Transcripts
1. Class Teaser: Hey, what's up? My name is Jon Brommet and welcome to Drawing Skulls. So, thanks for joining me in this class. We're going to be going over drawing realistic skulls, stylized skills, and downright silly skulls. The idea is that I'm going to show you how to simply draw skulls with proportions correctly and basically make sure everything lines up and that you're drawing a fairly accurate skull, and then from there because there's so many skulls on the Internet and you want your art to stand out, we're going to talk about stylizing it, how to changing it, kind of breaking those rules that I showed you, and then we're just going to get downright silly and we're going to draw a really crazy skulls, cartoon skulls, completely unrealistic ones, and the idea is that you're going to have the rules, you're going to have the foundation, you're going to know how to properly draw a skull, so that it is anatomically correct, and then you're going to know how to break those rules by drawing some really cool skulls that are going to make your artwork stand out, so people out there will think that you are an awesome artist. So, I hope you check out the class. I think you're going to enjoy it. You do not need any software for this class. I am going to be using a little bit of Photoshop and maybe Illustrator and Procreate, but I can definitely just get away with a pencil and a piece of paper, so it is not a software class as much as it is a creative drawing class, and I just want you to push your creativity and try and make your artwork really unique and fun and not worry too much about learning how to use a specific tool. So, that's it, that's what this class is about. I think it's going to be a lot of fun, so please click Enroll and we'll see you in a second.
2. Free Skull Inspiration E-Book!: Okay. Before we get into the class, I want to talk about a really cool Ebook that I put together that is totally free for you to download. The idea is that, I know that it can be sometimes tough to get inspired and get that creativity flowing, which is why I've put together this book featuring some of my favorite artists of today, and you can see it features some amazing artists. We've got Jon Contino, jetpacks and rollerskates, Alexa Elkaeva, if I'm pronouncing that right, Kendrick Kidd, Doublenaut, Ryan Putnam, Brian Steely, DKNG. We've got Manchu Sharma, we've got Aaron Draplin, and Williams, and even myself because I'm purely advertising myself. Anyways, if you check through this book, I would be amazed if you don't find some really awesome skull inspiration. I'm really happy that all of these different artists joined on for this and I got their permission to use some awesome work of theirs. Basically, I just want to really make sure that you guys had some cool references for tons of different styles. Each one of these artists has a different way of drawing skulls and it should really get you inspired. If that doesn't do it for you, I've also put together a Pinterest board, that is on pinterest.com/John Brahman and you can click on famous skulls, and you'll see about Picasso, Van Gogh, Fridah, George Jose, Salvador Dali, Andy Warhol, De Vinci, so you can see from some of the great, some of the old time artists. George is not old timers, but it gives an idea of sort of creativity and working in a kind of realistic versus stylized. A lot of these famous artists started to push that boundaries of going stylized because they know that it made their work stand out, and it was more unique from the competition. So, if this doesn't get you inspired, I don't know what will. Let's get this class going.
3. Basic Portrait Proportions: Okay. So, welcome to the class. So, to start with, I want to talk about the relationship of the human face to the skull. As you can see here, regardless of age, gender, ethnicity, beliefs, any kind of that thing, any kind of thing like that, we all have a skull. Beyond that, our skulls are very similar. Of course, they are different. They will range in shape, and they will range in a few different characteristics especially from different ethnicities, and from females and males. But generally, they're so similar that the average person, chances are if you haven't done any kind of anatomy classes and someone put a skull of a elderly African-American male and say, middle aged white female, you probably won't be able to tell the difference of the skull. You won't know which is which and that is because without really good training, they're very similar. So, that's really why skulls are such a popular art form for many different people. It doesn't matter the type of art that they create. A lot of the time, you're going to find that they've done a skull. You can go back through centuries of art, and you can look at Van Gogh, and you could look at all sorts of different famous artists, and it doesn't matter if you're doing traditional painting or you're doing really stylized work or pop art or you're doing really realistic sketches. A lot of different artists draw skulls. So, that's why they're so popular is because we all have one, and it's a cool bridge between all forms of people and all forms of art. So, what I wanted to show here, if we zoom in, of course, I've just picked some random famous faces that you'd probably recognize and you can see generally speaking that the skull, this one picture of a skull that I had, will line up fairly closely for every single person. There's going to be a little difference as to where the chin hits and the chin not hitting here. Of course, each of these photos isn't taken on the exact same angle, but the general idea is that they all land in the same spot. So, that's just to get you the idea that when we're drawing our skull and we're getting the proportions correct, we're really just trying this one system and they're going to vary a little bit. But generally speaking, everybody's skull is so similar that you don't have to worry too much about drawing the skull differently if it's a male or female or whatever. So, moving on from that, we're going to look at a little bit about how our faces line up as far as proportions and how to make sure that no matter the size or scale your drawing at, everything is landing approximately in the right spot. So, if we look at this photo, the general guideline is that you want to draw a circle for the top part of the head and then you're going to make an egg-like shaped to get down to that chin. This is where we're drawing portraits or for drawing skulls. What you're doing is you're cutting the circle in half, so that's at the halfway line and roughly, the distance from this halfway line to the edge of the circle is going to be repeated from this circle to the edge of the chin. Then, once you cut that in half, that is roughly where the teeth are going to line up and I'll talk a little bit more about this in a moment. But first, far as width on it, when you're drawing an actual human face, you'll see that it's about five eye widths apart. That changes a little bit on a skull because if we go back to these photos, you'll see that a skull, those eye holes are a lot larger, and they're actually bigger than most people's eyes, and they even almost go up into the eyebrow thing, and that's not technically accurate. The eyebrow does fall on the bone, but that gives you the idea of how to lay that out. So, if we look at this picture of a skull that I have now, this was a plastic one. I did get it on Amazon. It was inexpensive, so I'm sure it's not perfectly and atomically correct, but it should be fairly similar. You can get some pretty good guidelines from it. So, when drawing your skull, we want to have a circle, that's where you start with, and then you cut it in half horizontally as well as vertically. Once you cut it out horizontally as I said, you take the distance from that line to the bottom of the circle, and you draw another line where your chin will end. From there, you split that in half and that is roughly where your teeth are going to line up. You can see it's going to depend on the angle of the photo, but I would draw the teeth above this line and the teeth are below this line. From there, if you want the edge here where that gum line would be, you're going to go from the edge of the circle or the center of the circle here that you drawing for your eye. So, I'm talking about the skull. A lot of the times, I'm going to say things like the eye hole or I'm going to say the nose hole or where your teeth and gums lie, and that's because I want this to appeal to as many people as possible, and I want them to understand what I'm talking about. It's not really important to know what the mandible is, and the nasal bone or the frontal bone, and the inferior nasal concha or whatever it's called here like this part in here, so it's not super important that you know all of the technical terms when you're an artist. I mean, it doesn't hurt. It doesn't hurt to know more about anatomy when you're drawing a human form. But again, you don't need to know the term of every single bone in the skull to be able to draw it. So, I'm not going to really talk like that. I do know a little bit about it, but I don't think it's necessary for getting across how to draw the skull. So, talking about this eye hole here, center roughly of it, we want to go down, and that's where that gum lines land right there as you can see, and of course, it's not your gums, but again, don't want to get too technical here. So, coming up there, we've got this cheekbone that's going to fly up and it's coming in-between, so we've drawn a half line between the center of the circle and the edge of the circle and, that's where that cheekbones going to land, and get that nice little S shape to it or reverse S. Then, we want to make sure that our nose is going partially into those eye holes, and the bottom of the nose is hitting here, and that's pretty much the basics. So, you can see here too that the edge of this eye is going to come down and that's where your cheeks or that bone is going to go to the lower part of your jaw. So, this is all just variants. It's going to depend on the photo, the angle of the photo, but this is the general idea of how you want to draw your skull and the general proportions of it if you're looking straight on. So, we're going to get in to actually drawing a skull based on these proportions right now.
4. Drawing A Skull Portrait: Okay, so let's get started in drawing our skull from looking at front on and kind of drawing it with realistic proportions. I said, too, of course that you can definitely just use a piece of paper and a pencil or pen. You don't need any software. Because it's a little easier for me to record, I'm going to be using Photoshop, and I'm using my iPad Pro to draw it. Like I said, it's just a little easier to get a nice screen recording so you guys can easily see what I'm doing. If you're wondering how I am drawing on my iPad Pro in Photoshop, what I'm doing is I'm using an app called Astropad that is awesome. I couldn't recommend it enough. Basically, it allows you to take control of your Mac using your iPad, and it shows you Mac on your screen. This is a really good way to use things like Illustrator or Photoshop, any of those programs that don't have a good app on the iPad. It allows you to basically, you take control of your Mac. It works over WiFi, so I can be in a separate room or on my couch and I can be controlling my Mac on my iPad and drawing straight into Photoshop, which is awesome. I used to have a Wacom tablet, but the Cintiqs are just so expensive, and the iPad doubles as not only really useful for surfing the web and whatever you're going to do with an iPad, but now you can use as a drawing tool, and the app is so cheap, it's just makes for me anyway using Wacom kind of redundant and pointless. I'm just not going to spend multiple thousands of dollars to have a screen I can draw directly on when I could just use my iPad which isn't cheap either, but I'm getting an iPad anyway in my case. Anyway, that's all. You can use pencil, paper, awesome, whatever you want to use, or you can use software that you're comfortable in. Again, this is about drawing, not using tools. To start with, as we saw, we want to go with a circle. Now, my circle isn't going to be perfect, but this is a basic idea of how to draw a skull. Of course, if you're doing this on pencil and paper, you want to draw light so you can kind of draw nicely over top of it. Because I'm using a program, I can just lighten this and draw a different layer. I've split it across horizontally and vertically as I showed before. What we want to do essentially is we want to take this line here in the center of the circle, and from that distance to here, and we basically want to roughly duplicate it down here. If we look, I'm thinking right around here is kind of about an equal distance repeated down from there. Hopefully, we've kind of got one space here at the top part of the circle, bottom part of the circle, and another. It's kind of a nice a third, a third, a third. Now, if we draw this bottom part in half, that was going to be roughly where our T planned as I showed before. What we'll do is we'll just go ahead and we'll draw these lines kind of bigger across. We're getting a little bit sloppy, but the idea is that I want you to know that your proportions are kind of really drill it into your head if that makes sense. We're also going to split the area between the halfway part of the circle and the bottom part of the circle because that is basically our nose. This gives us a rough idea. At this point I want to come in and I'm going to draw this half circle, get this sort of egg-shaped. Some people will skip all this and they'll just draw an egg. They won't bother with the circle and then this part, but this to me makes sure that you're kind of drawing a little bit more accurately. It does seem too that my teeth are a bit low here, so that line can maybe go up a little higher. Yeah, this is just the general idea. For working from the center point here, this is our nose now, so we're going to go ahead and we're going to draw that space. Just kind of rough that in. We want our eyes again to extend a little bit beyond this line, so we're coming in here and we're going to get up near that nose. Now, we talked about the five eye width. It doesn't work quite well with the skull. It's good for when you're drawing portraits, but the skull, because the eye socket holes there are larger, it doesn't quite work that well. You're going to go a little bit by eye and kind of make sure that we have this roughly in there. Some women's eyes are a little bit more circular. Men's are a little bit more crisp and clean. Again, that doesn't really matter very much. This is our base. You can see that my drawing isn't perfect, but it gets the idea across anyway, so we'll follow this down along here. Again, if we're drawing this kind of center down the eye, that's kind of where we want that line to hit here, so we're just going to draw a nice curve, and that's going to come up to about here. Basically about the bottom of the nose, that's where you want that line to come up to. I like to extend a little further, and then I bring this part out. We're going to draw a little line here. That's roughly where our kind of our bottom jaw is going to hit. Again, you can always refer to- I'll give you a file that you can print out that skull that shows just kind of how to break it down as well. If we go here kind of near the top part of the eye, give it a little space, and I would bring this out something along those lines. Of course, if you're using software like I am, then you don't have to worry about drawing the left and the right. You could of course mirror it, but that's not really the point. It's more about just getting the feel for how to draw this stuff. We're going to bring this part of the chin down a little bit. I like to curve it kind of in, and then we're going to start drawing this jaw. Again, if it's a female, it's a little bit more of a V-shape or U-shape, whereas men kind of have a strong bone. Jokes can be inserted there. This is kind of the general idea. I'm going to give this a little curve, bring that in. This goes here. Hopefully, you find this interesting. The goal, too, is I'd like you to basically be drawing along with me because I know I'm kind of going slowly and just kind of hitting each point one by one, and I think it'd be useful for you to kind of be drawing at the same time. There's no real good way to learn to draw without actually doing it. Watching somebody else draw, you might get the concept in your head, but actually, getting that pen to paper is very important part of, of course, learning. I'd like you to follow along with me. This is a basic idea of how we're getting the skull. Now, I'll zoom in a little bit here to make sure that you can see it nice and clean. Now, that we're doing the teeth, the average adult has 32 teeth. Usually, I find you only see about 24 at a time. Now, the size of the teeth I do find a little bit tricky. Sometimes I end up going a little small or a little bit big. Teeth are fairly large. In proportion to the nose, from what I'm seeing, you could say that- I don't know. Let's say you break the nose down into thirds, right? This is the top, this is the bottom, and we go here and here. We roughly want this space, this space, and this space to be the same. Maybe it's a little down. Something along those lines. Then basically, what we're going to do is take this distance right here and we're going to use that as the distance of our tooth. That's a pretty decent size tooth, but I think that's fairly realistic. What I'm going to draw is I'm going to draw a six on either side. That's three, four, and then they're getting a little bit smaller with five, six. That kind of thing. Then we're going to repeat that of course over here. One, two, three, four-my sizing's a bit off obviously-five, six. Then for the bottom teeth, I find that at least height-wise, they're a little bit smaller, so you don't have to go quite as big. We're giving them a little bit more of a V-shape which is up to you whether you do that. They are kind of going as you can see these lines here. I'm trying to go with that kind of curve, so are following that along. Just because you're bottom teeth are a little skinnier and thinner, so that's why I do that V-shape. That's a pretty good idea of how to draw your skull. You can start getting into some details of drawing the lines here, and of course your shading and everything and refining. If you did this nice and light, then you're going to come in and go over it and ink it or something like that, depending on your artwork. This is generally what you want to do when you're drawing a skull, and this is going to be a pretty good idea of making sure that you get the basic sort of principles right. There's lots of different ways to shade it, there's lots of different ways to get the lighting accurate. I'm not a very realistic artists. When it comes to drawing, I like to do stylized, more- those zones shouldn't be quite as round as I had either. For that reason, I'm not going to teach lighting and shading and really making sure that your sketch pops off the page because that's not my area of expertise. I wanted you to know the basic proportions so that you know how to draw a skull, and then I'm going to show you how to break the door down and get really creative. That's the front side. I do want to show you the side as well, the profile of the skull, because I think that's really important. Putting your skulls on different angles is going to bring a lot more character to them, and I think that's important to know.
5. Basic Profile Proportions: Okay. So, now we're going to talk a little bit about drawing the profile or the side view of the skull. I'm not going to get into all the different angles, the head slightly tilted 45 and up and down, all those things but this gives you a good foundation for getting the basics of how to get your proportions right. So, at least when you're drawing your skulls, even if they're pretty stylized you have a good idea of where things land because that will even make a stylized skull just a little bit better. You can definitely break the rules and that's what we're going to do later in the class but I do think that this is good for any artist, any Illustrator, any graphic designer or anyone that's doing this for fun. Knowing how to draw things accurately is always the start before you want to break the rules. It's a common saying to say, "Know the rules before you break them." So, if we're looking at the skull here, you can get an idea that the idea is more or less the same as what we did on the front, but it's a little bit trickier, it's a little harder to learn things, instead you got this big oval for this cranium. We're still split it down the center but the only reason for that is just to show you that this bone here for the mandible, the bottom part of your jaw is coming up and it's a little bit off, it's not quite to the center, it's a little bit more towards the front and if we split this from half of the circle to the bottom of the circle, we split that in half, you give me an idea of what that cheekbones following down from the eye again, a little bit lower, it's just giving you a rough ideas. Again, the teeth are going halfway between this line and this line or a little bit higher. But again, they're just general ideas, general guidelines to make sure that you know how to learn everything but it is a little bit trickier I find for the side profile. So, in my thing, I'm just going to call that the front, I'm going to hide that and then we're going to go to the side. So, based on what I just showed you, we want to get a rough oval, draw it again and of course your oval doesn't have to be perfect but that's the idea, something like that. Maybe that should come down a bit. Anyway, something like that is we're going to get an oval. Then, what I like to do is of course we'll just cut that in half, cut that in half and we just want to make sure that from here to here, let say as again roughly down here, so that's the bottom. So, what we're going to do is we're going to draw a line coming fairly straight down to about that bottom line and we're going to curve it. Again, we're just eyeballing roughly and roughly there is now our chin. So our chin's heading right here and that gives us a fairly decent proportion. From this line, we can come up so about here and about here you want to get that. That line there for the cheek and you can bring it down a little bit. So, this is the rough idea you want, and this is going to go here. So again, there's quite a bit really more guesswork in learning the side profile and that's going to depend that if you are a better artist then you're going to worry a little bit more about some of the stuff and then others. But it doesn't have to be perfect, it's just getting that general idea and trying to figure out things. So, what you should do is have your teeth pop out just a little bit, give them a little bit more characters so they're popping past this line here. Another thing is, when you're getting to your nose. So again, that nose was starting roughly at the bottom part of the circle, if you're bringing your nose out, this part of the nose actually goes beyond, say you want to kick that out there and then this is going to come and hit here, so this thing. That nose, like this part of the nose here, this curve is actually partway through the eyes. So, you're having the eye come up and go all the way over like this thing and really it should be not even seeing that much of it, but that gives you a little bit of an idea and that comes up. So, we've got that coming out a little bit and that curves to here. So this is giving you some general ideas. Then, you can have almost like this bone there for your eyebrow and then that comes up nicely here. It's a little bump, usually here, you got this. Then, of course you can worry about if you wanted to draw, I'm going to bring this, looks a little bit thick to me. If you want to worry about drawing the spine and stuff like that, that's a good thing to learn too, is where that's going to hit roughly. Then, from this side, you could do the the six rule again where you've got 1,2,3,4,5,6, but it's a bit different when you're doing things this way. So hopefully, that gives you the rough idea of drawing it from the side. The idea generally, if you're drawing your skull like we did before, let's just zoom in here on over to the side. So, if you have your basic rules and you're drawing your skull like this and I'm just going to do this really quickly and not really accurately compared to what we were showing. But if you do this and you have your everything landing where you want it or whatever and you draw your skull, that's an interesting skull. But sometimes what you might find is that your skull is a little bit more interesting if it's got a little bit more curve, got a little bit more angle, things are hitting a little more on aside. Again, I'm doing this real quick but, because now you've just got a little bit more, and that certainly at least to some people's opinion, this one has a little bit more going on, it's a little more going forward and we didn't even worry about getting anything looking realistic, but the shape of a it has a little more character. That's why we're going to move a little bit more into stylizing and definitely when we get into the cartoon stuff going a little bit crazier.
6. Assignment: Okay. So, the assignment in this class is that we're going to have a few different ways in drawing skills. We're doing the realistic, we're doing the stylized, and we're doing the cartoon. On top of that, we're also going to be talking about some creative exercises so that you're sort of pushing your limits and you're trying to think a little bit outside the box and make your skills a little more unique by adding other objects and other pieces that go along with that skill. So, the idea for this class is that you're going to watch them and see the different styles that I cover, and then you're going to pick one or maybe even two of them to try it out for yourself. I'll definitely make sure I comment on everyone's project and I will definitely be trying to give you helpful tips and critique you basically. If you are a little bit sensitive, just let me know. I don't want to offend anyone, but the idea is just to help you guys come up with really cool artwork. So, please upload your assignments, it's going to be really cool to see everyone's projects. I think this class is going to be a really a ton of fun, and hopefully we can use it in further classes. You'll be able to use your work for maybe making pens that might be coming again in the future. All right, onto drawing.
7. Monoline Style: For this video, we're going to be working on at Monoline Illustration style. So, if you want to learn more about it, I actually did an entire class on this illustration style I like a lot. Basically, what it is is you don't fill in your design, you draw it with pencil or pen or whatever you're doing or on the computer, and then you leave it with just those singular lines, you don't bother filling it in. A lot of time, it's really simple and it's a good way to make really clean vectors or you can do it really hand done. In my class, I show how to do them really clean vectors, but this time, we're going to do it the hand-drawn way. So, here is my quick initial sketches and what I want you to do is I'd love to see you come up with 20 different ones and just start with basic ones like on the front or profile, and then move into being a little bit more creative. So, for that, I'm going to show you this video of a behind the scenes. So, you can see that I'm starting with the front profile and then I'm just sketching and sketching. I'm using a light green, a lot of comic artists and stuff will use this cyan color. The original reason for that is that when you scan it, the printer didn't pick up that, so you could draw blacks over it and you wouldn't pick up the green lines, but that's the idea. So, anyway, I draw in that color. So, what I was doing is just trying to come up with as many ideas as possible, and then on a separate layer, I would ink the ones that I like the best that I want to actually keep. I'm not expecting you to come up with flawless perfect art, but the idea is just to experiment and see what you come up with and share it with the class. We can all learn from each other and see what's cool. So, that's me sketching everything and playing with this arrows and they're not all the most creative ideas, but that gives you an idea of what I did. Then when I was finished, what I did is I went and I compiled the inked ones. Those are my favorite ones there, so I picked five that I liked and I thought were cool that maybe I'll use for something in the future. From taking Jamie Bartlett's class which I believe is called textured stamp or something, I put it out an effect on them and I blew them up a bit and it gives them a little bit of texture and stuff, and I think those are pretty cool. Very [inaudible] experiment and you don't have to spend a lot of time, spend 15 minutes coming up with as many skulls, spend an hour, spend half an hour or something. I think I spent less than an hour and I came up with five cool illustrations that I can share it on Instagram or use for anything. I think it's just a fun way to do it. This is a really natural style because most people will draw an outlines anyway, so you're just going to stay in outlines even in the finished form. You don't have to do it on black, you can do it on any color you want, or on white. Do anything you want, it doesn't have to be like mine. But that is the Monoline Illustration style, so I'd like to see some of you experiment with that idea and see if it's a style that you like drawing in.
8. Creative Exercise - Wrong Handed: Okay. Here's another quick creative exercise. This one I am calling wrong handed. In my case, that means left-handed. I'm going to talk fast because this video is very quick. It was in Procreate and it's a time-lapse, so it's only a 30-second video. So, this one is straightforward. Try and draw as realistic as a skull, anatomically correct with your left hand or in my case, my left hand because I'm right-handed. Your wrong hand and see what you come up with. I did three different ones. I actually thought this one was pretty cool, so I went over and redid it with my right hand changing the eyes. Quick exercise. You'd be surprised at how fun it is and the results you get.
9. Sugar Skulls: Okay. So for this video, we are going to be drawing in the style of a sugar skull or a calaveras which is skull in Spanish. Basically, a sugar skull is just a skull that is stylized and drawn on and the reason why it got the name is that it used to be made with sugar cane. There's a lot of history to sugar skulls and a lot of deep meaning with Day of the Dead and passed-away relatives and things in Mexican culture. But, nevertheless, sugar skulls are really interesting and really cool looking and it's a cool way of drawing basically a tattooed skull. It's what it looks like anyway, and you can go crazy with the tattoos, and it's a good creative exercise even if you're not really into sugar skulls because you can try and experiment and try to come up with different things and lines and shapes, and just ornate details that make the overall illustration look cool. Again, this isn't trying to make necessarily the best skull you've ever drawn in your life, but it's just a style that I want you to try and spend a little bit of time in and it's a creative exercise to see what you've come up with essentially. So we're going to look at the video of how this was made. So you can see that with this sugar skull, I started with the basics of how to draw a skull. So this skull is a little bit more realistic than say the mono line skulls that I did which were completely stylized. I wasn't worried about proportions when I was drawing those ones. In this case, I was slightly trying to get the proportions correct, start with a basic foundation of how a skull should be laid out and then stylize it a little bit from there and ink it. Once that's done, then I started adding in the tattoo design. Now, of course, this is convenient when you're drawing digitally to be able to put that together, but if you want to just do it on a pencil and paper, that's totally awesome. You don't have to worry about having a perfectly refined thing and these are just exercises to push your creativity and basically just make you better at drawing skulls and then also make you better at drawing stylized skulls that are unique to you. As I mentioned in the intro, there's so many skills on the Internet, so it's important to be creative and make sure that your art is actually standing out rather than just a straight on boring skull in that case. So, basically, I just drew in some rough sketches and then I would go over with ink. If you're doing this by hand, you could of course just use onionskin or tracing paper to do some white ones and then if you have a window or even a light box, then you could go in and ink it nicely afterwards. But it doesn't really matter. You can do it all on the same page too if you wanted. But I just experimented with doing some cross-hatching in where there would be black. I like seeing through the skull just to give it some different style. It definitely makes it busy but I think it's pretty cool. The halftone pattern that's on there is True Grit Texture Supply, which is really cool brushes for Photoshop and Procreate made by actually a fellow Skillshare teacher Andrew Fairclough I believe his last name is. But, yeah, the company name is True Grit Texture Supply if you want to check out his brushes because they are really awesome, they're fun to draw on.
10. Silly Cartoon Skulls: So, I just wanted to show you in this video that I did also draw by hand in my sketch book and you can see that I drew around my tikis from my tiki class which by the way, if you haven't seen my tiki class, check it out. It's awesome. It's super underrated. Not very many people checked it out but I loved it. So this shows you that I started with some pretty plain skulls and then they started getting really crazy, and that's because I started basically cartooning them. I'm inspired by some texts Avery stuff and some old 1930's cartoons which is what the new video game Cupheads based on. Kind of old Mickey Mouse, Popeye, Betty Boop stuff. So, I found that just unlocked this new creative freedom. Not having to worry about proportions and not even having to worry about really like any kind of realism at all, and putting like cartoon eyes, and huge teeth, and like worms coming out of the skull, and silly hats and all this kind of stuff. It just added so much more interest to the illustration for me anyway. I'm sure that some of you will look at that and it wouldn't be the style that you liked but I want to show you the behind the scenes of how I took those illustrations. I just took a photo of them with my, brought them in a procreate actually on the iPad, and then I drew them in by inking them like so. I experimented a little bit with roughing it up because this guy's got a black eye, I guess he was in a fight and so I experimented a bit you'll see, and it just came out awesome. I really think that this one's fun. Again, it's not going to be for everybody. It's definitely. Once you start getting a really stylized and go in a specific direction that's not going to work for everyone, but you got to do what you think is fun, and what you enjoy and for me, this really sort of pushed the envelope and made my illustrations just so much more interesting, and I'm actually planning to do a class on this kind of illustration style but not for skulls, just cartooning in that 1930's kind of look. So here, I experimented with doing different halftones. Again, I'm using the turget texture stuff but I'm not going in with just the original one that you saw before. I like the grit rather than the halftone, and this one was one that I thought was really fun. I played with the idea of like this guy is so scared that his hat shot off his head. That's silly kind of old texts Avery style and a lot of the way I'm doing this, it's a little different from what I've done in the past. So, I'm experimenting with different ways to fill it in and I'm using the other skull as a guide for the look because I wanted them to have a similar overall look. Then I noticed the hands, well actually, my wife pointed out to me that the hands looks crappy and you couldn't tell that they were hands, they're just too flat, too plain, like straight up and down. So, I showed them to a few people and they agreed. So, you'll see in a moment that I started really experimenting with the hands and I play with the eyebrows, and made the hat go up, and you can see now the hands got a little more character to them. They're a little bit, it got more curves, a little more expression, and I was really working on that. I changed the eyebrows because that worked better and then I redid the whole thing. I was like all right I'm going to re-ink this whole thing because I love this. It looks awesome and then so I mirrored it on the other side but then you'll see in the end, I decided that the hand still weren't really realistic. I actually do like the hands. They're pretty cool but I decide to just make them just a little more realistic, so they have a little bit more expression to them, which we'll see in a moment but when I was doing that, I was having a hard time doing it without reference. So I got my wife to take a ridiculous photo of me and I use that for the reference for the hands. So I'm just adding the texture here and around the house when I go, "Oh shit these hands still aren't perfect." So I compared them side-by-side and I actually changed the shape of the skull a lot, and here's where I start going crazy with the hands, and here is an awesome photo of me. So I noticed obviously how my palms were meeting in the center of my chin, and the angle of the hands. I played around with this a lot because there's such renewing this cartoon stuff. There's a fine line between it looking realistic and looking cool, and you had to find the balance. So I worked quite a ways on that. I did a lot of different variations. I don't draw hands a lot especially not cartoon hands. So I took a little longer than I would've thought but in the end, I'm really happy with how it turned out. I think there they have more expression and I look better. I added a little bones there from your forearm because I wanted to be really obvious when people looked right away that those are your hands. I didn't want anyone to guess, "What's going on near this guy's chin?" So I ended up re-inking this one a few times but in the end, it actually is really awesome to me and it's probably my favorite illustration that I've done in a while. I definitely think it's my favorite skull from this class. I don't know. It's something about it. I just love the character. I love the expression. I love that there's kind of a story being told. So if I open up Photoshop here, you can see that that's the final one. It's a little bit pixelated right now because I didn't do it in the highest resolution but what I usually do is I bring this in Illustrator, and I'll live trace it because it's rough anyway. It doesn't need to be pixel perfect and then, I'll get it nice and crisp, and vector, and I might use it for something like a painter, or a patch, or something in the future because I just love it. I think it's fun. Same idea with this skull. It's a little bit more crisp but yeah. So, I'm going to play around with that and if you have questions about vectorizing, I've covered it in a lot of classes, so I didn't want to do it all over again that's why for this class even though I'm using software, it's not important that you do and it's important that I go over how to use it because I've beat that horse to death in other classes. If you have questions, of course, ask in the discography but this is the 1930's crazy cartoon skulls and for me, this unlocks some crazy creativity. I'm really looking forward to working in this style more in the future at least for the time being. I just think it's super fun. I hope you think so too.
11. Creative Exercise - Look Around: Okay. So, for this creative exercise, I want you to look around. What that means is that, no matter where you are, wherever you're taking this class or looking at it, whether you're on a train or a bus or in your bedroom or living room,or whatever. Look around and see what is around you that you can draw. Then, you want to incorporate that with this course. So, what I did is I looked around my room, I saw things like, a hatchet, a plane, I think pants, is pants what I wrote? Crocodile, tiki, key, astronaut helmet. So, what I actually did with the astronaut helmet and some of them, I even picked up some books, some art books that were in my office, and I started flipping through them really fast. But the idea was just to do this as quick as possible. Don't use your brain, just flip through books or things that you have, or look around your office or wherever you are, and just try and draw something. Whatever it is, write it down so that you know what it is. Maybe if you're, like I said, if you're on the train, you might see somebody's funny hat or a briefcase or whatever or if you're on a bus, you might see some wheels as you're getting on or whatever it is, just try and draw and write it down as fast as you can. Then, from there, the idea is that you're going to take that, and you're going to incorporate a skull into one of those things or each of those things. This is not about being an awesome drawer, this isn't about impressing your friends, this is about just trying to almost turn your brain off, and just create some stuff. Once in a while, you'll strike gold. You'll turn your brain off, and you'll come up with something really neat. So, the idea there was that I was drawing a skull incorporated into a beer bottle label, and then I had the idea this puzzle piece, and I got stuck. I was trying to think how can I incorporate this puzzle piece and a skull. After spending a few moments, I was like, no, I don't want to waste my time on that. I want to go. The idea is to go fast, and onto the next thing. Once I had to stop and start thinking, I said. "No. Pass, next thing." So, then, I played with this idea of this skull that has almost like a crown, and there a tiki. That one was actually pretty cool. I was happy with how that turned out. So, from here, I'm playing around with the idea of a nesting doll. A lot of these skulls I've been just drawing straight skulls, but feel free to draw, or skeletons if that's something you're interested in. So, I play with this nesting doll skeleton skull idea. From there, I was playing around with an old school like candelabra, like taper candle, and the flame is coming in and it's dripping wax down out of the skull, I don't know why those like a skull, maybe it's a ring wrapped around the candle or something. But again, the idea is just to go fast and try and see what comes up. That was a skull bat, that one sucked, that idea was horrible. But that's okay. The idea is to go quick and again, just see what you can come up with. Maybe you'll impress yourself. I thought that was interesting. A skull with an old school cartoon, astronaut helmet, or something like that. But it's not easy, it's not easy to turn your brain off. I have a really hard time not overthinking it, and that's something that I'm trying to work on. I cannot doodle, I'm not a doodler. That's the stuff that you need to work on if you want to be really creative. So, there I was playing around with the crocodile. I had one on a poster in my office. So, I drew this crocodile with this huge big mouth, and now it's clamping down on the skull, and it's completely cartoon and unrealistic. But that's the kind of thing that's interesting and cool, I think, is just trying to practice and make something else work. Again, all of these drawings are horrible. They're not impressive, and I should be embarrassed to show you guys. But that's great because it's not about drawing well, it's about getting ideas out. This is how you work, or I work as a graphic designer as well, where I'm trying to come up with logos. The initial thumbnails you should try and come up with 50 or 100, and you just go fast. You don't worry about making each one look good. I always find it skeptical when I see an artist who post their sketchbook on Instagram or whatever, and every page is a flawless finished piece of art. I wonder, where's the real sketchbook. But that's okay. So, I started the ones I liked. The idea of this whole thing took me 12 minutes, but I didn't want to post the full 12 minutes just to bore you guys to death. So, instead, I decided to cut it down to only for about four minutes. I cut it a little more than an half and that's it. I want you to try and do this fast. If you spent 10 minutes on this exercise or even five minutes on this exercise, see what you come up with, post your ideas, and maybe you'll hit something really cool that you want to actually refine. If not, that's okay. You will learn something, and you might be able to bring this to the table on another project. It's just a creative exercise.
12. Outro & Thanks!: That's it. Thank you so much for taking the class I hope you enjoyed it and you learned a lot. As always, you can follow me on Instagram that's @JohnBrommet without an H. That's where it's easiest to get hold of me but I'll also be checking out things on Skillshare so you can always add a discussion. I really look forward to seeing your posts and to seeing what you come up with and how you make your art working and your skills really unique and that's it. Thanks so much for seeing the class and until next time, take care. One more thing I always forget to say is that on Skillshare now you have to follow me in order to know when I put out a new class. So, at the top left of the class you should see my name and you should see this little "Follow" button and so just go ahead and click that and then you will be following me and you'll be notified of any future classes or discussions that I put out. So, follow me on Skillshare as well. Thank you.
13. A Message From Future Jon: Wait, one more thing. I'm adding this. This is future Jon Brommet talking to you. I hope you enjoyed the course that you just watched. Some of these classes have been recorded a few years ago, so I just wanted to give a little up to date on what I'm doing now. You can see that I've put out a ton of classes potentially from the class that you just watched as you may have been watching one of my older classes. If you go over to my profile, you can click it somewhere on the Skillshare website or go to Skillshare.com/jonbrommet, just like that with no H, just J-O-N; and you'll see here I've got things broken down in my newest classes. This may even look slightly different for you because I'm putting out classes once a month right now. I've got my most popular classes, illustration, efficiency in Illustrator, Photoshop stuff, and then all of my other classes. Make sure that if it's not already selected, you click See More to see the rest of it. So many different classes. I hope you guys will be inspired to learn lots more and hopefully you're enjoying my classes and want to see more, and if that's not enough, I'm @jonbrommet on Instagram, so you can check out my Instagram as well to know what I'm doing and I post all my new artwork there, and of course, to let you know when I'm doing new Skillshare stuff, and I've started a YouTube channel where I put short videos that are instructional and I'm obviously advertising with my Skillshare class. But short videos that I can't really put a whole-class out, I put it here on YouTube, and I even do things like have conversations with other teachers, like [inaudible] , planning to do that kind of stuff more often. If you head over to jonbrommet.com, I've newly updated my website, I have a digital shop where you can grab my Procreate brushes or other things like that. On top of seeing my different portfolio elements and things like that, I've also got a Etsy shop, which I'll click here and it would open this, so you can buy all of my pens and different art things that I've created and I will ship them to you from me. I've gotten them all produced here in my home and they look awesome and I know that they're cool. I just recently started a Threadless shop, which you could click here. Of course, it's about [inaudible] Skillshare and contact, everything's linked from my website. This new Threadless shop has all my merch that can be printed on demand on a really weirdly wild variety of things, like I don't know, let's just click one of these things here. It's going to open a t-shirt, but let's just say maybe instead of a t-shirt you wanted, I don't know what, a duvet cover or shower curtains, why wouldn't you want those things? I don't know. Anyway, I've got lots of different things going on. If you like what I'm doing and please check out more of it and I'll keep making more things. Thanks everyone. Bye bye.
