Transcripts
1. Introduction: Art as the spark that
illuminates our culture. So help me celebrate one of the oddest creative
sparks in human history, the medieval sea monster. In this class, we'll start
with the close-up look at the culture in history surrounding the
mysterious monster. With that as our inspiration
will work to imagine a sea monster of our very own using some conceptual
brainstorm. Next, we'll take
all our new ideas to the drawing board and sketch, ink and Color. Monstrously mythical
Illustration. Okay, you're ready to explore the world of the
dangerous sea monster. Good, Let's dive right in. Nautical sea monster joke. I'll see you in class
2. Monsters and Imagination: Imagine you're an Italian cartographer in the early 1400s, you sit for long hours at your drafting table with your sliding ruler, hunched over your massive wooden drafting table creating barebones charts for stingy sailors. You've been doing this for years and you've nearly gone blind squinting over the infinite angles of ragged coastlines. Of course there is those small flourishes. Sometimes you get to draw a compass rose but no one wants to pay you to decorate a map. It's a tool they say, what's the point? When you went off to study the art of mapmaking, you always imagined there'd be something more to it than this. Then one day, a wealthy merchant walks into your studio. He tells you he wants you to make him a map but not just another sailor's chart, he wants something beautiful and striking to hang in the great hall of his castle and impress his guests. Your eyes widen at the opportunity. Finally, a chance to put your artistic skills to use. You tell him how you'll illustrate the bold shapes of the cities riding right up to the coastline and the majesty of the staggering mountains in the middle of the country. You'll include the forestry, rivers, roads, and everything that comes in between. You'll fill the forests with running animals and oceans with sailing ships. Your heart races with the opportunity to finally express your creativity. The well-dressed merchant yawns with boredom. He's not impressed by your proposal. In fact, he turns to leave, taking his heavy purse with him. You beg him to give you another chance. He nods his head and poses a challenge to you: "While you've been slaving behind your drafting table, I've traveled the known world a few times over. I've seen all there is to be seen. If you want to impress me, you'll have to show me something I've never seen. You have until tomorrow morning." And with that, the well-dressed merchant walks out of your studio. Back at your drafting table, you're sketching like mad, your table filled with doodles and notes about how you can impress the merchant. The sun begins to set and soon you find yourself staying up all night sketching out ideas that might impress the well-traveled man. Soon you realize, you're going about it all wrong. The usual map of pictograms are not going to win this man over. You need to look beyond the usual. Like any good 14th century Italian, you look to Homer's epic tale of the sailor Odysseus for inspiration, talk about a man who's traveled the world. During one of his adventures, Odysseus and his brave crew were passing through the Strait of Messina between Sicily and southern Italy when suddenly, their ship was attacked by the horrible monster known as Skyla. Homer describes Skyla as a monster of the deep with a crab-like shell, six long necks, triple rows of teeth on each head, and 12 feet dangling from her monstrous body. Her voice as Homer writes, "Sounds like the yelping of dogs." Before Odysseus can lead his men through the channel, the Skyla has picked off six of his men, one in each of her deadly mouths. Even as a little kid hearing this story, you know that Skyla wasn't an actual creature but that didn't make it any less real in your imagination. And that gave you an idea. As the sun comes up, you sit exhausted putting the final touches on your map. Just then the merchant walks into your shop. Well, he says, you sit back and present a proficient rendering of the Strait of Messina. He leans in closely to study your design. He sees the Sicilian and Italian coastline facing each other. Strong lines representing the powerful tide currents flow through the middle and form into a powerful whirlpool. In the center of the dark pool, lies the monster Scalia. The merchant stares at the creature and you see his eyes filled with the same wonder you knew as a child. "I have never seen anything like this," he says. By the mid-15th century, sea monsters were all the rage among map collectors of the medieval world. While the early creature designs were rooted in mythology and cautionary metaphors of actual deep sea hazards, the designs changed over time becoming strange illusions weirder than anything anyone had ever imagined before. Bird-like sea dragons with bat-like wings, bearded walruses with cactus-like bodies, serpents with the heads of dogs, spiky elephants, and giant-headed Chinchilla things. The story of the sea creature is the story of our cultural imagination. Art historians say that these strange and exotic creatures were designed to engage the viewer of the map on a higher level, evoking the imagination with their supernatural appearance. Even to this very day, with access to all kinds of creative media, we still search for that engagement in those moments of wonder and imagination.
3. Mythology and Geography: For me, every good creative process, no matter how fantastical, begins with a real point of reference. Even imaginary creatures have roots in reality. The sea monster for all its strangeness, is actually a commentary on culture and exploration. In ancient times, the appearance of a sea monster spoke to the challenges of exploring uncharted waters. Medieval sea monsters on European maps were often referencing the exotic animals of the region they appeared in, showing how the world was bigger and more dangerous than anybody ever imagined. In the mid 20th century, the sea monster rose again, this time in the waters off the coast of Japan. This version of a sea monster is a lot more complicated as it represents Japan's concerns on the exploration of nuclear power in the 1950's. In both of these examples, understanding the geographic location of the sea monster does a lot to help unpack the cultural concerns the monster is trying to evoke. All that said, our first step in designing a mythical monster is to find a home for it on the map. What's that writers workshop quote, "Write what you know"? Well, I'm going to draw what I know. A place I know pretty well is a little spot on the east coast of Florida called Daytona Beach. I was around six years old when my family was living there and we had a little trailer in a park about 10 minutes from the ocean, in freshwater rivers and swamp land. In my memory, I went swimming almost every day. Being close to salt water as well as fresh water introduced me to a lot of strange and dangerous creatures. I remember, my mom getting stung by jellyfish and having to stay out of the water because there is a shark warning and a barracuda swimming by my leg. Then, in the fresh water, I remember seeing manatees who were so gentle but a giant, and an alligator crawling along the beach. All these creatures would make great points of reference for my sea monster myth but I'm going to go a little less conventional with my point of reference. For me, the strangest, most elusive creature of the Florida coastline was the flamingo. Back in the 1800's, the unpopulated wetlands of Florida were home to thousands of flamingos who would migrate there during the warm winter months. But over time, European settlers moved into the area and started hunting the birds for their cool feathers and their big eggs, and that drove the birds away. But still, the flamingo remained part of Florida culture. Its iconic look represented the state's tropical and vacation ready vibe. Growing up in Florida in the 1980s, the myth of the flamingo was very real. In the next chapter, I'm going to take this myth and expand on it and design a unique creature who's the long lost descendant of the flamingo, driven into obscurity by manifest destiny, in America's dream of a comfortable retirement and a lawn filled with tacky birds.
4. Personality and Ability: The most famous, and recognizable sea creatures have memorable descriptions, and even sometimes distinct personalities. So, for me, it's important to have some flavor to my sea monster, to make it stand out from the other creatures of the sea. I'm going to take some notes here. When conceptualizing a creature, I think it's important to ask yourself the right questions because those will guide you through your drawing process. I'm going to start with this question. What is the monster's personality? After the exodus of its flamingo ancestors, the creature has lost touch with other living beings. It's lonely, because it's one of a kind. Sort of like the story of the Loch Ness Monster. It's not an evil monster bent on revenge, but it's defensive especially if it feels threatened. What are the monster's abilities? The creature may be inspired by a flamingo, but it needs to remain in the water because it's a sea monster. To have survived as long as it has, it's probably able to swim quickly to elude humans. Speed usually implies a character's place on the food chain. So, I imagine this monster has some other defenses, like maybe the ability to cloak itself. Can I describe these parts of the monster? Some visual description can help kick off the drawing. So, let's see if I can imagine a little of what this creature is going to look like based on the ideas I've written down. My monster needs to be fast, but birds aren't fast swimmers so I'm going to find reference in another Florida animal, let's say an alligator. The strong tail of an alligator could really come in handy with my character design. Its feathers are going to change color also to blend in with its surroundings, that's its cloaking ability. That leads us to the question, how big is the sea monster? I'm going to say it's a mid-sized monster, something that can be seen from the shore line but isn't too overwhelming. So, the scale would be that of a mid-sized sailboat. All right, I'll be honest. Sometimes, I do start drawing before I brainstorm in this sort of way. But for the sake of organization in this class, I'm putting all the writing in conceptual stages first, before I get to the sketching and drawing. The creative process is an ebb and flow so I expect that whatever stage you like to do first, you go there. But don't be afraid to visit some of these other steps before you get to your final rendering of your design.
5. Reference and Ratio: The thing that makes an impactful sea monster design is the same thing that makes any visual art impactful, a cohesive balance of strong, visual elements. If you picture a variety of mythical creatures, you notice they come in varying levels of complexity. So, I'm going to break the design complexity down into three different types. The most simple being the Moby Dick approach, where you choose a base anatomy and add an iconic physical detail. So Moby Dick is a giant whale but is made mythical by adding the single defining characteristic of the stark white skin. The second type is the mermaid approach where you start with a base anatomy and then you split it with another base anatomy. This isn't a very realistic approach because a mermaid is just half a human cut off at the waist and a fish cut off at the middle part of the fish and they're both stuck together. It doesn't feel like a natural evolution. The third style is the amalgamation. Take the beautiful creature from Guillermo Del Toro's Shape of Water. In this case, it's base anatomy is a human but its reference points are abstracted so much that the creature becomes a whole different thing of its own. In the creature design you might see influence from an eel, a fish, a frog, a salamander and an athletic human. In our class, we're going to go for the gold here and try amalgamation. You start with a base. This is going to be about 60 percent of the creature design. The base should be practical to make your creature seem somewhat realistic. Since my creature needs to know how to swim, I'm going to use the Florida alligator as the base. Choose a secondary influence. This is going to be about 30 percent of the creature design but I think of it as the main aspect of its character. I'm going to use the flamingo here and the flamingo has a tropical stoicism and that's going to influence my character design a lot. When picking that secondary influence, consider your monster's personality. Is it aggressive? Try a shark influence. Is it secretive? Try a nocturnal animal like an owl as your influence. The third choice you need to make is the seasoning of the design. This represents 10 percent of the creature design. This is the choice that takes the creature to the amalgamation level. This aspect of the design is nearly invisible and basically bridges the base and the secondary influence by being a unifying agent. It's the chemical reaction of the whole design. I'm going to pick something purely on its visual likeability. I'm going to go with the clownfish for my third point of reference. So alligator, flamingo and clownfish. Next, I need to find some good references of these three distinct animals. I want some full body shots of the whole creature from different angles, and I also want some close ups so I can understand the textures and some of the characteristic details of these animals. I'm going to just speed through this process because we all know how to google images. Once we've got a good collection of references, we can move on to sketching our design.
6. Sketches and Silhouettes: Our goal right now in this section is to get our ideas that are floating around in our head out on paper, whether they're good or bad. This is called the thumbnail in stage of sketching. They're visual notes that are just for you. No one else needs to be able to read these, so you don't have to refine them in any specific way. I'm calling these thumbnail silhouette thumbnails. In character design, something that makes a memorable recognizable character is having a strong silhouette. The trick here is to exert as little energy as possible so you don't regret any of your choices, and you don't second guess the want or need to draw anything. You want to just get a bunch of stuff down on paper and sort through it later. So, I'm going to play around with these three visual references and just remix them in different ways and see how the drawings feel to me. Keeping in mind some of the concept ideas such as, "If this character's fast, would he have long narrow skinny legs like a flamingo?" Probably not. So, maybe I should stick a little closer with the body and tail of the gator and give it a little stubby legs. I'm trying to fit the clownfish here in little ways but since it's only 10 percent of my design, I don't think I should waste that on the silhouette. Maybe the texture or skin of the clownfish comes into play when I start to add details to the body. You can see me trying some feather techniques on the back of the creature. So, I just had this idea come into my head of a gator head framed with flamingo feathers, almost like a lion, this frame by its mane. So, I'm going to sketch that out. I'm kind of into this, it gets a little circle around it. Now, I want to find a body that complements his head type. I'm going to try gator body maybe with a thin, no. I want something a little stubbier. All right, that's getting a little closer to what I want. I'm going to consider more flamingo feathers maybe instead of a thinner legs, it gets a wing, that could be cool. This creature strikes me as a heavy creature, something that can't really move on land very well and has to stay in the water most of the time especially if it's being chased by any sort of predator. So, I'm going to bulk up the body of the creature. Now, it's starting to look more like kind of a manatee body type with a long gator head and a flamingo-style bill on the end of it. Okay, this is getting a lot closer. I like the weight of the creature and I like some of these details. Not sure if I'm going to use all of them but for a thumbnail, it's pretty great. All right, I think we need a name for this animal so I can start referring to it more specifically. Well, it is a gator and a flamingo mixed together. So, I'm thinking "allimingo". I'm going to work on a more refined sketch. Figure out the rational parts of the body, the shapes that make up its form. Before I do that, I'm going to remind myself of the influences of its pose. I know this creature is lonely. It's not an evil monster, it's utterly unique. It's defensive when it needs to be. It's bound to the water, doesn't spend much time on land. It has a fast, strong tail for quick swimming, and it's about the size of a medium sailboat. I'm going to start with these basic shapes. The character's going to feel heavy, and weighty, and almost an absurd sense of proportion, but still feel realistic enough. I'm giving it a massive head for the shape of its body, and a giant tail, and tiny little knobby legs. The head is a combination of a gator's head and a flamingo beak. There is the feather mane that I talked about earlier. Almost looks like he swallowed a giant bowling ball. All right, I started to capture a little bit of this lonely feel but I want to push it even further. A good way to do that with a sketch is to establish what's called an action line. It's kind of like an extension of the spine. If this character was your actor, its body language would go a long way to expressing its emotive state. I'm giving this a droopy action line. You can see it right across the back. So, everything I build off of that is going to kind of reference back to the action line. I'm getting a very Eeyore type of feel from this creature. It's kind of saggy, almost depressed, overwhelmed by gravity. All right, again, I'm not going to overwork the sketch, but I need just enough information to move me on into my final drawing. Let's try a couple of eye styles. Now, keep in mind, I've been drawing a long time. I have a whole lot of stamina for sketching. If you don't have that much energy, just do one simple sketch or if you really need to move into the final design, whatever it takes to get you through all the stages of this process.
7. Pushing and Posing: So I'm going to go through one more sketching stage and really push the pose and get to know this character before I start to ink it. We'll start back with the action line. I'm really pushing the droopiness of this line. And now the shapes that I'm putting are going to bend and curve along with it. Instead of an oval for the body, I've got a really bent bean shape. Tails nice and saggy. Some basic shapes for the legs. I'm adding more droopiness to the head and getting a general placement for the feather mane. You want to make a peel in shapes. Shapes that feel unique and convey a sense of tone. Now on top of this, I want to add some perspective to my drawing. I'm creating depth to this two dimensional form I've got. So these red lines are my guides for the roundness of the character. Notice how everything's curved. I have no straight or rigid lines, everything's bent. On top of this, I'm going to do one last final sketch and work out some of these details starting with the eyes, the beak, and the shape of the head. The function of this character's head is to be moody and lonely, so I'm going to give him a big heavy brow and a big droopy beak nose. Now, I need to figure out the structure of the feathers. They overlap in the same way scales do. And I want them to shoot off from the head. One last time over the shape of the body, really getting to know the curves of the body and the tail. All right. I've got a lot of confidence in this sketch. I feel like I really know this character well. So when I get into the inking it's going to be a lot more effortless. Nervous inking can really ruin a drawing. So it pays off to be really confident in your character's design before you start to ink.
8. Inking and Hatching: You can see on the left hand side of the screen I brought in two references for my inking process. These are both illustrations from Renaissance era, sea monster art and I've highlighted some of the different inking techniques that are done in these drawings. You can see that hatching, which is basically using lines of varying thickness and density to represent light, you can see how the hatching can show the form of the creature, represent different textures like fur, or feather, or skin or even water in this case. It also gives you a sense of where the light source is. Overall, hatching is going to bring depth and shape to this drawing. I want this course to work for both digital and traditional illustrators. So, while I'm drawing on a tablet for clarity, any of the things I'm doing can be done with pen and paper. I'm using a very generic default brush that would come with Photoshop, or Clip Studio Paint, or Procreate. It's not a micron which has more of a consistent thickness, it's more equivalent to a brush pen or a calligraphy pen with a nib. So, when you press down harder, you get a thicker line weight and when you let up, you get thinner line weight, which you can do with a micron but you get a lot more of a dynamic feel with a nib or a brush. You can see my first step here is to just get the main line work of the illustration, all the outlines. I'm leaving in a bunch of my mistakes, so you can see that instead of picking my pen up as I work, I try to create the line all with one gesture. It gives a much more natural flow to the design especially, along bigger shapes like the arc of the back down into the tail. If I can capture that all with one line, it makes the image a lot stronger and a lot more clear. A lot of style is revealed through inking and when I used to work on pen and paper, there was a level of sloppiness that I would allow myself with my work. I liked a bit of spattering of ink and little textural things like that. But when I work digitally, everything feels like it needs to be fairly accurate. Otherwise, it looks like a mistake and not the good kind of mistake. So, my digital drawings are a lot more crisp and clean. I really think about where lines interact, the types of tension that I'm creating when lines bump into each other. Now that I've got my outline finished, I'm going to bring in another image to reference. Here's a photo of a mossy alligator. This is how I can suggest the roundness of the creature. I'm going to create a couple basic guides inspired by the textures of a gator. They have almost a grid like form on their bodies but of course, these lines can't be flat because they're on a curved surface, so I have to make sure I get the angles to represent the right parts of the body. You can see as I build these lines up, it starts to make my character appear rounder and the closer I put the lines together, the more you can see a hatching technique. With traditional hatching, you don't want the lines to overlap unless you're doing cross hatching, which is a different thing. So, the lines need to run parallel and the density creates a darkness. You can see as the density of the lines increase, the tone of the image starts to change. The more details you add, the closer it brings the image to it as type of reality. I don't know, for me some of the humor starts to fall away from the drawing, some of the lightness and I've even tried some other types of textures here. I don't think this is working for my style so I'm going to pull out some of that stuff and take a different approach to the hatching. Less lines, meaning the lines I do make have more of an impact. Let's look over the types of lines I'm using here. With the main, I want all the feathers to be pointing in towards the center of the face. So, you can see the way they all point towards an imaginary pin somewhere between the eyes and right behind the nose. I've added some scuff marks on the nose to give the character a bit of a history. Maybe he digs his beak around in the rocky crags of the shoreline. I've added just little bits of texture on the body. I've got some stripes in the style of a clown fish the way its body is kind of segmented with color. The texture is referencing the alligator but it's not as dense as an actual alligator. All right. For the next step with my hatching, I'm going to build out the shadows inside the feathers. You can see I've got my references back up here again. When feathers overlap, the ones in the foreground cast a shadow on the ones in the back. So, I'm going to move in the depths and the cracks between these feathers and build out the shadows which makes the ones in front pop out a bit. Again, the lines are cross hatched, they're all moving along the same reference lines. They don't shift direction, meaning they all imply the same light source. There's a unified feel. I'm going to come back in around the eyes and add just a little bit more hatching again, and just let the beak be the main point of emphasis, meaning it has the most level of detail on the face. I'll try a different approach to the texture on the back, I'll use little dashes. You can see, I press down harder on certain lines and lighten up on others, it creates a bit of variety, a more naturalistic feel, some shadows behind the main. I'm going to try to filling in the underbelly of the creature but I think that's too much depth in the light value so I'm going to pull that back out and just keep a little bit of accent around the legs. Let's get back here and hatch some of the texture in the water. So, this version of the sea monster stays pretty true to the techniques used in the Renaissance illustrations. Basic hatching techniques, nothing extravagant or experimental, just relaying the basic form, a bit of a light source, and some of the exotic textures of the creature.
9. Color and Theory: Before we start to color our sea monster, let's take a little crash course in color theory so you know your options. The character of a single color can be broken down in two ways. One is the saturation intensity of the color. This is a shade of red at 100 percent saturation. As we lower the saturation, the color is stripped away until we're left with white. In the natural world, a fully saturated color is seen when it's absorbing all the light. The second way to categorize color is with value or the brightness of the color. We start at full value of red and the more black we add, the less light is interacting with the color and it hides it in shadow. The ratios of saturation and value are super powerful because our eyes are very sensitive to them. So really, you can take a single color and create really interesting and evocative compositions. You could even paint a whole picture using different levels of saturation and value. Of course with only a single color, we'll lose a lot of our storytelling options. So let's look at color harmonies which is the theory of combining colors. Let's look at three different approaches to harmonizing colors. The first is the monochromatic approach which is basically what we talked about. It's using a single color with different levels of saturation and brightness. Monochromatic coloring can work for a single subject image like a logo or a piece of graphic art. But when you get into narrative arts, it gets tricky to work with only one color. Let's look at analogous color harmony, which means working with colors that are adjacent on the color wheel or next to each other. So if I start with this pink base, you can see I move around my color wheel to the right and to the left just a little bit. Never strayed too far from that original base color. In this context, I can use my adjacent colors to represent shadow, texture, highlights. So restricting yourself to a certain corner of the color wheel, it can actually be pretty liberating. By eliminating a lot of choices, you can actually have more freedom with your creativity. Analogous color schemes can feel very comfortable because they're not putting any harsh contrast in your face. The natural world is full of analogous color schemes in terms of animal, patterning, or just the natural environment around you. A third approach to color harmony is the complementary approach, meaning colors that are on opposite sides of the color wheel. I'm sure you're familiar with complimentary colors. It's something that's covered in elementary art education. So let's add a variation to that, split complementaries. That means picking one of your two complements and choosing an analogous color to work with it. So if I have a base of pink and a complement of green, it gives me the option of using a blue to create a little more variety and a ton more of compositional potential. Okay, there's your crash course in color theory. Let's get back to our artwork. I'm going to take my fully-inked illustration and work with a split complimentary color scheme inspired by the Flamingo, which is the orange and the green of the alligator and my adjacent color to my compliment is going to be blue. I'm going to work with the green as a base and just go through and fill this whole thing in. Then I'm going to play with different combinations of my complement and analogous color. With coloring you have to decide where you want to draw the eye. So my base color has to be dominant, otherwise the accent color isn't going to stand out. I'm going to keep just the feather mane orange and use different values of green along the body. Again, this is a creative class, so we've got our rules and sometimes rules get broken. I'm going to revise my color scheme. Let's try this out and I'm going to try this yellow on the beak. This darker value of blue actually seems to fit better with the alligator body so keep that and then orange in the mane, how about some stripes. All right, again, even with this limited palette, it's very easy to make a overly busy design. I'm just going to stop here for a second and reassess the situation. When I was hatching my design, the aspects of the character were really working. But as I add color now, the design is just getting too muddy and nothing's really standing out to me. So I'm going to take a drastic approach and I'm going to take out all the hatching and just go back to my outline of the design. Let's see if I can find a more satisfying color palette. This little lonely guy has got a cuteness to him, so I'm going to pick a more cheery color palette. I'm going to start with a teal-ish type of green for the alligator body and I'm going to use that adjacent complement of pink to be the Flamingo feathers. Then I'm going to jump back to the green, lower the brightness and start building a pattern. The trick here is to not over complicate things. So as I build this pattern, I have to decide if it's really working to the overall look of the design or if it's taking too much away from the face. As you can see, I'm starting to bend some of the color theory rules that I discussed, mere minutes ago, but that's how the creative process works. If we all played by the same rules, we just end up with the same things over and over again. So we have to be a little malleable and allow the rules to fit the situation. Here's a good case of that. I'm going to make a dramatic change here. I'm starting to lose the intensity of the face in this pattern but I'm not going to change the pattern this time. I'm going to go in and change the look of the face. Let's take these eyes and revise them. Now, I'm drawing back into the face which is where I want to be with the good character design. I'm going to use a little yellow here to make them pop or add a couple more details. I want some darker values to make the feathers stand out and the eyes pop and after a little trial and error, I've got a design that I'm happy with. Here it is, ladies and gentlemen. The elusive alimingo, wandering the waters of Daytona Beach, off the coast of Florida, USA.
10. Wrap Up: All right, that's the class. I hope you had a good time and I hope it inspired you to create a sea monster of your very own. Even if you don't go through all the steps I took, you can remix them in different ways and feel free to share any stage of your creative process in the student projects section. That goes a long way to building a community around the class and let other students know that people are actively here and participating, and it really inspires me to create new classes for you guys. I love the classroom aspect so I hope you play a part of that. If you enjoy this class on making sea monsters, you might also like my other creative illustration courses on concept art and world-building, inking and illustration in children's books, drawing cartoon characters, and making comics. You can find all that stuff on my Skillshare page and make sure to follow me to see what comes next. All right. Catch you next time.
