Drawing Ideas: Create Conceptual Illustrations for Editorial and Beyond

1. Class Trailer: Drawing Ideas: An illustration teacher, I've taken on some of the hardest topics including style, color, and composition. Now I'm taking on conceptual illustration. How do you come up with clever, compelling ideas for editorial, advertising, and publishing clients and beyond? I've had to dig deep for this one, but I think I've figured it out. It turns out that the best conceptual illustrators are all in on a little secret, leaning closer, and I'll tell you three things that I found out. Are things they don't want you to know that will revolutionize how you come up with your ideas in your own work. First, the best ideas are actually not that original. In fact, they're based on pretty unoriginal ideas. The trick here is that the best illustrators know which ones to start with and how to add just the right twist to make their point. Second, most of these starting points are right under our noses, like literal on our lips, we use cliche ideas all the time in spoken language, not just to state dry facts, but to express deeper feelings and truths behind them. The best illustrators just know how to take these verbal metaphors and turn them into pictures. Third, it just so happens that many of these visual concepts have already been made, and we illustrators just go out and steal them. Or maybe not steal them, but we shop for them. It's like finding a ready to eat meal in the freezer section rather than hunting for our dinner in the forest. Are you hungry for more? Learn all about these secrets and more in drawing ideas. This is my new class on Skill Share. I hope you can join me. Visit tomfroz.com slash TeachET earn more. I'll see you in class. 2. About the Class and Project: This class is all about conceptual illustration. How do we communicate big ideas in just one illustration? One of the most interesting kind of projects for illustrators is the editorial illustration, which is often conceptual. In this class, you'll learn the basics of what goes into a conceptual illustration, and then we'll get to put that knowledge to the test in the class project. For the class project, you'll make an editorial style illustration that communicates a big idea in a clear and compelling way. Conceptual illustration is not exclusive. Everyone can use the methods in this class to make conceptual illustrations. These methods are based on ideas that you already know about and for which there are thousands and thousands of examples out there in the world to learn from and be inspired from. To take this class, you'll need a notebook or a sketchbook for taking notes or the digital equivalent. You'll also need pencil and paper for sketching. I will be using Procreate, and you'll need your favorite illustration gear, and for that, I'll be using Procreate, as well. If you're interested in learning my techniques and the brushes and stuff that I use, all of that will be included in my project demo later in this class. In terms of experience, you should have at least beginner to intermediate illustration skills. So that just means that you have some experience working in some kind of tool or technique, whether it's an app on your iPad or Photoshop or even just stuff that you do on paper. You should have some experience playing around of making illustrations. You should also have a basic drawing ability, and that doesn't mean you have to be the best drawer ever, but you should be comfortable holding a pencil and sketching. So who is this class for? It's for a beginner to intermediate illustrators, artists and designers. It's also for anyone looking for techniques to develop concepts or illustration, advertising, marketing, and beyond. So even if you're a more experienced illustrator, but you tend to work less conceptually and more narratively, or you do more storytelling. If you want to dip your feet into some more idea based illustration, this class will be perfect for you. Now, just a quick note about how this class works. I always start my classes off with a little bit of theory that I call the primer, and this is where we just learn a little bit of the what and why of what we're going to be doing in the project before diving into that project part so that by the time we get there with our pencils and our iPads and stuff like that, we're fairly confident about what it is we're actually doing. So if you want to jump right into the project, you can, but I highly recommend that you start with the theory or basically the first lessons, and that will really help you understand what we're talking about and doing later on. Okay, with that being said, let's get into the class. 3. LESSON 1: What is Conceptual Illustration?: In this video, we'll look into what makes an illustration conceptual and what the difference is between a conceptual illustration and a non conceptual illustration. A conceptual illustration is an illustration that has an idea to it. There's more to it than what you see at face value. Whatever you see in the picture at first, it probably means something else on closer inspection. In spoken language, we're used to saying one thing but meaning another. We call this metaphor or more broadly, we might say that we're speaking figuratively. For example, I might say that my last meal out cost me an arm and a leg. That sounds pretty extreme and gory if you take that literally. But of course, you know that what I really mean is that my meal was really expensive. We can speak figuratively in illustrations as well. Conceptual illustrations often involve some visual metaphor or they make a visual pun or they otherwise have some surprise twist in it and the twist is possible by showing mostly a regular expected thing, but changing a part of it in a surprising way. The opposite of a conceptual illustration would be a literal illustration or a representative illustration. Here, I mean, the illustration is literally about what you see at face value. What it means and what it represents are more or less the same thing. Non conceptual illustrations are perfectly valid. It just depends on the context and what you want the illustration to do. Sometimes you just need a beautifully illustrated object or a fun character or a lovely little illustrated scene. I would also include maps as part of non conceptual illustration because they're non metaphorical and they literally represent the place that they're about. Another non conceptual illustration type is what I call the act out. An act out is an illustration where there's a character literally acting out the idea. I've found that illustrators who aren't used to working in a more conceptual way will often resort to showing a character gesticulating or acting out an idea almost like it's a game of charades. For example, if an illustration is about comfort, the acto might show a figure sitting in a couch snuggling up with a blanket or something like that. Nothing wrong with the actout approach, but strictly speaking, it's not conceptual. This particular example would be more narrative. A good test of whether an image is an actout or maybe more conceptual is to ask, could you have shown the scenario in a basic photograph? If the answer is yes, it's not conceptual and maybe a photo could have been used instead. Now the most common context for conceptual illustrations is in editorial publications. This would be mostly newspapers and magazines, whether that's in print or online. Now, we all know about the big names here like the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, or Time magazine. But there are many smaller editorial publications out there that you can find across all industries, including but not limited to travel, education, and retail. Thing that makes any publication editorial is that it features mostly written articles or stories, and these are often paired with illustration or photography to make them more appealing to the reader. Now, not all conceptual illustration is editorial. Conceptual illustration is useful in many situations such as posters, book covers, and advertisements. The opposite is true. Not all editorial illustration is conceptual. For example, most of my illustrations for editorial clients, including the Washington Post, Time magazine, and the Independent, have been non conceptual. Most of these have actually been maps. Now, many people might think that a conceptual illustration needs to be super clever and original, but the truth is that the best illustration concepts aren't that original at all. In fact, they rely heavily on very common ideas to get their main message across. The clever part is in how they springboard from these ideas in a surprising or novel way. This takes us back to what I said earlier about speaking figuratively. We all use these figures of speech to say what we mean without actually saying what we mean in a direct way. In this case, I call these figures of speech idioms. Referring back to my previous example, to say that a meal costs me an arm and a leg isn't just a fancy way of saying that it was expensive. It suggests that the expense was a huge sacrifice comparable to trading my own irreplaceable limbs for it. Obviously an exaggeration, but this dramatic figure speech helps me communicate not just a fact about how much a meal cost, but about how I feel about it. We lean on common metaphors and images to help get our message across not just in a factual way, but also in a more emotional or intuitive way. In summary, a conceptual illustration is any illustration that expresses an idea in a non literal way. These include common metaphors and idioms and also symbols and tropes. In the next few videos, we'll look more deeply into each of these idioms, symbols, and tropes to learn how to harness their power in our illustrations. 4. EXERCISE 1: Is it Conceptual?: At the end of each lesson, I've made these simple exercises that will help you test out what you just learned. This first exercise is called Is it conceptual? The purpose here is to help you learn the differences between conceptual and non conceptual illustration. Using Pinterest, find one example of a conceptual illustration and one example of a non conceptual illustration. Next, explain what makes each one either conceptual or non conceptual. For the conceptual piece, describe what the concept or idea is. In your own words, just explain what you believe the illustration is saying. Share your answers in the class project and be sure to include the name of the artist in each illustration. So I'll show you an example of how I've done this first exercise. This is my conceptual illustration on the one side here, and then the non conceptual illustration on the other. I've just pasted them into Procreate and I've put the artist name for each one of them. Now I'm going to just explain why I believe this one is conceptual. And this one is non conceptual. Now, I've gotten two illustrations of a similar subject, basically a kind of statue head. So this one's a guy carrying a statue head, and this is just basically the head from the statue of David. So this one is conceptual because it's more than just showing statue head. There's something else going on here. There's an idea. Happening here is there's this guy carrying a statue and I don't know exactly what this means. I don't know what the headline is or what the artists original intention might have been, but I'm going to do my best at interpreting it myself here. What I read out of this is what is a statue? The statue is a monument. It's an image of someone it looks like it's an image, maybe of this guy here. It could be the idea of he's trying to keep up his image, it's this idea of a burden because he's carrying a burden here. It's a burden of keeping up your image. This just makes me think of the whole phenomenon of personal branding that is this thing now that everyone seems to have to do and that could be on Instagram or other social media. It could be on LinkedIn. But anyway, it can get burdensome. That's what I read out of it. That's what I'm getting at here. I can just put my reason here, why I think it's conceptual. It's using clear symbols to represent an idea. So how do I know that? Well, the easiest way to describe it here in this class would just be that this is the trope. This trope is playing on the idea of atlas, carrying the world. This is I don't know why I feel like I have to draw what I'm talking about here, but, you know, you have the mythical creature or the mythical character, I should say, of Atlas having to bear the burden of the world. And so this would be considered a trope. Now, for this one, I don't see any real meaning in it. It's just a stylish or stylized version of David's head. In some context, it might mean something, but out of context, there's no concept to this. So you really only have to describe why the conceptual piece is conceptual, but if you want to go ahead and talk about why the other piece isn't conceptual, you can go and do that, as well. I would say it's not conceptual because there's no clear idea. I don't know what the artist intended this to mean. 5. LESSON 2: What are Symbols?: In this video, we're going to look into what symbols are and how they are the basic building block of conceptual illustration. Every day, we use words to represent ideas and things that are in our heads and somehow others seem to understand what we're talking about. We can talk about love or dogs or inflation without any of those things actually being present or even a physical thing you can see with your eyes. It's almost magic when you think about it. The sounds I make with my mouth can put pictures in your mind thousands of miles away perhaps. In this way, words are symbols. There are things that we use to represent other things. In spoken language, symbols are made out of sounds. In illustration, symbols are made out of pictures. In this sense, a symbol is a picture of one thing that means something else. Symbols can be graphic symbols like logos or characters, but they can also be more complex representations. Whether we represent them more realistically or more graphic in a more simplified way, we can use symbols as building blocks to craft our visual messages, just as we use words to craft our verbal messages. Symbols can be very literal in their meaning or they can be more abstract. For example, a book can be a symbol of just a book, like a literal book, but it can also be a symbol for anything we might associate with books in a more abstract sense, education, stories, literacy, doorways into other worlds, and so on. We can choose symbols for both their literal meaning and for other things that we might associate with. Smokestack could represent a smokestack, but it could also express an idea like industry or air pollution. For another example, a ladder could literally represent a ladder like the thing you climb up, but it could also be symbolic of concepts like opportunity, going up, ascent, access, having a better vantage point, and on and on and on. Some symbols are really open to interpretation. There's not just a few possible meanings. I can really be applied to anything. For example, a jigsaw puzzle can be used to represent all kinds of things, especially abstract ideas that don't have any physical form. Things like connection, relationships, cooperation, following apart, intelligence, and things like that. Because these big abstract words are hard to visualize, it's easy to see why the puzzle piece has become something of a cliche symbol. Now, there's nothing wrong with cliche as illustrators, it's our job to find a way to use them more appropriately and to add something more to them in order to make more powerful and more meaningful. Often, all it takes is just adding a little twist. Just for example, let's take the puzzle piece we're talking about. Maybe the idea of piecing things together is a good metaphor and maybe the puzzle symbol or metaphor is perfect for our concept. But then we can think beyond a literal jigsaw puzzle. Maybe it's a broken vase or a mirror or more abstractly, maybe a fragmented face in your illustration. Whatever it is, you want to adjust this idea of the puzzle more to whatever it is that your illustration is actually about. You still have this puzzle idea, these pieces that are coming together are falling apart, but they have been reinvented or reimagined in a way that speaks to the subject more directly. For another example, instead of using a ladder as a symbol of opportunity or access, you can think about what else might be used to climb up something or down something that will be more related to your subject, such as a beanstalck or a rope or stairs. These are basically all symbols for the same basic idea. The takeaway here is that in order to illustrate an idea, you need to start with symbols. The symbols you choose need to be related to your subject in a more direct way, but they should also have deeper meanings that can speak to some bigger ideas that you're working with as well. As an illustrator, your job is to understand how symbols work, what do symbols mean at face value, then what deeper meanings might they have as well? The most powerful images don't shy away from using common symbols. Whether they're cliche or overused matters less than whether they're appropriate for your specific subject and how you use them. Now, in our conceptual Illustration tool kit, symbols are the basic building blocks of meaning, and sometimes we can get away with just one building block, like just using one symbol, and that's our entire illustration. But we usually need to combine symbols to communicate our message. In the next couple of videos, we'll look at tools that will help us do that, namely idioms and tropes. 6. EXERCISE 2: Symbolic Nouns: This exercise is called symbolic nouns. We all know what a noun is. It's a word for a person, place, or a thing. In this exercise, we'll look into how literal people, places and things can become symbols for more abstract ideas. The purpose here is to help you build your symbolic literacy. That is your awareness of how everyday things can be used symbolically in your art. To do this exercise, first, write down three nouns, one person, one place, and one thing. A person, it can be a real or fictional person, could be a figure from history or at a politics, for example, or a character out of a movie or a book, but they need to be well known. For the place, this is a hard one to symbolize, choose a well known building monument or landmark to represent it. Choose a familiar object that you believe most people would be familiar with. Next, write a one to three things that each noun could be a symbol of or what it could represent. For each of these possible meanings, write or sketch out alternative symbolic nouns that could in turn represent these. Share your answers and any sketches you may have made on your class project. So I just have my example here of my exercise too, and for my person, I chose Abraham Lincoln and for my place, I've chosen the US capital. I could have said, my place is Washington, but then I start thinking about how to represent that symbolically. So it's much easier to think of a specific monument or building or landmark that I could easily draw and so the US capitals my place. Then for the thing, I've chosen a neck tie. Part two, we want to write one to three things that each noun could be a symbol or represent. The most literal thing here is Abe Lincoln himself. I've just doodled a little symbol of each of these things up here. Now I want to think about what does Abraham Lincoln, in this case, represent? He could represent the idea of freedom or emancipation, or perhaps assassination. Now, for the US capital, this could be a symbol of America, it could be US politics, or it could represent something like big government. And then for the thing, the neck tie, this could represent men or just, like, a man. It could represent business, and a neck tie could also represent dads. So we've gone in the direction of going from something very literal to what they more abstractly represent. And now we're going to flip things around to go back the other way. So we can take each one of these associated words and see what other symbol we could use to represent them. So, for freedom, we might choose to represent that with the US flag or the statue of Liberty. For emancipation, we could represent that with, say, a hand and shattering handcuffs or something like that, or even just handcuffs themselves being shattered. Now for our place, we have the US capital. We said that it could mean America, US politics, and big government. Let's just say US politics is a word or an idea that we want to then find another symbol for. You could represent that with, say, Donkey. I'm going to try and draw a donkey here and an elephant, which are, of course, the symbols of the two parties of America's two party system. So Donkey and elephant together would be a symbol for US politics. Then finally, the thing, the neck tie. The literal neck tie is symbolized here and a neck tie can symbolize men or businesses or dads. Let's just see what we can come up with dads. Reverse engineering this to see what symbols we could use to represent dads. I think right away of lawnmowers. I think of beer. I think of beards. I know not all dads have beards, but these are the things you think about. There's no wrong answer for what you associate with certain ideas. The question is, which of these symbols might be the most universal? Now keep in mind that for all of these, you're looking for symbolic nouns. If you get stuck for ideas here, you may find yourself turning to actos, something more than just one thing that can represent the idea. For example, for the dad one, it's hard to represent dads abstractly with one symbol, isn't it? My first thought is to show a dad like figure holding a child like figure, which is literally what a dad would look like. But our job here is to go beyond that literal scene or scenario or what I'm calling an act out. And by doing this exercise, you'll experience first hand how hard this process can be. It can be hard to find a symbol that represents an abstract idea. Just do your best and if you find yourself in a dead end, just say so in your write up, just say you couldn't think of a symbol for that particular idea. 7. LESSON 3: What are Idioms?: Okay. In this video, we're going to look into what idioms are and how we can use them as a powerful starting point for ideas in our illustrations. Idioms are common phrases or figures of speech that we use so often we barely even realize it. For example, hair of the dog or pulling back the curtain or the goose that lays the golden eggs, a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. The piper must be paid. I'm sure you've heard some of these before. Idioms are usually references to well known old stories or historical events or cultural works like movies or books or songs. They can also be more direct metaphors drawn from shared human experiences like fanning the flames. Idioms are prepackaged metaphors that we can use to express bigger ideas and simpler ways. Now, metaphors are probably the most common type of device used in conceptual illustration. To say we're pulling back the curtain, that's a very illustrative way of describing the revealing or unveiling of some truth that was hitherto hidden from us. While we might say pulling back the curtain, we don't actually mean there's a physical curtain involved. Now, conceptual illustrations often play off idioms in ways that are very clear and easy to identify. An illustration isn't a direct interpretation of the idiom itself. The idiom is modified in some way to represent a more specific idea. An idiom is chosen to line up with the subject or the point of view or whatever the illustration is about, but then it's adjusted or twisted in ways that make it mean something more or to invoke more curiosity. Now, there are no hard and fast rules here. Sometimes an idiom can be used in a very on the nose way that is perhaps used ironically or for a comedic effect. Other times an illustration might just use an idiom as a starting point, but then it takes a lot of liberties to make it more specific or interesting or even quirky. Often as illustrators will get idioms handed to us directly in the headline of the story we're illustrating, especially if we're working on an editorial style project. For example, a recent illustration that I worked on was for an article with squeaky clean as the headline. The article was about how to wash your car properly, but my point here is that the headline of the article came with that built in idiom, squeaky clean. I was a natural starting point for me. It's sometimes enough to just run with the idiom that you get from the headline and then customize it according to the context or subject. Now one key thing to note about idioms is that in themselves, they're not original ideas. They are cliches, but that's what makes them idioms. Now, the best illustration ideas are not that original. They take an old idea, an idiom, and then use it to communicate a new one. Example, fanning the flames is probably something every culture since the beginning of civilization would understand, but we can apply it to more current events or ideas in an illustration. Creative communication does not mean we're inventing a new language. We're just being creative in how we're using the one we already speak. Other thing to note here is that idioms are most powerful when they're used figuratively as a symbol or metaphor for a bigger idea and not in a more direct way. Even though idioms are unoriginal, they're powerful to us because they give us this prepackaged metaphor or this mental illustration that we can use as our starting point and we can be fairly certain that our audience will understand it. 8. EXERCISE 3: Drawing Idioms: Exercise is called drawing idioms. As you now know, an idiom is a common figure of speech, which is often based on a metaphor of some kind. In this exercise, we'll play around with the literal and more figurative meanings of idioms through drawing. The purpose here is to practice visualizing idioms through sketching. First, write out one idiom that comes to your mind. Next, explain in your own words what the idiom means. You can write it out in one sentence or you can make a list of possible explanations. Next, draw your idiom out in the most literal possible way. Next, experiment with replacing different elements of your idiom drawing. My example, idiom here is a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush and I've just written a list here of possible meanings. Sometimes you know what a thing means, but you don't necessarily know how to say it in an eloquent way, or it means lots of different things. I'm just saying all the things that come to my mind here. The thing that you have is worth more than the thing you wish you had or go with the sure thing. Or work with what you have. There's a few others here, but the other one that I was thinking is if you're greedy, you might lose what little you have. I think that's really the meaning of this idea. The bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. You have something in your hands, you can eat. You have your pigeon or whatever it is. But if you go and try and get those birds in the bush, you might lose the one in your hand because you got distracted or something like that. There's lots of ways you can pull at this idiom and turn it into a metaphor for other things in life. I already went ahead here and drew different configurations of this bird in the hand metaphor, it's really literal. There's a bird and a hand and there's two birds in the bush. That's really the exercise here is just to start by drawing the literal interpretation of the idiom. I went a little ahead here and decided to as literally as possible illustrate the whole idiom. There's a bird in a hand weighing more or being more valuable or worth more than two birds in the bush over here. It weighs more than the other. It's a super literal, not very thoughtful or brainy way of depicting this idea, but in a way, you understand what is meant in this little picture. If you were looking at this picture and you didn't know what the idiom was, you could probably guess it pretty easily. For this next part of the exercise, I experimented with replacing different elements in my more literal drawing. Instead of a bird in the hand, it's an elephant in the hand. Then I was thinking about the other one, two birds in the bush. I replaced the two birds with two elephants in the bush, which is silly. But then I was thinking like, Oh, okay, elephants have trunks and trees have trunks. I started playing with that idea here, drawing a sort of loose tree there with two elephants in there. I ended up with this silly thing here where one elephant's trunk is the tree trunk, and there's a bit of a balancing act happening here and I included a little bit of plant or tree in this elephant's mouth up here just to reference the bush. At this stage, your ideas or your drawings don't have to make any sense, but it might be interesting just to see what other meanings can happen by accident or just what interesting compositions you come up with. When you're done this exercise, be sure to share your idiom and some of your sketches on your class project. 9. LESSON 4: What are Tropes?: In this video, we're going to learn about illustration tropes. What are they? And how can they work for us as conceptual illustrators? Just as idioms are prepackaged metaphors, Illustration tropes are like prepackaged concepts and compositions that we can use as a starting point in our own work. You've probably already seen what I'm talking about here before. There are certain kinds of illustrations that seem to come up all the time, the same concept or composition, but from a different artist. Sometimes the only difference is in the color or style. Example, there's the stack of books with people climbing on them. There's the book as portal to another world. There's the head silhouette with gears or a maze or something else inside of it, where the brain should be or the human head with the top open and stuff exploding out of it. As you can see, there are certain concepts that show up again and again. In this sense, they're visual idioms and that means they're often very cliche. The power of tropes here is that they provide something that viewers can immediately recognize. We humans don't really connect well to things that are totally new or totally unfamiliar. Having something that we've seen before can help us at least start to pay attention. We can use tropes to hook viewers in before hitting them over the head with a more complex or nuanced idea. Whether a trope is a thoughtless imitation or a clever concept depends on how well it was used. How appropriate is the trope for the subject? How natural a fit is it to the overall idea? It also depends on how well the trope was executed. How well suited is the trope to the artist's style. Sometimes we can forgive a cliche if it's just beautifully illustrated. As we saw in the previous lesson, headlines often come with built in idioms. Sometimes the idioms lend themselves well to a certain trope. For example, if a headline used the phrase peeling back the curtain, we could easily turn to the peeling back the curtain trope. More often you'll probably have to look a little harder for the right trope for your concept, but you don't always have to look very far. In the class project, I'll show you how I use a list of existing tropes to find the most suitable one for a given idea or headline and that becomes the starting point for my own unique idea. Now, tropes exist in all art, movies, and literature. This is just an example from movies. We've all seen the movie where the guy races against time to get to the airport just before the girl of his dreams flies off forever, arriving at the gate just in time to tell her he loves her, and then they live happily ever after. Not out of laziness that screenwriters use this trope. It's because they know that everybody understands it. Everyone can relate to rushing to the airport and we can all relate to the pursuit of love. Now, tropes can be more subtle than that, for example, space movies often will have a scene where the characters are eating food or drinking coffee on the spaceship or the Starship. This connects an unfamiliar situation being an astronaut in deep space with one that's familiar to everyone else drinking coffee. This can just be a way to make that connection stronger. I have a love hate relationship with tropes. On the one hand, I do see a lot of them overused and it seems like they're used really without thinking about why or what they mean. You see this a lot with stock illustrations, especially, but on the other hand, sometimes we're just attracted to a specific trope and we just want to try it for ourselves, but in our own way. It can actually be really fun to play with a trope and see how we can make it more our own. Of course, it can be way easier to work with an existing trope rather than trying to invent a completely new idea for our illustration. There are no rules about which ones you may or may not use or which ones are to be avoided. What really matters is that if you're using a trope, you're using it thoughtfully and hopefully you're adding your own spin to it. Just keep in mind that a trope might help you get to your idea faster, but there may not be a suitable one out there for your particular situation. Tropes are a tool and sometimes the tool works and sometimes it doesn't. If you can't find a suitable trope, you don't have to force one into. Finally, tropes are basically templates and like all templates, if you don't spend time customizing them, they're still going to look like templates. A template isn't there to solve your problem for you, but simply to give you a strong foundation to build onto. 10. EXERCISE 4: Tropes BINGO!: This exercise is called Tropes Bingo because it's a Bingo game where you have to find certain illustration tropes in order to win. The purpose here is to help you become more aware of the most common tropes or illustration tropes out there and also to see just how different each artist's way of interpreting a trope can be. To start, download the Illustration tropes Bingo card from the class Projects and Resources page, you can open it or copy and paste it into Procreate or just have it up on your screen. Now go onto PNTraS and start looking for the tropes that you see on your bingo card. Many different ways to search here, and part of the fun is just figuring out what keywords you need to use in order to find what you're looking for. Just for an example, I'll give you two modes or search modes here. One might be more challenging and one will be more easy. In challenging mode, this would be just to be more general in your search, look up conceptual illustration or editorial illustration and then just start scrolling. In this way, you have to do more of a treasure hunt. You're looking through lots of different examples and checking against your references on your Bingo card. In that way, it can be a lot of fine a scavenger hunt. Now, you could also do something more easy. This is what I call easy mode. This would be to search for each trope type more directly. Maybe you want to look for the balancing stack illustration. You use those three words as your keywords and you might find those very directly in that. Either mode, whether you're searching in challenging mode or easy mode, it does help to include the keyword illustration in your search, just to avoid getting other types of media like photos. For every match that you find, be sure to save the illustration that you found and then put a dab on your bingo card that corresponds to that particular trope. This works especially well if you place that card in a digital app like Procreate. To get Bingo, you need to have a vertical, horizontal or diagonal row your card. Once you get Bingo, share the five illustrations on your class projects page or the four illustrations if your line crosses the free space in the middle. Be sure to include the artist's name for each illustration as well. If you'd like, you could also share an image of your winning Bingo card with your dads on it. So I've copied and pasted my bingo card into Procreate here and then I've just created a new layer just on top of that. As I go and look for these tropes out in the wild, I can just start dabbing them off. I actually have a brush in my inky Basics brush library that I've included in the class. You can get this in the class Projects and Resources page. There's one called Dabbi Dot, and if you make it big, I have mine set at 73% and put it in a nice poppy color. It looks like a bingo dab or like a bingo chip. I'm just going to put my first dab down on my free space, and I'll start hunting. Now I'm going to start my hunt and see if I can get bingo. I'm not going to do the whole game here, but I'll just get started and show you what I would do. I'm just going to look up conceptual Illustration. And see what I can find and if anything corresponds to my bingo card. Here we have a stack of books. It's abstract, but it is a stack of books and there's another. I would just save one of these to my computer. Then I can go ahead and put a dab on the stack of books. From here, I can definitely just start scrolling down and right away, we have the book as portal. So I can just go and put a dab for that down whereas my book as portal. And now, what about the head montage? This is kind of a head montage. It's a head shape, and there's sort of a montage of elements in there. Same with this one here. So I could download any of these and then head over to my bingo card and get that one. So as you can see, it's a lot of fun looking for these tropes out in the wild and it might be surprising how many you'll find of a given trope. They really are tropes and hopefully you can see that even though they're super common, they're still very interesting to look at because everybody does it in a different way and they always apply to a different concept, a different headline, a different idea. 11. PROJECT: Brief: Okay, it's time for your project brief. What I'd like you to do is imagine that an art director for the New York Times has assigned you to illustrate for their op ed or opinion section. They've given you a headline and some basic information about the illustration you'll be making. Now your job is to go and make that illustration using the tools that you learned about in this class. Specifically, you're going to want to think about how you can use symbols, idioms and tropes to come up with a suitable concept for your illustration based on your headline. I just have one rule for you here and that is no actous. I want to challenge you to create a conceptual illustration and that means avoiding the illustration where you rely very heavily on a character acting out or gesticulating or arading the idea versus using something more metaphorical, and of course, using the symbols, idioms and tropes that we talked about already in this class. Times an act out is a perfectly acceptable approach to an illustration. But for this class, your challenge is specifically to illustrate something more conceptually. It's not to say that you can't have figures or people in your illustration, but the actout or the scene or scenario can't be the main driver of your idea. So now let's talk about the image specifications. I'm just going to refer to my notes here. The illustration is going to be for digital or online use. It should be either square format or a wide rectangular format. That's up to you and how you want to compose your illustration. Of course, I will flash those dimensions up on the screen and you'll find them in the class projects page. Your illustration can extend all the way to the borders. You can have that background, cover the entire space of the illustration, or your art can float in the middle and have no background. That's up to you. In terms of your file format, you should be working in the RGB color space and upload either a JPEG or a PNG to the class projects page when you share your final illustration. Let's talk about how to get your headline. Typically, an art director would give you your headline and that's what you would get to work with. Of course, for this class, I need to assign each and every one of you a unique headline and the best way of doing that is to use AI. I use hat GPT to come up with the headlines for this example project, and so I will just show you what that prompt looked like. It was really simple. Can you generate five pretend New York times headlines? That's all I said, and then it gave me five. You're welcome to use one of these headlines. I'll share these on the class Projects page. But the point here is that everyone should have a unique headline to work with so that you're not influenced from one another's ideas on the class projects page. Now, if you don't like AI or you don't have access to it for some reason, that's totally fine. Like I said, you can use one of the headlines here that I've generated, or you can actually just go over to New York Times and head over to their opinion section and use one of the headlines that they have up there on the website. Now, the risk is that you're probably going to find an illustration or an image already there associated with that headline. Do your best to ignore it, maybe cover where the illustrations are with your hand and then challenge yourself to come up with an idea that's fresh and based on the process that we're going to go through in a. Just a quick and important note, I am not condoning the use of AI to come up with your ideas or to come up with your actual illustration imagery. I am simply saying that AI is a great tool for coming up with randomized headlines that are unique for each and every one of us. Finally, before we get into the project, here are the deliverables or the milestones for you to reach. So we're going to be going through the following stages over the next few lessons. We're going to start with the brainstorm and that's where we start trying to come up with ideas in a more verbal word based way, and then we're going to move into rough sketches where we start to work things out more on paper in rough sketches. Then the third stage will be refined sketches where we try to choose our best ideas from the previous stage and refine them and get them ready. Want to have at least one of those refined in an estate where we can confidently illustrate over that in a final illustration. That takes us to the fourth and final stage, which is creating that final illustration. This is where you flesh out your idea in your own tools and techniques, your style, however you like to illustrate. I'll be working in Procreate in my own way and you're welcome to follow along. I'll tell you everything that I'm doing. If you don't have a process or technique that you're married to at this point, you're very welcome to follow along with me. Each lesson will walk you through a specific deliverable and then you'll be prompted to share your work at the end of each one. That's pretty much it for your brief. Let's get started with the brainstorm. 12. PROJECT: Brainstorm: All right, it's time to start our brainstorm and of course, before we do this, we're going to need a headline. You can source that by using AI or using one of the supplied headlines on the class projects page, or you could head over to the New York Times website and use one of the real world headlines that you find there. Once you've done that, it'll be time to start the actual brainstorm. The brainstorm is broken down into two steps. The first step, we're going to do a headline analysis and that's where we break down the headline and make sure that we understand it. Then in the second stage, we do what I call a pre visual brainstorm. This is where we start to try and find actual visual entry points into our concept. This is pre visual because it's before we start actually sketching. We're just doing it in words, but you'll be surprised how much actual imagery you start to discover at this early stage. The first thing that we want to do is analyze our headline and make sure that we understand it. In your sketchbook or your digital equivalent, such as Procreate, like what I'm using here, you want to write out your headline somewhere on the page and then we can start breaking it down. This way. There are five categories of analysis here, and each one will help us find ideas from this headline in different ways. What I'm going to do, this is a little bit unorthodox. I don't know if many people do this, but I'm going to break my page into these I wouldn't call them quadrants, whatever the five version of a quadrant is these five boxes. In each one, I'm going to write down one of the categories here. So we're going to be analyzing the headline by subject and then by the meaning or interpretation is another way of putting that. Then we're going to see if we can identify any built in idioms and metaphors. Of course, we're going to be looking for keywords and things that are associated with those keywords. Then finally, sometimes the headlines that we're working with raise questions or issues. These might be ethical or philosophical questions or just curious questions that we might ask by reading the headline. Let's just start with subject and sometimes this one's very straightforward. So my headline is lost languages, the global effort to save endangered dialects. So the subject here would be endangered languages or dialects. In my interpretation, what this is getting at is basically there are these dialects or languages that are at risk of extinction, basically. And I'm also thinking, like, why is this important? Like, why would there be an article about this? Why would there be an effort to save, you know, these endangered dialects? Maybe it's loss of diversity or of cultures. And, you know, since we're talking about the meaning here, we could actually shortcut right down to the questions here that are being raised. You know, as we're writing down in each of these boxes, sometimes we'll think of something that goes under another one. So right now, questions here are, you know, is it about homogenization or globalization. These are just things or issues that this headline is making me think of and maybe I'll return to this as we go on. Now let's take a look and see if there are some built in metaphors and idioms. Sometimes your headline gives you exactly what you need and it's easy and other times it makes you dig a little deeper. So here we have not really anything in the way of idioms, but there is this idea or metaphor of saving endangered dialects. So the metaphor, in this case, is endangered species. Usually, when we think of an effort to save something that's endangered, we usually think about animals. Maybe I could pull something out of lost languages as well. So something like a missing link, but I'm not sure if that's going to go anywhere. So I'm going to move now onto keywords and associations. And so, of course, we have lost is a keyword. We have endangered. And I'm going to run out of room here, so I'm just break open one of my box, actually, both of my boxes and start using the space down here, too. The boxes just help me keep these different categories a little bit separate. And of course, we have a keyword language. And I would say dialect is synonymous here, and, of course, global. It may be global effort as one key phrase. And then for each of these keywords, I'm going to think of associations like lost. Lost missing off the path, off track, whatever comes to my head. This is a brainstorm, so it's not about having the perfect idea here, lost in the sense of extinction. So we have extinct, dead. I think of precious, losing something forever. And if it's precious, it's irreplaceable. I'll move on to Endangered now. So with endangered, we have this idea of extinction as well at risk, threatened. I think of animals, elephants, dinosaurs, dodo Birds. And so as I come up with these endangered associations like dinosaurs, dodo Birds, it makes me think of idioms that might be related here, and I'm just going to sneak these into the idioms and metaphors category. So we have maybe an elephant in the room and going the way of the dodo Bird. I'm just put a box around that so it's a little easier to read. The point of this category here, idioms and metaphors at this stage is about asking, is it possible to rephrase our headline in our own words and possibly even using another metaphor or idiom. My way of rephrasing this might be, are certain dialects going the way of the dodo Bird. This is just a thought exercise and a way of thinking about your headline from different angles. The important thing here is that you're thinking about them in your own interpretation. Your own point of view and perspective is very important to being a conceptual illustrator. Okay now moving on to language and dialect. So I think of speech. I think of the Tower of Babel, I think of cultures, traditions, Lingua Franca, dual lingo came to my head. I'm not sure if that makes any sense, but it's there. And then global effort, I think of Globe, of course. I think of the map. I think of countries. I think of cooperation and operation, flags, nations. And there's one other keyword here that I think is important as I'm going, which is save. So I'm going to make more room here. So it makes me think of rescuing or rescue operation, salvage effort. Maybe think of ER of doctors, surgery, but maybe more like search and rescue SAR, search and rescue, helicopters, some kind of rescue operation is what I'm thinking. And then, lastly, we can think about questions or issues that are raised by this. We've already talked about homogenization and globalization. I just want to give myself one more chance to think about my headline and ask myself if there are any other questions or issues raised here that might be of interest. I guess, for me, questions would be, and I'm going to open up a little pathway here so I can write more. The brainstorm process can be kind of messy, as you can see. So other questions I'm asking are, who is saving endangered languages? I'll just write in short form here. Like, who are these people? Why are they doing it. In other words, why is it important? I've started to try and answer that myself, maybe something about how we're trying to fight against a loss of diversity and everything in the world becoming a little bit like Starbucks or something like that. The point of this exercise that I just went through is to make sure that I understand my headline and that I have enough material to work with for this next stage, which will be the pre visual brainstorm. This is where we're going to start looking for deeper symbols, idioms, tropes that are related to the headline. So I'm going to circle that headline again, just like the last time, I like to break up my page into sections. This time we're going to have three categories, so I'll make three sections. And the first category will be symbols. The next category will be idioms and metaphors, and the third category will be troops. So these categories are now going to be more visually oriented. So before I was looking for any associated keyword I could work with, it could be adjectives, nouns, whatever. This time, I'm looking more at things that I can actually see with my mind's eye. So this would be more in the order of nouns. So why don't we start to see what kind of symbols we can use to represent some of those keywords we kind of pulled out in the previous Starting with symbols, I'm looking for anything that can represent some of the keywords here, basically. So a symbol for lost might be a maze, could be binoculars, a compass. It could be kind of like a black hole, a force or jungle. When something's missing, it's gone altogether. So it's not even visible, so invisible, nothing. Although these are not directly things you can represent, there might be a way of indicating this in the illustration somehow, but it might be jumping ahead. So the next word I want to look for symbols four might be this idea of endangerment. So some symbols here would be a panda as an endangered species. And it's not exactly correct because endangered does not mean extinct, but there are definitely symbols of extinction, which would be dinosaurs and the dodo Bird. And I'm just going to quickly jump over to metaphors here while I'm thinking about it because or endangered, I think of something being at the edge of something, at the edge of extinction or at a precipice. These are idioms and also metaphors at the same time. But then going back to symbols, there's this idea of saving. And this is probably going to be a keyword here and a key source of symbols for at least some of my concepts. There's this idea of, like, a military operation, a rescue. So I think of, you know, troppersF aid, maybe it's an ambulance. And again, I'm trying to keep my symbols here as things I can actually draw. So an ambulance could be a symbol of saving or rescuing. There's the idea of conserving. So what symbols could I pull out for conserving? I think of maybe a conservation officer, not a very strong symbol there. You know, it could be hands just holding something. And again, this is kind of jumping categories. This might actually go into the illustration tropes category, so I'll save that for a little bit. For global, there's the globe or countries like the shapes, and then for language, I'm thinking of a speech bubble. The Tower of Babel is an interesting symbol of language, could be a dictionary or a book, could be a mouth, an ear, tongue, could be words. Those are just some symbols that I could pull out of my headline here. Now I want to think about some more metaphors. I had the metaphors of something being at the edge or at a precipice. What are some other ways of rephrasing this headline in some other metaphor? People are going in to save endangered dialects. Earlier, I said that the dialects are maybe going the way of the dodo bird, and that is an idiom. It's a global effort. So maybe there's this idea of all hands on deck for lost languages, this idea of vanishing or disappearing act or into thin air. You can see how immediately you start to get visual pictures in your head based on these common turns of speech. So another idiom here would be something about the global effort to save endangered dialects would be kind of like a rescue operation, a search and rescue. And so when I think of search and rescue, it gives me symbols like flashlight. And while I'm here, I'm thinking about this issue of homogenization or globalization maybe as the enemy. Let's just say the article might be about how globalization is the enemy. What would it look like for globalization to be threatening language? What would it look like for this global effort, this team or whoever fighting against the enemy, fighting against globalism. This might be a stretch because globalism wasn't mentioned. When I think of a global or group effort to save something, it feels like a fight. So there's another metaphor. The fight against whatever is endangering languages. So as you can see, as I'm going through this pre visual brainstorm, I'm looking for those symbols and I'm looking for those idioms and metaphors. My mind is going in all kinds of different places, making all kinds of different associations. Sometimes I'm thinking in one category and suddenly my mind jumps to another one, and that's okay. This is a free association exercise. As long as you're getting imagery, along the way, you're accomplishing what you need to do in this step. We've looked into symbols and we've looked into idioms and metaphors. Lastly, we want to start looking at any illustration tropes that are out there that exist that might help us visualize some ideas that we're starting to come up with here. In order to do this, it's helpful to actually see those tropes in front of you. What I've done is I've compiled a chart of some of the most common even cliche tropes out there. What I'm going to do is just put this up on my screen so that you can see what I'm looking at. I'm just going to ask myself, which of these might actually help me visualize or illustrate some of the concepts going on here? I'm thinking about the hand holding the symbolic object, maybe instead of a plant that you might see in a cliche environmental illustration, maybe it's something about language like a speech bubble, maybe a balanced or balancing stack. With different language symbols being balanced, and that would suggest this idea of precarious precariousness. When I think of a group effort or that global effort, I think of the group of hands, and this could double up with another trope, which is the globe the globe standing and another trope, which is the puzzle. So I'm starting to get an idea here of hands piecing together countries in the globe maybe. I think it needs work, but that's where my mind went with that trope. There's three tropes there. Another one would be the globe stand in the globe stand in is basically where you have one object that is being substituted for the actual globe. Maybe it's a speech bubble and then it's the world or it's a balloon. This wouldn't be appropriate, but a balloon and it's the world. Whatever your object is, it becomes a globe. That's a trope that I've observed out there in the illustration world. Right so one more trope that might be useful here is the symbolic shaped hole, and that's where you have some kind of hole that is shaped like whatever symbol you're working with, maybe a speech bubble and usually have some kind of figure either getting something out of it with a fishing rod or climbing inner out of it with a ladder. It could be some kind of a rope coming into or out of it. I'm thinking of a speech bubble hole, and then there's a helicopter kind of rescue operation here, and they've got some kind of hero person on this ladder or rope going down into the hole to save the language. This isn't quite going to work, I don't think. But the idea here is that it's a possibility. I have to play with it yet in sketches, but just in using words at this stage, I've started to think of tropes that might be useful to me now. Another trope that I've seen before is this idea of the maze and there's so many variations on the maze trope. Often, you'll have someone maybe in the maze, but they have some way of seeing the whole thing. This is a really bad drawing, so you probably can't see it, but they have some periscope or telescope and they can see over all the walls and find their way out. Again, just another possible trope to work with. So I hope you're not feeling totally lost after watching me do this brainstorm. But basically, in stage one, I analyzed my headline, and I tried to break it down in those five different ways that we talked about. And then I went into a more visual way of thinking in what I call pre visual brainstorming. And this was where I started to look for actual concrete symbols that I could use to represent some of the ideas or keywords in the headline. And, of course, I was looking for some metaphors and idioms that would help me actually visualize, what is actually happening with this idea saving lost languages or languages being lost. Then finally, with some of these ideas top of mind, I looked to my illustration tropes, reference chart and started to ask, which of those off the shelf ideas or illustration tropes could I start with to help communicate my metaphor. By the end of the stage, you should definitely be able to describe what the article 0R the headline is about in your own words. You should also feel fairly confident that you have some good starting points for how you're going to visualize that in the next stage when we start our rough sketches. Before moving on to the next step, please be sure to share your headline analysis and your pre visual brainstorms on the class projects page. 13. PROJECT: Rough Sketches: All right. Now it's time to do our rough sketches. We've done some preliminary pre visual brainstorming, and now we're going to take that brainstorming into sketching. At this point, we're really just looking for ideas in a more visual way. We don't need to be precious here with how we're drawing. The most important thing is finding ideas that work for our subject. By the end of the stage, you should have a lot of rough sketches, which will mostly be the early stages of you trying to work out your ideas on paper. Goal is to have a few decent ideas there, but this stage is more about quantity than quality. Again, this is all about your ideas way more than it is about drawing well. Don't worry if your rough sketches at this point aren't the best drawings you've ever made. So at this point, I'm looking at my brainstorm from the last stage. I've already identified some of my strongest ideas, and so now I just want to identify what my starting points will be as I start digging into rough sketches. And so I find it easiest to start with anything that is associated with a trope because trope that illustration trope will already have a visual I can start with and start to sink my teeth into. So we have the hand holding the symbolic object, that would be the speech bubble. So this idea of preserving languages. So I'll just call that preserving languages. And then there's the globe stand in. I think this has some potential. Something about the world, global. We'll call it, we'll just call it globe stand in for now and I'll remember that. There's this idea of the group of hands. This was the one where we had, you know, the idea of a global effort to save endangered dialects, and then we have the balancing stack. This is the idea of the precipice something at the edge of extinction. Now, there were a couple more here that I liked. I like this idea of the rescue operation. I don't really have a trope for that in this moment, but I'm going to just highlight that as a potential starting point for sketches and then this symbolic shaped hole, which might tie into that rescue operation now that I'm thinking about it because we have this helicopter that I doodled here over that hole. Something about a rescue operation in that symbolic shaped hole. What I'll do is, I'll clean this up. I know it's a bit of a mess, before I completely go to a blank page, I just want to in a darker color here, write down what those starting points are. I'll start with these four, and I think I might have enough to sketch from there. I'm going to go of the speech bubble world. I just think that that's too cliche and not enough about this particular headline here. So I just wrote down the title up there, so I have that to remember as well. I can hide all that messy stuff, make this a little bit smaller, and then begin my sketching. The first concept that I explored in my sketches was the hand holding the symbolic object. The symbolic object, of course, was the speech bubble. That's the most obvious way to represent a language or speech. Really I'm just working on different variations of multiple hands. Is it maybe just single hands? Is it multiple speech bubbles or just one speech bubble? For a moment, I thought maybe I could pivot and play with the idea of saving languages like you'd save money in a piggy bank, but I quickly abandoned that because it was a little bit off point. So I really wanted the idea of nurturing and protection to come through here. So that's what I'm trying to work out with my hand shapes. And at some point, I started thinking about whether the languages could be represented with different shaped speech bubbles, each one representing different language. And I remember that I had this Tower of Babel as one of my symbols for different languages or many languages. And so, of course, maybe this symbolic object is the Tower of Babel. And as I did that, I started thinking about other ways of protecting or preserving an object. Maybe it's in this kind of glass dome. It's protected, and we have this hand kind of placing that dome over the precious object. And as I was going, I was thinking about this idea of preservation. I think the glass dome made me think about conservation in a different way. So I was thinking about a butterfly collection, like the taxidermied butterflies that you'd pin onto a board and maybe put into a window box or a frame. And so, of course, the obvious replacement for the butterfly here would be the speech bubbles. And so somehow maybe those speech bubbles are butterfly specimens, so to speak, pinned onto some kind of panel. I put that aside and just tried a few other things that weren't quite working. At that point, I felt like I explored enough and it was time to move on to the next idea. So this next one was the balancing stack to represent this idea of precariously placed objects and the overall idea here being that these languages are at the edge of extinction or in a precarious situation. The actual balancing act or the balancing stack didn't really communicate what I needed it to. So I tried other ways of representing the speech symbol at some kind of an edge or precipice. And when I had a personified speech bubble kind of clinging for dear life at a cliff or on a cliff. Then I was thinking about the idea of people catching a falling speech bubble to save it. It was a little bit of a stretch, but at this early stage, I'm really just trying whatever. Once I was satisfied that I had explored that one enough, I went on to the group of hands times Puzzle, times Globe. This one, I was really pushing the cliches and seeing if by mixing them together, I could create something unique. But everything I did started to feel pretty cliche. There was nothing really great that I was adding to this idea. It just felt like cliche layered upon cliche. I want to emphasize that cliches are okay, but you have to add some kind of a twist that's new or surprising in order for it to really be interesting. So none of these really did that. And so I quickly figured that out and moved on to the next thing. So the concept that I was most interested in exploring was this idea of the rescue operation, people coming in. Doing some kind of a search and rescue to find these lost languages or to somehow save them from getting lost in the jungle or something like that. So I even did a little bit of extra brainstorming with keywords, thinking about what my metaphor specifically was. Like, what are the lost languages? What is maybe a metaphor for these things being lost? What are they being lost from who's coming in to save them? I even tried doing a hole in someone's head, and maybe the helicopter line or rope or whatever is being dropped into the hole in this person's head. But again, that was a little bit of a stretch. So another metaphor that I came up with along the way here was the seed bank. So the way seeds are preserved for the future in jars, I kind of quickly sketch that out and set it aside for a moment, and I return to that later. And then finally, I started thinking about this idea of the flashlight. This is another trope that you see in illustration where, you know, there's this flashlight beam. It's kind of a triangle or cone shape, and then whatever's in that beam is being revealed. And so I thought maybe the Tower of Babel would fit into that beam kind of conveniently. Then I took another side trip here into this idea of ghosts in the forest being like these languages are being forgotten, and so they're fading out of existence. They're kind of transparent and languid, kind of these flimsy sheets hovering in the forest. And then I went back to the flashlight metaphor or trope and started thinking about, well, if it's a global effort, then it should be multiple people holding multiple flashlights and it's multiple languages. And then playing again with this idea of the Tower of Babel, you know, sometimes as I'm ideating, I jump between one idea to another as things kind of flash in my head. And it is a little bit chaotic to try and describe and perhaps even to watch for you, but this is just how my mind works, and I'm doing my best here to share my creative process at this stage, which is not always as organized and linear as I'd like it to be when I'm teaching how to do something. I played with different variations of the flashlight. Some were working better than others. I even paired this idea of the helicopter and the flashlight, so the helicopter has a searchlight. And these speech bubbles are down below, kind of being revealed in the light. I was doing some more variations of the search party and the flashlight beams. There was something to that that I liked. I really did spend the most time on the search and rescue idea because it just felt the most interesting to me for some reason. I'm not sure if it will pay off, but it's just where I tended to gravitate at this time in the process. The last stops along the way was thinking about these speech bubbles floating in the water about to drown and maybe someone was throwing them like a life ring. The final stop along the way here was playing with this idea of CPR. How would someone give CPR to speech to resuscitate it? I was trying to figure out what hands would look like. I ultimately came up with this idea of the hands in the CPR position where they're clasping each other and instead of a person's chest, it's a speech bubble. When you're done, please share your rough sketches on the class projects page. Be sure to take a little break before moving on to the next one. 14. PROJECT: Selecting Sketches for Refinement: All right. I've done a lot of rough sketches at this point based on some of those starting points that I gave myself at the beginning, and now it's time to go through those and see what my strongest ideas are. There's a lot of maybe bad ideas in there, but there's probably also some keepers and so that's what I'm on the hunt for at this point. Let's just go through one by one and start circling ideas that I thought were the strongest. I started off with this idea of the hand holding speech, and of course, I started with some pretty obvious solutions that I don't think are really that good. They don't really add anything original to something that might be a little bit more cliche. So I'll just keep looking here. I don't mind something like this. It's a little bit basic, but there might be something to work with. I'm going to actually just circle that one in red so that I know that it's something that caught my eye for one I was trying to play with the idea of the shape of the speech bubble playing into the shape of a hand. But again, I don't think there's anything really conceptually valuable to that because it doesn't really speak to this idea of saving anything. With this one, here I started thinking about the Tower of Babel being the symbol of speech, and I started losing touch with the hand as my trope device. It started here with the hand holding the tower of Babel. But then I thought about preserving or trying to protect it under some kind a glass dome. So something like this might make sense. In which case, the hand isn't really that necessary except maybe to add a human element. So I'm just going to really quickly play with an idea here, something like, you know, if you're going to have a hand in there, it might as well be doing something perhaps about to put that dome on or take it off of the platform or whatever this Tower of Babel situation is sitting on. Now, as I started thinking about that dome protecting the tower of Babel, I thought about other things that are collections. I thought about preserving butterfly specimens, these dead previously living creatures that you're collecting and preserving and even if they are not alive. Preserving them is valuable because you can study them later. That's what these lost languages might be like. The fact that a language might be lost may mean that people won't use it anymore, even if you try to protect it. Maybe the Taxidermed butterfly is actually very appropriate for this concept. So I'm definitely going to keep tabs of this idea. I'll probably try and push that a little bit further. Another one of my tropes that I was trying to work with was this idea of the balancing stack, and none of these were really going anywhere. I didn't explore them super far, but I didn't need to. It was like they're balancing on things, but there's nothing really speaking to this idea of language extinction here. But I did think about this idea of being on the edge more metaphorically. I have this speech bubble hanging on for dear life on a cliff. That's a little bit of an interesting story happening there. If I can make that speech bubble personified in a way and you feel sorry for it because it's about to fall off this cliff, that might be a nice concept that has an emotional component to it as well. And then here's this idea of a group of firefighter type people holding a trampoline or something like that, and the languages are maybe jumping onto it. I guess the idea here is that the languages are falling out of use. That's a bit of a stretch in terms of a metaphor. But I'll leave that for now. I don't think I'm going to pursue that now for the group of hands trope, this is a very dangerous trope to try and work with because it can be very cliche if you just leave it as a group of hands with some object. But I tried to double it up with the idea of a globe and puzzle pieces. I triple dipped here. We've got the group of hands and the puzzle and the globe and I really do feel like this is a bit heavy handed, so I'm going to leave these concepts behind. Okay, so the one that I was most excited about was this idea of the rescue operation. I started off with the symbolic shaped hole into which someone is going or there's some kind of a ladder or a rope. And so I thought about the idea of a helicopter and some kind of rescue guy hanging on the rope. Going down into that language shaped hole. The metaphor is a little bit forced because he's going down to save languages. He's not going into a language, which this speech bubble could represent. There's a little bit of a mixed metaphor. It's not quite right, but it still could make an interesting image. I'm not totally throwing it out. I will keep it and maybe judge it more critically in a moment. And so I continued along the lines of the idea of a rescue operation, and I thought about flashlights and the flashlight beam is another illustration trope that you see out there where there's something hidden beyond the beam, but once you're in the beam, things become clear and that's a nice conceptually coherent fit with the idea of searching and rescuing. I had this idea of a search party. I continued to play with this idea. It could just be a forest scene with trees even. That somehow are a metaphor for something, whatever it is that these languages are getting lost in in the beam, you see these speech bubbles being revealed. Another interesting possibility is the flashlight beam going down and that creates a conical shape that the tower of Babel symbol would fit nicely into. I do have questions about whether the tower of Babel is actually a very clear symbol of languages when it's pulled out of context. Like, if you were to see this picture on its own, would you interpret that as language? You know, maybe I could help it by sort of adding little speech bubbles just to make sure people understand that this is about language. But in a way, this is kind of a nice elegant solution, and it has potential. And then I was thinking about, like, a scene where there's, like, a city and there's this dark alleyway, and you see a person holding a flashlight from behind kind of over the shoulder and the flashlight is being projected, and it's kind of landing on a flat wall in front and so you have this cowering speech bubble down there in the corner. Well, I think this concept definitely has emotional value to see this poor little speech bubble cowering by a garbage can in a dark city alley. I also think that it's close to an act out. The only difference is that the speech bubble is doing the act out instead of a human figure. It's a little bit, I would say, heavy handed as a concept. I'm going to leave that one behind. Other idea I had here was this idea of the speech bubbles being lost to memory. Maybe they're just becoming ghosts. I see them in the woods at night, these languid flapping ghost like semi transparent shapes, but I don't think it's a strong enough concept given the headline. So these ones down here are coming a little closer. I think this idea of the search party, whether it's this one up here or these ones down here, there's something about these that work symbolically. I don't think they're exactly rich in imagery or anything like that, but they are definitely clear and possibly original or unique enough for me to go with. I especially like this one. Yeah, I'm actually going to call this one right here because it has the party, the group of people, which would symbolize the global effort, and then you have languages here being revealed in the beams. So if there's anything along the lines of the search party and the flashlights, I think this one's probably the strongest. And then there's something about this tower babble thing that I'm not ready to let go of yet either. So I continued my search party metaphor or exploration here. This is very similar to the previous concept. But instead of having all those people separate, we have them more together to show this idea of more collaboration, and so all of their beams are crossing and revealing these speech bubbles kind of here. It's just a different take on the same idea. Then I was thinking about helicopters with search lights, there might be something there. I don't know if the helicopter is the right object to be looking for the thing, why a helicopter? It feels a little bit too military, I think, although it's unique, I don't think it's hitting on the right notes. Okay, so this was my last kick of the can here at the helicopter slash Search Party. It's multiple helicopters looking or dropping lines down into this speech shaped hole. Again, I think the helicopter motif is too military feeling. I'm not going to do that one. Okay, so I just had one last rescue themed idea here where you actually see a couple. One is these drowning speech bubbles. So these are speech bubbles kind of drowning in the water. And I didn't really go anywhere with that. But then I also had this idea of someone performing CPR on a speech bubble. You have the way you would put your hands like this for CPR to start pumping their chest or whatever that is. Instead of a chest, it's a speech bubble. One's a little bit medical, I think. I'm not sure it's the right connotation. But all of my concepts so far are a little bit off in some way, but I guess when you have a metaphor that you're trying to work with, especially for a very abstract concept like dialects, language, endangered, these are all things that have very few concrete symbols, and so I'm just really grasping for the best or the closest possible metaphor, or even an illustration trope that would work with that metaphor here. Now there was one other concept here that I didn't pursue all the way, but it was this idea of a seed bank. That might be a closer metaphor. We have this idea of a see bank, which is jars, probably all the same size and each one in a see bank would have you know, certain kind of seeds stored in it. And when you're thinking about saving or preserving something for the future to enjoy, seed banks kind of hit on that idea pretty closely. And this reminds me of a trope where you have things on a shelf, the shelf trope or the symbolic objects on the shelf kind of trope. The trick with this concept would be, you know, how do you indicate different languages? So I guess you could have different speech bubbles of different shapes and colors in each of the jars, so that could work. I'd want to avoid having words on these jars if possible. But I think in this case, it would be necessary to have some label. It could just be squiggles or it could be some blurred out gobbledego that you can barely read, but you can tell it might be some language, or you could try just doing it with the speech bubbles inside the jars. The other thing that I see as a problem with this particular concept is it's a little bit same same. There's nothing breaking up the monotony here, you'd probably need some kind of human figure or something that shows a little bit more action. There's something to this concept that is very much on point, but maybe not very interesting to look at because it's same. It's just a bunch of jars on a shelf. At this point, I've done a lot of rough sketches and then I went through and started to mark the ones that I thought had the most potential. Then now what you see here, are my final nine selections that I've chosen based on how on point they are. So I want them definitely to relate to the headline as much as possible. I also want them to be interesting. So I've chosen these for how interesting they might end up being with a little bit of extra work. And I've also tried to keep them in this idea of illustrations that follow known tropes. So each one of these, I believe that there are a lot of other illustrations kind of like them, which makes these a little bit more accessible and relatable for people. 15. PROJECT: Refined Sketches: After doing your rough sketches and you identify at least a few among them that you like, it's time to do what I call refined sketches. At this point, we'll focus in on just a couple of our selected roughs to make them stronger and to get them ready for the finished illustration. Now, in the rough stage, it was all about quantity and we really wanted to just get out as many ideas as we could without worrying about whether they were good or bad. But now at this stage, quality becomes more important. By that, I mean quality in your ideas and quality in how you're drawing those ideas. Also be more mindful of the proper proportions of our final illustrations, either that one by one square or the three by two wide rectangle, depending on how your sketches will fit. By the end of this stage, you should end up with anywhere 1-3 refined sketches, all of which you'd feel good about taking into the finished art stage that we'll be getting into after this. Just as an aside, when I'm working with clients, I usually aim to have around three refined sketches to show them. I also find that as I'm refining my rough ideas, sometimes one turns out to be a bit of a dead, by having a few others, at least I have something else that I can work with as a backup. Once you're happy with your refined sketches, please share them on the class projects page. Now, as you'll see in this video, refining doesn't just mean making my drawings cleaner. It also means clarifying my ideas and sometimes adding to them or removing something from them. Whatever I need to do to make that idea make sense. Everything becomes clear as I focus more deeply on each project, and that's why at the rough sketches stage, I really can't expect much in terms of knowing how that's going to work and things really just become clear the longer I work with them. Okay. What we're looking at here are my final selections from the previous stage, and I want to narrow these down to maybe just two or three that I'll take into the refined sketches. I'm going to go with the butterfly concept. I really do think that that one is very on point, and I'll do one of these flashlight search party ones. I think this one here is the strongest just because of the scale of figures and they fill the whole kind of rectangle there, and I think that will make a stronger composition. I'll go for those two, why don't we just start with the butterfly one? I'm just going to select and copy that and then I'm going to bring it into a new composition. As you can see, I've already created a rectangle here. This is three by two proportions, and that reflects the wide rectangle format that my final illustration will be in. This was one of the sizes that we talked about in the briefing stage here. If you remember, there was 2048 pixels by 2048 pixels square. Or 2048 pixels by 13 65 pixels in this rectangular format. That's what I'm working with here, and at this point, it's important now to start thinking about those exact proportions. I'm going to paste my very rough sketch in here and you can do one of the following. You can place your sketch right in your box here and then take the opacity down and just sketch over that and refine what you have. Or if you like, you can take the sketch and just put it off to the side to reference it instead if you don't intend on sketching right over. I always like to start by sketching right over my rougher sketch or tracing over it. I I feel like I need to reinvent the wheel here, then I'll discard the sketch altogether and maybe start again in some way. At this point, I will just use the free form distortion setting and that will just help me stretch this right into the box in a way that more or less fits and I will turn off snapping because it's snapping to things in a weird way. What I like to do with my sketches is set the blending mode of that original sketch to multiply and then do my refined sketch under that. That way, I can always see that original sketch coming through a little bit. Before I begin, I will take this border down in opacity a bit as well. Now it can get started. For this concept, I want the idea of the butterfly frame or this window box that butterfly collections would come in to be in there. I think that's an important part of making this concept meaningful and recognizable. Then I want to have different shaped speech bubbles to indicate different dialects or languages. So I'm thinking about making everything just a little bit more clear here, being a little bit more mindful of space now. And if I'm not happy with how things go in this first go, I can always begin again. So in a butterfly collection, you have these little pins that hold the specimens onto some kind of a card or board, and they are suspended or float above they cast a shadow. Now, I think with butterfly collections, there's usually some kind of little label that goes under each specimen, and I have to figure out what that would be for my particular concept because obviously, I'm not going to put butterfly species names in these, so it could be different languages? The problem is, what are those languages? I'm not exactly sure what the article would be talking about. And I want to avoid putting words in an illustration as much as possible, especially if they're specific, because the illustration should stand on its own and not need words. So let me hide the original sketch now. So this is feeling a little bit static to me. There's something missing. And so I think what I'm going to do is add some hands that are actively making this collection. I think that will make the composition stronger. I'm not going to just introduce a hand maybe holding some tweezers, and it's holding one of these speech bubbles. And then I'll see how that looks. Okay, so it's getting there. I'm wondering if there's just one more iteration that I can do of this. I like these pins, and I want to have the sense of this about to be pinned down as well. Maybe this is an opportunity to bring in another hand. So I'm thinking about one hand using tweezers to bring this in and the other hand holding a pin about to pin it down. Maybe I'll just trace over that one more time. As I'm drawing these hands, I want to be sure that the hands are interesting and they're in a nice gesture, but I also want to make sure they're not suggesting anything. Hands are very expressive and it's possible for you to add too much expression to a hand that brings too much attention for them. These are really just devices to drive the concept of this butterfly collection rather than anything to do with the personality of the hands themselves. So I may spend a little bit more time than I want on getting the gesture of this hand right, and I may even, you know, reference my own hand or some pictures of hands online just to make sure that I'm getting that right and I want it to be holding tweezers in a believable way, even though it's kind of stylized. Because this is a serious topic, I don't want the hands to be too comedic, even though my style is fun. I just don't want my hands to be silly cartoony hands. I'm being a little bit picky here, letting myself get a little bit carried away in the details here because details matter when you're doing refined sketches. And now I'm looking for consistency between the two hands. I think this hands too big compared to that. We'll do something like that so we can see more of the collection. Now we'll do the whole thing together at once. And then with the pins, I'm going to try one where you just see the pin head. Maybe you see a few pins kind of scattered to the side there just to get a little bit more story. Then for the labels, in a quick search on the web, I found that there are these little pins that you can have with numbers on them that are sometimes used by butterfly collectors, maybe that's what these are. Okay, it's getting there. I need to clean it up a bit. And I do think this hand needs a little bit more work. I'll see if I can just do some surgery on it in place here just to get a little bit more the feeling that I have going in the other hand. Again, I want to be careful not to suggest anything with my fingers in their gestures. So a little bit of character is okay, but you don't want to draw undue attention to what the hands might mean. It's simply a hand holding a pin. That's it. Okay, so I'm happy with this concept as a refined piece. Oh, I'll just indicate those shadows again before I move on. But otherwise, I'm pretty happy. Now, in terms of these hands, I think I will actually have them as white gloves if possible, and that can again, make them as neutral as possible. We don't want to get into details of whose hands are they, what do they look like? What country are they from or anything like that. The hands are just part of driving the overall concept of preserving something in the metaphor here is the butterfly collection. Okay, I refined my first sketch here, the butterfly collection, and now I'm going to go over to my sketches again and pull out the search party concept. This one is going to fit in this three by two dimensions as well. We can take that down in opacity and multiply it and begin the refinement process of this piece as well. So with this one, I don't want it to be an equal 50 50 kind of composition. I think that would be a bit boring looking. So the choice is whether I will have more speech bubble than search party or we'll have more search party than speech bubble. I'm going to start with the search party and the first third, and the second third will be more dominantly these speech bubbles, and we'll see how that works out, and we can adjust if that's not working. So I don't want these search party people to be too specific. I don't want to indicate that they're from any particular country or that they have any particular hobbies or interests. It's just the idea of a search party people looking for something. It could even be as vague as being all one color. They should all be kind of holding flashlights, though. We'll figure out details about, you know, what does it look like to hold the flashlight and stuff and their faces and stuff in a moment. These look like guns at this point. So we will definitely want to fix that. So I think it doesn't make sense that the speech bubbles were sideways, other than to fit the cones. But there does need to be a sense of being revealed. Okay, I'm going to go with what I sketched because the composition was stronger and I can make some refinements later. And so this idea of the dark and light. So sketching in some of that value dark and light is important at this point. And then the question is, how do we represent these speech bubbles in the light versus in the dark? What happens? I can turn off my original sketch now. And I think I need to keep trying that one. I didn't work out so well. There's something actually better about the original sketch. And sometimes what you sketch without too much thought can have a better feeling to it and something more correct that you figure it out without overthinking it. So I think I'm getting somewhere with this one, but there's something not quite resolved about it, so I'm going to try going back to just sketching with outlines without value for a second, and see if I can figure out what to do about those speech bubbles because I like how the speech bubbles are created by the light beams. So let's just see what we can make work here. Always looking for the most elegant solution, so it doesn't look forced. Now, while I said that the quality of the drawings at this point does matter. The quality, I think that's most important is the clarity of the idea in the drawing. So even if it's not the best drawing ever, it should be a lot clearer than your rough sketch, and the idea should be very clear. If you look at a lot of conceptual illustrations, the art is an amazing gallery quality art. Some of it is, but a lot of it is just a good idea rendered in a professional, clear way. I like how these speech bubbles are kind of like ghost like. And if you look back at some of the ideas that I threw away during the rough sketches stage, there was that one about these kind of speech bubbles kind of floating and fading in the forest, and that's kind of coming back again without me meaning to. So somehow either consciously or subconsciously, that idea has followed me, and I think that's just part of the process and why you shouldn't be afraid to throw ideas away because maybe later, they become useful anyway. And so I'm just loosely playing with value here this time just kind of shading it in because it will be important for this concept to work properly. And I don't want to have to figure all of that out in the final. I think actually the speech bubbles would be lighter than the beams because light would be catching them, that would make sense. The beams would be like a mid lightness and then the speech bubbles themselves would be layered over one another semi transparently. But I think that's maybe the missing piece here of this concept. Okay, so I've refined those two sketches and I've lined them all up on my screen just together so that I can compare them and make a decision about which one I want to take into finals. I really like both of them. I think they both evolve nicely and between the rough sketches to now, I think they become a lot clear. The one that I'm most excited about is the second one though, the search and rescue one because of it, it's so clear, whereas this one has so many bits and pieces to it that I worry that it will not be as clear. That it will be just difficult to illustrate in the style that I work in, which is a more flat way. I think what I'll do before making that decision is just go in and sketch it over one more time to see if I can simplify it. I I can't, I know that I had this one as a strong contender to work with moving forward. Every iteration that I take my sketches through is an opportunity to just make everything more minimal and clear. That looks more like a tweezer to me. The key thing to remember here is the idea needs to be clear, more than this looking like the best art in the world. I want it to be clear and well executed, but it doesn't have to be amazing art. Should definitely be interesting, but we work that out in the final art. With this one, I feel like I need to work out a bit more about what's happening, maybe just one less obese. Felt a bit too much going on in there. Okay, so I think these concepts are ready to make my decision with, and then I'll take one of them and turn it into the finished illustration. These would be what I would present to a client in the real world. Like if I was working on a real project, this is the level of refinement that I would expect from myself to give to my client. I don't want to subject them to any of the chaos or the mess of the creative process. Up to this point, I feel like it's my job to go through all that and give it my best shot to come up with what I believe as the illustrator. Are my best ideas and my best solutions in this way. At this point, a client in the real world would say they either love one of these concepts or the other and have me go ahead with one of them, or they give me feedback and ask for certain changes. Now, since I don't have the advantage of a client making this decision for me, I have to choose one of these to take into the final. In the next video, we'll find out which one I end up going with. But before then, I'm going to post these on my project page on the class and then I'll see you in the next video. 16. PROJECT: Final (Part 1/2): It's finally time to make our final illustration. At this point, you've already accomplished the main goal of this class, which is, of course, the conceptual part of the conceptual illustration. So everything from this point forward is really down to how you want to illustrate. What apps or materials do you use? Which techniques? What's your style? What colors do you like to work with and all that kind of thing. Of course, I'm going to show you my own process here for creating my final illustration. Normally, I use Photoshop to create my finished illustrations, but for this one, I'm going to be using Procreate. You're more than welcome to follow along and use any of the techniques, textures or colors, et cetera, that I'm using here, and this could really help you just get started, especially if you don't have these things worked out for yourself just yet. I'm even going to include the brush set that I'll be using here as a free download to anyone taking this class. It's called Inky Basics, and it has everything I'll be using plus many extra brushes that I probably won't get a chance to use. Okay, so I'm going to start by creating a new canvas at the final Illustration size. I'm just going to hit this little plus sign up on the little icon there, and the dimensions are 2048 pixels wide by 13 65 high. For this, I recommend that you just keep your color profile to your default RGB setting. I'm going to use this first SRGB setting and then everything else you can leave as defaults and then create. I've already copied the sketch from my refined sketch, and I'll just paste that in here. Once that's down, I'm going to set the layer blending mode to multiply. We did this in the refined sketches as well, and I will also turn that opacity down somewhere around 20 to 30%. So this allows me to see my sketch over everything else that I'm going to be creating here without it dominating my view. So I'm going to start with my first layer here and tuck it under that sketch. Everything that I'm illustrating will be under that sketch. And so it's clear, I'll name that top layer sketch. And we can even lock it just to keep it in place there. Okay, so for this illustration in particular, I know that it's going to have a sort of dark ambient kind of feeling. So I'm going to start by just creating a darker background, and that will just help me kind of get a feel for what I'm illustrating over it. The brush set that I'm using is called inky Basics. It's a custom brush set that I've made and I'm including it here for everyone taking this class. It's up on the class projects and resources page. As I use different brushes, I'll explain what they mean. For this background, I want it to be a textured, not totally solid view. I'm going to hit this one here, soft edge Baer and I'm going to use a darker navy color. This is usually what I use instead of black. The way this brush works is that you can use it as a stamp brush to put down some of that texture. But you can also just swirl it in there and it randomly stamps down this printy texture. I want to get it nice and text root in there without it being totally solid, something like that. Always add more to that layer later if I want. Now I'm going to start with one mic eyes. I'm going to create a new layer and I'm going to use Tom's paint pen. In this brush set, most of the things here are actually just stamp brushes where they are textures that you can stamp down one at a time, one impression at a time. I really only have two brushes here. One is paint pen and one is paint pen, wet edge. They're more or less the same. The wet edge just has a slightly more transparent effect at the edge of the stroke. I'm going to just go with Tom's paint pen, the non wet one. I'm going to go in with yellow. I'm using the same brush as my eraser as well. I just want to make sure that I've closed up this shape and then I can fill it in. Now, you might notice that I have this funny little keypad here. This is a pen pad by Pen tips, and this is a hardware physical shortcut keyboard for Procreate. One of the things that I miss about working in Photoshop when I'm working on Procreate is the ability to use my keyboard for keyboard shortcuts with my left hand while I'm drawing with my right. This allows me to do something similar, but all within Procreate. And if you want to learn more about it, I have a link to it in the class page somewhere there, either on the projects or the About page for this class. And as you can see, using the keypad here, the pen pad allows me to just focus on drawing with my right hand instead of doing certain gestures. I'm doing each different color on its own separate layer. This is just how I work with my style. I don't like to blend my colors or blur them together so much. I like to keep them nice and separate. Now for the vest and the boots and other darker features here, I'm going to use a darkler that's almost invisible against that dark background, but maybe what I'll do is I'll multiply it, so it just has a darkening effect. So now I'm gasing out of that dark vest to bring back the yellow of the arm. Now I can draw on the boots. This guy's pants have kind of a Prince of Persia puff thing going on here, but I don't mind it. So these paint pen brushes that I've made have a very subtle texture to them, and they're inspired, of course, by paint pens that I use a lot in my daily drawing practice. They're definitely not this exact same as working with a paint pen, but it's my best attempt so far. And so when you draw in with them versus just do a direct bucket fill, you get a very subtle texture effect in there. Which is usually enough. It's usually all I need. And create a flashlight shape here. So you can choose to use a bucket fill or just paint in by hand. And I find that doing things just a little bit differently here and there in my illustration gives it a tiny bit of extra spontaneity and variety. And then on top of that flashlight, we'll add some red. Maybe we can even multiply that 'cause it's white underneath, and give it a little bit of a layered effect there. I'm getting carried away with mama detail here. I have to keep in mind that this is a conceptual illustration, so small, subtle details aren't as important. This starting again at the hand 'cause I lost track of its shape. And sometimes I can start again, and it's easier than trying to edit a shape. Okay, one other thing that I'll do for the flashlight is just add some ridges on that end there. This is a small detail that might not be necessary, but it could be fun. So I'm going to go into my inky basis brush set and try one of these strokes here. So maybe ink hash would give me something fun to work with here. I'll show you what I mean. Just gonna use a dark color here. And do one dab, and then I'll use the rotate tool here and multiply. And I want that only on the red. So this is just above that red part of the flashlight. If I use a clipping mask on that, it clips it just to the red area there. One other thing I'm going to do is just blend the skin tone back a bit so it blends in with the background. So I'll create a layer above that. And I will create a clipping mask. So you won't see anything happen just yet because I haven't actually put down any ink. But if I go up to my soft edge brayer again and I have my darkest color selected, it's the same color as the background. I'm just going to do a dab or two over that. And then I will multiply that. And so my idea is to have I'm gonna start again, but my idea is to just have that skin tone blend into the background again so it's not as prominent. So I'll start with that, and maybe I need to lighten it up later, but We'll see. Okay, so I have my one guy, and I think now what I'm going to do is duplicate it, so I have my three. All these layers above the texture background so far are just this one fella. I'm going to create a group from it and just name it to person and then duplicate that two times. Keeping in mind that the bottom one here is going to be the one in the background. It's a bit counterintuitive. I'm going to rename it just so I know. Then the next one up will be the middle. And then this guy down here at the bottom is actually the top layer. Naming these just helps me keep track of the layers as I go along here. Now we can go in and maybe change the colors of each of these to represent different countries because that's what these are doing. If it's an international effort to save endangered dialects, then I can represent that international component just by different colors. I'll do blue for this guy. I'll do red for this guy. I work with a very minimal palette in my work, so I try to make do with the colors that I have rather than doing lots of different variations. Then I'll just change some of the skin tones a bit just so it has an even more international feeling. Anyway, I have my three characters here. If I just hide my sketch for a moment, I can appreciate those on their own for a second. I think they're looking pretty good. Okay, so the next thing to do is the beams of the flashlights. What I'm going to do here is I'm going to rotate this so it's more vertical for a second. I'm going to turn on my drawing guide, just so I have a grid to work with here. I want to make a cone that I can duplicate for each of these guys. What I'm going to do is just go up to a layer beneath the sketch just to start. I'll call it cone. I want it to be more or less symmetrical. I'm going to use white as my color. And I'm going to make it a little bit narrower than what I have going here. I want to make sure I'm using my paint pen here and not one of my stamp brushes. Basically, I want to create a triangle, something like this for now, and I'll just duplicate that and turn on my guides here for a moment so it snaps. But by duplicating it, I can just flip it and then I have a perfectly symmetrical triangle and that's what I want to work with here. I'm merging those layers here so that they're all on the same layer so that when I complete it like this, I can just fill it in. In fact, I didn't need that grid at all, the drawing guide. Because I was able to just do that copy and flip and that achieve the same thing. Now, what's happening on this end here at the broad wide end of the beam isn't so much of a concern to me because I'm going to just bring it off the edge of the page here anyway. Just making sure that when I hit Select here, freeform is selected. This allows me to distort in one direction, either width wise or height wise. I just want to bleed that off the edge of the page. I'm also going to just extend this end here, just pass a flashlight so that once I maneuver some of the layers here, it will appear to come from just this one flashlight. So now might be a good time to tuck this one under the middle guy, and that's where naming my layer groups will come in handy. Now, I want this flashlight beam to be wispy and almost transparent. The way I'm going to do that is I'm going to go to my layer here and create a mask. This is called an Alpha mask in Photoshop, but just a mask in Procreate. I'm going to invert it so that the mask is black. Basically, in a mask, anything that's white on the mask will show through, and anything that's black is masked. Anything that's black is basically invisible. Now I'm going to go and use my soft edge brayer again. This is a very useful brush in this particular illustration. I'm going to set my color to pure white and you'll see that I'm going to draw on the layer mask it's selected. I'm just going to subtly dab in some of this texture. And maybe go back to black and I can dad out some of that. That's good for now. I still have this original cone that I made, and if I ever want to correct how transparent that is, I could start all over again just by removing that mask. That mask is a non destructive edit. With that in mind, I'm just going to copy this layer, and then I'm going to move one of them. Beneath the top person back here. I can just move that and tuck it back. I'll do the same, duplicate this, can bring one of these under the bottom person. Now you might see what I just saw and realized is that because this top one cut off, it's going to stay cut off. I cropped off the top there, the part of the triangle. I'm actually going to delete this layer and go back to my middle cone. That's the one that has the complete triangle, and I'm going to duplicate that instead. I will just move that one down. Let's hide our sketch for a moment and see what we have going on here. There's a few things here. We have this hard edge at the end of the cones that I push back, and then the texture itself, you can tell that it's repeating. I'm going to go in and actually redo the layer masks for each of these, and you'll see how this works out. I'm basically going to use my texture to soften that edge so it doesn't exist. The same thing is happening on the cone top. So we'll just clear it, invert it. And using white, I can go between black and white to mask in and mask out that texture as I need. And here is actually where it's helpful to rename the masks to so now when I use my push and hold with my finger, I can select the layer quickly, and I know which one I'm looking at because they don't look very distinct here. So I want to go to my cone mask bottom and take out some of the texture there. 17. PROJECT: Final (Part 2/2): Okay, so the last part to go here is to draw in a speech bubble that I can use over here. So I'll create another layer just beneath the sketches here, and I'll call this speech, and I'll use my paint pen again. And so what I kind of want to do is mirror the proportions of the triangle, basically this angle of the speech bubble pointy part. I don't know if there's a technical name for that. Should be the same angle as the beams. And that just gives us some harmony. There's a little bit of visual logic happening there. That doesn't really hurt or help the concept itself. That's more of an aesthetic thing. So I'm going to start here. Just to reference that angle. And I will use my drawing guide here just so I create a speech below that has proportions. I tend to draw in a very diagonal way. And so I want to make sure that I'm not drawing too distorted and diagonally. And this is not vector illustration. I don't want this being totally precise. That's why I'm drawing things in by hand. I'm trying not to use quick shape for everything. You can see what I mean by how I draw diagonally here. We have very awkwardly shaped speech bubble. I just want a little more evened off, especially because as I copy and paste these around, any of these imperfections will be multiplied and therefore more visible. When you repeat a mistake, the mistake becomes more obvious. So I've drawn my speech bubble. I'm not sure how I feel about that. It's a little bit funny shaped. I'm gonna turn that off and try one more. So what I want here is to have a speech bubble that looks like a speech bubble. Not too perfect. And I guess I have to speak the language of a speech bubble here, where the I think having the pointy part of the speech bubble a little bit more to one side helps. Then I'll just fill in some of the awkwardness. Okay. I think what it'll do here. I want to quickly copy and paste the speech bubble motif, but I also want to fade it back a bit. So I think what I'm going to try and I'll see if this works is I will just make a selection from this speech bubble. I'll hide that layer. I'm going to create a new layer, and I'm still using white, but I'm going to switch my brush back to my soft edge and just fill that in a little bit like that. And then I'm going to create a new layer. I'm going to I think selection is still activated, and I'm going to do it again. I'm going to create another thing. You can't really see that. What I'll do is I'll just move this over. I need five of these, I think. I'm going to keep doing this. I'm going to create a new layer and press and hold select to re select that speech bubble shape and then going back to my brush, fill that in. And I'll move that out of the way, and I will try two more of these. So again, I'm pressing and holding that select tool, making sure that my brush is set to that soft edge brayer, and that's four and just one more to go. I'm moving these out of the way and keeping them within the canvas so that I can see the next one that I make. And I'm making sure that I'm not moving it off the canvas because if I do it will crop it off. So what I can do now is turn off my drawing guide. I haven't needed that in a while. And I'm going to place each of these layers just roughly in place where my sketch suggests. So we're almost done. I just want to make these speech bubbles a little bit more subtle, I think. I'm going to make the backs of these speech bubbles just a little less harsh so that they feel a little bit more languid or ghosty. Now, I think I overdid it with some of these. So this one, for instance, I'm going to try another version of the same thing. Okay, so the next thing that I want to do is play around with the intensity of my beams. I could do that by just adjusting the transparency a bit. You can start by doing that and see if that's good enough. I think that works, actually. Okay, so the next thing that I want to do is take out some of the speech bubble that's not in the beam and make it even ghostier. I think what I'll do for each of these is I'll just go to each of these ones here like this one here. Okay. I'm going to use my selection tool to just isolate what's going on on this side here and using my eraser set as that soft edge brayer. Just dab it out a little bit, and the result will be you get a bit of this line so that the speech bubble outside of the beam kind of disappears altogether. And the same thing will happen wherever I see an edge of a beam. So with this one up here, it just plays a little bit with beam versus speech bubble, which I like. And some of the stylistic decisions that I'm making here are deeply connected to the concept itself. I'm not just randomly making these lighter or darker. The idea is that these languages are endangered and so they're fading out almost like they're dying. I think as an image, this works really well. The fussy perfectionist in me wants to keep working on this and add details and do all tinkering here. But I really do feel like it's possible to overwork this. What's really important in this concept is that we have the characters representing the international effort. It could be countries, it could be scientific bodies, whatever it is. Then you have on the larger third here, these disappearing speech bubbles, and those are the endangered dialects or languages, and they're literally searching and trying to rescue these. So it's a little bit open to interpretation. There's not entirely the whole story here, everything that you and I know because we went through this whole process. It's doubtful that people seeing this image for the first time will know everything that's going on, but when you read the text, and you see the headline, and then you pair this up with this image. My hope is that it will be on point and a strong image just because of that combination and the context. Now, like I said, I always have a hard time finishing a drawing. And one way that I signal to myself that I'm done is I sign it. All right, that's it. When you're done your final illustration, you can share it on the Class Projects page. Since you were probably using something temporary as your project thumbnail, now's a good time to update it with your finished illustration. I'm going to go and post this up on the class Projects page myself, and then I'll see you in the final video. 18. Conclusion and Next Steps: Okay. Congratulations. Well done. You've made it to the end of the class, and that means you learned about conceptual illustration, and particularly, you learned how to create conceptual illustrations by using symbols, idioms, and tropes. You then applied this knowledge to making your own illustration based on a hypothetical illustration brief. Just want to acknowledge all the hard work you've done here, and I want to thank you personally for taking this class. As for the next steps, please do share your project on the class Projects page. This is the best way to get feedback from others, including from your fellow students and myself. If you'd like to go deeper in your career as an illustrator or if you'd like to personally pick my brain, I do offer one on one sessions as an additional service. Learn more, visit tomfroz.com slash Coaching or just pop over to my profile page here on Skillshare at skillshare.com slash TMFroS. Also, if you're interested in any of the products and resources that I've been using here, I will leave links and descriptions to those in the About and class projects page here on the class. Thank you so much for taking this class. I'll see you in the next one.