Drawing Expressive Characters - Any Style, Any Level

1. Class Introduction: Have you ever wanted to draw characters that feel alive, characters that are just brimming with personality? Learning to draw expressions just might be the way to do that. My name is Andreas Provost, and in this course, I will be teaching you how to do just that. We'll go through a drawing project together, where you will learn how to draw emotional, and expressive characters like never before. You'll learn how to use these skills in a way that is freeing, and exciting, but still very practical, and applied. In addition to that, there will be some extra exercises in every lesson to help you continue learning if you want to, all you need for this course is something to draw with, and something to draw on. I will be working in Clip Studio Paint, but you absolutely do not need to get it if that's not what you have, anything you can draw with is fine. If you want to stop drawing characters that are static, and lifeless, and you want to start making them feel like real people, well, join the course, this is the class for you. I hope to see you inside. 2. The Story and Idea: Welcome to the class. Naturally, the first thing we need to do, is we need to decide what we're actually going to draw. There's a certain way that I would like to go about that, but I would also like to explain to you why I'm choosing the way that I am. When people typically talk about drawing emotions, they talked about something called the base emotions. These will be something like anger, joy, happiness, sadness, envy, and disgust. Sometimes there's six, sometimes there are five, sometimes they're seven. But the most important part is that they try to take the entire complex spectrum of emotions, and boil them down into a few select boxes. Now, I don't really like this system very much because I think human beings are much more complex than that. I think that as artists, if we reduce all the beautiful richness of emotion down to the single select boxes, or maybe start mixing and matching them. We're losing what's most important here, which is the story. I also think it gets you focusing on the wrong things. If you're trying to wrestle every eyebrow into position and making sure that the lips curl just right. But you're not considering how the character actually feels. I think you're losing the plot and placing importance where it shouldn't go. If you're in sync with the emotions of your character, that will automatically show through your drawing. The way that I want you to start thinking about this is an idea I'm going to call a thousand smiles. Imagine as an assignment, I told you to draw a smile. What would you draw? While you might draw something incredibly simple, like an actual smiley face. Or you might just draw somebody who is generically happy. But I believe that a smile can say 1,000 different things. Let's go at it at a different angle and think about the story instead. Let's say we have a character called Alice. Alice has been training for years to become the chess champion of her country. The day of nationals finally arrives, and she makes it way further than people had expected. She's playing well and she wins. She keeps winning until finally, she is in the finals after a nail biting match full of tension, surprisingly, she wins. What would Alice smile look like? I'd wager, it might look something like this. An elated smile, a joyful smile, a smile that feels like a big payoff for all the trouble that she's been through to get here. That on that day is Alice's smile? But we can also go at it from a different angle. Imagine her opponent, she's been training just as hard. Now that the day is finally come, she takes second place. She's devastated. Sometimes being really close to winning can feel a lot worse than just straight up losing. So she heads off the podium, walks back to the family that came there to support her. Luckily enough, her boyfriend's there who always knew how to make her laugh, despite the fact that she's devastated with her loss, her boyfriend cracks a stupid joke and she just can't help but smile. Her smile might look something like this. It's a smile of mixed emotions. A smile that clearly cares for the people that she's with, but also a smile that came in a very difficult time. How about this one? Alice, overloaded with joy also heads back to her family. It's only her mother who came to watch, but she is intensely proud of her daughter. Her smile might look something like this. It's a tender smile, a loving one and a very proud one. These three smiles tell a drastically different story, even though they all took place within the same situation. Hopefully, you can see now how having an understanding of the story that you're about to tell is really important to deciding what the emotional presentation of these characters should look like. To help you consider the story, you can use the following questions. What has just happened? What is currently happening? What is about to happen? Try to put yourself in your character's shoes and think about what has just transpired around them. If you don't yet have a story idea that you want to draw, it might be worth just looking at a random word generator. by cycling through these random words and thinking for a few seconds on each, seeing if any ideas come to mind. Sometimes you can spark stories where previously you had no inspiration at all. Now the main thing we looked at so far is the situation, what is happening to the character? But of course, the actual personality of our character is also super important. Even if we just take Alice's position of winning the championship. There's different people that might have responded very differently in that same situation. Alice was joyful and elated, but maybe a very cocky and confident character, well, would have never even doubted the outcome. Maybe you have a character that's so wicked good at chess that they are just completely bored with it because there's no more mountains to conquer. Their victory feels a bit hollow. Maybe all your character does, It's just breathe a sigh of relief knowing that all the stress is over now. To practice this kind of thinking, I wanted to give you an optional exercise called three smiles. And it basically involves just doing what we did in the demo. Pick an emotion and think of a story of moment that might involve that emotion based on the different perspectives and different personalities of characters in that story. See if you can draw that emotion three different times, but presenting in a different way each time. Just like how in the example we had a winner's smile. We had a proud smile and we had a sad, tearful, cheering up smile. You can do the same thing with any of those other emotions, anger, sadness, fear, and when it comes to actually drawing these emotions, the biggest tip I can give you is to just act it out. If you act angry what happens to your face? What happens to your shoulders, your hands? Look at yourself in a mirror and see your body language and your facial expression. It can also help to Google the emotion and get the appropriate references. See what happens in people's faces, and how little tweaks to that can give very different impressions. But like I said, acting it out yourself is one of the best ways to do that. With that said, have a go of the exercise if you want to. But in the meantime, we're going to get started on the first part of our project. All right, so first off is the thumbnail. For this one, I'm just going to grab a bit of a scratchy brush, use a simple paper texture just because I don't like having a pure white canvas and I'm just going to stand that's what I want you to do as well. I don't want you to spend too much time thinking about the exact perspective of things. I don't want you to construct a realistic figure. I just want you to get started getting some ideas onto the paper. Again, try to consider the story by thinking about the situation and thinking about how the character you're drawing would respond to that situation? What expression would they have? What's their body language like? Don't stick with a single thing, but explore different options. Tilt their head one way or the other, are their hands touching their face or maybe not? This is your playground. This is where you get to just explore and try out what works and what doesn't. Don't be afraid to be messy, and be willing to throw away any work that you're doing here. You don't want to be precious about what you're drawing, but you want to just explore anything that helps you feel more free to just try what you want is something that you can use. There's no rules here whatsoever. The story I'm going with is a call center worker who just has too much on her plate. I imagined her being on a call with a particularly frustrating customer already having been on that call for ages and just wanting to be out of that situation. I wanted to capture that mixture of frustration and stress and I wanted her body language to feel the same way. Again, I'm not worrying about proportion at all, but I'm just exploring what the final image might look like. Everything we draw here, we are going to just entirely redraw anyway. You don't need to worry about keeping everything clean or precise. It's a process of iteration. On one sketch you might have one aspect that you like, and another aspect that you don't. Maybe for example, the camera angles good but the pose doesn't quite work. Or you've got a good facial expression, but the body language doesn't quite match it. In these cases, you just want to go through and see what options you have. Remember, if you're unsure of how to capture these emotions, one of the best things that you can do is to actually act it out yourself. What does your body naturally do when you try to channel these emotions? If you put that into your characters, they will naturally start a few more expressive. Try to force yourself to try out some ideas, even if at first you feel like they probably aren't going to work anyway. You can see me trying some different camera angles, some different perspectives and in the back of my mind, I'm thinking I'm probably not going to use these, but by trying to apply them anyway, sometimes you get some amazing ideas that you otherwise wouldn't have had. I'm trying a more close-up angle. I'm trying some different poses for the arms. And I even try one that's more over the shoulder, getting a complete reverse view of the situation. Then at the end, I put all of the sketches together into one page, just so I can see which ones I think work best. And again, it's fine to mix and match here. If you have parts that work and parts that don't see if you can combine them to make something that's better than either option. In the end it's these two thumbnails that I think work best. I'm going to work with some combination of the two. Have a go at this yourself. Make a page of thumbnails, try different options, try different angles and poses, and just see which ones look best to you. Don't get stuck in technical details and just explore freely. Then when you've done that, I'll see you in the next lesson where we're going to look at how to refine this. 3. Developing Your Drawing: Now it's time to take that rough sketch and turn it into something that resembles a finished drawing. We're going to look at how to refine your sketch and how to apply some structure to your methods. What I will say though is, I don't plan to teach you the Loomis method or the Asaro method or any type of head construction method. I think these methods have their place and can be very useful, but I also think that for what we're looking for, they're just a bit too restrictive. I want to encourage you to explore and to push things a little further than you think they can go. Using these construction methods sometimes just discourages you from exploring. There are no real rules here. You can work in whatever style and proportion you want. You don't need to copy my style or anyone else's style, but there are a few effects that it helps to be aware of. For example, no matter what style you decide to work in, you can still push your characterized designed to push certain characteristics. A common example here is age. To differentiate between a young person and an old person in your drawings, it can help to be aware of ideas like relative proportions. The relative proportions of the face tell us a lot about the ages of different characters. Older people will typically have a relatively larger nose, larger ears, and smaller eyes. The forehead can sometimes also seem larger as the hairline recedes, and there will typically be more surface details as aged skin starts to get wrinkly. One way to boost your ability to draw different kinds of characters is to learn to identify characteristics and infuse your drawings with those characteristics. The idea of showing age through relative proportions is a good example of this. If there's a portrait that we've drawn that we want to feel younger, we can figure out how to do that by looking at the youngest type of humans. Babies, once we've got our initial sketch, we can look at what makes babies look different from other humans, and then all we need to do is infuse our character with some of those characteristics. We can tweak the shapes to soften them and make them rounder. We can enlarge the eyes to change the proportions of the face. As we push these characteristics into our character, our character will start to take on some of the qualities of the thing that we're referencing. This doesn't even need to be limited to just people. Although people are often a good starting point, especially if you're drawing humanoid characters, you can find inspiration for this in all kinds of places. Here I'm sketching a portrait of an older man that I wanted to feel more rugged. So while I did find references of an older man and a man who just looked closer to what I wanted, I also included a reference for a tree, and a references for some hay. I wanted to see if I could give his face a bit more character by converting the smoother and rounder simple lines into something a bit more like the gnarly curves that you find on an old tree. Similarly, I wanted to add a bit of Bristol to his beard by mimicking the shapes that you find in dry hay. For this type of characterization, feel free to reference whatever you want. For example, maybe you can think about the outfit that your character is wearing. What would their teeth look like? Do they care a lot about their appearance or do they not? If you're not yet sure what kind of things to change to push these characteristics, it can help to look around you in the real-world. Look at actors that might look like the character that you've seen in your head, or maybe you can look at photos of people that you know in real life. Of course, you can also reference existing character designs and other artists works to see what they've done to push their characters to look a certain way. You can apply all these ideas by trying to draw two portraits of different characters with the same pose, the same angle, but see if you can push the relative proportions and their physical characteristics for them to still feel significantly different. But even though I'm not going to talk about any specific head drawing methods, I still want to give you a few tips to get your structure's sorted out. Unless you're working in a very stylized matter, it still helps to be able to draw your character from every angle. So while I don't use the full-on Loomis head method, I still use crossing lines to help me get to the angle that I want. If we draw two lines on a sphere that go all the way around and are perpendicular to each other, the cross that we see on the front side gives us a very good idea of at what angle we are seeing that sphere. This works for pretty much every head shape, add a nose to this, and you'll always know which way the forms are facing. So this is what I'm going to recommend you do as well. Use this crossing lines method to figure out exactly where you want your head to point, then when you place the nose where it needs to go [NOISE] you will have clarified exactly which angle you want. The angle does matter a lot. Even if we keep a character's design the same, but we see them at two different angles, it can still tell two different stories. So with that said, I'll show you now how I'm taking my thumbnail to a more refined sketch so you can do the same thing. Next step it's time to refine our sketch. I think that one of the best ways to get started with this is before you start drawing the specifics, actually take some time to find some relevant references. There is an amazing program called PureRef that you can actually download for free which will allow you to gather and organize references beautifully. I use this program on pretty much every single project I make. By opening a PureRef window, putting it off to the side and simply browsing through a stock photo library, I am able to find a lot of relevant references for pretty much every part of the image. What kind of things can you reference? Well, you can start with the emotion that you want to depict. Maybe you want to reference some people that look like the character you're trying to draw. Or maybe there's objects or technical details in the scene where having a reference can just help you figure out what exactly those things look like. Generally, if we try to draw all this stuff from our head, we leave out a lot of little things that help make the thing feel real. So to avoid that, having relevant references is really important. When you have the references that you want, you can simply select the images, right-click and go to arrange and then to optimal to instantly have a beautiful spread of all the references that you've collected. Now we've got our references and it's time to actually draw. What I've got here is a simple Canvas, again with that paper texture, and I'm just going to start making some rough marks. The difference is that unlike with the thumbnail, now, I'm actually starting to think about the exact angle from which we're seeing things. However, to keep things feeling spontaneous, I'm not too worried about getting everything right first try. I personally find it's often easier to get a correct looking drawing by just putting some stuff on the page and seeing if you can correct it rather than just trying to conjure something that is already perfect out of thin air. I'm just making a mess so that my brain actually has something to grasp, something to hold on to. You'll see me remove parts, erasing them and redrawing them. In doing so, I'm trying to get the best option for every part of the image. I want everything to work together. I want the hands to feel like they have some tension, I want the face to feel expressive, I want the body language to work, and I want to make sure that we're seeing it from an angle that makes sense and further elevates the mood. Some artists use a lot more construction than I do. The reason I'm not doing that right now is because I want the drawing to feel spontaneous. But if this type of free-form sketching doesn't come naturally to you, you can either use a more constructed approach or just try and see what you can learn from it. Just stay open to the possibility that this can often help you loosen up a bit, and loosening up is the key to getting a nice emotional and expressive read. Here you can actually see me erase and redraw the face at a completely different angle. That's because I really like the dynamic feel that the upwards head tilt of one of the thumbnails was giving us. Although you can't see them, I have my thumbnails open on the other screen and I regularly look at them to make sure that our sketch still retains that same energy. Ideally, at the end of this stage, you want your drawing to feel better than the rough sketch you made. The way I'm going to clean up the perspective is by going up to layer, hitting "Ruler/Frame" and then clicking "Create Perspective Ruler". This is an amazing CSP feature that essentially guides all the lines that you're drawing towards the vanishing points that you created. It really makes creating perspective a lot easier. Once I've got my rough pass, I'm going to go over the top of it, trying to refine it and make it look a little more like a finished image. The thumbnail is our first idea. Then the rough sketch gets us a little closer to what that idea should look like, and then this refined version is basically our first attempt at actually creating the final work. Now I think our sketch is starting to look a lot more like a finished illustration. But you might be noticing the same thing that I was noticing. Our sketch right now has lost a lot of its energy. This is a problem I see people experiencing all the time, it is so incredibly difficult to maintain that energy as you make your piece into something more finished. But don't worry because in the next lesson we're going to look at exactly what you need to do to get all that back. So I'll see you there. 4. Exaggeration: Making Your Character Feel Alive: Welcome back. As I said in the last demo, I feel like we lost some of the energy in the structure part. This is something I see happen all the time. I think people typically lose track of what the intention of the pieces when all they are focusing on is perspective and form. I want to see if we can get that back. I think the key here is exaggeration. Exaggeration is not the same as distortion. The important part here is your intention. For example, if we want to make this character feel more burly and sturdy, just moving the parts of the face around randomly is not really going to help us with that. What we want to do instead is identify the characteristics that make something feel burly, and push the different parts of our portrait closer towards that. Some things I was thinking of, for example were a thick neck, a square jaw, and a very strong brow line. Think back to the previous lesson where we were talking about extracting characteristics from different kinds of images. What we were doing there is basically a form of exaggerating design. In this video, I want to look at how to exaggerate movement and emotion. But when we specifically think about what parts we want to exaggerate for a certain effect, we can actually make the drawing feel right. Now that's an important idea. A lot of the time drawings should be right and all the pieces are in place but we don't really feel the impact that we intended. I think that's because within drawing, because of the lack of realism, we often need to push things a little further. If we want to draw two characters punching each other, just tracing on top of the photograph is often not going to feel right, even though the shapes are exactly the same as they would be in real life. When we're drawing anything, we typically need to design it and we need to push things a little further to still get them to feel the same way. Not just to look right, but to feel right. But how do you know what parts to exaggerate? Well, let's look at facial expressions. It can help to start off by knowing what parts of the face can actually move the most. If I were to heavily simplify the anatomy of a face, it would just be a skull with a bunch of stuff on it and a bunch of stuff inside it. If we look at where the actual facial features would go here, the eyeball would go inside, the lips would go on top here. The eyebrows would go on top here, and the nose is actually baked into the face. This part is actually the start of the nose and from here on out it's mostly cartilage. If we're looking for things that makes sense to exaggerate, we want to look at the parts that move most easily in real life. That means that we can get a lot of exaggeration from the eyes and we can get a lot of exaggeration from the mouth. Of course, the nose can change as well, but it's mainly affected by the muscle surrounding it. The nose itself doesn't actually cause that much of that action. Keep in mind, there's still no real rules here. Plenty of styles break this kind of stuff all the time. If you want to make all the features of the face just drift off to one side for comedic effect, you can totally do that. Depending on how stylized you draw, you might have more or less space for details. But no matter how much detail you decide to use, it can still help to be aware of how wrinkles form in the face. Especially during very intense emotions, having these wrinkles increases show up really helps drive the point home. Creases and wrinkles are caused by skin being pushed together. As the muscles of the face contract, different parts of skin are being brought closer together. But of course all that skin still needs to go somewhere so it creases and bunches up. An easy way to simplify how wrinkles form on the face is to think about pushing a piece of fabric. Here you can see me apply some pressure to a shirt that is held down by a heavy weight. You can see that as I apply pressure in one direction, these rippling forms start to follow my finger. The same thing happens on the face when the corners of the mouth move out into a smile, you see the same thing happening there. Similarly, when the eyebrows move into a frown, the same thing is happening in the center of the face. The exercise I'm going to recommend you to practice this is called push, push, break. Start off by drawing a neutral face. It can be whatever style you're comfortable with and any type of character. Now choose the emotion that you want this character to convey. This would probably also be a good time to get references. Simply try to draw the same character expressing that emotion. Simply draw this emotion to the best of your ability, but don't think too hard about it. When you're done drawing, compare the two drawings and see if you can analyze the differences. What is it that makes the second drawing feel a certain way where the first drawing just feels very neutral. If you want to just write down some notes, it can really help you to observe. Now that you know what changes cause this portrait to feel certain way, I want you to exaggerate those differences. If the eyebrows move up, move them up further. If the corners of the mouth are moving out, move them out further. See if by exaggerating those differences, you can create a more intense version of this emotion and then when you've completed that sketch, do it again, and go a little further. This exercise is finished when you've reached the breaking point. The point where you feel the drawing just doesn't really work anymore when you've gone too far. This is why it's called push, push break. I want you to explore the limits of how far you can push these things. Don't be afraid of ruining that final drawing and pushing it way further than you think it can go. This way it'll help explore your limits. How far do you want to take your exaggeration. If you want to, have a go that exercise and in the meantime, we will continue our class project. As we just discussed, it's in the eyes and the mouth that we can see a lot of expression. That is actually the area where I'm going to look first. I'm analyzing what her eyes and mouth are doing and I'm just going to push that a little bit further. Her eyes are squinting, so I'm going to make them squint more. Her brow was frowning so I'm going to make that brow stronger. For the mouth I'm going to emphasize the grimace by moving the corners of the mouth further out and I'm also going to emphasize the wrinkles that are forming around her nose. We can also exaggerate things in other ways. Every part of your character is essentially an opportunity for exaggeration. For example, if I want to make her feel frazzled and frustrated, I can do so by making her hair messier. Even though it's not a typical part of the expression, it still helps to sell it. Another really expressive part of the body are the hands. I want to make sure that the hands actually feel like they have some tension. I'm going to emphasize the lines for the tendons on the back of her hand just to make it feel like her fingers have more attention to them. I'm going to try and use sharp and angular shapes to do this for the same reason. With that same thinking, I keep going around the image. I'm just looking for little things that I can do to further enhance the emotion. I thought maybe adding some drops of sweat on her face would be a nice addition. But this feeling of expression is not limited to just the character itself. So far we've looked at expression by exaggerating the facial expression, by exaggerating the hands and we've also looked at what we could do to her hair to further emphasize that feeling. But we can also use the environment to strengthen that feeling of stress and overwhelm. I thought we could add stacks of paper in admin to really make it feel like there's a lot to do. We are making her emotion read more strongly not by changing her emotion, but by changing the situation in which she is expressing it. That is actually a nice teaser for the next lesson. Have a go at getting your own project to this stage, and then we'll discuss how to get the entire thing to a nice finish. I will see you there. 5. Everything Matters: Truth be told, I wasn't exactly sure where to put this lesson, but I did still briefly want to talk about it. As you saw in the last demo, we talked about how adding some environmental elements actually really elevated the idea of the picture. This is true with everything. The main takeaway that I want you to get is that exaggerating and conjuring a certain feeling is often not just exaggerating the face or body language. We can do this in all kinds of ways. It's the composition, it's the camera angle, it's the lighting, the color. There are so many other aspects that come into play that can help you further ramp up a certain feeling. The thing is if you want to consider all these things, you have to consider them from the start of the piece. But because we were so heavily focused on character drawing, I didn't think it right to place this lesson there. Just keep in mind that every choice you make within your drawing can have a certain effect and every choice, therefore, can also be designed to support your main idea. If you think about cinematography, these filmmakers are really trying their hardest to convince you that their story is actually emotional or that their scary thing is scary. They're doing this using all the tools in their arsenal. Sometimes they'll pull the camera really close, whereas other times it'll be further away. The lighting can be very stark to give something an uneasy or dramatic feel, or it can feel very soft and gentle if things need to feel romantic and tender. There's really no limit to the factors that you can consider. What's the weather like in the scene? Is the camera pointed straight or is it tilted? How many people are in the scene? In what kind of environment does that scene take place? All of these things can help and you can use them to shape your story. There really is no one part that is more or less important than the others. They all come together to make a finished product. Just know that whenever you feel stuck and whenever you want to push your story and emphasize it just a little more, know that you have choices. You've got a lot of choices in fact: the environment, the weather, the lighting, the composition, the camera in your drawing, the character's pose, the character's design, your line work, your actual mark-making, the brush you decide to use. All of these things can emphasize what you want to emphasize. I hope this doesn't scare or overwhelm you because there's a lot of choices to make because this means that there are so many possibilities to explore and there's so many wildly amazing things that you can do using art. I hope you take that with you. There's so many stories you can tell in so many different ways of telling those stories. I'm really excited to see where you take them. With that said, let's try and apply that thinking to our work and see if we can finish it off nicely. The main thing I wanted to do in this final video is to think about how we can use color and light to really finish things off nicely. I wanted to think about how we can get the viewer to look exactly where we want them to and how we can make the character stand out in her environment. I also wanted to think about how we can use elements like color and light to sell her story better. The thing that I wanted to do is I wanted to contrast her frustration with the droopiness and the overwhelm of her job. I thought it might be nice to do that by keeping her skin tone and her hair color quite warm while keeping her environment in quite a muted and cool gray. By giving her some warmer and intense color, she would stand out nicely and the heat from her frustration would contrast nicely with the environment, would make it easy for the viewer to know what they should be paying attention to, and it would also separate her nicely from the world around her. I think the warmth of using some strong reds would really help her frustration ring through. The way I typically start coloring these pieces is to quickly block in some color for each of the different tones that I'm seeing. I'll use one for the skin, one for her top, one for her hair, one for the chair, etc. I'm just estimating what I think these colors are going to be. I'm going a little darker than I expect, because typically when you're working on a light background like this paper, it's really easy to underestimate just how dark everything could really go. Because you're working on such a light background, everything looks really dark relative to that. The first color is you put down are probably going to look way too dark, even though in the final piece they might end up looking just fine. I also add a few quick drops of white to make her sweat drops stand out and also nicely contrast her against the background. I thought the white looked like the overhead office lighting you get in a lot of places. I think it fits the scene quite well. Just to prevent everything from having the exact same color, I added some quick different types of paper into the piles by using the perspective ruler to quickly draw some lines. I eventually decided that I didn't want to go with only pure flat tones. Using some soft brushes, I added a little bit of shading to the character. I wanted to keep it fairly minimal and apply the shading mainly just to her so that it's still very clear that she's the focal point. The papers and everything else needs to be there for set dressing, but I don't necessarily want the viewer to pay attention only to that. I also used a soft brush to further add some red tone to her face, emphasizing that feeling of frustration. Remember that whatever stage you're at, it's never too late to fix a drawing mistake. Beautiful coloring on top of a very shoddy line work generally still doesn't look very good. No matter how far you are in your piece, if you're noticing a drawing error, it's probably worth correcting it. One of the final things you can actually see me do in this demo is transforming the face just to make sure that it fits the rest of the body. After receiving some useful feedback from friends, I decided that, yeah, I did prefer it when the face was slightly larger on the head. I just quickly transformed it and then painted it back in to make it fit in seamlessly. It is never too late to make changes like that. I typically try to never just finish and leave a piece in the same session. A lot of the time, simple mistakes or little changes that make the piece a lot better, are found only when you take a break. Even though this is a fairly quick and rough drawing, I still left it for a bit just so I could later see if there was anything that I wanted to change. When I came back, I felt like the piece could use some very light background elements and maybe just a little bit of extra shading to help the entire thing fit together. Once again, using the perspective ruler, I quickly blocked in some darker shapes in the background and then reduced the opacity of the layer just so they don't draw too much attention. Lastly, using a couple of soft brushes, I added a little bit of glow to the rim light on our character, and I also added a little bit of a soft light coming from above and a soft shadow coming from below. I think a lot of time people debate between pure cell shading using only two tones or full-on painting. But I think you can get very far with just these very general light adjustments going in with a big soft brush and just quickly making a couple of strokes on top. There you have it. That is our expressive character sketch done. Now it's time for you to have a go. Finish your drawing using these ideas. Think about the lighting and the color, and if there's anything that you can do to emphasize the feelings that you want your picture to have. Then go in and just finish it to the best of your ability. Good luck and please share your work with us. I'd love to see it. 6. Closer: That's the end of the class. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you learned loads. If you want to follow what I do, I go by @andreasprovoost on my social media. Before you go, I have a couple of requests. If you've done any of the exercises or made the class project, please share it with us here on Skillshare or tag me on social media because I genuinely love seeing what you all have made and it makes my day. If you have any feedback or suggestions or maybe things that you just want to learn more about, you can let me know by sending an email to the email address on screen right now. With that said, I hope you enjoyed this and I'll see you next time.