that's done, I take the rough away. I'll pause this in a moment. And over here. And then I start working on the line weights. So you can see the image is pretty flat without the line weights. It's still a good image. It's still kinda reads FUN. But it really needs some differentiation between what is in front and what is behind. The line weights. So quite crucial. Even if I am painting it later, the line weights are crucial in helping me see what is in front and what is behind. And also it allows me to FL1 to iterate on the different types of styles of Coloring or Painting that I wanted to do. And I, because the drawing is so solid and we want to keep in mind as well. If you have a good drawing, but you painted badly or you color it badly, it's still a good drawing. But if you have a bad drawing and it's colored really well, painted really well, it's still a bad drawing. So you wanna make sure that the drawing really works and is work and it's really looking good as looking at peeling. It is convincing the viewer of the characters in motion, of the theme of the character that outfit, the costume that opposes reading. Well. So here I just go in and I start line waiting using our principles of if the object is in front, it has a thicker line. If it's behind, it has a thinner line. If it's in front of it as a darker line, if it's behind it has a lighter line. Usually internal details have thinner lateral lines. External silhouettes have thicker, darker lines, slightly thicker, obviously, depending on the kind of work you're doing, the style you're doing. Putting in that hook shading to show the overlaps like they're on the hair pieces coming from the lip of the hat. And so on. Move through this piece. Learn waiting where I needs to learn weight. And you can see already the difference that it makes to this focal point of the head area. And on that note, really, when you're splitting your time up in cleanup between important areas of focus, obviously you want to work the focal points. Put your most time investment in the focal points because if the other areas are a little bit looser, a little bit rough, it's okay because the view is being directed by how you've composed the character to the face, to the hands, into any other focal points that you've set up in the piece. And this particular cleanup that I'm doing here, I'm using because I'm using such thin brushes, I can be a little rough, especially because the resolution of this page is quite high. I can be a little rough because when you zoom out, you just don't see any line areas. It doesn't look sketchy or rough. And you can see as we zoom in closely, there are some areas with overlapping lines and there are some areas that are not super perfectly clean. And of course you can go for super clean line on that is a particular style. Typically look that is great. But you don't always have to based on the purpose or the end goal of the piece. I'm going to move this just a little bit forward here. And so as we approach the end of the piece, really just emphasizing overlaps, emphasizing those line weights. And at the end of the day, ending up with a fairly appealing character drawing, right? And that is Comey. The major sees a major and a role-playing game called League of defenders. You can check that out if you want to. And I'll see you guys, I guess in the next demo, please do enjoy the full demo of kwame. You can go and watch this in real time. I think only have clean-up stage is slightly Timelapse. So do enjoy that. And I'll see you guys in the next demo. Thank you for watching 5. Roderick Timelapse 14: Welcome to the Roderick Demo drawing. And in this demo we're gonna be looking at Roderick. He's N your typical cliched burly Ahmed warrior guy. And he was designed to be the westernized version for an RPG game from China for the marketing Art very similar to Kami, same game in fact. And so you see that I initially started with those three thumbnail drawings and I don't have the footage of those. Each one of those took about two to 5 min. And then we're basically done just to get the basic silhouette that we wanted in the marketing Art down for that particular title, we went with the number three, which is this particular pose. And you can see me here immediately blow up the thumbnail drawing and kind of stopped doing rough rough detailing and sort of rough refinement on top of this thumbnail, you might say, Well, where are the dynamic forms? And the thing is really that I'm drawing the dynamic forms. I'm not drawing the dynamic forms. I'm imagining the dynamic forms as I'm drawing out these elements. And I must say on this particular piece, it was kind of a time crunch to get him out quickly. And sometimes when I do need to draw very quickly and may just forego drawing the dynamic forms. Not because I'm in a bit of a rush and you'd rather just relying on my ability to imagine them in, draw the, refund, the rough details on top of these imagined dynamic forms. Now this doesn't always work and a lot of its terms you'll see me probably in this demo as well, correcting elements because I didn't draw the dynamic form first, I didn't have a solid enough grasp of what I wanted to draw on that particular element, whether it was the arm, the leg, or what have you. His right hand arm, for example. And that said you will see undergo many changes. Let me talk about another topic while you are watching this time, let's go through which is the idea that you have gained a particular level of drawing skill doesn't mean every drawing you now do is going to be awesome. Alright? Now of course you want to put only your best work in your portfolio. That's something else. But it doesn't necessarily mean that every piece you do is great. And I don't consider this piece to be one of my bidder works. And could have been the tongue crunch, could have been that I don't think I planted particularly well or I fiddled with him too much. He's okay at the end of the day, he he's okay and he got the job done in the project continued and whatnot. But just realize as well that like everything, just like a music artist, she may release an album, but you're only going to have maybe 123 hits and the rest are gonna be, okay. So one, put your best work in your portfolio, but also be realistic. Not every single piece you do is gonna be amazing or blow people's minds. But every piece you do is definitely always a mark of progress. Every piece you do is just another piece on the road to you getting better and better and better. Here you can see me in a sense, struggling to get that sorting, struggling to sort the format. And there'll be multiple proportion changes that I do through the course of this piece. And I think again, I wanted him to be very big and burly, so I change the size of his head to being a little bit smaller. That makes him look a lot more dominating. But at the same time I was really messing with this overall proportions. This top of drawing where you see me moving a lot and moving lot of elements and erasing, redrawing, erasing, redrawing, raising drug. It's very chaotic and sometimes you can get into a rut with this sort of thing. You get it into a rut of drawing where just things don't feel like they're working. And to be honest with you, if I had to be very critical of myself, I would say that it's primarily improper planning, the fundamental level that's usually what's going to come down to. You haven't planned fundamentals properly. So because you haven't done that, everything's kind of like you're stumbling along as you're moving through the piece, trying to make things work. And you'll see I do multiple AMA designs and multiple detailed changes on the piece and things just don't seem to work, but it does fortunately come together at the end of the day. And the real-world does time to your work sometimes too, where there's a time crunch, you need to get the job done, do the best you can and the time you have. That's all you can do and just get on with it. So that's what I did at that stage. And I do think if I wasn't on such a time crunch, it would have planned it a little bit better. So here I've used some cues from the original Character Design, which is very TB look. Mainly their helmet which infect two didn't really end up being so good in the final. That's probably why you've never seen the actual posted final? I didn't I wasn't really proud of it. But as for a Drawing Demos, this certainly is a demo of how things can go and also does follow the general processes, particularly here we're working the rough stage. You can see that I'm trying to figure out the details of this particular character. How does the AMA look particularly? Now, if you've seen my work, you might notice that I don't really draw that many gods and it's something I definitely want to work on. I want to draw more gas And also I didn't draw much Ama, I don't think I had drawn medieval armor prior to this point. I was really struggling along. And definitely, I would think I would have appreciated time to have gotten more research in all medicines, how Alma fits together. I really ring the slack crazy. Nevertheless, you see me doing a few checks there. I did a few checks just now. And it's the same tricks that we've learned in module six, those five crucial elements of posing. And of course, also thinking here about the hand position, the head position that tilts. And perhaps by now, you're probably recognizing a particular pattern in the Demos you've seen this far, not all Demos, of course, with Anime as you've likely seen this far. In that the head angle, the shoulder angle in the pelvis angle are generally always edit tilde. Sometimes it can be a similar, similar tilt. Sometimes it's a different tilt. But the key thing is, remember these tilts try to avoid parallels. It's not the end of the world. If you have a hand parallel to the shoulders or perhaps the shoulders parallel to the pelvis. But try been to add in additional overlapping objects or additional foreshortening, etcetera, etcetera. Because you want to get that variant, that dynamic look in your work the same time. Try to make sure that you are not doing the same tilts on every single piece in which I do feel that when you look at ChronoViper, you look at Comi, you look at Roderick. They tend to have a similar vibe to them. And I think in this instance, more rotations are needed amongst this variety of work so that perhaps Roderick could have been looking the other way, helping the tilts to be opposite, right? So always think about ways, even in your work, try not to have too many symbolic repeating patterns in your work at either because to viewers of your portfolio views of your work, they might start to feel, well, everything looks Samy. They might not know why it looks Samy. They might feel that things looking saving it could be that your tilts are repeating in every single piece. So be very aware of that. Here I'm going into slightly more of a refund rough. There. I'm adjusting his head to change his proportions. I'm using these digital tools, the selection tools and stuff to move things around. And I want to get this rough to a point where I'm confident that when I draw over it, it's going to look reasonably okay. And at this point is quite chunky and the rough, but I start moving directly into doing the drawing of the drawing will be clean. The refined phase, the clean lines phase. Here I was pretty intentional to make sure that his helmet showed a multiple sides, which was a little bit tricky to draw out of my head, but it just came out pretty okay. And I just do think that the proportions of his head were just a little bit too weird if you consider the top height of the helmet going to the bottom of the chin, his eyes just seem too low now. And the final piece, this was corrected in the final painted work, it was corrected and it looks okay. It's not super noticeable in the lunch line Art. I mean, you could argue that there's padding and narrower. He's got a lot of hair in there or something like that. But you can see there already. There's the sense that I've felt that something was a little strange. So I had adjusted the eyes. But as we move into the cleanup phase, it's nothing you haven't seen very similar to Kami, depending if you've watched the Kami video before this or you're watching this one first techniques you should be first crushes, see in these started are, but nevertheless, because he is being drawn to be painted over, not 100% paint over it, mostly painted over that. The lines on that noticeable. I use a very thin line. In this instance, I'm using a two-point line and all the basic lands are being done first. Speaking about workflow as I go through this, usually when there is a crunch, when there is a time crunch, It's very, it's a very good idea to just stick to a workflow so that you can work logically through the working very quickly. So in this instance, I certainly did do all the lines first, unlike ChronoViper, where I did a little bit Elon waiting here and there while I was doing just the basic land phase here, it was really get the Lansdowne, get the piece done, then do the land waiting afterwards, and then what my hands clean of it. Then we'll do Painting another time or whatever. So when you're working on the rough, remember that it's that time to be free creatively. You can think of new designs, think of new things that you'd like to do on the character itself. Change up things, add extra sides, two objects, just takes another line to add another side to something. Resource things move things, change things, get it looking as good as possible. Do everything you can while you're working on stage. You don't want to revisit the piece 50 times and do multiple post edits after you're done. Just, it just makes the piece look overworked What I'm doing there on that leg is I initially wanted to have the same omnia zone and both. But here is an example of where I was thinking of both symbolic and also shape symmetry. And I didn't want any symmetry, I wanted asymmetry. So I design a completely separate shaped armor on his right leg so that the left and right legs AMA, even though there were the left and laugh right links where at different twisted angles, I wanted the AMR itself to look different, to break the symmetry to the viewer so that the legs weren't just a Del, Ponte. And also I was actually sneakily adding the points on the top of the armor. It's kind of drive the viewer's eyes backup to the focal point which was the head. Just looking at his arm there quite a bit of anatomical knowledge. It's not 100% anatomically correct, but it takes quite a bit of understanding of how the muscles plug into one another. And again, I just want to reinforce and potent this for you to just do your anatomy studies. Following the anatomy study plan. You can watch anatomy videos or whatever, but no one can really teach you to be good at anatomy. You have to learn it. You have to learn it off by heart, by yourself. People can give you tips, tips to learning anatomy, but learning anatomy is not really drawing, right? Learning and enemies learning anatomy. Doctors have to learn anatomy. Vets after learn anatomy, autosave to learn anatomy. It's one of those things. So learn the anatomy, it really is worth it. And it's just a, just an amazing tool in your pocket when you have got it down. And at this point, I'm being very careful to make sure that the perspective of the blade is reasonably okay, right, looks reasonably right. But rather when we're talking about character drawing, a lot of the times we're working in a very shallow field of view or shallow cone of vision. So a lot of times you're not having extreme perspective effects happening. You're having kind of basic perspective effects happening. That's not to say that perspective isn't useful in character drawing either. What I'm, what I'm trying to say is that you want to use basic logic. Things that are closer to us are bigger. Things that are moving away from us are smaller. As things go back into space, they narrow and received, right? Just the basic stuff of how we see. I don't think I made any major adjustments to the sword as I was working on the piece. I just felt that because of it's awkward shape, which was inferred somewhat from the original chubby style work of the game. That it kind of implied the kind of space that it was taken out reasonably fund and plus are also used the slack for shortening of the hilt to really sell the Perspective angle of the piece. And as we near the end of this demo, you will see me moving into land waiting and just making a few adjustments here and there. And that is pretty much the end of this demo. I will see you in the next demo. Please feel free to watch the full length version of this demo. Have a good one?