Drawing People in Procreate: Stylized Character Illustration for Beginners

1. Introduction: Drawing characters is always fun. It can add a lot of personality and stories to your illustrations. If you want to feel more comfortable in drawing characters for your own or client project, this class is for you. Hi. My name is Iva Mikles, and I'm an illustrator and designer based in Europe. Creating engaging characters help me to successfully work on many project, big and small, such as LEGO Friends, animated series, which aired on Netflix, illustrations for software companies, magazines, product illustrations with characters, and explain their illustrations for various clients for their website and presentations. Many of you have shared that you would like to learn about character design from me. In this class, I will take you through the journey of designing characters using simple shapes. In this way, you will get more comfortable and have a solid starting point when drawing characters for illustrations. What is more, we will be placing the characters in the interesting little story setting in a house, which we can call humans of my neighborhood. So it's even more fun to practice drawing characters. Character design is used in many art forms, like every feature film, TV animation, video games, comic books, in children's books, as well as corporate visuals, and illustrations. Therefore, when I was starting with illustration, among other topics, I really wanted to draw characters. But it was very overwhelming, not knowing where to start and frustrating at the same time, that I couldn't get them right or just how I imagine them. Actually starting simple, help me to overcome this frustration of making characters perfect right away and in amazing personal style. This is what I want to help you with in this class. Don't think about the illustration style for a moment and just practice with basic shapes and create fun characters with little stories. During this class, you will learn how to use simple shapes for designing characters, starting from sketching head, hair, different hairstyles, torso, arms, hands and few hand gestures, legs, and finishing with the feet before putting it all together in one character. I will also show you techniques on how you can take inspiration from real life references, and you will learn how to simplify the real life into your character design. So you will gain solid skill for developing your character design style further. At the end of the class, you will have an illustration, you can print out for your home, give to a family member, or take your design further and even use it in your portfolio if you create your own custom house illustration. I will be using Procreate, but feel free to use any other drawing digital software or medium you prefer. In addition to all of these, you will also get a bunch of freebies, like house illustration template for practice, window and balcony frame template, colored palette for the characters, and also colored palette for the night scene and the mood boards with the photo references for your characters. Last, but not least, before we start, don't forget to follow me here on Skillshare to get notified when I release new classes and make special announcements about the giveaways. I also invite you to follow me on Instagram where you can see my newest artworks and follow the stories from my life as an artist. Now let's get started with expanding your horizons and drawing awesome characters. See you in the class. 2. Class Project: The main purpose of this class is that you get comfortable and more confident when drawing characters. In each lesson, we will look at basics of different body parts and how these body parts can be simplified into basic shapes. After looking into each of these, you can start putting it together as a simple character as the class project. You can experiment with different shapes, poses, customize this character based on your favorite activity in your looks, or draw someone you know, as a present. Then you can place this newly created character in a window of a house as a little story moment called Humans of My Neighborhood. If you would like me to share your creations on Instagram, tag me in a post or in a story so I get notified and I can re-share your illustration. To take your practice further, create different story moments in different house windows. I prepared reference mood boards with different topics. I believe that we get better as artists with lots of practice in drawing different subjects and topics. Creating a different topic for each window can be a nice drawing practice which you can approach as a drawing challenge. You can follow my examples, but feel free to experiment, customize, and most importantly, have fun. These little stories can be about your friends, your family, or your neighbors, or the ideal neighbors you can imagine if you don't know your neighbors very well. The topics I have prepared for each window are plants, music, yoga, home office, relax or relaxation, and beverage or food. In addition to this, I prepared a character color palette, which I am using in this class when sketching the basic shapes. You can download it in the resources if you want to follow along with the color choices. If you don't use procreate, there is also an image of this color palette, so you can sample these colors in other digital drawing software. You will also find the link to the house template illustration in the resources. Of course, I encourage you to create your own house design and windows designs when you feel extra creative. If you prefer creating your own house design, try to research different styles for the window frames and balconies to make the illustration interesting. For example, you can search for Victorian houses, Mediterranean, or art deco windows. If you create your own house design, you can use the same night color palette, which I have prepared for you too. If you prefer to draw a window character scene instead of a whole house illustration, there is also a separate window and the balcony frame as a PNG, which you can use as a frame for your character. When finished with this illustration, you can print it out for your home or as a post for Instagram. You can even post one window illustration every day as an art challenge to engage your community and your followers or one illustration a week if you have less time available. Also, you can use these new skills for building your portfolio for the future client projects as explainer illustrations and website illustrations. You can also create illustration examples with two or more characters for your portfolio, which you can easily adjust when you offer custom character commissions. As you can see, you can have a lot of fun with these illustrations, and in the next lesson, we will start our class with drawing heads. So see you there. 3. Brush setup: In this lesson, I will show you how to set up brushes for drawing. For the font, I'm using this crepe brush, which you can find in inking section. For the sketching, I created a folder for most used brushes and you can just take one brush and you can drag and drop it to your folder which you like the most. I will leave this one here and I will go to my most used brushes. As you can see, you can rename it, delete, share or duplicate, so I don't want to do any of these. I'll just click on it. Here you would see that I'm using the dry ink brush for sketching. I will go for my color palettes, which I'll be using for the sketching and the characters. You can download this palette in the resource section. For the sketching, I will take brown color because I don't like to sketch with black because this feels more softer if you use the brownish dome. As you can see, you can sketch pretty nicely. One more thing you can check before sketching is going to the brush setting. Click on your brush which you are using, and you can set up the streamline. What this does is if you have it to maximum, it has more smoother, it's like magnetic feel to it. Let me delete this. If you set the streamline to zero or somewhere lower, it has more organic feel following your hand so it doesn't have the magnetic feel, what we just saw before. I will keep this setting like this and we can start sketching. 4. Drawing Head: In this lesson, we will look at how we can simplify the head design using basic shapes. We'll use the circle as a starting point, and then we will add oval or a teardrop shape to draw the head from the throne three-quarter view, and side view of the head. I personally prefer to draw the characters in the three-quarter view because this gives the characters depth, perspective, and also attitude. We will not be designing the faces in this class because we are focusing on simplification. We will be placing the character in the setting which is usually far away. The faces don't need to be super defined. But in the later lessons, I will show you a quick way how you could approach designing faces for the characters when they are far away. For the head, I would like you to start with oval. If you have a hard time creating a proper oval, you can also tilt your Canvas. Let me delete this. You can tilt the Canvas or you can tilt the whole iPad. You can try to use the whole forearm. You can do something like this. It's still like an egg, but it gets easier. Let me make a line to split the face. I will zoom in. You can always fix this. Then in one third, I will make a line where usually the eyebrows and eyes would be. In the second third, this is where my mouth and the nose would be. This is just the practice. You can practice creating these ovals. You can also add a chin. You can also select the same brush for the eraser just by holding this icon. Like this, we can add the chin to our character. Of course, there are a lot of varieties in the characters, so we are not going to go through all of them right now. But as you can see, you can adjust it pretty easily. What I'm doing now here is, when you draw a straight line and you hold, it will straighten itself, which is pretty handy. This would be the first practice. I hope you've done the same layers. I will take it with three fingers. You can cut and paste. Now we have it on a separate layer. Now I can make it smaller because I don't need it. Now we will draw the head in three-quarter view. I will put it on a separate layer. I will make approximate circle. Of course, it's not perfect. Now you will create something like a teardrop. Okay, let me zoom in. Let me change the color so you can see it. Here where the circle is meeting this teardrop, the ear would usually appear. I can delete it so you can see it better. Of course, you can play with the placement of the ear, but this is where it usually be. Where the ear is attached to the circle, and the tear drop, this is where the usually neck would start. The second part of the neck would go somewhere around the chin area. I would not go directly under the chin. This would be the middle of the face because we are in three-quarter view, not side view. I will add that to the chin somewhere here. Okay, so we'd have a basic head. The eyes will come somewhere around this part where the top of the ear ends. Okay, I can copy these, three fingers again, duplicate. What I want to show you here is a little bit of difference between stylizing male and females. Because females in the animation, or illustration, or in the [inaudible] , usually you have thinner neck. This is one of the things how you can differentiate male and females. I will talk about more of these differences in the following lessons. But this is one of the things you can play around with. Of course, there are many shapes of male and female bodies. But this is one of the details how you can differentiate male and female in the stylized illustration. Okay, let's go to the next one. Now, let's sketch a side view. I will do a circle again. This circle is not perfect. Again, this is all about practice and you shouldn't feel bad if it's just looking weird. With more practice, the circles would be better, and ovals and all of the shapes. We can erase that. Other thing what you can do is drawing circle and hold. When you hold with the other hand, the circle will become more geometric. When you don't hold it is more oval, now when you hold it is more geometric. That's a little help. But we want to get better with sketching. Just try to practice your perfect circles. Again, as you see, I'm using my whole forearm, not just the hand because then it's a little bit more difficult. If you use the whole forearm, the sketching becomes easier. Now we have the circle and we will again add a teardrop shape. But now in a little bit different angle. Here, you will create almost like a straight line, but you would curve it a little bit. Here, we will add a chin to the end of the circle. As you can see, the tear drop is angled a little bit this way. Okay, let me delete this. This will be our side of the face, again, same as in this part, you can see the ear. The ear will usually come in this section, where the circle is touching the teardrop shape. Again, this is where usually the nose would come in. Okay, and now same as here, we can attach the neck somewhere in the section where the ear comes in. Same as previously, let's attach the neck. Also notice that when I'm sketching the neck, I don't do straight line. It can be your stylistic choice. But if you would notice in real life, the neck is usually angled because it's holding our head. Here, you can play around with the thickness of the neck again. Okay, so let me copy this, duplicate. We would have male and female. The female can have a thinner neck. Again, start with the ear placement. In the same spot, in the front part of the neck, you can keep in the same place so you don't get too close to the chin. Another thing we can do with the females, it's making the chin shorter and smaller because guys can have bigger jaws. But we are trying to keep it quite simple. We are not stylizing the characters too much. That can come in different classes. Also try to notice in a real life that this line is usually straight, touching the nose and the chin. They are usually aligned. The nose doesn't come too far or the chin too far in front of the nose. So always try to notice this line in the real life. Okay, let me delete this line. Okay. Select, flip, and now you can compare the side view. Okay. Now I see that the chin is very pointy, which I don't like that much, and it looks very long. What you can always do, you can adjust the length of the chin, what do you just sketched, and see if you like that better. When you are sketching, it always helps when you flip the canvas to see the misalignments maybe which you created along the way, and this is what I usually do as well when I do bigger artworks. You can always take your canvas and check it from both sides, so you can flip it and see if the eye got a custom to something which doesn't work that well. Now, I will create one layer under and take the color for the skin. Of course, you can choose whatever you like, something pale, something darker, or green, or yellow, or whatever you like for the skin. I will take the texture brush. I will adjust the size. I usually like to zoom out a little bit what I'm coloring, checking again if I'm on the correct layer. For the coloring, I usually adjust the stream line so it's easier to color to zero or one. Make the brush bigger. Okay. Now I went out of the line, which is not great. Now, I will make the brush smaller. I can merge these if I don't need it or you can sketch on a separate layer and you can practice without outlines. For example, if I would want to draw a head now, let me zoom in, I would simply do an oval shape for a frontal view. I just realized we haven't added a neck for this one. You would start from thin and widening out at the bottom. It looks like lollipop. Don't worry, it will look better when we add the hair. Then if I would do the three-quarter view, I can start with this oval, add a little bit of the chin, add the chin and the neck here. Okay, I have three-quarter view. If I would do the side view, I can start with a circle, making the teardrop and editing the neck again. They look little bit more like aliens right now, but don't worry that would be better. You can organize your canvas a little bit better and you can practice these shapes. The more of these shapes you draw, the more confident you will feel. Okay. You can also make this part little bit more flat and add the nose later on, but we'll get to that. This is the side view, adding the nose and the ear. Again, now it looks like two set of ears, but you know what I mean. Okay. You can make the head a little bit more round, adding the neck. You can practice. This is the front view. Again, more round. We can add two ears. Here, I can do side view looking to the left, attaching the neck as we looked at here. If you want to have the head more rounded, you can again just draw a half circle, hold it, and it will create this very nice half circle for you. We can add the nose. Don't forget this line for the neck is angled in the both directions, and you can play of course with the noses. You can create bigger nose, more pointy nose, something smaller and cute. Just practicing the shapes. Attaching the neck, curved line on both sides, adding the nose. Now, let's create another one looking back at this one. So circle, the teardrop with rounded edge, curved line for the neck, adding the nose. Frontal view, you can start with a circle, adding oval to it, add ears, and then neck starting from the thinner to thicker. Okay, I think we are good with practicing. They are little bit bobbly. Don't worry, you can always clean it up. When you are just practicing the shapes, don't worry how they look like. This is just for you. Practice front view, three-quarter view, and side view. Now, let's move on to the next part, drawing hair. 5. Drawing Male Hair: I find variety in hairstyles as the most fun part when designing characters. You can create round, bumpy, or angular silhouettes of the hair and play with variety of lengths, hairstyles for the girls and also facial hair for the guys. When it comes to simplifying hair, there are so many hairstyles out there. In this lesson, you will learn an effective way on how you could draw different hairstyles by focusing on the overall silhouette of the hairstyle first and then adding details like shadows, loose strands of hair, and other details. We will sketch a few ideas for the male hairstyles and in the next part, we will create different hairstyles for females. I will be using the three-quarter view and focus on the basic silhouettes for the hairstyles. Later on, you can try out different hairstyles from references in the front view, three-quarter view, or the side view, applying the same principle. The silhouette and the main volume of the hair first and adding the details later. I can take all of these characters, merge the layers. We will need this. I can make this smaller, so I will have it as a reference on the side. I will create a new layer. Pick my brown for sketching. Change the brush to dry ink and I will practice the hair on the side view. You can also copy the thing what you drew before or practice with me. We can zoom in so we can be more precise. Starting with oval, adding the teardrop with rounded edge, adding the neck with curve. Again using the whole forearm to sketch the circle or hold and it will create the circle for you. Then you can add the teardrop, hair touching the neck. As you can see, it will always come out a little bit differently. You can add the ear and you can always erase if you don't like the shape. Now, I can either copy this. You can slide on the layer and duplicate, you can zoom out. I can merge these two layers. I can move these little bit further apart because I want some space for the hair. Let me duplicate this one. I have few head shapes. On the layer below, I will add color. You can rename the layer. You can also rename this by just writing. Let's set this layer to multiply and reduce the opacity a little bit. I can be a little bit more precise with the coloring here under the outline. Now we can finally add some hair. I will create one more layer for this one. You can sketch either as shape or follow me with the outline. Starting next to the ear, I will create the curve and follow to the forehead. Here, you can go a little bit further away from the face and you can create little curve. Hair also usually ends somewhere behind the ear, so you can see the ear. This will be the outline for the hair. I can go to my color layer and take the dark color so you can see it better. Let's do another one. Maybe without this Johnny Bravo hairstyle, so something a little bit closer to the head. We can create this small cut-out, a modern hairstyle when you shave side of the hair. You can practice also just with the color, as I mentioned, without the outline. Let's try that. We can create a big hairdo, something like this, more curved line and let's color it in. You also want to cover part of the head so it doesn't look like just like a head and the ear helps with the shape. You can make it a little bit uneven so it doesn't look artificial and we still have the ear. Let's create something similar but maybe with more bumps, so it's cooler. Try to make the curve which is closer to the face smaller, because the small curls we have near the face are usually like smaller pieces of hair and maybe they are bigger curls at the back of the head. Like this, you can add variety. Don't forget that you also have hair at the top of the neck, like the starting point behind the ear. Of course, this type of hairdos don't have to be only for the guys, as you can imagine they are of course for the girls as well. You can pick and choose what you like. Here I would add maybe a curve to add more curls. Maybe another one for the guy, so curved here. Try to add more hair on top of the head because we still have the head here. It's like emphasizing the shape of the head. Here, compared to this one, we have the curve here, there is a little wave, now you can add a straight line here, the little bump. It's higher in this top part of the head, and here we will make it a little bit lower just to add more interest. Something like this. Again, as before, let's cover part of the head and now we can also a beard. You can make the guy smiling just with the beard. The beard can be also rectangular or we can make the mouth a little bit smaller and this would be nice to add a nose here, so just where the beard ends. We can add the noses to all of the guys. Remember, that it's somewhere where this circle ends and where the ear is attached. You can add noses to all of these guys. Maybe some bigger, some smaller, maybe something cute as we had before. Maybe on this last guy, let's just add beard. Maybe it doesn't need hair. Let's color the ear. We have few guys, we can copy these and then create females, because, of course, we want to draw also girls. 6. Drawing Female Hair: We will sketch a few ideas and create different hairstyles for females. I will be using the three-quarter view and focus on the basic silhouettes for the hairstyles. Let me group these two. I copy, duplicate. I make one of these groups smaller. I will move it to the side, open this group, I will remove the color, hide this layer because we had that on a separate one. Always remember to copy layers if you want to use them in the future. Now here I will create another layer for the girls outline. Let's color these heads, and to be more efficient. Let's create a hair on the separate layer so you can maybe reuse these heads later. I can take maybe brown color for the hair now. Let's start with some of the air. I can make a fringe. The ear can be higher, and if you would want to have a shorter hair, you can start with something like this, but it's quite interesting to create different angles in your drawing. I will add this type of curve. Notice there is a curve here at the bottom, and also here at the side. Again, this part of the hair is little bit higher. You can also create little bit of straight line here, and you can create a dent in the hair, which also makes it little bit more interesting. Of course, when you are stylizing the hair, you can add lines and other details, but it's about the overall shape of the hair, which helps to create the coherent look. Also what is nice is that you don't finish the hair where the phase ends, but you go a little bit outside, and of course you can add more hair to this side of the face as well. Don't forget to align the hair so the curve of the hair, it's aligned behind the head. Let's try next one, let's do a fringe again. I just kind of like fringes. Then we can maybe create small ponytail. We can do this with the ponytail to have quite fun with it. You can start with a small ball and then add will a piece of the hair here, and maybe the end of the hair is little bit curved. Then you can add this crunch here maybe. That's quite fun. First, let me fix this part because I think the hair should be curved here because we are following the head shape and adding the hair to the back of the neck. Now maybe let's make a long hair. You can notice that I am creating a curve following the neck, and we can create much longer hair curve here. Now no fringe. Moves little bit too much. Notice that I am following this shape. You can make a small curve here and then turn the other way following the head. Again adding little bit of hair to the side. Now we can add small bun on top of the head and make the hair a little bit longer and curved on the side, covering the shoulder little bit. I'm just noticing with these ears that they are a little bit lower, so they should be somewhere around the here and ending where the curve is. Let's do this. You can notice it here. They should be kind of in this area. Note is ending where the curve is, and going back to the hair, you can create the dent like we did here and one can be longer, and one shorter to add variety. Let's add some blond hair maybe, and we can create something curvy or wavy, we'll continue with the ear because as we learned, the ear was too low and I was sketching so don't forget to adjust so we are on the outline layer. The ear would be here ending where the line is. Of course, we can play with the placement. Now, I can do the hair. As you can see, I move the hair layer above the outline layer so we can see it better. I will create a fringe starting somewhere here, kind of like a side fringe. You will go out of the face and we will not finish here. Create the bound for curve, and try to add variety in the curves so the hair will look more natural. This one is like the biggest one then we have the smaller, and here I can add small strand of hair which helps me to end the hairstyle. You can finish the hairstyle by straight hair here at the bottom. It's more like a stylistic choice because a lot of the curvy and wavy hair, of course, would end with more curves. But you can imagine that someone has the hairdo, which is cut off at the bottom, but you can add a little bit of curve here. I think I like when it ends with the straight line, and we can make it longer. It's wider at the bottom, so you can add the curves here covering the neck as well a little bit. We can add small strand of hair also here. I feel like we need more space because here it's very middle so it makes the hair look little bit strange. I have the whole group. I can zoom out. I have to put this one into the group, and I can move now should be in the group. Now I can move the whole thing to the side, make it a little bit smaller, and I dress the hair here. When I'm zoomed out, I can see that the hair would be more fun with little bit more volume. Now I can add the curve, and it looks quite fun. If you want the hair to look little bit messy, you can add these separate strands of hair and then these small curves. Here at the end it doesn't work, so I can do something like this. You can always adjust the hair if you feel like it doesn't work well. Now, I think it's little bit better. You can add this one here and you can add this strand also here. I think this one, it's quite fun, covering the neck as we said before and leveling out this part. Let's create maybe another wavy hair. I will create the wave here, wave around the head, color it. When you zoom out, you will have these better flow with the hair. I will create this one line here, and here I will end again with the small curve. This one will go the same way and then one more the other way. How I would connect these I will add these small halve circles, and now you can just color it in. We can add messy fringe. Overexaggerating a little bit the top of the head. Making the hairdo more interesting, I'm adding this curve, so you have one curve following the head shape and one in opposite direction. You can also add more hair here and make this more curved. As here, you can add separate strands of the hair. As in these previous hairdos, you can also delete parts of it. Maybe let's create a bun. If you want to keep these, you can always duplicate also this one. I can move these two out of the frame in case I will need them later, and now I can merge these. Because for sketching purposes, I think I'm pretty good so I can always duplicate this one. I will duplicate this so I have more heads to sketch on. I can keep one separate in case I would need it later on, so you can duplicate it and hide it and merge these together. Let's sketch more of the hairdos as I mentioned. Where am I? Erase her, so let's create the bun. Maybe I need to move this one a little bit further. Again, emphasizing the shape of the head with higher or more hair in this part, and going lower following the shape of the head. Now, I will add little bit more hair here. I can add funny fringe here as we did here with the guys and I can add a bob. Let's move it even further so we can make the messy bun a little bit bigger because it's more fun, and you follow the shape of the triangle because it's more fun than just the circle in this way or you can make two of them. If you are adding one more, don't forget that this one would be bigger and this one will be smaller because it's little bit further away from us. Like this, we can keep it here. Then let's add some more darker hair like some fun hairdo. It's now following the shape of the hair, adding the curve, maybe a ponytail with circles. If you want to end the ponytail, you can add another circle but more like a curved teardrop. Because usually, we have less hair at the end of the ponytail. I think this hairdo is quite fun, so bigger circles at the beginning. Then we can have a little bit messy hair just again with the fringe, adding the curve here. It's something in between curvy and wavy hair. I'm keeping the hairstyles quite simple because we don't want to have very detailed drawing because we are focusing more on the silhouettes of the hair. What are we missing if we want to do one more hair type? Maybe we don't have straight hair, maybe with the fringe. Here, you can follow the shape of the head and also follow the shape of the neckline direction to the shoulders. I think we are pretty good with the hair. Here, as you notice, I finish the hair where the face is finishing. To make it more interesting, just go a little bit out of the face. If you want to add more details to the hair, you can always go for the little bit lighter color if you have dark here or darker color if you have light here. You can add lines to the hair, follow the shape of the head and also follow the shape of the neckline direction to the shoulders. So if we have curls, you can do something like this to add little bit more interest. You can show that there may be soft and add these halve circles. In this type of hair, I will go for darker tone so it's visible. I think we are good with this one, and now we can move on to the torso and the hands. Remember, we are trying to keep the symbol and we don't need face that much because the characters will be further away from us. Now, you just want to practice different hairstyles and shape of the head. Now, let's move on to the next one. 7. Drawing Torso and Arms: When you know how to break down any character into basic shapes, then you can draw any character from any angle, even if you haven't drawn that character from that angle and in that pose before. In this lesson, we will look at drawing torsos using the simple shape of a rectangle with different angles so we get the proportions and poses right. This will save us time later when we will be adding details. For the male torso, I will be using a rectangle with a wider top part to emphasize the shoulder's width almost like a triangle, and you can almost imagine a superhero. In contrast, for the female, I will draw a smaller, more petty torso in relation to the head, which creates more cuteness. This type of character proportions, and especially the bigger head and smaller shoulders for females, are used a lot in animation and toy character design for the kit. As always, you can experiment, for example, try flipping the shapes and variations in sizes to end up with unique character designs. I'll create another layer. I will take my either sketching brush or dry ink. You can select some of these colors. I will take the brown for sketching. How does usually the torso look like? We have the rib cage, we have the shoulders, and we have the spine. Here, there would be the head attached with the neck and the hips. As we want to stylize the characters, you can simply create a rectangle. But then you might be thinking, okay, if I create the rectangle with the head, isn't it a little bit strange? You can make the rectangle a little bit narrow at the bottom where it will be attached to hips, so I can delete this part. It already starts to look like a human. What is the difference between male and female character? You can imagine that the female would have smaller body usually than the male. Of course, this going to be a stereotype, but naturally, females would have more narrow shoulders. This is how you can distinguish male and female character. We can put these aside and draw something more fun. Now, I will take three-quarter view. We will create the head, and we will make our rectangle. How can we make it more fun? We can make this side of the rectangle a little bit more rounded and angled. Now, we can make this part also rounded, and you can imagine that there is a shoulder here and here. Now, we can add arm. We are not following the exact anatomy here as you can imagine, we are creating more rounded shapes. You can imagine it's like a spaghetti. You can study the anatomy more in detail. Of course, it's very important because then you can simplify easier if you understand how the anatomy would look like. I will create this type of spaghetti, and behind the torso, I would create another shape for the second arm. Creating a neck. Let's create another one. Now, we can push these shapes a little bit further. You can imagine, again, the rectangle. But let's curve this angle as well, so it can look like a jacket or the character has bended back. We can add the same arm what we had here, but more to the foreground up. The other arm can go down here. Also, what we didn't mention here is if we have hips, the arms should go somewhere to the midsection of the upper thigh. If your arm is much longer than that, that can feel very long. If our knees would be here, then the arms would be too long, so you can finish them somewhere here. Always try to think how long are these arms. If I would take this arm and rotate it and go down, how far down the arm would go? You can always mix and match and test out these arms and shapes how far down are they going or how long they are. We have these two. This can be also male and the female. Let's move this here to the side. Maybe let's create one which looks a little bit more like a female, so we can create more narrow shoulders and white t-shirt at the bottom because we can imagine going to the hips, so white t-shirt. Again, the shoulder is here. Then we can imagine these wide sleeves going here. We can also add some color. Let's add another layer for fun. We can take maybe yellow or we can start with a green. Let's start with this guy or a girl. It looks a little bit more like a guy because of the shoulders are a little bit wider. Circle half drop and the neck. Let's add little bit of the shadow for the neck because it always helps. This one is not visible, so like this. Then for this green part, I will take, let's see, the palettes, this darker green. I will add shadow for the arm. The second arm, which is little bit further away, it will be darker. Let's take the red. Our female, starting with the basic color and adding the shadow, again. As with the other guy, just the shadow under the arm and the arm in the background. These are all stylistic choices, so if you would go more into realistic proportions, you can play more with the shadows, but we are trying to keep it simple. So the female with a thinner neck as we learned before. You can add a neck opening which is a different cut of the t-shirt, maybe as here. I will take the shadow from this guy. Now, let's take the yellow or maybe purple, we're having that purple. I will create this purple here. Because of his arm, we need a shadow there. Maybe we can add open t-shirt, so let's color the shape of the arm behind here in a darker tone, and we can add maybe beige t-shirt here. We have stripes. Now, let's add the head. Maybe we can create one more guy. Let's sketch it out, maybe with a hoodie. Let's add him here. Let me move these guys. I'll make them a little bit smaller so we have space. This guy can have very wide shoulders and a big hoodie, so you can add a hoodie here, the arm with these puffy sleeves. The shoulder is here, again, there is another shoulder here, so you can always imagine that. The arm in the background, we can exaggerate that the arm further away from us is little bit smaller than the one closer to us. He can also have open jacket. You can add these rounded corners here to emphasize the puffiness of the jacket. Imagine there is a zipper. So here it will be puffy on this side, and this side would be more rounded, and you can make straight lines when it will be touching the hips in the place where the hips are and the neck. You can stylize the characters in more realistic way where you have the bigger head which is more appropriate to the shoulders, or you can stylize the head in a smaller shape so it's a little bit pushing the cartoony look. Here, let's create maybe yellow. Puffy hoodie here. We will need the shadow under the arm. The hoodie is behind the head. Let's take darker color. I should have created this lighter one so I can take it and drop it here. Now, take a darker color and create a shadow. It's not very visible, so we can make it a little bit darker. Now, it's what I was looking for and shadow under the hoodie and the shirt. Whoops. This color will work nicely. Let's add the head to it. Let's add some hair, and then we can practice hands in the next chapter. Maybe let's make a girl out of this one. Maybe this is also a girl. You can always decide if it is a girl or a guy, and you can play around with the shoulder wave, puffiness of the jacket, size of the head and the hair. Let's make this one bigger because, of course, it can be a guy with a bun as well. This guy will have this basic short hair and maybe a beard. I think we are good with practicing torso and arms. Now, let's move on to the hands. 8. Drawing Hands: Hands can be really difficult to draw. They have many parts, and they can be very expressive, which is also great, but this makes it so difficult at the same time. As in the previous lessons with the other parts of the body, in this lesson, we will look at how we can simplify the complex object of a human hand into simple shapes. This thinking will help you to draw hands from any angle in the future. I made a copy in case I would need it later on. Always make these copies because you never know when you will need what you created before. I will move all of these to the side. Let me change the brush. First of all, if we have a torso as we sketched before, let's say it's a guy, we will have the shoulders as we mentioned before, and the arms would usually be thicker, closer to the torso, and going thinner following the shape of the elbow. The same on the other side if you want to simplify. Of course, I really suggest to look more into the anatomy so you can learn more, but this is a great start. Then if you would continue with the arms, they go thinner where the wrists are, and they are thicker on this other side where the elbow is. So thinner, thicker. Let's give him also a head so it's not too creepy. You would have trapezius here. Sometimes it's a little bit curve depending how much you exercise. It's not usually straight, but attaching these muscles to the neck. Also, the shoulders would have a bump. But we are simplifying, so this is a great start. Now, if you would want to add a hand, let's continue here. How can you simplify a hand? Imagine a mitten. Because we have this part of the hand, so you can either draw a circle or a rectangle. It's this part. Now, if I would want to add a thumb, there is a bone and muscle here. I can add this half-circle. That'll be for the thumb. If you notice the fingers, the middle finger is the longest. You can create a simple mitten shape. The thumb usually goes out. Of course, it depends on the human and the hand. But remember this part, the longest part. These two are not aligned. This is a little bit longer usually and shorter, of course. Let's draw that. You can look at the other hand when you are drawing, or you can use the mirror. If I do something like this, it already represents a hand. You can create something like this. For the thumb in this hand pose, draw a straight line on the left side of this example, and on the right side, draw a curved line, the side of the thumb closer to the other fingers. This would be the simplification of the hand, so like the mitten. If you look at the arm, of course, the wrists are thinner area than the hand. You can create something like this. We have a hand. Now, if you would look at the hand from the side, it can be more tricky or difficult angle. But if you are still thinking about mitten and simplifying the fingers, it's thinner, and here it's thicker. Let's draw the hand from the side here. I will move this. Imagine the hand in this position, we have the straight line representing the top of the hand, and straight line on top of the fingers. I will start with the middle part. Create a straight line on the top, the fingers. For the thumb, I will create this line. If you want to have more of the line of the hand here, one line, second line, and third. So we can angle the hand. I feel like I'm a dragon now because the hand will stay like that. Anyway, and then we said 1, 2, 3, and then the arm is angled. Here it would be attached to the wrist. Let's make all of this a little bit smaller. Now, if the hand is going down, we can, again, imagine a mitten or the triangle. You can always start from that. Here will be the arm. With the half-circle, you can attach a thumb, and here is the mitten. This is a simplification of the arm. Here you can add a curve, and here you can add a straight line. This is a little bit too big. Let's make it smaller. Like this. Maybe this is too long, we don't need this part. Now, if we would imagine, we are holding something. We need a thumb, then we need fingers, and the arm. Something like this. You can always hold the hand for yourself. Always look at the square or the rectangle here. The circle for the thumb and simplification of the fingers. This will be the rectangle, simplification of these fingers, thumb. Again, as here, the wrists are thinner part, and then you go out to wider parts, and they are thicker. If you want to add another finger to add interest, you can always add one finger sticking out. Then you can delete the parts which will not be there. Maybe if you are holding something, you can always hold something or imagine holding something. What do I do? What do I have here? I have a plush cat from Tokyo. Yeah. Always cute things in Tokyo. Anyway, imagine you're holding something, and it's usually interesting if you have fingers here. Of course, the phone would be easier or more interesting to hold. We can imagine you're holding phone like this. I don't have extra phone here on my hand, but okay. Phone, the fingers, they are the longest here. This finger is a little bit shorter, and then this finger is here, and the thumb would be on the side, and the arm would follow here. For more elegant look, you can create thinner fingers, and you can create a phone. Let's keep it away. Now we are holding the phone. We want to add probably hands to this guy. Maybe he is pointing to something. Again, imagining a mitten, and then pointing downwards, and the thumb. As you can see, I simplified this shape. So it's enough to show hands. You don't have to avoid not drawing hands, and you can just create these simple shapes. Maybe one more expression. Let's hold the cup maybe with coffee, and it would be from the other side. I can't show you really in this way, but imagine the hand kind of rotate it because it would be great if you can look at yourself in the mirror. So we need bigger part of this hand. We will have a cup, thumb. The arm would be here. This will be the rectangle as we looked at before, and the fingers would wrap around the mug or the coffee holder. Now, if I would delete this part, you can imagine it better. Yeah, I think that's good. Maybe we can add a sign, for example, like this with the thick fingers and two fingers being happy. Triangle is there. You can, of course, add now hands to these guys. Imagine they have these mittens as we just drew a second ago, so triangle, mitten. Don't forget the thumbs are always close to the body. The body is here. You want to draw the thumbs next to your body. When you're thinking about how long the fingers on the hand should be, you can think about small round fingers are used for kids. If you want more elegant looking female hand, you can create long fingers with more pointy ends indicating fingernails. For the males, you can try both short fingers and long fingers. I usually create bigger rectangles for the palm shapes. Of course, you can color the hands in so they look a little bit more realistic. I think we are good. Of course, the hands are very difficult to draw, so practice makes you feel more confident. When you feel more confident, you can add more details or stylize the hands even more. 9. Drawing Legs and Feet: In this lesson, we will draw legs using few basic shapes for the paint, so you don't have to worry too much about the anatomy at this stage. As mentioned in the earlier lessons, we'll focus on the three-quarter view which makes the character more dynamic. You will also learn how you can simplify the feet and draw the shoes. Let's create another layer, take sketching brush. We had the figure, so we will have the torso, head, neck, shoulders, arms, and if it is a guy, we would have fairly straight legs. If you would want to add feet pointing outward, we can do this. So let me move it. Torso would be like a rectangle as we looked at in the previous lessons. The hips would be quite narrow. You can draw the pants quite straight. If we would place female character here, let's make same size head. Maybe she can be a little bit shorter. We can create wider hips and create the same feet. Of course, there many body types, so we don't have to take this as this is our only option, but I just wanted you to notice the subtle differences. It took me quite a while to notice this. But when you want to sketch simplified characters, this is very nice way to distinguish the male and female characters. The width of the shoulders, so men, narrow hips, and female had usually the wider hips and length of the arms are usually the same, and the feet, sometimes in the animation, female feet are created and drawn very small, so cute and petite. Let's move this to the side and let's focus on different type of legs because of course, both male and female can have the same pants or skirt or shoes or whatever you would like. Let me sketch three types of pants which can be simplified legs when you're starting out with illustration. Maybe we can take colors right away. Maybe I will take our purple and I will start with this three-quarter view. We will have hips, I will draw one leg which is more bend and one is straight. As you can see here, the leg which is more in the background will be darker. As you can see, I'm drawing the same width of the pants on the top and on the bottom. Of course, if you want you can add the curve for the butt, but that's not necessary. Let's do another one. With this one, I can keep wider hips and skinny at the bottom. If you would want to add realism, you can add curve here and above. But they will be very skinny jeans. We can add and move that and keep straight lines. Another one, I will keep this leg more straight and we will bend this leg. We can add shoes. Here we can add little bit of the heel. Important thing is that you keep the same line for both feet, so they are not different levels. Of course, if you're in perspective then you would think about that. But if you want more realistic look, try to keep the feet at the same height. You can draw them and then you can also erase part of it and hold the pen, so you make sure that they're on the same height. Here we are just drawing simple shoes. Of course, if the character would be walking, the feet will be placed differently. But we try to keep it simple here so you don't get overwhelmed. There is another way how you can simplify the shoes. If you start with a simple triangle, let me zoom in more, so we would have this type of triangle and this will be the ankle. I will replace it here. I can duplicate it. So you can notice it here. You can add this curve because that's how I usually see the shoe, and then you can add little bit of the heel and in the front you would add this bump for the fingers. You can add the sole and you have already quite realistic looking shoe. You can add pants, which have this small detail like they're rolled up. You can delete this part, jeans-marking like the scene here and you are good to go. Maybe one more thing, if you want to sketch that one leg is sideways and another one is visible from the front. You can go for the simplified triangle which doesn't end, and the other foot would be this elongated triangle as we just looked at. This is a simple way of looking at it, so triangle. Here, in this one you can make it little bit wider in the front, keeping the lower part straight, and as we did in the other shoe, you can delete this part, this part, adding this curve and we have feet, which are pretty simple. Again, there many styles of the shoes you can draw, but this is pretty simple way how you can do feet and shoes. Now let's move on to the next lesson. 10. Balance and Proportions: In this lesson, we will combine all the elements like torso, the head, and legs into a simple character. We will also briefly discuss proportions and at this stage we will be designing the whole characters in different poses and the fundamental proportions can really make or break your characters, even if they are stylized. As you already know, I will be designing the character in the three-quarter view. I will find this angle better for conveying emotions and bringing dynamism to the characters. Now you can practice putting these elements, would we just sketch together? Let me try to take maybe this pink shade and I will start creating a female character. We will use also references in the later section. But right now, just try to practice what we looked at. Right now I'm looking at these character with narrow shoulders and a wider t-shirt. I will give her a turtle neck. I can take the skin color, what we had here before. I'll add that to the neck, of course now the neck is very long. But we are doing also stylized illustration, so this is fine. I will add hair. Maybe something with the flinch adding the ear as we did before. Then color to their characters also experiences their personality. For example, I am using pastel tones because I want my character to feel calming and almost shy. If you use bold colors, it helps the character radiate confidence. I will use more bright colors in the second exercise, drawing from the reference lessons as I plan to make that character look more confident. I can give her gray pants. Looking at this one I will may be add bended leg here with wider part on top and little bit more narrow at the bottom. I'm trying to keep the tie and the curve from the knee to the foot the same length. Of course you can experiment with longer and shorter. I will give her a little bit wider pants here, on the top, we'll take the darker tone for the back leg and the back leg will be more straight, or maybe I will bend this leg as well little bit. Try to keep the knees at the same height. Now they feel a little bit too low so you can take it and move a little bit higher. Now I will add these wonky big sleeves which we used here, I liked it there. We can add to this character holding something here. I need shadows, so I need darker pink. It will be something unlike this. Then here, this will be the end of the sleeve and I will give the character a plant pot. The plant pot will be here. I can look at this hand what we drew before. Taking the skin tone, you don't have to make it so perfect, but approximately. As you can see, this is maybe too long. We can do something like this. The sleeve is quite big, which is quite funky I feel like. I will erase this part to emphasize the smaller shoulders. Add little bit more hair and at the end, maybe moving the head little bit lower anyway. I like this. Taking darker color what we used before. Let's add also shadow on her neck and fix the hair a little bit. You can make back smaller to be more precise. Maybe she's holding the pot here from the other side. If you remember, we did it here in this hand. We will just use few fingers. Then you can add small plant here. If you want to add few more details, we can add these lines to the sweater. I think that's working quite nicely. Maybe this part is not necessary. I'll delete that, and let's see how that works. I think that's quite nice and if you want to add eyes and nose, it's quite far away because we will be putting it into the windows of the house, but let me show you. You can add the small lines to the character, looks like it's smiling. You can also add small circles and you are trying to keep this proportion. Here you can add top part of the lip, and you have a simple face. But again, this is quite far away so you will not see it. I still feel like maybe the head is too high up on the neck. Also try to keep your character balanced, so the neck and the hips and the feet are aligned so the character will not feel like it's falling to the side. But otherwise, I quite like it. Let me explain briefly what I think of in terms of proportions. Proportions and body joints are something I always consider, even when I stylize the character and exaggerate parts of the body or make arms bend like spaghetti. When I'm doing the initial drawings, I always sketch or at least imagine where shoulders, elbows, wrists, knees, and ankle joints would be on the character. In addition to this, I consider the placement of the head, torso, and hips in relation to all the joint. As you can see, all the joints are shown as red circles here. For the placement of the muscles, I'm drawing the green ovals, as you can see here. When designing the character, you can just connect these circles and is right away easier to pose the character. There are a few rules of thumb you can remember when it comes to realistic proportions. An average adult human figure is six head size toe, and also length from the head to the crotch should be the same length as from the crotch to the feet. I believe it is good to know what it should look like in real life. Then when you want to exaggerate certain parts of the body, you can do it consciously and not by accident. Like Pablo Picasso said, "Learn the rules like a pro so you can break them like an artist". If you push and exaggerate some of the parts of the body shapes, it creates more dynamic and interesting character designs. For example, creating a big or small head compared to the rest of the body long or short arms, and so on. Another example can be very long or very short legs. Some of these traits can become your signature style or let me give you another example, which was very often the case when I worked on characters for the kids, like toys, books, or animation industry. You can see oversize heads compared to the width of the shoulders in the females and child characters. As I mentioned before, the bigger head and smaller shoulders creates more cuteness and therefore more likable characters for the kids. The same goes for the size of the eyes, big eyes, eyebrow cuteness, and they are very often used for child characters in the character design. On the other hand, you can use small eyes if you want to make your illustrated characters look more adult and more grown-up. Remember, experimenting with pushing the design as much as possible helps. But watch out that it doesn't break. Keeping it well-balanced between exaggerated and normal shapes is a golden middle way. We can move on to the next one to play around more with references. 11. Using References to Draw Characters: Let's continue and you can keep the references what you practiced before here on the side. You can also hide the layer with your drawing so you have more space or you can import this image into the phone and/or print it out and keep it on the side so you have more space. But for this purpose, I'll keep it on the side so you can see what I'm referencing. I will take this character and I will make it smaller so I have more space as I mentioned. Now from the resource section, you have to be on the computer to download that. You can import the reference images, which I collected for you. We have different mood boards because on the house, which you see as an example for the practice of different storytelling moments with characters, you can practice plant lady, you can have a beverage, you can have a couple or a music theme, pet, exercise, or work. I will show you the example of a plant lady because we have already one character holding a pot with a plant, which is quite nice. I will import the photo. Okay. We have our references on a separate layer, and as I mentioned, you can have all of these references will be sketched before, print it out, or on the phone. Now, what you can do, we can reduce the opacity of the layer with our references and you can be zooming in and zooming out. You can also go to canvas, turn on the reference, and put these references. What we just drew on the side, you can also make them bigger if you need them. You can always look back and make this window smaller if it will work. Okay, this is fine. Here, we will have our reference mood board with the photography, which you can download from the resources. I will create another layer, where we can sketch our basic poses for the characters. Referencing the heads, hands, and the whole poses for the characters, we want to put them in the window so we don't really need the legs. You can go for the guy character. We have another one here. I didn't find good reference images with the different skin tone characters, I have only these. But of course, please experiment with different hairstyles and the skin tones. I really like the pose of this character so I will zoom in, and based on what we discussed here, I will sketch the character on top of it. You can imagine the shoulders here, so one shoulder will be here and other one here, and I can make the nice curve like we did here before. I can reduce the shoulders. We stylize her a little bit. Then as we discussed here before, going from the brace and the forearm and the elbow, it goes from the thinner to thicker lines. The same here, so we create this rubbery hand. Here, we have to imagine the hands, so I will go for something like this. These are the fingers and maybe the thumb. Here again doing the triangle, one finger separated, the rest are here. I like her outfit so I will keep it. Here, you can follow the shape of the head and adding the ear. Now, I can delete this part, also the shoulders. Then because of the hair is just here, as we discuss these different hairstyles, maybe I give her this type of hairstyle, adding more hair here and straight hair going here. I like the pot what's here. Notice that I reduced the shoulders. If you would keep the same shoulder size, it will look more realistic. Now, I can create another layer below and add colors through it. The same as before. Let me take the light pink. This will be darker pink for the other arm, shoulder, the skin tone what we were using before, and you can turn off the color anytime and add simple eyes. Like we discussed before, you can just do these small halve circles and the eyebrows, and the top lip, and the shadow under the lip, and the shadow under the nose. That will help you already create simple face. You have this face, you can erase this part. I feel like the chin might be very long, so you can erase this. We can add also hair. Let's add dark hair and maybe blue overall. Now, we have single character based on the reference. Now, we can try this out without the outline on another character. Let me take the skin tone which I was using before. You can also combine the pictures. You can crop and paste the head with the body if you like. For example, the head of this character, you can crop it and paste it on this one. I will do this one. You can take the head of the character. You can do duplicate, paste it here, make it a little bit bigger, flip it, angle it little bit because it's just for reference because we are not following it closely, and now we'll sketch on top of it. Let's add this yellow shirt and maybe the blue outfit. So small shoulders as we did before, wider shirt, and you would add the head. Let's go for this gray hat. We can make it bigger, add the hair. The line may be like this, so we have this nice, curly hair. The line for the head, I will go for a different color because if it is the same color as the hair, it wouldn't be as natural-looking as it can be. If you feel like the arm is little bit too thick, you can make it thinner in some parts and you can also add stripes to the t-shirt and you can continue practicing like this. You can add plants. So if you like this plant, you can just loosely base it on this photo. Again, if you want to add face, you can look at your reference. Reduce the opacity here or you can add simple eyes like this with the curve as we looked at before. Okay. I am pretty happy with this one so I can hide the references. If you want to keep the line art, you can, and if you want to keep just the face from the line art, you can cut and paste so you have it done on a separate layer. Hide the line art and you can make the face little bit smaller as well. Now, when you hide the line art, you can have these gaps here so you can look at your references. Based on these, you can clean up the artwork so it doesn't look too realistic. We have to erase this part of the face. We have to add a little bit of hair the same way as we were doing it here. Maybe I will add the fringe because we are missing parts, the ear. You can also clean up this part, so you just go around the neck, and you can add more leaves to the drawing. Now, I feel like this arm can be little bit more interesting so I will do this. I will bend it, even though it wasn't in the references, but I feel like that can work. Yeah, I think that's fine. You can emphasize these curves, you can merge the layers of the face with the color, and I think we are pretty good to go. We can take this character, and based on the references, you can draw little bit more of the plants, for example this one, and you can place it on top of the character or you can take these plants and put it next to your selected character. Just by duplicating them, you can flip them and there you go. Let's place our character to the window. 12. Character within a Composition: So when you're happy with the character you just created, you can just zoom in and see if you like the character. You can always clean it up in the next step, so this doesn't have to be your final sketch. But for now, let's hide the references and let's import the window PNG so we can set the character into the window setting and see how that would work as composition. I can move this to the side so I can see my character. I have the reference here on separate layers, so I will hide that. I also don't need the references what we sketched before, so I can delete those. But if you want to keep it for future reference, don't forget to have this as a extra canvas. You can always duplicate the canvas, so you have this safe so you don't delete something you want to keep for the future. I'll just delete all the layers I don't need. Okay. I want to keep these plants on the separate layer because I might want to move them around in the future as you can see. Okay. If I would zoom out, I don't want this character anymore so I can select, and with three fingers I can cut it. Because I copied the canvas, as I mentioned before, you will always have it saved. Now, we have our character here. I can move it into the middle, and now you can import the PNG window or you can sketch your own. So if you would want to import the PNG, you can just select insert photo and select the PNG you saved in the camera roll. You can download this in the resource section. Okay. Now we imported the window, and now you can reposition your character by selecting both of these layers to the window frame how you would like to have it. So let's see. Now, I'm thinking these plants on the separate layer might be very nice if they're hanging over the window frame. So you can put this in the front. You can see that there is some little mistake which I copied from the character, which is not a problem. You can just zoom in and delete this little apart. Now, looking at this, we have a lot of negative space. Let's look at what I mean by negative space. I'll just create one extra layer for you to see what I mean. Maybe let's take pink so it's visible. Okay. All of these would be our negative space. So if I would hide the character, you can look at the silhouette of the character approximately and you can see if you like the silhouette or you want to push some of the shapes because this curve doesn't look super nice to me. This curve is nice. Let's hide this one as well. This is also quite interesting in the silhouette. So what I can do, I would like to emphasize this curve and maybe reduce the hair here. So quick fix for this one. Let's select our character. I can go to Work. We are in a Transform tool before we had Uniform and you can go to Work and you can move the head little bit like this. Or if you don't want to transform the whole character, I can just select this part of the hair and go to Transform tool, Work, and let's just reduce this part. I can do the same with this arm, and as you can see here it doesn't work that well, so I can just go to the Eraser tool and clean up the shape like this. So you can work with a brush and eraser just to fix the shapes you would like to change. Here, we are behind the background so I would need to hide this layer, which I don't need. You can zoom in, and now I like the shape much more. With this Transform tool, it messed up our hair a little bit here. But of course this was just a sketch, so you can go ahead and make this drawing nicer with cleaner edges in your style and adding the textures by selecting each part of the drawing exactly how you want. Now, one more thing what I wanted to show you, I can delete this negative space part because we don't need it. This is just for a reference. You can see how you can emphasize the silhouette. I was just mentioning the hair, right? I can clean up the curve of the hair. I can also clean up all the edges as I mentioned. As I see, the thumb here is not super visible, so I can make it more visible here. If you want to have your character in a higher resolution, don't forget to do all the cleanup and the edges and the textures in a bigger canvas so you will have very crisp and nice edges when you are finished. Okay. Also to fill up the composition of our window, I will add another layer. Go to the colors and I can take something darker and add these lines so it would look like the plant is hanging from the ceiling. When you draw a line and hold, it will be straight line. So even if you are not the best with drawing straight lines, then it's easy in Procreate. Now we have these lines in front of the character and it would look more natural if it is behind the plant, so I can move the layer just here. If you feel like you would like to add more plants, we still have these ones. You can add more plants to fill the composition. This is up to you. You can find more references for the plants and try to fill out the whole window with plant shapes. You can, of course, do variety in colors here, so you can add maybe some darker tones to these plants or add more colors. Of course, you can add flowers. The possibilities are endless here, of course. Maybe I'll just add something here. Some of the plants are connected together. When you are happy with your design, I can group this into one selection. You can go ahead and create new canvas for the house what we had in the intro lesson. I will duplicate my group. I will flatten it. So I will have just one image with the character, and now I will import it to the other canvas. Now, I will take the character and the details. I will tap, hold, and drag the layer. I will go to gallery and I will open the image of the house. Maybe you able to straight it, or if you want to, you can take this image for practice. Now you will open it, still holding the layer. Now, I will open the layers and I can drag and drop the layer into this new canvas. Now, as you can see, I have my character with the window imported, and now I can just scale it with the Uniform tool and there you go. We have one of our characters imported into the house. Now, you can go ahead and fill in all the windows with the characters. At some of the windows, you can also add the balcony as you can see which I imported here. Maybe you can add the balcony to this lower window, so I will just scale it down. Okay, so balcony is here. If you would be adding character to, for example, this window, it's nice to fill in the whole window with the character with legs as well. Because if you would put only this character there, it would look strange with the balcony. So if you would see something like this, it would cover the face of the character. In the next video, I will show you another example based on the topics and the references I have shared with you, and it will be the yoga character. We will also exaggerate some parts of the body and talk about proportions little bit more. 13. Characters Exaggeration: The more you practice, the better and more comfortable you become with drawing. So let's draw another character. In this example, I will take the mood board with a yoga poses. I will be applying the same principles like before. You can take the colors from the color palette I shared with you in the resource section or the colors we used from the previous lesson. First, I look at my mood board to find the posses I like. I like the idea of the standing character, the tree pose. As in the previous examples, feel free to combine the references. I like the pose of the first photo on the top left with the hands above the head. From the second image, I will use the same pose, but the front view. As you can see, I will sketch the circles for the joints, and ovals for the muscles on top of the reference photo. In the next step, let's think about what to exaggerate. I will make the arms longer, especially the forearms, and the head smaller, and the hips wider, and, of course, you can play around and exaggerate different parts. Talking about this character, notice that I'm exaggerating the curves, which you can also see in the reference photo. When drawing characters, it's interesting to combine curves and straight lines. I'm using straight lines, for example, on the lower part of the leg. Straight lines placed against curves or juxtaposition against curves can make the designs more lively and interesting. Using both straight and curved lines help to avoid parallel lines which are more static in the design. To balance out the overall shape of the character and the smaller head shape, I will create a bigger hair silhouette inspired by the photo in the bottom right corner. Now it's time to color the design. I'm adding the color on the separate layer above, and reducing the opacity of the sketch layer. I'm also adding shadow below the chin, and this always helps visually separate the head from the neck, especially in the simple designs. When I'm creating this type of hair, I focus on the round silhouette with the bumpy edge. Then I would add few loose curly strands of hair, which you can see also in the photo reference. As a last detail on this hair design, I would add few lines in lighter color indicating the flow of the hair. For the face, I'm using the same principle as before, placing the eyes, nose, and the mouth in the symmetry of the face. Eyes are at the same height, and the nose shadow is aligned with the mouth in the middle of the face. I also decided to create a more round face shape for a variety in characters instead of a diamond face shape what we just had before. You can experiment with different face shapes like rectangles, triangles, or ovals. If you'd even Google face shapes for references, you will find many examples. As a next step, I'm adding few shadows on the character based on the reference photo with a light source on the top right corner. So my shadows would be on the bottom left on the character. Last thing I noticed was that the leg on the left was wider than the leg on the right. I decided to reduce the size of the thigh so the character is more balanced. Of course, feel free to experiment with adding more shading and textures as much as you like. When you are happy with this character, you can import it in the window as with the previous character. Because of this nice yoga pose, this time, I would like to have visible as much as possible from the full figure. When placing into the window, consider, how would you see the human from the outside of the window? Probably you wouldn't see the full figure, so we will hide the bottom of the legs. To fill the negative space of the window with objects, I will add few plants in the same color as in the other window and add few lamps. Notice that I added few items which are more angular with straight lines like the shelves or the shape of the lamps to have some angular object when the plants and the yoga character has a lot of curved lines. I will also compare this yoga lady with the other character, the plant lady. Because they will be in one house illustration, I need to adjust the style. Therefore, I will reduce the head size of the plant lady, so they will appear like they belong together in one universe and one illustration with the same styling choices being the smaller head. You can also make the hair bigger with more volume and adjust the arm shapes on the plant lady to match the style of the yoga lady even more. Of course, you should consider all of the styling choices you like before you draw new characters in the future. When we are happy with filling in the window, with the yoga lady, and the elements around her, you can take these layer and place it into the house illustration. After placing on top of the house illustration, I noticed that the flags on the house are behind the window layer. I don't want to delete part of this window layer, so I will apply a mask on these layer and draw on top of this mask layer with darker color. This will cover the part of the window, and the flags will be now visible, and voila, we have more characters in the house illustration. When you create more of these characters for the windows, think about the balance and the composition, and try to move around the windows with the characters and see how the illustrations work together as a whole. For example, like I decided that the yoga character would fit better with the balcony shape window in the bottom row of the composition. I really hope you had fun, and I can't wait to see your characters. As you know, and I've said it many times, practice makes better. Please go ahead and create more characters with a little stories for the windows, either from your own references or the mood boards I prepared for you, which you will find in the resource section. 14. Final Thoughts: Congratulations, you finished the class. Thank you so much for being here, and I hope you now feel more confident about drawing characters and you are inspired to draw more and more. Like feeling the full illustration of this house with characters. By the way, if you want to expand on the knowledge you learn in this class, you can watch my other classes as well. For example, the one about colors, called Color Ballads in Procreate, or the one about the compositions. Just visit my teacher profile to find them and don't forget to share your class project in the project section. I can't wait to see all of your awesome art works and if you would like me to also share your illustrations on Instagram, please add your Instagram handle so I can help you and your art to be discovered by more people. If you like the class, please leave a review because first of all, I appreciate it so much and second, you will also help other students to discover the class and you might contribute to their artistic journey too. If you have friends or family members who would love to learn to design characters, please share this class with them and if you have any questions or suggestions, please leave a comment in the discussion section. I would love to help out and thank you again so much for being here and see you in the next class.