Drawing Comic Art - Understanding Line, Shape, and Form

1. Introduction to the Class: the live one. My name is Robert Marcelo, and welcome to my class drawing comic art line, shape and form. In this class, we're going first talk about the language of the line. So a lot of times you'll hear people referred. Teoh are shaped language. And the main thing is that you just realize that each one of these aspects of your work convey a certain narrative. So we're gonna talk a little bit about that. We're gonna talk about the benefits of using primitive shapes, a lot of people thrown upon it. But I really think it's the key to basically unlocking the more advanced strong's for yourself. Then we're gonna jump into some scenarios where we actually work through, rendering the forms and adding depth. So we're gonna take the basic line work converting to shape and then forms. Then, from there, we're gonna add some detail. We're gonna shade and refine the concepts, and I'm gonna show you a couple different examples of a few areas of the body because this is one of the ways that I practice, and I find it to be the most beneficial. It helped me to create variation of my work, which I think is very important. And I think it will also help you to develop your own style. So I'm excited to know what you think about this class, and I hope you enjoy it. So talk to you soon. 2. L1 Line Language and Line Energy: welcome back. So now we're gonna talk about lying shape and form. We're gonna start off it lines and really, really talk about this in the way that it affects. Comic are okay, So really effects all are. And obviously, knowing more about it is gonna help you to be aware of it when you go to create your illustrations. So what I've got here is Bristol board smooth. I've got a technical pencil. I guess you could call it, but it's a lead holder type pencil made by Stabler. I believe it's how you say it. But you know, any lead holder any pencil will do. I just want to be aware of the tools. Amusing pen tell clickable Racer and a what I call a roller ruler. But it's obviously a Williams and Plath parallel platter. Okay, So what I want to do is talk to you about creating lines, uh, in lines themselves are, you know, kind of left out. A lot of times, people just talk about drawing and creating artwork, but then they don't really get into line. Languages like toe refer to it as it's basically the energy in the you know what the lines . Conveying we have to remember that are in and of itself is a language. It's a visual language. So knowing what you're trying to convey with, you know almost every line is important. And the more that you get into illustrating, you'll start realizing that these lines make a big difference on how your heart work conveys how it reads to the viewer. So, for instance, if we were to take this and just go across the canvas here and just draw a line, you know, what does it say to you? Does it just look like a boring plain line? I would know a lot of people that would call this a boring line. Okay, it's referred to that way a lot of times in comparison to a more energetic line. So let's say in comparison we do something like this. You know which of the two have more energy? Obviously, this one down here. But what is this top one say to you? Says to me, Anyways, I guess we could all read it differently. It's his stability, says function. It says Horizon, like if this was the rise in plain, this is the sky, but it gives a certain feeling of a solid, rigid strength to it. So a strong line. We could elaborate on that line a little bit more by simply beefing up one side. Normally, just probably do this by hand. But let me just try to put that in there with roller here. So, just like that, we have awaited line on one side, so you can also structure lines. You could do the same thing here, where maybe you want the bottom of these dips to be a little bit more weighted, just kind of draw through there and make those bottom dips a little bit more waited. So it obviously starts to convey a little bit different idea. Just a simple is that just by using weighted lines now, another thing you can dio is you can omit parts of your your line work right? This is very common and comics. I actually recommend that you really pay attention to this because what happens is you are able Teoh kind of harder to see there. But you definitely see it an incline. You are able to convey things like where light might be hitting a service that's one of the many ways that this is beneficial. Nothing is. You start to draw your illustrations by learning to omit certain parts of them, which is very essential and a lot of things that it helps to make the artwork more interesting. Energetic. It also just saved your time. You're not trying to trace every contour of every shape inside of the artwork, which is an amateur kind of mistake, that you'll see a lot of people going and try to draw every shape. And that's not what you want to do You want. Omit certain areas you want to learn toe, lean towards drawing the shadows, drawing the line weight on the shadow side. Things like that. Sometimes you'll break those rules for stylistic interpretation. All sorts of you know neat things that you want to do in your are. But it's very important to pay attention to simple things like line wait line breaks and try to incorporate incorporate those into your own artwork. Eso This is obviously just the main to write. This would be an organic line. This would be a very structured line. Straight line. What's another thing that lines can convey if we take and we simply create an angle. What does that say? It's almost a shape now. If we connected that last line, there would be a shape. But it's an angle. And what is this angle tell us is kind of conveys that it's sharp that it might be dangerous if it was a character, and that was their nose or their eyes. You could say that character might be untrustworthy. Always, always feel it's a bit strange, but that's that's kind of how it is like with shape language. If you want your character to look more friendly and lovable, it's a lot of rounded shapes like Think of a teddy bear in a big, round belly on it. So all those things factor in when you start designing your character, your all these lines cohesively fit together and they form a you know, an idea narrative. So you got to be very aware that as you construct them, okay and also lined in succession can convey basically texture. So this is more like a rendering. But if you were to put a bunch of lines in succession like this, could stagger, Army could make him ah little bit different from one another e. I would say if they're too awfully structured side by side, he would think of something more mechanical. See the top. There is a start to align them. Ah, little to evenly by 10. To get down here, they might resemble something like stippling of hair. Eso again lines can also convey texture, grit. For instance, If we go up to the straight line here and we just simply put line breaks will be to, ah, specific about how far apart these are because again, remember, the more specific we are about how far apart they are, the more that we're going to say. This is mechanically, uh, created because things that aren't mechanical, organic and have more fluid a toe. So you see, since there's, you know, separations there they almost look mechanical, but maybe, like they almost resemble like a hand stitching of some kind. But that's how you would illustrate maybe bricks or a design in the building of any sort. And again, if you want it to be mawr specifically, you're trying to convey that it's ah well, say a futuristic room or something like that, then you're gonna be very specific in the way it did it connects and maybe map things out and measure things out. Um, another thing that you can be aware of is when you do things like this little doodles and patterns, you can make something look like it's more hypnotic. Or just, you know, mawr strange, you know, in a feeling of sense. So, you know, just by doing that sort of design one continuous line that's not evenly disperse and has some bumpiness to it. It conveys that kind of loose energy in that again hypnotic kind of sense that we're used to relating that you could almost call that a shape. But it's still a line, so lots of things that you can convey with your lines, you know, just like we established here. This is a curved line in a straight line. There's also the way in which you create that line. So, for instance, if I throw a curve here and I literally throw the line, there's gonna be more energy there. There's also going to be a little bit more of a smooth flow to it, because I threw it so quickly, so it generally will give you a nice, smooth line where if you do this, especially if you don't have as much hand control, you're going to get more bumping this there. And I guarantee if we zoomed up on these, I could see it, and I don't know if he can, but if you zoomed up really tight, you're going to see a little bit more rigidness here. Now, I've drawn for a lot of years over 20 years, so I should be able to do a nice control line. And I also have These is reference to help me. Maybe a good example would be side to side because I actually have to pull the line down in inward to myself to get more control. So you're gonna rotate the page and go with what feels the most comfortable, especially if you're trying to get a sense of fluidity. So, for instance, you're trying to draw hair, and so for me, drawing hair to the side doesn't make his much sense. But another thing is, if I throw the line, I may not get those bends that I want often referred to his beauty lines at the very end with a curl simply, you know, a kind of curl up. Flick up. Um I mean, I get that, but you can notice this line because I threw it, is has more of a, you know, smooth feel to it and actually has a little bit more of a weight to the back. There were again. It's ah, it's the fact that I'm actually using less control, but the speed is actually kind of contributing to the control, in a sense, So it's just a flick of the pencil. And you want to really play around with that? I really suggest that you just fill up a page of doodles and things like this where you practice making different lines, you practice weighted lines were going to get into rendering later. And so you're gonna wait thes lines you're gonna practice, making them get progressively thicker and progressively thinner again, I don't want to jump the gun, but that's gonna be into the rendering section of what we're going to talk about. But it's important that you practice these different types of lines and you think about what that language that line language might mean to you and what you're trying to convey as you go into your illustration. on again. You're going to try a variety of lines where you do some with slow, concise, steady pulls, some with more weight, and you're going to do, you know, some intentional line breaks, maybe not intentional. And then you're going to do some where you practiced quick polls and speed to see we can get there and you're gonna practice in different directions. We got also play around with the mechanics in the way that we create again, knowing that for me, pulling down and towards myself, I'm gonna get the most controlled clean line. But as soon as I turned that line sideways, I can feel it assumes it to here. It's less controlled. I might still be able to fake it on and see some bumpiness there, but I need to know that about my mechanics. And to do that, you need to play around with this. You need to draw all sorts of different lines, different shapes. Eso. Let's Segway into the next lesson. Let's talk about some shapes now and practices line making exercises and let's move on 3. L2 The Benifits of Basic Shapes: All right, So now we're gonna talk about shapes, and, you know, I know you guys are just, like, probably thinking goodness, rob lines, shaves, forms. I mean, let's get to the good stuff. Right. But it's so important that you practice doing this so that when you get to the good stuff, it reads better. It makes more sense. It has a feeling of occupying space on the page. You probably hear me say this over and over again in different lessons. But you got to remember, artists are basically magicians, right? Kind of makes you feel good anyways, were tricking the eye to believe that their space on the page it all starts with this. So, for instance, this is gonna be boring, But let's just get it going. Let's draw a square triangle in a circle. They all kind of relate to this. I mean, obviously, you can elaborate with all sorts of neat shapes there, but this is what I want to start with and think about. You need to practice drawing the shapes. And I noticed I did this free hand, right? I could have used a compass here. Ruler here, ruler there, uh, and I could have made these close Teoh perfect, hopefully. But that's not the point. You actually need to think about creating shapes on the page freehand so that you can spot errors like I can see right here with my triangle that it's not centered. So if I wanted to correct this, I need to draw a square, crisscross my corners, find center. But that's a little bit more about basically perspective or mapping space, I guess. But what I'm saying here, it's important that you learn to correct your work, okay? And you can do this with or without the little device, their own Children. You can do it just by visually trying to soft to race and redraw, which I highly recommend, because that's essentially what you're gonna dio when you draw characters when you draw your compositions, I mean, you may get out rulers and draw your perspective lines and things like that, but it's important that you just learn to kind of correct things visually on. It's gonna take time, years. I just want to let people know it takes years to get good at that, and you don't ever stop getting good at that one of the things that I faced with my own work is having a tough time getting cemetery, right? That's why I flipped my work. I hold it up in a mirror, things like that. But I continually try to analyze my work and then try to correct it and keep in mind. Same thing works here. You start with square. If you want this to be more perfect, you have the same measure. Both sides get one measurement and then make sure they all codes they're aligned to that coexists they're gonna definitely coexist and then place a cross section there again. I could be using a ruler if I wanted this to be more accurate. Gonna crisscross both the middle's there. You're gonna actually form a diamond here. Other popular shape, right? Just like that. And then from here, you can pick one of these areas. That's why I like to rough sketch first. And you can say, Well, I like I like this side of my circle and then you're gonna recreate this and probably the toughest part here is getting yourself to, you know, hit these marks because you actually feel like you have to stretch it out word to hit those marks. But that's what you dio. And then you also have to remember to kind of hug this edge for a little bit before you come in. So playing around with this will help me to understand, You know, this basic shape again, mapping it out with angles and things like that are always gonna make him or correct. But I want you to practice drawing these different sizes and try to just really get it as close as you can. I want you to also practice being inventive with the shapes. Keep it all to D. At this point, we're gonna talk about converting these two forms next. But right now, I just want you to play around with these shapes in any way that you see fit. But you have to remember that all this converts to everything else that you're seeing. These basic shapes will turn into everything that you want to draw. And the more confident you can get here of establishing these shapes, the more it will become easier for you to draw characters that are in complex situations and scenes. I know a lot of people that that will kind of protest the other way. They'll say, No, that's how it is. And you really just need to draw organically and lots of scribbles. And that's not bad to like. If he knows the previous lesson, you know, saying we want to use a lot of organic line making and things like that, we're going to use these in conjunction. But you also have to be able to look at something and break it down into the primitive shapes. And that's what this is for. We're looking at and saying, Well, if we were to drawn arm, you know, kind of extended out will say it's gonna be a circle. It could be a square, other circle, other square, Okay. And then, uh, a wedge shaped for the hand and then so on and so forth. That's an arm. It doesn't look like an army at Looks like, you know, a kid's toy kind of sprawled out on the floor or something. But that's again. It's looking through the forms and the complexity of the things around us in the same way where you could take the square here and as soon as you put triangle on top. What do we see? We see a house. As soon as we put a rectangle here, we definitely see a house. And we started. You know, we're looking down on our kids working, going while they're amazing. You know, my five year old did this or whatever, and it's because this relates this does talk to us. It does convey ah, narrative and what this is, and that's exactly what we want. It's the same reason you could take triangles and stack, um, on directing at the bottom, and you basically you get a tree. So again, I know this seems very primitive and you just wanted to go for the advance fun stuff. But I recommend that you do this in the next day, the next stage if you find that your your illustrations kind of lack, you know, a feeling of being solid on the page. You want to go back to this and you know, as we go from this to the forms, you'll see how it becomes a lot more imperative that it all works together. But you want to go back here and you want to play around this. So, for for the exercise for here, I recommend that you just kind of draw out a bunch of shapes, and you can you can put him behind one another as well, you know, kind of like what we did with tree here, but I really recommend that you, you know, you stack up these shapes and then you get inventive, you know, with like, you know, something might come off it. So, for instance, if you were to bring something off of here and down to the ground plane here, it's still just a basic shape. But it looks a little bit more like maybe a pipe or electrical conduit. And you just keep elaborate in there, but I want you to stay primitive, stay two dimensional, but create something. Have fun with it. It doesn't have to be all boring like the one I did here. But what I'm trying to get to see is that this is where the language really starts. And then the next stage, we're going to convert these 23 dimensional objects and we're gonna turn them in to forms. So but don't discount these primitive shapes. Practice him often. If you're not so proud of it, you don't have to share it on your favorite social media or anything like that. But at the same time, you should practice him because you know, it'll make you better what you dio and you also want toe practice to more advanced shape. So, for instance, if we come off the the triangle here and we just, you know, make some kind of weird shape, it doesn't have to be basic primitive shape. So you can do something anger like this. You can also play with the gaps here. Obviously, once you start doing stuff like this, it looks a bit more mechanic. Or it looks like maybe a top view of ah, map or something like that are, you know, an interior structure? Uh so again, that's another helpful practice activity is to throw these shapes around and try to envision what you might be looking at and then elaborate from there. And like I said, you can also put these kind of on the side. And by doing that, you could make it look like it passes through the other shape and get us detailed as you want, but make something inventive, fun and realize that these basic two D shapes will allow you to do the more complex stuff that we're gonna do next. So don't know, don't shy away from doing these exercises. Okay? So now let's head over to the next lesson and continue on and let's talk about converting things into form. 4. L3 Turning a Shape Into a Form: All right, So let's talk about form now. So form is just basically a three dimensional representation of any of those objects or shapes and now converted to a three d plane so you could take a circle and just say, Okay, I want this to look Spiric away, so not just to de but three dimensional. And you want to find some sort of light source. In this case, we're just gonna kind of jump in start shading. So if we shade this side were saying the light is obviously on the opposite side, and if we shade a greater distance through this area, we're seeing the light is on the other side of this shape. So if you were to look at it like if we brought the shadow down here, the light would now be on this side. I'm tired. Explain. Let's look at it like an orbit. Okay. Like this. So, based upon this orbit of this, the light is over here somewhere. If the shadow is down here, lower light would be over here somewhere. So you want to play around with light source in the way that orbits around your objects? Now, a good exercise for this is to set up some still lifes. It could be anything it could be. I remember one time I set up a chrome mixing bowl and I put a light around it moved it around, and I watched the reflection in the chrome shift. It was a good way for me. Teoh practice drawing chrome, interpreting chrome into ah, line and treating. So just like this, we've got this feeling this is now a little bit more shadowed. Uh, again, we could do this and see, I'm not going for any rendered lines that, but I'm still able to convey form with just these basic lines and as a crosshatch, these in different directions. I'm essentially getting a darker shadow to the bottom edge of this shape reform. Now I should say, I could also focus on my my line. Wait so much about and I could really keep cross hatching as many times I felt that Sarah I could also practice the line wait of these. He's crosshatch line so I can sculpt these lines to be a bit thicker on the shadow side, so lots of ways you can really mix and mingle. These effects to keep darkening the side. You're essentially trying to get it to look and feel the way that you want in your mind's eye. Whatever your visioning, some people are gonna want a lot more detail. They're gonna want a lot more tighter lines in succession. And also you can break these lines further apart. Has it come this way? So again, this is rendering eso rendering and form basically tied together. But then a Z we get into talking about rendering. We're going to get into a lot more examples because there's just so many different ways to render so many different materials. There's so many different ways to texturizing something on. That's what you want to think about because me personally, when I go to draw my own comics, I want a nice variety in my work. I don't want everything to look like I shade it in one way. So I practiced different rendering styles for that reason. So this is kind of where it starts. You know, you could take this a step further and you could imagine the cash shadow that this might have. You could also start darker and then fade that off again. you could use lines you could do solid rendering whatever you want to dio cross hatching. Just darken it with Latin. So all sorts of ways you could do that. But now what you're doing is you're building up this concept of this being a three dimensional form. You could also put probably my ruler for that. You wouldn't do that. You could also put a line back here. Remember that that little boring line we talked about look out immediately conveys, you know, atmosphere in space. Basically, you could also shaped back here. You could also add to these lines. I didn't really get a nice ending point to my lines there. Another thing you can do is you can throw it in a nice little soft guy at first. But there's our first example hopeful that just shows you how with these basic primitive ideas, you can turn something from a two dimensional object to a three dimensional object and just keep on playing around with this fact. I feel like it could look a lot more rounded. Also gonna be a little bit more messy about it. So I wanna show you that as well that not everything has to be so clean and concise. When you doing cross hatching, the more overlaps you create at different angles, I will just keep dark darkening up your you're shadowed areas. So lots of styles I like that are very, very messy. And I want to make sure to talk about that because I think as young artists, we tend to think everything has to be very clean. And sometimes we lose a little bit of the energy for what we could create, because we're so worried about making something precise, and we think that that will make us look like a better artist when it doesn't always particularly do that. So you just play around with this concept. Don't be afraid to cross hatch in different directions. Different line weights. Think more about the great Asian and the tones that you're getting in the values, and I just play around with it. You could even take imposing lines like this going downward, and this is more again, more rendering. But it will make the table look a little bit more reflective for whatever material this might be sitting on. So just like that, play around that and let's head over to the next lesson and try another example 5. L4 How to Draw Forms Drawing a Nose: Okay, lets try another example. And in this particular example, I want to show you kind of the staging process. So we're gonna start with the basic line first. So you remember Line two is gesture, right? So when you're talking about figure drawing when you're talking about characters, the basic line is an idea in, you know, gesture, in a sense. So even though this is doesn't look very gestural, and you could probably already tell what it is, I know by the time I had the next couple lines, you'll know it doesn't seem like there's much gesture here, but even a certain stiffness eyes gesture. So, um, you know, it's We've got to think about the energy and the idea underneath the underlying structure, in a sense, and so again, probably not the best way to explain gesture. But I just wanted to mention that the line work, even as basic is this is, is very important in gesture, and that's where you want. You want to get better, your figure drawing your character drawings by playing around with that concept. You also want to elaborate from this and stylized, you might bring this bend down further you might bring it up higher. You might put a little bump here. So you want to think about all these little style choices, and I think that starts in the line, making so essentially it versus just a line. But as we get back to here, pretty much becomes a shape because, you know, we're generally not going to draw a line down like this. But if you were to break this down, it's just kind of, ah, triangular shape. And if you were to, you know, break it down further, you could say, Well, it's a triangle here. It's a smaller triangle here. It's a circle oval here and so on and so forth. So you could really break this down into primitive shapes. And that's important to do because it makes drawing the stuff from memory easier to dio. So even if I look a reference, I'm not gonna let the reference really dictate too much for my interpretive comic style art . Anyways, that's the way I do it. Sometimes I might hear a little tighter to reference, but unless it's I'm really trying to get a lightness of that person, then I just let my own ability to work through these thes two D shapes and then turn them into forms. So now we've got our basic shape or Siris of shapes, I should say on Let's go in and get a another oval right here for the nostril opening like that. You see, I have to nudge ALS lines around as I go, and then now we want to think about a light source again. We could think about the you know, the Spiric ALS orbit, if that's the proper way to say no, but we'll play it will please the light source kind of, I guess, more on one this side, because what would happen is if it's back here, a lot of this is gonna go into shadow, not only get too much into shading and chattering, that's a whole nother series of lessons that I'll be including. But right now we just want to focus on line, shape, form and or rendering because obviously rendering ties into the form creating the form now . The other thing is this. You can also practice just shading this almost like you're doing a charcoal drawing or something like that. So I think it's important to practice a lot of different ways that you do this, for instance, you can shade this like we're doing here with a lot of little kind of connected strokes, you know, some blending. You could get a blending stump out. Remember, that's really just a rolled up piece of paper. Or you can, you know, pay for the nicer ones, obviously. But what I want to do here is I'm actually just kind of starting the process. So I like to do you know, probably 99% of my rendering comes out lines, But there's those times when it can be beneficial to play around shading like this and then converting it or, you know, just having some studies where you leave it like this. But same things were going apply. I want to use heavier, darker lines to the bottom to help reinforce that shooting. Because down here at the bottom of the nose, I tend to like using a little bit of, like, almost a bounce like kind of effect. So what I'm gonna do here is I'm just gonna lightly glance across this with some thinner lines so I could make this area a little bit darker that could be of cross hatching. Or that could just be with, you know, using a pretty dark lead here, just kind of revisiting that area with more strokes. And, you know, same thing across here, maybe at the very bottom. It was a little bit of lighter shading, so that what happens is you start to get a little bit of the the rounded nous. If I just feel that in, that's not bad. It's a little bit more stylized against are a little bit more animated. Maybe, but if you start incorporating more variety into the way that you have these, the's are gradations of shape shading. Then essentially, you start to get a more rounded, more realistic feeling. Now you can couple that with a more stylized Siris of shapes, and that's actually what I go for. I don't like I shouldn't say. I don't like realism, my love realism, but for my own style of my own comic work, I tend to exaggerate. I tend to stylized, attend Teoh, basically characterize my work S O. That means changing the shapes, maybe adding a wrinkle. It's not really there a times or muscle or fold or whatever. Um, but just having fun with it. And I think that kind of melts well with the concept of all these lines that I like to add anyways, because they're not really there, right? We don't see all these lines on the face, and that's definitely kind of a stylized thing that we're doing, even with shading. So if you want it to be more realistic, you probably just leavin more of a charcoal drawing kind of effect where you're doing more of the the softer gradations or maybe not always softer gradations, but just blended gradations and, you know, transitions. So let's say something like this, and we could keep elaborating here. We could keep drawing this out. Remember to if we want to really play around with light source on the bridge of the nose here, we could erase that back. We could likewise just make the other lines thicker. Would you actually like doing this because you really want some pretty heavy line wait for comics, I think. Anyways, I think the styles that identify the most with and look the most impressive to me have a good variation of line way. Another thing to remember what this is. If the line weight is nice and bold on the outside, it makes all the lines on the inside read. Ah, bit thinner, smaller and gives that nice feeling of contrast. But if you have this same line weight around everything, then it all kind of blends together. So again, I like having grab, actually a smaller technical pencil here, and I like having the ability to go in and put these thinner, kind of lines that read entirely different than the exterior line. So again, this is just by contrast and variation, but I think it really helps. Obviously, if I wanted this to be more find, I could softer races and keep elaborating on these concepts and really tighten them up. But I think that this should convey what I'm after. So but again, a little bits, a cross hatching, not afraid to use different lines here and there. Just change it up a bit. Remember, you can soften up a a particular line by just kind of breaking it up with a little bit of texture like that. Lots of meat ways really do this. Let's get rid of our basic starting point of the shape Siris of shapes, I should say, And just like that, we've got a, uh knows. So hopefully you see it. That's pretty easy to do. And there's lots of ways you can really get in here and create thons. Variation. Right noses there, just every shape size you can imagine So you can really play around this you can bring. You can get rid of his bump altogether. You can change the size of the ball. This part of the nose the nationals can bigger, smaller, further up. Yeah, lots of shape and variation that can have fun with right there. So let's move on to our next example and talk a little bit more about rendering forms. 6. L5 How to Draw Forms Drawing the Lips: Okay, so let's try another example. And this one I want to show you to how you can kind of think about the forms will start the lines first. But you want to think about the forms from different angles as well. So I think this is another helpful exercise. So let's just start with some lines. And I'm also going to let these be a little bit Maura organic from the start. Okay? So, see, I'm just gonna jump right into curved lines, So at first you might play around with angles. Angles typically will help you map out space a little bit better, but in this case, I'm just going from imagination. I'm just gonna let it kind of let the chips fall where they may. So it's gonna be our top lip. Just remember, it's really just a couple ems, right? Connected at the base. And then for here we just do a big stretched out You for the teeth have issues more than just those. But I like to show the 1st 2 you know, and again, this is a stylized representation, So I also want the look that we're kind of looking up at the lip. So the bottom lip is gonna appear more straight to camera. So I'm gonna have a little bit more of a dip down like that, go across here and then back up. So another one of those you shapes I like to make it worthy top lip kind of passes over in the bottom. What tucks under it. So again, that's probably a little bit more exaggerated. But that's fine. I'm gonna put a little dip right in the middle right there and then I'll put another little kind of stretched out You shape for the pocket of skin under the lip there. So what I mean by practicing drawing these from the side is I think that it gives you a better idea. Beginning. Make that the teeth look a little bit large right there. So I can't say nuts. Head around. Eso? Yes. So drawing from the side Now, obviously we could take a ruler and we can go across Probably isn't a bad idea. You can actually start with your grid lines. Well, just like that, you can map out where the bottom lip is. We can map out where the top lip is, So I recommend you do it with him without even these extra guides. But what I like about doing this is that this is probably a really good practice activity for anybody. It wants to draw comics anyways, because, you know, you're not just gonna draw faces that air forward facing all the time. So what you need to do is practice aligning these features. So, you know, kind of going over here looking at the information there, relating it back over to this. The other neat thing that happens here is I'm now paying attention mawr to the recess information. So meaning the teeth their way back and probably even further back in this in a in a real life depiction of a nice, voluptuous lips teeth, they're going to push back pretty far. So you gotta pay attention to that. Also, from here, it just looks like a straight plane, right, parallel to our view. But over here, we're going to get more of something like this on most most people. Unless they've got a pretty big under bite. There's obviously never a one size fits all to the way that the face and body works for everybody. They were all very different, but there's a lot of common things that you can look for. And this is one of in this little slanty right there in this part of lip Generally tux back again. This one right here goes back to about here and get that little full. That's what this land represents. So just like that, we've got a front and side view of it, you know? And we've done this all with lines, but obviously they convey some shapes and they actually convey some kind of some complex shapes, you know, especially these being more organic lines. But now we can jump in here and we can start to turn these into forms. I guess even want the line waiting. The scribbles that I put in there already kind of look like forms, but we're gonna render amount a bit more what I would consider comic style. So one of things to pay attention to here is if the light source will start with the side here, I think it's a bit easier Teoh to envision what I want explain. It's a viewer to draw lines down almost like perspective lines to hit these areas of the illustration. Then you can tell that light is gonna only hit more that top heads with lip. Someone bad. Okay, but on the bottom, it can hit all of this area, you know, depending on the type of light and things like that. But you could see if there's a very different orientation to lips toe where this top lip is gonna catch a lot less light. Maybe just some edge lighting or room lighting to the very top edge. It'll lip. But then this lower portion could get a lot of light was just like pap. So as we render this out, we want to think about that so you could release you. Fill this all. Then if you wanted, you could cross hatchet. What's the different ways you could figure out how you want to render this? But I think that paying attention to the way that these would catch the light is very important. You see a lot of styles, they don't even draw the teeth. So that's up to you. If you really want draw teeth, I tend to just draw the separations. So again, we talked about style izing lines and omitting certain parts of lines. That's something I would definitely apply to the teeth. You don't want to draw every line down the middle of every tube. Just gonna really kind of make it look strange again. Just kind of filled us in. And then lips typically have you no noticeable minds through him. But I don't really draw those lines unless I am going for more realistic depiction. But I do tend to have a little bit surrendering, and I feel like we kind of suit that texture ring of the lips anyways. So it's kind of a dual function. It's giving me that shading in that little bit of, ah, that look of texture that I'm used to seeing with lips just like that and play around different rendering styles different ways. You want to shave this? Remember that you can curve these lines with lip, helped to reinforce that rounded feeling that they have, and you can also convert these lines together towards an edge to make it look like it blends mawr into that shadowed area of the mouth. You could even do some tiny little light lines to shave back the teeth, but generally I'll be honest. I leave that for the color, I would just focus on line. Wait. And if you're going to see any separation of teeth, But I don't think you'd see it right there. So just focus on the line. Wait and remember that if we wanted this to look even better, we're just gonna do a softer race in a redraw. That's where you clean up all the inconsistencies here. So let's go and do that. I will tighten up on this a little bit more and do a quick redraw and hopefully make these looking better. So let's move on. Okay, So soften up my kneaded eraser. That's actually a Prisma color needed to raise her. And then, after getting the our work down, really light where I can barely see it, I'll go over top and pick and choose my lines. So this is just a great way to clean up, and it's pretty much the process I take for everything. But at this stage, I'm trying to find the line weight that I want, so you'll see me go around the entire perimeter shapes and, you know, making sure toe not use just the same line all the way around. I think that flattened it out makes it look boring. So once I've got the line weight in place, I start to work on the highlights and you see me play around the shapes of those as well. And then I start to fill in the lips and, you know, it's something that's kind of you could really just put little X is in there if you're gonna go back and think it obviously. But like Teoh, you know, see what it looks like, Phil then and I obviously want to show you what it looks like. Filmon. Any team still adding little bits of light source to the edge of the left and even a little bit of cross hatching to the side and some final touch ups. Then I'll get in here and at a little bit of rendering lines again, all sorts of ways. You can do this, but I'm just using some tapered lines to convey a little bit of great Asian from the shadow to the highlight. So now I'm working on the next lip, the side view, same exact process. In fact, I kind of like when I am working on a page or a series of illustrations to go through and do all of the same things at once. I kind of find a little bit of solace and that workflow. So if I'm doing line weights, I may go through into all the line weights from shading, and we do all the shading, rendering so on and so forth. It just seems to make things go by a little bit faster. And also, once you're warmed up to a certain activity, you seem to do better at it. So you're able to take advantage of that and, you know, implement that in your work as well. So that will bring this one to a close. Let's head over to the next lesson and continue on. 7. L6 How to Draw Forms Drawing an Eye Style 1: Okay, so now let's do one more example. And since we've already done a nose and mouth moves will do, and I write so with an eye, the thing that I looked for first is the roundness. So you'll see a lot of people draw a circle for the I doesn't have to be the exact sighs. I wouldn't be able to tell you what the exact size of an eye is behind it. But the fact that you put a circle in place something spherical allows you to think more spiritually about the, um on the island. So essentially, you're just thinking about the underlying structure which were always very important for drawing characters that look like they have, you know, good weight. Good. Ah, occupy space. So you wanna give yourself lots of light little sketch lines, Teoh age in that process. But again, it makes you think more spiritually. So, for instance, with the bottom island, you could just draw a straight line across. Not a big deal, but if you want it to look more realistic, you're gonna put a little bit of a bow in a band right there and same thing with the top I think it's a little bit different from top to bottom or I know it's different. But again, this could be something that you do in your own style so you could make it very different or you could make him the same. It's really up to you, I guess. But I tend to notice. It almost has, like, bit of shaped like a birds head, like I almost looks like if you put it, I right there be a your bird. I don't know just one of those shapes I tend to see. But as you elaborate on to this, you want to probably immediately get in the the iris. Now the Irish is generally 1/3 across, but for stylized eyes, I would say that you know, it's probably a bit bigger. Building thing to focus on is the whites of the eye, and that would be the sides here and even the area below it. So, for instance, if you leave white to the bottom and top, you're obviously going to get an expression of fear. And I always find that I want to pull this area, and after I draw the iris, I don't know why But I feel like if I leave too much of this white of the eye, it loses. The impact guy just doesn't look as good for some reason. So again, this is probably more stylized thing that I do. But I'm kind of thing nudging these lines around and looking at the negative space, not just the iris itself. Well, say something like that. I might even bring it a little bit more. We're still rough sketching here, So the next step is I might get in the top island the way that it comes up and meets the brow. Most like us. Eso lots of different styles here as well. So you get people that will just draw just this shape, kind of leave it alone and other people that will draw the lines that react off the brow. So it's just kind of like the skin that Bunches up get. Sometimes you get a line right there so and as far as the island, the main thing I would say for comics is that the top eyelid is always, if not always, like majority of the time, a lot larger. So even, you know, obviously in realistic depictions the ill eyelashes, air separated and they come down in front of the eye on the back up kind of swooping thing that happens. But more often than not, I tend to see him like this for comics, where they're solid. The other thing, I would say to pay attention to us when you draw the eyelashes toe leave a gap either at the top or bottom. So what this is is your kind of emulating the look that we get when we look at a real eye, we see a bit of the skin. There we see a gap shows how thick the islands really are. They're actually pretty thick, but a lot of artists will admit that. So it's not something you have to have in your work. But again, if you kind of like this little bit of a feeling of a little bit more realism, I think the adding that helps. Now I tend only see it on the top or bottom, based upon where the viewer is in relationship to the I. So if you're looking up at the I, you're going to see that fold of skin or that the thickness of the island at the top, but here we're kind of straight on, so I tend to draw at the bottom on a straight on shot. So it's the way I do it. Okay, so we got the tear doc right there. We re some of that back and then let's slide this down a little bit and I tend to draw an angle over here to get the eyebrow and then I'll just map out the distance. So that's another good thing about the lines. You You can kind of use it to map out distance proportions. Quick shifts in the angle of the face of this would be kinder to resemble the plane change of the brow. And then also, I put a glare here, glare here, drop shadow here around that drop shadow to again reinforce the feeling of the spirit, Kal Look of the I and Iris. And just like that, we've got the base lines and now shapes obviously into place. So let's go into this. We're gonna solve two races from redraw through it and clean up this work. So let's move on. Okay, so it seems before a softer race and a redraw. Now what? I'd like to do is actually aim for a little bit more of an organic Siris of lines with this one. So what I want to do is show you in this particular example, how you can have a softer, more rounded I with couple of features that are a little bit more resembling of realism. Not much still, very much a comic book, I But I just want to show you, you know, the difference. We're gonna do one i this way. In the next example, I'm going to show you one just slightly different. And the reason why I think that's important is just so you you know, you start to play around with different styles. Different ideas are all. She won't be able to figure out your style. So one of the common questions I get is how do I find my style? And it's playing around with different variables, like a miss I leaving the gap for the lower eyelid to show the with the thickness of the I . That's just one particular change that you could make you could do it with. Without that, you could make the eyelashes bigger. Notice that I've grouped him up in the shapes like I mentioned before, and I'm also trying to sculpt the initial shape before I get to the point where add the separations of eyelashes for the eyebrows. I just kind of trace over that existing shape. But then I try to style eyes it as I do that with overlapping strokes in that one's a bit loose, so I'll essentially throw it in there and sometimes find a shape. But you know the repetition. I pretty much have done hundreds of eyes by now, so I generally know what I'm going for. But I do try toe experiment as I go as well, so that I find something new. So you see what the eyelashes there. I just kind of sculpt him into the larger shape, uh, throwing in some rendering lines to mimic the shading that you get with the I. Obviously, you can have lots of fun with this realistic guys obviously have a lot more detail in there , but you also have to simplify the eyes in some ways for comics and then also allow the colorist to take advantage of certain areas. So you kind of want it implement texture or imply texture, I should say and imply shading. But sometimes again, you don't want to overrun to the work. So it's finding that fine line there and you see here I wasn't happy with the eyebrows from reshaping that. I find myself doing that a lot with different parts of my characters, you know, sitting back and looking at it and taking it all in and go along. I mean, not to this line when we change the shape of this line. So again, constant experimenting, counselor changing things, trying to get the best out of the work. So let's bring this one to a close. Let's head over to our next lesson. 8. L7 How to Draw Forms Drawing an Eye Style 2: okay. And for this example, I want to show you the difference from, uh well, I just want to do one that's actually more angular. So in the previous example, we didn't I That's a bit more organic, you know. Just remember, organic is gonna be sweeping curvature lines and then angular, obviously Just angle sharper point, things like that. I think that's also important to think about in practice when doing your comic art, because it's one of the things that can help create a lot of variation within your work. So what I'm gonna do here is just first start off with, you know, creating some lines, but I'm gonna think a little bit more angular. I'm still gonna use a little bit of curvature, so I don't want you to get the impression that it's all of one or all of the other, but I'm just thinking, in terms of what might be more predominant. So I'm so gonna try to get a slope to the I, uh, somewhat still of similar shape overall, but just not more squinted or squatty. And as I render this out again, I will try to bring out more angles. So something like that. So there's the, you know, perimeter shape, you know, And then as faras, the same rules kind of apply, You know, a nice, heavy shape for the eyelashes up top. I'm actually gonna try to encompass this I with even mawr, Um, more eyelashes. So really, basically tracing out the shape. So what happens here is, by contrast, by placing such a heavy top eyelash and bottom eyelash, you really bring out the white of the eye more so it's ah, again, it's a contrasting element and you can play around with the intensity in which you use this effect. So you can really think in these up, you know, I'm gonna omit the separation from the eyelash to the width of the island that you typically see. It definitely seemed more realistic depictions again, this is just something where I might want to simplify that. As you draw nigh a lot further away, you'll definitely admit that. But again, I want to play around with simplifications of the concepts. That's another thing that's really important to do in comics, because it ah, it just makes your life a little bit easier on. I think a lot of times. Simplicity breeds well to the viewer. It's not so so much for them to interpret. So it becomes very much a quick read and, uh, can generally be more well received. So just like that, we've got the initial shapes and play around with these. Obviously, this is just our kind of rough starting point. But again, I want to really try toe bring out angles as I meet these lines together. And I definitely do that as they are under it. Now, obviously the iris, we're not going to use an angle for their, but I am gonna try to make this a little bit different. Have a look. So it's also important that you play around with your expressions and the alignment of certain features. So I'm gonna bring the pupil kind of behind the top island just a little bit. It gives kind of this, you know, sometimes sleep here expression or anger. You know, whenever we're angry, typically my tilt her head down and I look up at something just seems to be pretty prevalent. Comics, obviously, you know what kind of angry up look that you might get? So putting in some glares to make it look. What? But again, Can't really do. A whole lot of I wouldn't try toe Explain this shape with angles, obviously. But then I can also keep nudging this around. So maybe I wanna bring up this bottom line a bit more, get a little bit more of a steep angle, something like that. And then for the eye brow again, bring it over at an angle like this, remembering it closer to the I here. And what that will do is again reinforce that look that they're kind of angry and looking up upon to their brow kind of thing. We'll start off very sketchy, just get all the major components of this in place. And then as I render this out, I'll throw in these tips and make the eyelashes look more impressive. So you see, this is a little bit more of a simplistic version, really than the other one. You know, we don't have that separation of the eyelash and the lid that with that, you see, uh, it will be a bit more angular and squatting kind of easier to draw because of that. Really? Me personally always find angles easier to draw than curves, so it's a little probably quicker, I would imagine. But let's go in soft to Racists and redraw it and bring it out and see how it turns out. Okay, I won't not really explain this process since we've already talked about it in a couple of videos. But I will say that variation is really key. So that's really what I want to show you. Two different eyes, because I do lots of variation. I draw eyes over and over. I draw malls noses over and over. So I wanted to share a little bit at with you through these lessons, basically, that it doesn't just happen by drawing it right the first time. In fact, you may get a you know, a good sense of your are or I don't want to see that you may get a little bit of a confidence boost when you draw something right one time. So you get like a really good I a really good face or whatever, but it's not until you draught over and over again. On you changed the variables that you start to learn about what it is that you consider your style on that's always evolving. That's always changing. I'm always looking for the next best thing to incorporate into my arsenal in my style. Essentially, you know, that's that's what makes art exciting. You're constantly improving. You're constantly developing when that stops happening, then I think that you really need to challenge yourself and then jump out of your, uh, your safety zone and do something entirely different. So again, always challenge yourself. Always keep it exciting in your, more likely, always grow from that. It's pretty hard to stop drawing when you're excited about where you're doing. So let me know what you think of these lessons. More content is on the way. As always, keep drawn, keep having fun and bye for now.