Transcripts
1. Introduction: Drawing a good face is probably the most important part of my work. My characters have to have appealing features. They got to show off a little bit of style, and most importantly, they have to project a strong personality. Faces are what make my drawings and stories connect with people. Hey, my name's Ira Marcks. I'm a graphic novelist and I've been drawing comics professionally for over 15 years, but not a day goes by where I'm not challenged with drawing a facial expression that's a little more clear or adding a little bit of style to a character's face to make them really jump off the page for the reader. Now if you're like me, you're constantly gathering tips on how to draw better faces. My Instagram is filled with counts on how to draw the perfect nose or get eyes just right. When I sat down to make this class, I started by collecting everything I know about drawing faces. I picked out the best stuff and organized it in easy-to-follow lessons. This class is designed to ease you into a new set of skills and concepts that will naturally become part of your process every time you pick up a pencil. Drawing Faces: A Beginner's Guide is a step-by-step journey through the basics of expressive features, adding variety through details and expression, using dimension to tilt and turn the head and putting all these skills together to tell a story through a character's face that really connects with an audience. Now I've got a bunch of stuff I want to share with you today, so I've taken the time to create a nice comprehensive little booklet for you to download and reference as you work on your class project. Anxious to learn but short on time? No problem. I've arranged this class into a few days of bite-size lessons, and with each day, you get to focus on a single topic built on the previous day's skill set. All you got to do is set aside a little time to focus and practice and by the end of the week, you'll have drawn a whole bunch of new friends. Believe it or not, this is my 13th Skillshare class, and thousands of students later, I'm just as excited as ever to share what I've learned with you, so let's get to class.
2. Class Overview: Welcome to class. Thanks for joining me in drawing faces, a beginner's guide. Now, before we get into the lesson itself, let's do a little overview of how the class is set up so you know what you're getting into and talk a little bit about the tools you're going to need to participate in the class project. First of all, I designed the class to be taken in little chunks. Each day of the class, is focusing on a single topic. The topics build on what you learned previously so I'm not going to throw you right into the task of having to draw a face at a three-quarter angle without first showing you how to place the features on the face so it's proportional. Everything builds on what you learned before. Hopefully it's done in such a way where the information makes sense and is sticking with you. Every time you sit down to pick up a pencil and draw a face, all these tips and this advice is going to come back to you in some subtle way and influence your work. That's the goal with the structure of this class. It begins on day 1, with looking at the placement of the features and how to communicate in expression through a two-dimensional, flat, forward-looking face. I talk a bit about some of my influences and how I design and stylize my faces. On day 2, we're going to get even more specific with features and details and talk about how to express variety of character and personality through traits like the shape of a jaw line, the form of the ears, the shape of the nose, and styling of the hair. All the stuff that's actually really fun to draw and evokes personality in a character design. On day 3, we level up to talking about dimension of a face, which means being able to turn and rotate and change the angle of your camera to draw faces that are a little more compelling than a flat, two-dimensional face. That eases us into the topic of storytelling. Storytelling is all about telling an audience where to look and what to focus on. Based on all the skills we have, how do we make choices that create a character that's compelling, interesting to look at and conveys some sense of a story? That all builds towards that last day where we're creating a class project using all the things we have learned before. Of course, you're going to have your reference book here on hand to look at as you work. You could print this out before you start the class, if that helps you. Now let's talk about the tools you're going to need to participate in the class. Luckily, it's very simple. Anybody can participate in this class as long as they have a stack of paper on hand and a pencil and maybe, an eraser if you need it. one sheet of paper is not going to do it because there's a lot of lessons here and a lot of things to practice. We're not creating one image, you're going to be drawing a lot of different things. Just get some cheap copy machine paper so you can participate in all the different exercises and techniques. Of course, that all builds towards a final project. For that, you could use a heavier sheet of paper, sketch with a pencil, ink over the top of it, like I'll be doing on my tablet here. But, for traditional tools, you can keep it really basic. Pencil, the sharpie, and some paper. I'll be working here on my tablet using a program called Clip Studio Paint. Now the desktop version, is a more economically priced program than let's say like Photoshop or like the Creative Suite and having to get a whole subscription to it. Clip Studio Paint is designed for making comics. It's pretty popular, not as popular as something like Procreate or Photoshop, but it's specifically designed for cartoonists and graphic novelist. I use it basically for everything I do. The tools are very similar to things you'll find in any other drawing program. You're allowed to make layers, you can reorganize them. You've got pencils and brush tools here, all that stuff. I'm not doing anything fancy with my software, so I don't really share any tips on that in this class. This is all about just picking up your pencil and practicing drawing faces. That said, let's start on day 1.
3. Inspiration: Now we've got to start things off here by talking about the things that inspired me when I was young, so you really understand where I'm coming from and how my style has emerged from my influences. It all begins with comics, unsurprisingly. This is an awesome collection by Brian Walker called Comics: The Complete Collection, and it's just a great overview of the whole history of newspaper comics, starting with something like The Katzenjammer Kids going into stuff like George Herriman and Krazy Kat and some of the early Popeye comics. You can see as I flip through these pages, there's such a variety of face design with comics. Sometimes it's super simple, sometimes it's a little more rendered to create wrinkles or some of the details of the face. It all really depends on the type of narrative. All this work stuck with me so much as a kid because I was seeing these faces in reading these expressions before I could understand the words to the story. My earliest reading experiences were with faces. I particularly remember sitting down with my dad and looking at something like Peanuts. Charlie Brown is often staring right out at you, so you can really take in some of the details of his face. The way Charles Schulz works is you can see how much just a little line change can affect an expression. Here's Charlie Brown just staring blankly out at you as he listens to Linus tell a story. Then you can see this moment of realization, and it's expressed by just two little lines on each side of the eye to make the eyes look like they're opening up a bit and putting the pupils into context. Looking at this work helps you see how little you need to do to evoke a reader's engagement. We're so attuned to picking up all the subtle details of a facial expression. You don't have to do a lot of work to say a lot. Now, cartooning and comics go hand in hand. While I spent a lot of time reading and looking at comics, cartooning is also a massive influence on the work I do. This is an awesome book about early Disney animation called The Illusion of Life. Something you can use to enhance the expression in a face is this concept called squash and stretch, and we'll talk a little bit more once we start our lesson. But you can see right here in this example, the way Mickey's arc of emotion through the course of this little animated sequence changes based on the squashing and stretching of his face and its features. This principle is designed to evoke motion, and motion can convey expression in story and narrative. So if you can get a sense of a character squinting their eyes or elongating their face, it tells a better story. A lot of early cartoon character face design really felt in this vein of simplicity and style, But things leveled up when Disney got to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. This is next level face design. It's extremely expressive. There's a sense of squash and stretch, but there's also another level of believability in the wrinkles and anatomy of the face. It's still simple in a way, but there's a higher sense of the physics of the world. You get a real understanding of the volume and mass of the faces of these characters, and that's something that I think a lot about when I'm creating a cartoon face. I don't want them to feel light and airy. I want them to feel like they have a weight and substance, even if they're really simply drawn and bubbly. Cartoon storytelling goes in all kinds of different directions. So if we were to just jump to another category here, we've got Alison Bechdel's. You might know her for her book Fun Home. But through the 90s, she did a comic strip called Dykes to Watch Out For, which is just a mix of op-ed, opinionated narrative about a group of friends living in Minneapolis style town and there's a lot of romantic Victorian style drama amongst this contemporary group of friends. It's a view into Alison Bechdel's life. You've seen such a variety of character design. It's drawn pretty simply, but you can easily connect and see who these characters are over the course of reading the strip just based on things like their hairstyle, or the shape of their nose, or their lips, or their jaw line. All these little features that when you're reading the narrative get lost. But when you sit down and look at these comics, you can see the subtle little choices that are being made by the artist to express the world of their characters. Comics are a real opportunity to get a glimpse into somebody's life without having a camera there to capture it. Growing up, I ripped off a lot of the artists I love in my own style, and eventually that grew into a style of its own. But it's always good to step back and look at how some of the masters of commercial illustration render a face. Comics are great, but it's also stylized. You don't get a great grasp of the underlying structure or anatomy of a face, so you don't have as much control if you just focus exclusively on cartooning as a reference. This is an awesome book by commercial artist, Andrew Loomis, that breaks down the structure of a face and how you can make subtle changes to the angles of it just by following some guidelines, so a totally different illustration style that can also inform cartoonish style. Here's a look at how he grids out the construction of a head in different poses. Andrew Loomis really understood the fundamentals of face design and head construction, so he was able to play in all kinds of different stylistic rounds like. On these two pages here, you see two fairly different approaches to face design. A real simple art nouveau type of minimalist face, really elegant and simple. Over here, we get something with a lot more form and expression. This whole group of elves, their face is covered in little hatch marks that represent their cheeks, the shape of their nose, the shape of their lips. While line art is really important to my style, it's good to understand how hatching and light can be played with different pen techniques. All these different influences come back around to really help me enjoy something like Charles Burns' Black Hole. This got its own vibe. It's cartoonish and that it's simple. The features are bold and very expressive, easy to read, and they're peanut's way. But there's an attention to detail with anatomy and perspective that really grounds the story. It's a supernatural comic adventure, really dark actually. But the characters feel real in that their proportions are accurate. Then we see the way he's using the surfaces of the face to reflect light, and that's something we're going to talk about towards the end of this lesson. How do we represent the surfaces of the face? They have form and dimension and feel like they are existing in this little world we've built. Once we start moving into the lessons today, think of the face designs and illustrative styles that influence you already and try to blend those with some of the techniques and advice that I'm giving you in today's class. Let's jump into our first lesson.
4. DAY ONE : Expressions pt.1: Welcome to day one of our workshop. Today's focus is going to be on creating powerful facial expressions. Now, there's a lot of details in the face, you have the eyes, you have the nose, you have the mouth, you have jawlines, you have ears, ear lobes, hair stylings, eyebrows, forehead, you have all these elements of the face, to try to juggle all those when you're learning to create an expressive face for the first time, it's a lot. So we're going to strip down the face to what I call the key features. Now, for me, the key features are the features of the face that convey expression and emotion the best, and those are the eyes, the eyebrow area, this zone here, and the mouth. The first step for today is to work on the placement of those key features on a really generic face shape, and the most generic face shape I can think of is a flat circle. With your drawing tablet or a pencil and paper or iPad or whatever you're working on, I want you to open a new blank document so we can practice drawing the key features of a face. Get your pencil and before you start drawing, just pay attention to how I move my hand, notice I'm not moving from the wrist, like when I write, like if I'm doing my hand signature, I'm moving from the elbow and the shoulder, this helps keep my pencil straight and even. Notice when I move from the wrist, my pen goes through a lot of different angles and those angles can throw off the form I'm trying to make. If I move from the arm, I have way better control over the shapes I'm making. Now, I'm going to go to my paper and working nice and big, try not to work on a small surface, the bigger the better, I'm going to create a circle to represent the head. Notice I go over it a bunch of times until I feel confident that somewhere within this Doodle is a nice, clean head shape. Now, a blank canvas can be really intimidating and hard to work in, so the more you can divide up a surface as you're making a design, the better. For a face, it helps to divide it into four parts, like this. Now, I know where the center, vertically and horizontally is of my design. I'm going to start by placing the eyes, begin with the pupils and then big circles around those to represent the eyeball, and they should be about one-eye width apart, which leaves plenty of room for the nose, the bridge of the nose here. Now, the mouth is going to be about one-eye up from the bottom of the chin. If you want, you could sketch a circle there, an eyeball-sized circle, and then put the mouth right about there and a flat smiley mouth should be about the width of the distance to the two pupils, like this. Now you have the key features of the face and what you could call the standard placement. The read is generically happy, they don't really have any sort expression to them which is good because it gives us a starting point to practice from. Now, let's look at the placement of the eyebrows. Notice whenever you make a facial expression, your eyebrows do a lot of movement, and when we read facial expressions, we look to the eyebrows for clarity as to what a face is trying to convey, so that's why I include them as one of the key features. They're going to sit right about there, right above the eyes, about the same width as the eye. Now that I've placed the eyebrows, I'm going to create a shape that's invisible in the final drawing, but it's going to help us create meaningful expressions. Now, we've got a little mask-like shape sitting around the eyebrows and the eyes. We can use this little region to guide our expressions. Let's shrink this head down, get it out of the way, put it over to the side here. Now that we've established the basic placement of the key features of the face, let's adapt them for an expression. Let's start with shocked. Now, if you make a shocked face for yourself, you can feel your eyes stretch open, your eyebrows go up, and your mouth drop down a little bit. Here's how the mask helps us convey an expression. Let's start a new face, place the eyes, place the mouth, just lightly sketch in these blank eyes, and now this time when we draw the mask, let's adapt it for this shocked expression. We're going to raise the eyebrows up, and now, we're going to create the mask that represents shocked. We try to maintain the volume of the mask and stretch it upwards, so that means the sides come in a little bit. There's the mask for shocked. This continuous motion line here helps us make more expressive eyebrows, the eyebrows both need to exist along this curve. Now, the eye shape also needs to adapt to the mask, so we're going to stretch the eyes out and we're going to stretch the pupils out. Remember, the mouth in a shocked expression comes in and goes down, so we can just bring in this shape a little bit, maybe turn it upside down. Notice I'm not doing any erasing, I just draw over the top of my sketches, the less erasing you can do the better mindset you'll be in while you're working because you're not thinking about the mistakes you're making. The trick is just to learn to read through all the messy lines in your sketch when you go to ink. I'll do a little erasing just so this is a bit more clear. There you have a shocked expression. You can see the way the mask affects these key elements. Let's ink this just to get a better look at the final design. I'm going to switch to my cartoon nib pen. Now, with inking, you want a nice wide line because that will allow you to make variation in the line width, depending on the pressure of your hand. If you start with a really skinny line like this, that might be fine for some spaces and some shapes but you're not getting any variety in your line width. I always scale my brush size up a little bigger than I want, that way I can lighten up with my gestures, and if I want to really push home a line, I can press way down, but I can also make really delicate lines. So a wider brush is going to get you a more expressive line. When I go to ink a design, I try to capture everything in really simple, clean gestures. This is the stage where drawing on a tablet can really help you because you can erase, but of course, I spend a lot of time working with traditional tools, and sometimes you just have to get comfortable with the imperfections of a brush or a marker. But drawing on a tablet, I have more options. Notice my sketch is really a guide, I stretch my designs even a little further in the final ink. Now, I'll turn off that lower layer, and there we have just a really clean shocked face. There's the sketch again so you can see the influence of the mask and the guides, there again is the final design. Now from here, we can build our other features of the face. Let's say, for example, we want to put a nose in here and maybe some wrinkles under the eyes or a shape for the hair, or even stretch some of the features further. This is why I call the eyes, the eyebrow, and the mouth the key features because they really are the foundation of the expression, everything else is the icing on the cake, it enhances the drawing, but if your foundation is weak, all these secondary features aren't going to help you too much.
5. DAY ONE : Expressions pt.2: Now, there's one core principle that I follow in my work that animators use to convey this illusion of life idea, and it's called the squash and stretch principle. If you've studied animation in any way, I'm sure you've heard of it. It basically goes like this. It says that by having your drawing respond to the physics of the world, you can create a sense of motion and therefore a sense of life. Motion is life in the world of animation. An example of how to convey squash and stretch is to draw a bouncing ball along an arc. As it moves on that arc, it stretches and distorts its volume and responds to surfaces. Here in the air at its highest peak, it stays perfectly round. As it falls, it stretches as its velocity changes. When it hits the surface abruptly, it flattens out and then eventually regains its form as it approaches the top of an arc. If we'd drawn those circles perfectly round all along that arc, we would have no illusion of life, we would have no sense of motion. The sense of motion also conveys a sense of character. Animators and anybody inspired by animation can apply this principle to the elements of a character design. This is a page from a cartoon book I had as a kid by Preston Blair who is an animator. I would look at these drawings over and over again and try to reverse engineer the shapes and forms and sense of motion that each of these drawings were trying to convey. Because if you think about it, anytime you go to draw something, you're really just capturing a snapshot of a movement or a moment in time. If your drawing feels pulled out of a real experience, the drawing will come to life. If the drawing just seems isolated and standing on its own with no context or no hint of a bigger narrative, it's not going to feel alive. Look at this elephant. See the way his body stretches and squashes in all these different aspects of them. His head stretches and squashes, his tummy stretches and squashes, his arms, his trunk, everything is responding to this basic bouncy principle. We can apply that principle to the face. Here's another page from the same book. Look at this face. You can see that it's also responding to the squash and stretch principle. Here's where that idea of the mask comes into play. A big part of learning to draw faces or anything is learning to see behind the final art. What are we actually responding to in an illustration? In most cases, it's some really simple forms that inspired the illustrator and gave them some structure to work from. Those masks on the eyes tell the same story as the eyes. See how that shape feels alive if you follow it from left to right? Now when you look at any pair of eyes, you should see the mask in the forms behind the expression. Here's some concept art from Pinocchio. We can play the same game here. Notice as the expressions get a little more complicated or unbalanced, the mask gets unbalanced. Here's a suspicious off-to-the-corner-looking face. see the way the mask stretches upward? A fun game to play while you're studying your favorite comic art or cartoon art or animation is find the mask in the facial expression. Now that you understand the squash and stretch principle a little bit better, let's do another expression and create another mask and see if we can really push the expression to the next level.
6. DAY ONE : Expressions pt.3: Aside from the video lessons, I've also created some print resources for you to download to help you through these exercises. One of the resources I've got for you is this list of 12 facial expressions. Let's do another quick doodle of a face and work from one of these expressions here. I'm going to use anticipation. Anticipation basically means looking forward to something with an optimistic point of view. One of the key elements of the anticipation face is wider eyes, because you're looking for something that open smiley mouth. You're breathing in, it's pulling your face up. Notice every time I talk about one of these expressions I'm acting it out. If you just sit and keep it in your brain, you're not going to understand all the details. Be the actor for your drawing when you're working on expressions. Eyebrows go up with anticipation. Let's try to capture that in our sketch. Start with basic circle again, moving from the arm, divide up the face. Let's get some basic placement of the features like this. We're going to raise the eyes up a little bit, and we're going to add little cheek lines to push the eyes up. We're going to bring the eyebrows up and pull him back. If we look at the mask for this, it's expanding up and outward. Every mask has a sense of motion. This one is breathing in and getting bigger like a balloon, and it's going up. The mask needs to convey that. This is the top part of the mask, is going to arc with the cheeks. Now, the mouth is going to come up as well and stretch a bit further. The amount of squash and stretch you bring to an illustration really depends on the style you're working towards. Over here on the left we have ultra cartoon where the character's faces is really elastic and can stretch and bend all over the place, and over here on the right we have a more restrained humanistic, we could say face that doesn't bend and stretch as much. It still expressive but it's not as stretchy. I lean more towards the cartoon side because I want my stories to feel really emotional and exaggerated. I'm not so worried about the grounded reality of them as I'm the emotional connection. There's a sketch of a face of anticipation. I'm putting just a circle in there to represent the nose for now, but we'll talk more about noses on Day 2. Again, you can play with the mask all you want to help you understand the expression you are trying to make. When you're ready, I'm going to just lower the opacity on that layer, turn on a new one, and start to ink. Again, try to get these lines in one fluid movement. Even the eyebrows become a shape. There is still a little line for the nose for now. I'm going to make the pupils, depending on the direction your characters look in you have to decide the location in the circle. Eyes should often overlap or touch one of the edges of the eyeball. If they're floating directly in the middle, that's like a shocked expression rarely, or your eyelids open enough where you can see all the way around. In fact, it's maybe almost impossible to do. It helps make your face feel a little more believable if you're touching the edge with the eyes a bit, giant pupils. I'm going to make the mouth open just a little bit like this, and fill in the black regions just to emphasize the shapes a little more. Anticipation is like that Christmas morning expression. Again, I can add all the details that I want now that I've successfully created strong key features. That's the lesson for Day 1, focusing on placement of key features and creating expressions that connect with the viewer. Now, I've created some great print resources here for you that cover all the main topics I just talked about. You can download these and print them out. They cover placement of the features using the mask. Some example expressions, looking for masks in other artists artwork. Now here's the fun stuff. Here's a little extra sheet on examples of types of eyes that are expressive and mouths. You can mix and match them as you practice your expressions. Some other little tips on drawing more expressive eyes. For example, if you put a thicker lid along the top, you create a more expressive eye. If you break the line of the eye you can help convey the direction the eye is facing. There are some tips on drawing mouths. Your assignment for the first day is to take this worksheet, open it on your drawing tablet, your desktop computer, or printed out, or even recreate by hand if you don't have access to a printer. Now the goal here is to practice your facial expressions, but to tell a story with them. We have eight circles moving along the bounce arc that we looked at in the squash and stretch examples. You're going to draw faces, but you're going to tell a story. Ask yourself questions like, how does it feel to be at your highest point? What's the facial expression that represents this floating moment? Now your character is falling down, how does it feel to be in free fall? When you hit the absolute bottom, what facial expression best represents that feeling? You come back up, what does that feel like? What does it mean to rise again? Adding the storytelling element to your practice is a great way to inspire you to get better at drawing. Because if you feel like there's a message behind your work, it's going to make you work harder to convey that message. Even if it's something simple like, what does it feel like when a circle hits the bottom of the page? That's it for Day 1, let's move on to Day 2.
7. DAY TWO : Character pt.1: Welcome to day 2 of our workshop. Day 1, we focused on the placement and expression of the key features of the face. The result of that is being able to draw really iconic, simple, expressive faces. But they're so iconic, they're not relatable, they don't look like real people. The faces we were drawing convey an emotional message in the same way like the be happy, yellow smiley face from the '70s does, but it doesn't reflect a personality. It's not part of a bigger character. That's what today is all about. Taking those key features and adding on secondary features to create personality. This class came about because I was about to start a new graphic novel, which means stepping back and deciding what are the characters I want to go on an adventure with. Who are they? What do they represent? What do they need? What do they want? What I've got on the screen here right now are my first round of character designs for this new, as of now, untitled book. We're going to break them down and I'll explain a bit of my process here, and then we'll start drawing some faces with personality. Here's a character called Elijah. I like to write little poem-like descriptions of who they are. Elijah is a good friend, aspiring filmmaker, stranger in a strange town according to the plot. He carries a notebook and pencil, so he's very organized, but he's a little off balance. He's more of a conceptual guy who likes to sit down and write. Here's a drawing of Elijah, you can see he's got a clean, big, open, expressive face. He's the main character in the story, so I want him to be relatable, but also a little bit of a blank slate. He doesn't have a personality that leans too hard one way or the other. There's not a whole lot of contrast in this representation of him. Notice his face is very symmetrical. His features are big, and round, and appealing. In the same way, Mickey Mouse's features are big, and round, and appealing. There's reasons we use certain forms in an illustration because they convey a likability. Harder edges are a little more off-putting, there's little more distance or hesitation to engage with them because they're sharp. So Elijah is very round. Let's turn off some of these layers here so we can get a better look at him. Here's a black and white version of Elijah. You can see there's a nice contrast in his hair, his eyebrows, and his eyes. I designed his glasses to be big and open so there's plenty of room to follow his expression. Like in this example here, we can clearly see he's looking down at something, and even when we zoom way out, we can still get a good read on Elijah's face. Now let's look at the sketch for this character. I like to show off my sketches, even though they're a little embarrassing because of how messy they are, but it's important to understand what a sketch really looks like on an artist's page. My sketches are really loose, they're basic guides. Some artists and illustrators sketch a little tighter so they can almost copy directly over their sketch lines, and that might be the result of sketching something on three or four layers, going back and erasing the old ones, and keeping that final sketch. I tried to work with one or two sketching layers and just get it to a point where I'm comfortable with the proportions, placement of the features, and then go in and just start inking. Now part of that is because I work in comics, and in comics, you have to draw a lot of panels, so simpler is better. But also, I think that faces are more expressive if they have less detail in them. It's a fine line of enough detail to convey interest in specific characters, and not enough detail to make them too busy in the face and distracting. Notice Elijah doesn't have really any wrinkles on his forehead or around his mouth or chin, he just has the main elements with a little bit of accent. Here's another character. Something else we're going to talk about today is variety. Notice these two characters look quite different, just not even in what they represent as types of humans but just in their basic shapes. Elijah's head is rounder, his features are rounder more wobbly. Suzy, her features are a lot more angular. This character is a bit of a distance. If Elijah is the stranger in the strange town, Suzy is the strangest in the strange town. She's a writer too, but she's more reclusive. You can see from her body language in the sketch here. Her hair is a lot straighter and angular, she's got a long neck in an upturned nose, high eyebrows. She's not making eye contact with us, she's looking off to the distance, she's either distracted or unwilling to connect. These are all little choices that you'll only learn how to make when you have control over the features of the face. If you don't know how to design an eye that's looking off to the side, you're never going to think to make that choice. Now the question comes up: how do we get these details out of the basic shapes we talked about before? Well, we have to add a little bit more to our face design. Let's get back to that blank page. Let's practice placement of not just the key features of the face but the secondary features of the face. Let's just get organized here. The key features of the face are the eyes, eyebrows, mouth. Those are your key features. Your secondary features are the things that enhance character, and also reinforced expression. You've got the jaw, you've got the nose, and the ears. On top of that, literally, on top of the head, you have the hairstyle. Once you have a clear understanding of these, you can work on these. So that's what we're going to do now; the placement of the secondary features.
8. DAY TWO : Character pt.2: Start with a basic head shape. The head isn't round, it's more of an edge shape. Also when a mouth is moving, the jaw under it moves. You can't just have a mouth sitting on a circle if you want your character to feel realistic, like they actually have bones in their face. So we have to have a line for the jaw. First we break up this circle. The jaw line arcs down like this, hitting right about the center of the circle and coming down. Every character is going to have a different jaw line. A softer jaw line might come to a point. A stronger jaw line is going to come out a little more like this. I'm going to jump back a couple of steps, so we just have a standard shape for the jaw line. I don't want too many lines on here. Let's place the eyes. The mouth sits right about here. Now that you have a jaw, you can move the mouth a little lower and place it where the skull shape here connects with the jaw. The ears, they hang down right from the outer edge of the eye. So if we come out to this line here, we just put some basic arcs for ears for now. Let's get our eyebrows in. Hinted this mask a little bit, even though we're not really dealing with that as much today. The nose has a couple main parts. You've got what's called the dorsal line, which is this big bridge part, then you've got a shape for the tip, and then the nostrils. To get good length on your nose, you have to place it down right above the mouth. There's that dorsal line, there's the tip, and there's the nostrils which are smaller versions on the tip on each side. There's basic placement of your secondary features. We talked about the jaw already a bit. Let's work through this list of secondary features and talk about how we can create variety within these basic parameters, because variety is the art principle that we can use with character designed to create an array of characters, and when we put them together, we have a whole story. So variety is a great way to generate contrast and express different aspects of the narrative. Let's look at the ears first. I think of the ears as a three-sided shape. If you were to make it really geometric like draw a robot ear, it's basically this. Inside of that is this main helix shape, which has a little arc in it. You have the lobe which has a smaller circle below. Put a little earing there. If you want, you could add another couple lines like that and put the opening at the ear canal. You can start to put a lot of detail into an ear. It's really just a matter of knowing where to stop with some of these secondary features, like if I switch to my marker and let's do a really cartoony ear. That works for some styles, or we can go a little further like this, or we could go even further and start to illustrate all the details of the ear. Maybe even put in some shadow and light in it. It really depends on your style. For me, this is too much information for the ear. I want a person to look at the eyes, nose, and mouth, this region here of the face and not so much on the ear. I'm going to step back and if you look at my work, my ear style doesn't get any busier than this. Simple. There's nice movement in the arc of the lines. Again, play with your pressure settings on your pen or on your hand to get those nice forms. That's an ear. Let's look at the nose. The nose in its sketch form has all its key shape elements. But when you go to actually draw the nose, you don't include a lot of this information in the final art. When I draw the nose, I start with the lines that represent the bottom edge of the tip and go in around to the nostril, like so. I try to get that almost all in one motion if possible, and then two little arcs on each side to represent the nostril edge. For the dorsal or the bridge here, you can just hint at it with a couple shadow lines depending on the expression. If a character's face is really stretched, you might want to put these to emphasize the stretching in this area, or you might want to just leave them out. Maybe put one line there as if it's a bit of a shadow. Sometimes you put a little arc right at the top of the nose to show the shape of it and if you want to add some detail, there's wrinkles that come down from the nose. In the world of cartooning, these lines are usually reserved for older characters that have more developed wrinkles and forms in their faces. I'm going to leave them out for now. With the mouth, we can use just a basic shape. If you want to add some detail to the lips, you can represent the upper lip with a little swoop and then the bottom lip with a shadow line like this. Maybe throw some teeth in that mouth. Now with the eyes, we're going to bring a little bit more detail to them. We're going to draw the arc of the top and then the arc of the bottom separately. Remember, the arc of the top could be a little thicker than the bottom and ends just a bit above that horizontal line. There we are. There's a slightly more detailed face, a lot more opportunity for our features in expressions up. Let's get that jaw line in there. Notice I come at it from both sides. You don't often draw a character's face straight on like this. It's just not an angle we see in the world very often. Usually, a character has had a bit of a turn, which we'll tackle on day 3 of this class. But for now, just do your best to create a sense of symmetry in the design. That's a quick crash course in noses, ears, and jaws. I've made you a little worksheet here with some examples of types of jaw lines you could use and a little tutorial on the nose again and a bit of variety in noses and of course ears. Use this to practice with, and of course, look at real photos of actors that you like or famous musicians, whatever, anybody that has a professional photographer working with them. You're going to get a good resource of facial expressions, appealing expressions, and that'll help you come up with more ideas for your faces.
9. DAY TWO : Character pt.3: Let's move on to probably the most important secondary feature of a character, and that's their hair. The hair helps create the main silhouette of a character. Think of The Simpsons, like if I go up and zigzag like this, you'd probably know which Simpson character I'm talking about, assuming you know who the Simpsons are. That's Bart's hair. Now, Lisa, the sister, her hair is more star-shaped. Then Homer has just got around arc. Even in just a basic silhouette, we can look at these characters and know who they are just by the shape of that upper part of their head. When we're drawing hair, we need to know a couple things to create interesting and expressive hair designs. We first need to know the hairline of the character, and that's where the hair meets the head. Looks like this line right here, and everybody's hairline is slightly different. But a standard hairline would look something like this. Comes down in the front, scoops back on the side, and comes out again, and ends right above the ear. Often, you don't see a character's hairline, but it's good to know it's there. If you want to create some really simple hair without getting into a lot of detail because maybe you're doing a long-distance or smaller illustration that doesn't require a lot. There's some really basic lines you can use to convey hair. When I'm drawing simple hair, I go like this. I start with the line for the bangs. Something like this with nice motion to it. That's the hair that goes in front of the head. Sometimes it's back a bit, sometimes it's covering part of the forehead. Layering is a big part of designing hair. Now, we create the form of the hair, taking into account where the parts are and stuff. Then we add a bit of shape at the bottom. That's really it. You could add a couple more hairlines in to represent the motion of the hair. But you don't want to start drawing strands because again, like with the detail and the ears, that's taking away the attention from the features of the face. Too much line art like this, it's a stylistic choice that can be done, but for me, it distracts from the overall purpose of the drawing. Let's reverse and take some of that back out. I'm going to ink this simple hair design just to show you again how I move with hair. Hair is the result of growth. It's got its own motion, and movement, and texture. I try to move with the way the hair grows. I try to catch it all in just some simple lines. There we go. Now let's look at hair with a little more depth. Here's a quick sketch of this character and profile. Notice the placement of the features are consistent, so it feels like it's the same character. Now if we draw the hairline on the profile, looks more like this. All hair has a part in it, at least one part in some space. My hair parts right over here off-center on the side, sometimes hair parts in the middle. Knowing where the hair parts can help you design a hairstyle. We can think of it like this region here. The area in front of the ear. This is the front. This is the back. If we're looking at here, we could say the part in the hair is right here in the center. Here's your front. We can get a little bit of a view of the back, so there's your front region and there's your back. Let's look at how this applies to our drawing. Taking into account these sections and parts in the hair, let's design a hairstyle. Again, I start with the front. This one is parted in the middle. I put a couple lines to represent where the front meets the back. Then I draw the back section on its own, and I usually leave out most of the detail in that part of the hair. Maybe put it in a couple little lines. If we turn off our sketches. We can imagine where those guides are, but they don't show up in the final art. Now let's try the side view. Up and over, little bit of motion there. Represent the part by bringing it up higher. I'm back and around. This hairstyle goes over the ear a little bit. It's helpful to take into account the weight of the hair, so hair on the top of the head has more height, and it's made from bigger arcs like this. But as it reaches down, it has more motion because there's less of it. It can curl or bounce. Just like withdrawing expressions and using that emotion mask we talked about on day 1, hair has its own personality and its own movement and character. Now there's a million different hairstyles in the world. Again, look at photo references and try to analyze what are the key features of the hair itself. What types of forms and shapes and lines am I going to need to create that hairstyle? Again, I've made a handy dandy reference for you. This worksheet breaks down the different sections when parting the hair, and gives you a whole range of variety of hairstyles, forms, textures. That's the real challenge here: how do you create an array of characters that feel like they're all part of a bigger world? That's what your exercise for today is all about. I've given you this little worksheet. We've got here a sports team, looks like they play some sort of ball game. We've got generic head forms on top of each of these bodies. Your goal for this exercise is to work with your key features, make interesting expressions, and then add secondary features that make each of these characters feel like individuals. You've got plenty of room here to do some cool stuff with hair, ears, jawlines, noses. You could actually open right up on the screen if you wanted, you could import it into your drawing program, or you can just do free-handed on blank paper, however you want to do it. Take some of the things you've learned over the last two days, and put them to use. Not every drawing is a finished piece of art. So practicing technique, knowing that you're free of the judgment of the world is a great state of mind to be in if you want to just play with techniques and you're not sure if they're going to really suit your style. Maybe I want to try out a big boxy nose style and really minimalist eyes, but a big heavy eyebrow, going to some real extremes with the features. If you don't like it, don't go back to it. But at least you tried it out. Even trying to recreate work that another artist has done can be a lesson unto itself because you'll get a sense of how they move their hand, how they represent different aspects of a face. Then when you go to create a more finished piece that you want to really put your name on and put out there into the world, you'll have absorbed some of those techniques, but they'll be diluted by other skills that you're bringing to the table yourself. Don't be afraid to make some big, bold moves that you wouldn't really use. Let's say you are drawing a comic of your own. It wouldn't make a whole lot of sense to have a character with hair that completely obscures their eyes and eyebrows because it becomes really hard to read their expressions. But an exercise like this is a great place to play with different techniques that could add flavor to a drawing, but they aren't necessarily going to be the main element. When you're doing something that's considered an exercise, you don't want to overthink it. This isn't really a conceptual process. It's taking stuff that you've already got in your head and just spilling it out on paper and seeing what develops. It's about just exercising your creative muscles and not taking anything too seriously. Now that we've got a sense of the main features of the face, the key features, the secondary features, we know how to mix and match these things to create a variety of character expressions. Let's move on to a new topic.
10. DAY THREE : Dimension pt.1: Form is one of those big, important art principles. When we talk about form, we're really talking about creating the illusion of weight and volume, and surface and texture, and an illustration, a drawing, or sculpture, any style of art can utilize form. But when we're talking about drawing, it's about using line and shadow and creating a sense that this object is existing in a space. So I can apply form to the word form by giving a hint that there's maybe a light source off to the side here, shining onto these letters. The hatching technique I'm giving the surface makes it feel like they're kind of bubbly and round. The shadow here implies that there's a ground right below these objects. Well, let's get back to our trusty circle. In the last couple of days, we were putting a cross right through the center of this circle, which made the circle feel very flat, and that works for more iconic two-dimensional style illustration. But if you want your character to exist in the space, you have to be able to make it turned at an angle, and to make this circle feel round, all we have to do is take those two lines and bend them a little, implying a curved surface. Now, we can practice this on other objects that will help us construct a face. For example, a cylinder shape can come in handy or even a pear-like shape if we want to get a little complicated. Form helps you understand which way an object is pointing, helps you understand what the surface of it would feel like if you were to touch it, and also, it's a way to give something a sense of light. We could add hatching to one side of this cylinder, which lets us know that the bulb in the room is over here. Now, let's start by applying form to a really simple face. I'm going to take our circle. Let's put just a random pair of curved lines on it. Now, the challenge here is to decide how the key features are going to sit on the surface. If we were to look at it straight on, it would look like this. So we still want to follow our guidelines of proportion. But now, we have to take into account the curve here. So things start to flatten, I bet, as they move along the edge, and things like the nose are going to pop off. Now, let's just ink that to get a better look at it. I probably should throw in hair on this character, but a guide for where the hair would be. There we go. Here's an example of form at work. Now, when we're talking about visual dimension of a character, there's some go-to poses that we use in comics and illustration. It really anytime you're drawing a character's face. You don't usually see or view an object, especially a face, from straight on. Everything's usually viewed at some sort of angle because you rarely just face to face at the same height and level with somebody else. So it feels odd to look at a person just like this. You usually seen a face at a bit of a turn. One of the most common angles to draw a character's face is called the three-quarter turn. The three-quarter turn is the angle that the photographer on picture day in fifth grade where they come in and see you in the cafeteria and make you get your portrait taken, and you put on a shirt that you don't usually wear and someone brushes your hair in a strange style, that's three-quarter turn. It's the best representation of the form of the face, like getting a bit of the angle of the nose, but also, you're still capturing most of the features. You're losing the other ear because it's turned away, but you're gaining the angle of the cheekbone. You're losing a view of this eye, but you still have this one, so you're getting a sense of the character's main features. So three-quarter turn is the best use of dimension in face design. Let's practice a three-quarter turn face, adding all those secondary features that we talked about on day 2. We begin with the head. I'm going to make the character just face over in this direction here. We're going to keep the horizontal line pretty flat. We could give it a bit of an angle, but we don't want to tilt the head too high up or too far down. It's mostly about rotation along the horizontal plane like this. There we go. If it helps you, you can draw that angle all the way around so we can visualize where it would be on the opposite side of the skull. Now, we need to add a jaw. The jaw is going to connect from right about where the ear would be across the front of the face, and it's going to push forward. The jaw sits more on the front of the face like this because we, of course, have to lead firm for the neck. So you can think of that jaw as sort of a mask on the front of the round part of the skull like this. Let's get the eyes in place. Now, the nose really starts to take shape when we're drawing the nose from the front. We talked about the dorsal, the tip, and the nostrils, and we have to give those a bit of form. So sometimes, the triangle helps with that. Because a triangle can have an edge that sits right along that vertical, which if we were looking at it straight on would be that right there. Throw a nostril on there, mouth, the eyebrows. Okay. Now that we have the general placement, sometimes, I like to do another sketch on top of that layout to give more character to the sketch. So based on what I've got here, let's give this nose a bit more of a shape, give the eyes a little bit more emotion and expression. Go with the nice, appealing, happy face for now. Let's open the mouth just a bit. Now, the mouth, we're also seeing a bit of an angle, so it starts to get rounded and we see the front edge of the teeth. You'll see that better when I go to ink it. A bit of the sense of the lip. Okay. Now, again, if we're in a three-quarter turn, the eye socket dips in a bit. So you don't want to just make this a straight line, you want to come in where the eye is and jut out for the cheek. Go down, come across the chin, stop about there. You don't want to draw the whole jawline unless you're really trying to accent it. Stop about there. Throw in some lines for the neck, ear, and now, we can move on to the hair. Sometimes, I lift the head up a bit, stretch it upward just to give a bit more room depending on the shape and form you want for the head. Let's check one of our reference sheets and pick an interesting hairstyle. Let's do this pompadour style. It could be fun. Like I was saying earlier, the hair has to have its own form. It needs to sit on top of the head, right? You can see I'm using some guidelines to distinguish the part in the hair. These lines won't necessarily get inked, but they're really helping me understand the form of the hair, which also later will help me simplify and make choices as to what gets inked and what doesn't. Let's move this out of the way. Okay. There's a real basic three-quarter turn. Let's ink it to get a better look. Now, when you're working on dimension, there's a couple of things that are going to help imply dimension to your drawing because again, this is a flat surface, right? So how do we convince the viewer that this world that we're creating here has depth and dimension? Overlap is a big part of that. With the face, the main part of overlap with the three-quarter turn is where the nose overlaps this eye. Notice the pupil flattening a bit. If we view a pupil straight on, we get the full sense of its surface. But if pupil is at an angle, it flattens. Now, some of these guides in the hair will help me direct the ink lines. I'm not tracing over any of them necessarily, I'm just deciding how I'm going to extend some of these lines to imply the form of the hair. So I'm not going to draw that whole part, I'm just going to imply the part. Let's turn this head into a bit of a bust. So we're going to add the neck and the shoulders just a little. Our focus is faces after all, not shoulders. There is a three-quarter turn. It implies the depth and shape and form of the head, also implies a direction for the eyes. I didn't quite get the angle I was going for. This is more of just a straight on looking over here angle. But if we wanted to make this more of a character portrait, I could erase these eyes and turn them like these.
11. DAY THREE : Dimension pt.2: Let's stick with the three-quarter angle here and look at some zoomed in versions of some of the features. If we're talking about dimension, we're talking about the angle of your camera, your point of view of a character's face. So not only are we moving around a surface, but you're probably going to want to start to play with moving in to a surface. Now, if we were drawing a face, let's put a little comic panel box right here. If we're drawing a face zoomed way out, you can get away with a lot of simplification. You can just imply the features with little dots or dashes. But once you start to zoom in, so let's get a real close look at this face, those dots and dashes start to lose their charm because we expect to understand the shape and the form of the features once we're getting a closer look, because that's how real life works, right? Once you start to look closer at somebody, you get a better sense of the surface of their face. So let's look, for example, at a nose. If we're drawing a nose straight on, it has these distinct parts. But if we're turning it into a three-quarter angle, now it starts to take on a sense of form. The three-quarter angle is moving towards a vanishing point somewhere over here off in the distance, right? Technically, this is two-point perspective we're dealing with, two vanishing points. So we have to keep that in mind when we're drawing features at an angle. That means horizontals need to tilt slightly. You don't have to follow those guidelines exactly, but you need to hint at them. So like this surface moves this way, whereas this surface moves back that way. Just keep that in mind, but don't obsess over it. Here's a very angular form nose. I could continue that geometric style. Now, when I ink it, it retains what was established with the sketch. If I sketch in an angular way, my final inks are going to feel angular. But my cartooning style, the forms are always a lot softer. They have weight, like the mass can be shifted and whatnot, but they don't have hard edges. So if I was designing a nose at a three-quarter angle, I would start with maybe a shape like this, rounder nostrils. Now, we can put some guides on that to understand it's a form. This is a good exercise. Imagine this object was covered in stripes. Let's really get to know the form of this nose just by drawing these guides that go top the surfaces. It resolves right there in the tip. Now, you can get a sense of the nose even without the outline of it. Let's jump back. Here's what that nose looks like, inked. So when you want to do zoomed in versions of a character, make sure you understand the shape and form of their nose. All these little guides are going to help the form stick in your brain. If you just try to freehand it, and let's say you wanted to use this nose style on a character and draw them in a comic, which means you have to draw them over and over and over again, without this proper planning, you're not really going to have a sense of how the nose is shaped. So now, you lose a bit of control over how you can look at it from different angles because you don't really understand the form that's existing below the surface. Form is an important principle to understand. That's enough with noses. Let's look at the eye mask. So if we're zoomed in on the face, the eye mask, let's say we're making an angry face, so the eye mask is going to be flattened like this. Applying that to the round surface takes a little bit more effort because you're cutting off part of the side of it like that. Now, you don't want to make the second eye too much smaller than the first. Otherwise, you're really making a forced perspective. The goal with the face design is to get a good sense of the expression. So keep this fairly similar in scale, but it's okay to cut it off a little bit. We're going to stretch them out a bit, let's create a stronger jaw in this character, give them some strong ears as well. Maybe we'll do more of a flat top style. Let's make the hair jut out in the front, flattened out here, and come down around the back. You can see that when I'm designing a character for the first time, my lines and my sketches develop along the way. That's why I work so light. If I was pressing down really hard and trying to get the perfect line the first time, I'm not going to be willing to go back and revise it. But if I work light, I can make choices like, oh, let's make his eyebrow a lot thicker. When I feel like I've made enough decisions, then I can shift over and start to ink. Again, overlapping is key when thinking about form. The pupil can be overlapped by the eyelid. Now, let's look at the mask that's going on below the surface of this face here. Now that we have the mask at an angle, we have to understand that it's coming in in almost like a hood over the eyes because the eyes are sunk into the face a bit to keep them safe. This outer edge of the skull really protects your eyes from any damage, so you have to imply that when you draw a face. Of course, these lines don't get inked. But understanding that they're there can help you in other aspects of your illustration. For one, it helps you with little curves and overlapping like this little eyebrow technique I've got here where the eyebrow comes around the angle of the face of it. It could help you with doing wrinkles. You would know where the wrinkles begin and end, how they would fit on the face. Let's see if we can redraw this line here so we could age up this character pretty quick. Too many wrinkles, but you get the idea. The same thing for the mouth. We have to understand the form of the mouth. So right here at the tip of the lip, we can put a circle and then work back. Again, we don't have to ink all these lines, but if we know the shape, we can add some surface to them. Now, the character has got a whole new personality just by adding a bit of form to the features. Of course, things are always a little better when you take away a bit. So we can subtract some of that stuff. If we have a character with an open mouth, the teeth also have to show the form. So if we're looking at teeth from below, they have to curve up like that. This would be looking into a mouth from a low angle. It's like we're looking like that. So it doesn't take much, just a little bit of shape and form gives your drawing a whole new dimension. If we're looking down on the mouth like this, then the teeth curve down. Again, if we need to get a better sense of that angle, overlapping is key, so the nose would actually overlap here. There we go. Now, we're looking more down on the character. Those eyes actually should be at more of an angle like this. Let's say we're looking down on this mouth a bit. Now that you have a better sense of form, keep track of it when you're drawing a face. Implying a bit of an angle from any direction can make your illustration a little more believable, a little more compelling, a little more artistic or even narrative. We'll get into that in the storytelling part of this class.
12. DAY THREE : Dimension pt.3: Here's the series of faces at a three-quarter turn. We've talked a bit about features earlier. Understanding surfaces can really open up how you convey personality and like just the features of the shape of the skull of a character. It's a whole another level of depth of character design. So across these four different three-quarter turn faces, I designed the surfaces with different styles of angles. The proportions remain pretty consistent. It's still a familiar face. The eyes are where you'd expect, the nose is where you'd expect, the lips, the size of the forehead. But by changing little aspects of that, I can just get a really different range of a face shapes. We've talked about inking over surfaces already and choosing the lines we want to use to imply really what would be the light reflecting off of a face, like when you draw a line. In a way, it's implying a shadow. But we can apply shadow in other ways by actually drawing shadows. Let's just take these faces. I'm just going to use a purple color here. Let's zoom in on this one and create some shadow. In this case, the light source is overhead here. Surfaces that are underneath, like underneath the eyebrow, underneath the nose, under the lip, the upper lip, those things all might get cast and shadow. The shadows will change based on the surfaces of the face. More angular lips are going to have a more angular shadow. You could also imply character personality or archetypes or role in a story. So like this character, their brow is been designed in a really archway, so it makes them feel a kind of villainous and their nose has been pointy. So now when you create that shadow, you get yourself a nice, pointy shape. Again, we're always looking back to the shapes we're creating whenever we're doing a design. Don't get caught up in the details without being able to look back at what you're saying with the basic shapes. There's four different styles of showing a surface. Let's just turn off the sketch. Even with just the shadows, your brain expects a face and they're so familiar with faces. You can create a sense of closure just based on the shadow. You can see the structure of the face just in the way the light hits it. If we get even closer to the face, we can get more subtle shadows, like the shadow that would fall on the surface of a nose that's turned away from a light source. Let's put the light source here. Now, let's try to figure out where the shadow would fall. This side of the nose will be lit, we'd see a bit around the top, but then the shadow would start to form here. We could even have it move around the eye if we want to be really dramatic about it. Now, let's say the head is turning in to the light source a bit so the shadow could start to fall away. Maybe it's only coming around the eye a little bit now, losing even more, and now it's just right above there. Light is part of storytelling. Because in a store, you can control it and you can use it to show contrast or hide something or reveal it. So light falling on a face really starts to tell the story of where the face is, what angle attack. Now if we look back to our booklet here and we move into the dimension section, we've got 1, 2, 3, 4 different pages. The first one is just an overview of the three-quarter turn. So there's some references here to help you translate a head from the front end view or the profile view like we talked about on day 2 and 1 to a three-quarter turn and even the back of the head three-quarter turn. Less useful, but you never know when you need to sneak up on a character. A little review on the form of some of the details of the face zooming in like we talked about earlier. There are some references there and some pro tips. This sheet starts getting into surfaces as we just reviewed. Feel free to even open this up in your drawing program. If you're working on a tablet, you can even take a picture if you printed it out and open it up in Procreate or whatever. You just draw right on top of it. Practice your line art. Think about what you want to show and what you don't want to show as you move across the surfaces of a face. Some styles need more line art. Some styles need less. Practice shadows on the features of your face. Now, here's an example of putting it all together. Expressions like we talked about on day 1, features, and style, and variety like we talked about on day 2 all at the three-quarter turn angle. So faces with dimension and personality, and just a bit of squash and stretch. As we move into a slightly more believable, like not realistic exactly but just believable looking faces, faces that exist in a space, we lose a bit of the squash and stretch. It's not so exaggerated in that Disney cartoony style. It's more subtle. When you see a face like shock, I'm not really stretching the skull. The skull isn't really elastic, but some of the features get exaggerated just to touch. Like I heighten the eyebrow and thicken it just to really imply that shock. I pulled the mouth down a little bit, but I don't overdo it. I don't want to lose a sense of the jaw is actually here and then it's an actual bone in the face. Having characters who has believable facial expressions and facial structures can heighten the drama of a story. If you believe a character's head exists, then when they get into trouble, you're going to worry about them a little more. Practice some faces at different angles, practice expressions, surfaces. If you want to really dig into angles and tilting of the head, here's a little worksheet that helps you focus on angle of the jaw from looking at a character from below, maybe a more dramatic angle of a three-quarter turn, enhancing different expressions like shock shown from a lower angle like this, make shock just even more appealing and more believable. Again, you get that superhero angle by just tilting the head up ever so slightly and you could add some drama or menace to a character by tilting their head down. You can see the way the features crushed together and start to overlap as a head tilts away from the point of view. Then here's a more complicated angle. This one took me about five times to get right. This over the shoulder angle, we've got a bashful feeling of this character. Adding dimension to a character's face, it's a lifetime journey of figuring this stuff out because there's a million camera angles you could draw head from. I recommend practicing the -quarter turn until you're really comfortable with it and then start to shift your camera around. But it also helps to really get to know a character's face first, so don't be afraid to just stay in that two-dimensional straight on view face design that we talked about on day 2 just to really get a sense of the shapes and forms of a character before you add depth to them.
13. DAY FOUR : Storytelling pt.1: Well, here we are on the last day of our workshop. Today's focus is all about taking the things we've learned over the course of these three days. Expressions, placement of features, variety, form, dimension depth and mixing and matching all those things to serve the purpose of a story. Let's start to think of the faces were drawing as actors and some narrative. I don't mean a long big story, I just mean even a moment. Let's look at what we've got on the screen here. We've got two faces reacting to something. You can tell they're reacting not by me telling you that, but just the way the features are. We see this face is exaggerated. The eyes are up, the eyebrows are up there and a joyous, excited moment. Over here we have a different sense of excitement. We've got more of a bit of a shocked face. The eyes are open but they're looking at something. The mouth is more drop-down and tilt at a lower angle. Whereas this one points up? Our brains just automatically start to tell a story whenever we look at a face we're imagining what happened before and what might happen next. Then of course we can answer those questions. These characters are of course, looking at little ghosts. But we can take those ghosts away again and see that the power of an expression goes a long way with the narrative of an image. We don't always have to answer the questions, if our faces are strong enough. Now, let's look at these little templates here when we're drawing the features of the face and we're making choices about what we put and where we put it, we start to break some of the principles of the placement of design. On Day 1, we talked about just these generic placement of features, generic shapes, which would be the middle of extremes. This is just general placement. But to convey a narrative through a character's face, we can change where the placement of those features are to suggest other things about who the character is. Let's say we want a character to feel more innocent. We can make the eyes bigger. We put the pupils here, we raise the eyebrows. We can even open the mouth a little bit. Tilt the mouth up in the corner. I could character a sense of expectation is a little more naive. They are wide-eyed, which makes him look a little more youthful like we see a lot more of the pupil here. Without any words or even much more detail, we can convey a sense of innocence. Now, here, let's make a character who looks more focused and mature and intense. We can bring the eyes in a little bit, make them slightly more realistic in their scale and proportion, level off the eyebrows, and have the mouth turn down just a bit, which is the default location or the default placement of the mouth, and it hangs just a bit, the upper lip coming over the bottom lip a bit. Bringing the eyes in and shrinking them a little gives focus. Let's make a character feel more attentive. We can go to extremes here, if we're looking at this arc exaggeration, subtlety, like way over here on this little chart. We can push these eyes way to the outside. Really opened things up here, and then this case maybe shrink the mouth and lower it down here. This is really exaggerated, but the character looks like he's really paying attention on a supernatural level. This character could be maybe otherworldly. Now if we move a character's eyes way into the inside and we give them thick brows. Just leave the mouth as it is. What I'm getting at here is you can do a lot with the eyes and the eyebrows. I'm not trying to adjust too many of the other features. This character feels a little more incompetent. Their eyes are really close together, which makes him seem like they don't have a great grasp of visual depths and sense of space. You can see just by simply adjusting a feature slightly, you can really imply different narrative aspects of a character, their personality, or their role in a story. We've got innocence here, focus, attentiveness and competence. Now if I take those words away, maybe you're not associating them directly with those words. Maybe there's a more broad term that you have for how you see these faces. But in general, try to guide your audience with your face design and see where they take it. At the end of the day, it's up to them anyway. One of the fun things about art and illustration is look at somebody's work and wondering, how did they come up with that idea? Usually there's a whole big backstory that's a lot longer and more complicated than you think to even creating a simple but compelling character design. Here's two characters on the screen that I created. I didn't just make them up. I didn't just pick up my pencil and start drawing and have them come out directly like this. For me when I work, I like to base things on a narrative. I like to do a little creative exercise in my head or on paper before I begin drawing a face. Some artists like to just sketch and see where it leads them, and then later go back and revise based on story. But I like to write first. These two characters, you can look at their faces and assume a lot about them. That's the goal here. You're supposed to be able to tell who they are just by looking at them. But they're actually based on these little narrative descriptions which just implies certain things about their features and their personality. This character here on the left was described as nervous, with tired eyes and a cozy knit hat. That was just a phrase I came up with, and then I based this illustration on that phrase. There are clues to some of the features of the character, but everything else built off of that initial description. Like it doesn't describe how the eyebrows should be here, but it does say tired eyes and nervous energy. I gave this character a bit of a bashful, uncomfortable feeling. You can see the head's tilted a little bit back. The eyebrows are up, they're not making eye contact with you. They're looking off to the side. I thought a nose that suited this face would be a round or softer, friendlier nose. You can see the shape and the surface of the face is a little more fatty. It's not very narrowly and dint. The form has some nice little overlaps here at the edges of the mouth. To echo that round softness of the cozy hat, I do the same shape with the ears. It would look odd. It would be an odd juxtaposition here if I had really angular ears on a face like this. Then I gave the character longer hair, and I let it flow down the neck, and just appealing simple shapes. This description informed the root of this design, and then I just built off of that and created a sense of logic about who this character would be, how they would carry themselves, and how their features would be. Just for the sake of the exercise, I went to the other side of the personality spectrum with this character, where the descriptor was mysterious with a wave of hair and glamorous sunglasses. That's fun to write little poetic phrases that might not be grammatically correct, but they just evoke an idea in your head. Right after that I knew that I wanted to tilt the head down with this character, simply because the other head is tilted a little more back, but it really works with the mysterious concept. We have the character tilted down and the wave of the hair gives it a nice wooziness at the top of the head. Really striking shapes, simple, not too complicated. We see that they might have a gray streak in their hair implying an age. Glamorous sunglasses. I gave the glasses a bit of personal style and I made them sliding down the nose just a bit so we can still see the character's eyes. It's tricky with glasses and other accessories that might obscure the key features of the face. The things you need to convey, the personality or the emotion of your character. You're constantly adjusting aspects of the face depending on the purpose of the image. In this case, I wanted you to get a sense of the character behind the glasses. I brought them down the nose a bit. You can see all the features are a little more angular. There's still round and the style that I work in, but they're are a lot point here than what we see on this other character here. As you can see, storytelling is always at the root of my character designs. I'd say that's probably the case for a lot of artists developing a good sense of imagination, being able to talk to yourself about the world building you're doing, is going to inspire your designs. Having no idea in your head before you start to draw is just going to result in a really flat, simple face that might have just a generic smile on staring forward at nothing. But if you can picture something that character is responding to, or something that's happened to them or might happen to them soon, it's going to inform a lot of your decision-making.
14. DAY FOUR : Storytelling pt.2: Let's look at some examples from some of my work before I let you start drawing here. Here are some character designs from a book I'm currently working on. We'll look at two of the main characters. Here we have Elijah, I wrote this little descriptor about him based on his role in the plot and his backstory. Elijah is a good friend. He's an aspiring filmmaker, a stranger in a strange town. He carries a notebook and a pencil, and he's easily thrown off balance. It is not clear all these aspects of his personality in these two images. But knowing a little backstory, a little of that iceberg below the surface, it's just going to help you add flavor to a character even if you're not seeing it at the moment. Elijah is a good friend. He has to have a certain sense of appeal. His role in the story is to connect the other characters. I gave him glasses, probably because I think it's fun to draw glasses and the challenge of trying to draw eyes in glasses can be tough. But it really works for this character because he's all about point of view. He is a filmmaker. He's often carrying a camera. His eyes can look big and appealing, it makes him look young and ambitious, and he's got a real positive attitude. The glasses informed that about him. It wouldn't be the only way to convey those personality traits. It's not like glasses necessarily imply that. But in this case, the way I'm using them, the big round lenses work for his personality. Here's an example of Elijah in a more distinct pose. Hopefully, you're getting some of these character traits. Then we have another character paired with him in the story had a bit more of a contrast with Suzy, who is a loyal daughter. She's a horror expert, she's into horror movies. She is the strangest in this strange town, and she's really good at typing. Sometimes it's fun to come up with a really specific detail about a character and see where that leads you. So I went so far as to say she can type up to 90 words per minute, which is pretty decent. She empathizes with movie monsters. Suzy, unlike Elijah, is a bit more mature. You can see it right off the bat in her eyes. There's a bit more level of detail, there's more subtlety, there's a bit more of a believe-ability. Elijah has a very cartoony expression. Suzy is a little more grounded, which speaks to her personality. She's got a bit more of a darker backstory and more complicated elements of her plot in this book. She's looking off to the side again, she's not making eye contact with you, but she's not bashful. She's looking away as if she's got her mind on other things. Like her face is tilted away from you, she's still standing confidently, she just got her mind on other stuff. I've stretched her nose out a bit. I think for this character, it works to have a longer face. She is the same age as Elijah, but she can feel more mature by just stretching the face and making it look a little slimmer that changes the proportions of her. Here's Suzy at work. You can see her eyebrows are often raised. She's really focused on what she's typing here. She's got a cute, upturned nose, and a little bit of a wrinkle under her eye, which just implies that she's often deep in thought. There's a couple of examples of how story informs character and you can bounce back and forth with that idea. You could start drawing a character, then come up with a backstory, and then maybe revise your drawing based on that. Before we start our class project, let's look at the last couple pages of our booklet. You've got some tips on expressing character, looking at some of the drawings I just showed you on the screen, to remind you that text and backstory can also inform a face design. A little tip here about drawing reactions. In the last page here, the goal overall, if anytime you sit down to draw a face that you want to share with the world, is to create a memorable character. I say here that a face of a character tells a story, but it also evokes questions. So for me, as a graphic novelist, whenever I present a character, I can't give you all the information right up front because then why read the story. Every character has to have some hidden aspects of them. I have to give the reader a reason to follow them on their journey. So I like a character design that hints at who they are without telling you right up front, and that's something that character design is going to do anyway, especially when you're drawing a face that's going to evoke questions that make you curious. But I like to keep that in mind whenever I'm drawing a face, it helps amplify my creative process. Here's an example of a collection of five different characters. I just point out little ways that they might evoke a question in you. For example, this character here, she's clearly a race of ancient elves, we can tell just by the pointiness of her ear. Then who's this weird fishman who seems to be able to survive outside of water. Little ways of using expression to imply mystery. This character, there's a lot going on, but we also see in their face that they're suspicious at something that's happening just off camera and what does that say about their personality. Got a generic wizard character here, but he's so bland, we don't know if he's good or bad. There's more to learn about that wizard. Then Elijah is back hanging out with these characters. He's such a normal kid, it's like, "Well, how did he get mixed up with this group?" Characters, once you put them in the context of other characters, we start to learn more about who they are because when you pair things together, you start to understand different aspects of those objects or people. Then a good tip overall that I learned from watching a lot of Looney Tunes cartoons is that the silhouette of a character goes a long way. When you're designing a character, it's often good to look at their outline. How did they present is just a black form. If you're able to distinguish a character simply by their silhouette, then you know you're on your way to a good character design because it's got a visual quality that's memorable. Imagine some famous characters like the Simpsons, you've got Lisa, Bart, Marge, Homer, and Maggie. You could probably sit down and draw their outline without thinking too hard about it. They all have very distinct head shapes and hairstyles, and that's what makes them so iconic and memorable. You can tell all kinds of stories with those characters because you've built up such a reputation with their shape and form, and just like a base understanding of who they are, they can go off in all these different directions because they're so iconic and simple.
15. Class Project pt.1: We've got a lot of information here after three-and-a-half days of learning about drawing faces. Let's put that all to use in our class project. The theme of our class project is character portraits. Your task here is to create the face, the head, and right down to the neck and shoulders of a character, that's typically known as the bust of the character. Here's some of our characters from earlier. We've got the face, the head, and I recommend drawing the neck in the top of the shoulders of your character, which is typically known as the bust of the character because it's going to allow you to just give a better sense of the tilt of the head. If you want to get fancy with the angle of your character's dimension, having shoulders and a bit of the neck is going to help with that. We're going to create a whole new character just in simple black and white line art based on a character description. Now you can get your character description from anywhere you want. Create a short descriptive paragraph about yourself and then base your illustration on that. You could go in a more fantasy direction by generating a character, maybe a character that's a little supernatural with heightened features like this elf or this watery fishman. But I would suggest not straying too far from normal human proportion because that's really what we've been focusing on. If you start to make up the features and stray too far from reality, then it's hard to know if you've really got a grasp of some of these basic core concepts that we've been covering. You don't have a great idea off the top of your head of a character description and you need a little more help. Like you don't want to base it on yourself and you don't just have a character idea in mind, you can use the character generator online. So that's what I did for my project. I found what's called the Quick Character Generator after a little Google searching. I like this character generator because you don't have to really put in any information. You can say generate and you get a name, and the age, and a brief appearance description and a little bit of personality. It's just enough information to get you inspired without being too descriptive where you feel reigned in. I generated a character using the character generator website, and I pulled that text into Clip Studio Paint here. This is all just straight off the Internet. I didn't really modify this at all. We've got Ronnie Gould, age 15, 5'2", crooked with tan skin, dominant feel about her. She has a long face, narrow nose, very thin lips, and her light green eyes are hooded, which basically means the top of her eyes overlaps her lids a little bit. Her mousy brown hair is short and frizzy, and features long fringe. Fringe is your bangs. Gentle, she's non-traditional, understanding, and observant. Now, this is a description I can take what I want from it. I can change any of these features. But it's nice to have a couple of things to pick from. It's always good to be able to have enough content to edit out stuff. In my mind, I've got a general idea of the shape of the head. I'm going to open, you want to open up a new project here, grab a fresh sheet of paper, and we're going to move through some of those basic steps. Now I'm going to draw my character portrait at a three-quarter turn because it's complicated enough where I'm covering all the different skills we've learned in this class. But it's not too complicated where I'm going to lose a sense of the proportion of the face. I don't want to challenge myself too much with this class project. I want to sit in a comfort zone, but be able to express all the stuff that I've learned. So three-quarter turn is the perfect middle ground. We're going to start with that basic shape of the skull. I'm going to make this character facing to the right a bit. I'm going to do that three-quarter turn and just quickly block out the features here. It sits right about there. I'm using really generic shapes right off the bat, and see I'm keeping my sketch really light. That way I'm very happy to be able to modify any of these lines as I develop the placement and dimensions of the features. The height is just a detail that we're not really seen in the face. But if the character is 5'2", it means their average height for their age. They're not going to have a little round baby head, if you compare a small baby character to adult character, the proportion of the head is very different. The character that is very young has a small rounder head, where is a character that's adult has a longer, taller head with a bigger stronger jaw. This character is young, so we're going to have a bit of a jaw. We know that they have a long face, but it can't be really long and that they are old, and they've got this long old jaw. It's going to be useful long. Let's go with something like this for now. Let's look at some other things we've got here, narrow nose. To me, narrow means thin and long, so we're going to draw a really basic nose shape. We don't want it to be too prominent and the way it sticks off. So narrow, skinny. Very thin lips. When I think of thin lips, I think that they are very wide and flat. Let's just do a flat line for now. We can add a bit more expression later once we've got a better sense of who Ronnie Gould is. Now, it all starts to come out in the eyes for me. Light green eyes that are hooded. Well, we don't have green to work with, but we can play with the hooded idea. Now sometimes when I'm drawing a face, I start to make expressions and start to feel out who the character is subconsciously. Don't be afraid to get really into your work. I'm starting to have a little bit of dimension to the face because Ronnie's face is very long. I think of it as being skinny. So I'm going to really bring in that little divot at the edge of the eye make the cheekbone pop, make a really narrow chin and a long jaw. I'm going to throw in the neck that now that I have got a better sense of the head. If you want to add some shoulders at this point, start by creating a flat surface like this. Notice, you can see the arc of my shoulders. My collarbone is here, my neck connects down here, and the top ridge of my shoulders is where my spine and the back of the neck is. So that's that point and this comes down. Your shoulder should disappear behind the edge of your chin a little if you're at a three-quarter turn. The nice about using this shape to design your shoulders is you can widen it or shrink it based on the structure of the character's body. Ronnie should not have very broad shoulders because she's pretty young. So bring them in a bit. I know some of you don't sketch in the same way. But anybody that's a messy sketcher, this is probably making you feel pretty good to watch me. Just go over these lines again and again and again. Then bring up the head a bit. The ears. Tall and skinny echoing the chin. You want your features to start to unify with the core elements of the face. If you were to describe Ronnie with a single feature, it seems like, to me, it would be, maybe the long narrow nose, it might be this little region here where the nose and the eyes create this T form. I'm really focused on getting these right and then letting the other expressions complement or the other features complement these main features. Gentle, non-traditional, understanding, and observant. Gentle, we need to soften the features. We don't want Ronnie to look worried. Maybe we'll move the mouth down just a bit. Let's erase this, move the mouth down a touch and let it curve up just a little bit. Maybe we'll try opening the mouth slightly. Let's work on the edges of the ears a little, something we haven't talked too much about since the second day. Notice I'm holding out on the hair. It's so fun to draw hair. I don't want to get obsessed with the hair before I understand the face really well. Now, I could just box off the nose, but with younger characters, it's usually fun to give them a little bit of a shape on the end of it. Starting to have a personality. Let's shrink this down, just a touch, so we have room for the hair.
16. Class Project pt.2: I'm going to actually start another layer for the hair just in case I want to start over, it's easier to just do something like this. Turn it off and begin again. I'll see brown hair, short and frizzy, long fringe. So maybe we aren't even going to see Ronnie's eyebrows. Let's start by giving Ronnie a hairline. Let's do something like this. Then let's try bringing the fringe way down. Here's me using some of those form lines we talked about on Day 3. Of course, I'm not going to draw all the hair in the final art, but if I can get a sense of the volume of the hair now, then it makes it a lot easier to convey it with just some simple inclines, short, and frizzy. Let's try a shape like this. When you're drawing short hair, usually it comes down a little further in the back, so if the part of the hair is in the center, and let's switch to red just so you can see what I'm doing here, the part of the hair is in the center, here's your fringe in the front. The sides come down like this and then the back is a little more full and lower. You can see I try to work in really basic forms when designing the features of the face. This is how I capture it like an interesting silhouette. I'm going to lighten that up a bit. Open up a new layer and sketch the hair again with a little more confidences to the shape I want to use. Let's draw wobbly line for the bangs. Bring this up like this, and have her ear poke out just a bit, and I can turn off that lower layer. So it was just a preliminary sketch, we don't need that anymore. There's her hair. Now if I really wanted to test this out, I could go back to my other sketch, create a little mask and just block out some of this so I could get a good look at the hair and how it sits on the head, and if it's working for the character, and I could even select this layer and either redraw it or just shift it around, play with its shape and dimension. Some of the benefits of working digitally is it's easy to make big moves like this without giving up any lines, and you can always undo, but I know some of you were drawing traditionally, so I'm not going to get too into the technical stuff, so we'll get rid of that mask for now, and just look at it as it is. Okay, pretty good. Now I'm going to lighten the sketch of the face, and now that I've got a better sense of Ronnie as a person, I'm going to enhance some of the features, playing off the eyes and the nose a bit more, add a bit of exaggeration, cartoony feel to what we've got, and then that'll give me something to ink on top of. Sketching isn't always just done in one layer, sometimes there's multiple stages. Especially when you're in a process of developing a character for the first time, the more you draw them, the more comfortable you can get, the more streamline the process. Let's see. Let's start with the eyes. Notice now that I've got a sense of the placement, I can play with the form a little more. We can make Ronnie's eyes a little rounder. I'm going to bring her jaw down just a little more. Let's play with the mouth a bit. I know I lowered the mouth earlier, but I think it works better if it's up. Just a touch, something that feels more gentle about raising it up on the eye. We'll show the teeth just a little, and give a little line of where the thin lips. If the lips are thin, that doesn't really work. Let's move that up just a bit. Now let's get to this crucial area of all this overlapping of the nose and the fringe. It's risky to cover the eyebrows, but the eyes are pretty expressive, so maybe we can go for it. Let's see. You'll notice I'm using the hair to frame the face now that I'm more confident in the shape. I brought this line down a bit instead of going out just to bring the view of the face in, instead of having it have so much outward shape. I'm going to try that on this side too. Let's get rid of that edge, and bring the shape of the hair in just a little more. A couple of guidelines just to help along the way. Shoulders, neck. Let's turn off those lower layers. Let's adjust these pupils a little. I'm not too confident that we'll get the expression without the eyebrows, so I'm going to move the hair up and put the eyebrows in. It's hard to lose those key features, so I'll do this. As you can see, don't be afraid to draw over your sketches time and time again. That's just a muscle you have to build up, you can't expect the first line to be perfect. Sometimes you've got to go over something again and again. There we go. That's Ronnie. Now, I'm going to lighten this layer and then ink on top of that. The first time you ink a character can be a little traumatic as you really start to lock in their features. Of course, you can always go back and draw them again, they can develop over time. Notice I tried to capture the features with a single line if possible, like the mouth. For me the hair always takes a little extra work especially with frizzy hair, which is not a style I draw very often. You don't want to have too many curves in it. We also have to imply the weight of the hair. It's light and short. Light as in light in weight, and short. We can have a bit of shape, but we don't want to overdo the shape. We don't want to make it too crazy, because sometimes that distracts from the face. We want the frizz, but without the distraction. It's pretty cool. Of course, there are many ways to imply hair texture, just my style leans towards simplicity and just basic soft appealing shapes. So I'm not going to add too much detail into the hair itself. This might not be the same way you would do frizzy hair, but for me sometimes that detail comes out in the coloring stage. Let's turn off that sketch and see how things are looking. Pretty good. Let's redraw the hair here a little. This line might need to be a little more clear. The fringe wasn't quite working for me. Let's try a couple more options. Well, this is just a personal taste thing, but for the fringe I'm going to swoop it off to the side. I think the face needs to break the symmetry a little bit, so swooping the hair to the side helps with that. I do like this nice little point here that happens at the edge of the hair. There's Ronnie Gold. Now, you're welcome to color your design. This isn't really a class about color but if you want to color your character, that's totally fine. I'm going to just do a bit of shadow work here. There is Ronnie. This is how she signs her name. That there is a basic class project. A character portrait, with a little bit of neck and shoulders. Interesting features, interesting silhouette, a bit of a sense of expression, personality, showing some form, some dimension to the face, a bit of character in there. All based on a brief description. Those are the guidelines for the class project. If you want to take yours a little further, add some color, maybe draw a bit of the setting in the background, you can fill the design out as much as you want, and then upload it to the Class projects section. That's basically our class on drawing faces, so let's wrap things up.
17. Sharing Your Work!: Well, I hope you had fun drawing faces with me. I know this is a big class and there's a lot to take in, but I hope you're really inspired to do a class project, because for me that's the goal with making these classes, is to get you not just to watch them, but to engage with them and create something that I think levels up the whole class overall. Like when people share work in my classes and students look at that work after watching the class, they get another point of view of how to approach the concepts and ideas and technical stuff that I cover in the course. Good class projects broaden the class is what I'm getting at. I think it's interesting to just take a minute here and look at some of the work students have done in my classes. I'll start by showing off some work by a student named [inaudible] from my class cartooning, and drawing people in motion, which was all about focusing really specifically on a running pose of a cartoon character, getting the shoulders and the mass at just the right angle where the character seems like they're pushing forward in motion. The focus of the class here is a bit more about body language, but it would pair really nicely with today's class on drawing faces. My class narrative art, drawing imaginary character's gets into worldbuilding a little further. Once you've got a sense of the basics of character pose and face expression and all that character building stuff, how do you put these characters in a scene that's compelling? Here's some work by [inaudible] called Rainy Day on the city. If you're getting sick of drawing people I've got a class on creative illustration about drawing sea monsters and using real life creatures to blend together to make a new creature that's equally believable. Now, if you go over and check out my channel you'll see I've arranged my 12 classes into different categories. We've got the cartooning basics, where you'll find today's class plus courses on how to draw comics, a beginner's guide, making diary comics, and other styles of cartoon and narrative art. Then we've got some classes that are more based in general illustration, talking about subjects like ink and line art, and style for books. Blending illustration and graphic design, how to work with story. Last but not least, I cover topics that are a little more conceptual, like map design for storytelling, how to use color to convey your worldbuilding and characters personalities, and how to build imaginary worlds using concept art. You can see on my channel I've got hours and hours of class content for you to engage with, but to get back to drawing faces. Make sure you download the reference sheets I've provided for you and when you finish your class project, make sure you upload it to the section called class projects. I'm really excited to see what you've made and let you know what I think. The conversation can go on beyond just me staring at a camera and talking to you. That's all for drawing faces, a beginner's guide and I hope to see you in class. Thanks, bye.
