Transcripts
1. Intro: Drawing is at the core of every art and that includes illustration. If that's true, then why does so many illustrators struggle with the drawing? If you want to draw with more confidence from heart and connect more seamlessly how you draw with how you illustrate, you are not alone. My name is Tom Froese. I'm an award winning illustrator and a top teacher here on Skillshare, where I've helped tens of thousands of students unlock the world of commercial illustration. When I was starting out as an illustrator, I found that while it was good at drawing and had a knack for illustration, I couldn't connect those two worlds. My way of drawing and my way of illustrating where a two separate things, and it was always a struggle to bring these things together. In the early days as an illustrator working for clients, while I was able to come up with decent concepts in loose sketches, it was always a gamble as to whether I'd be able to execute them in my final illustration style. Not only did this create a lot of uncertainty in my process, it cost me a lot of time and it really ate away at my confidence as an artist. More importantly, it created a lot of anxiety as I raced deliver on my client's expectations while meeting the big deadline. Thankfully, since then, I've been able to develop a process that helps me overcome these challenges reliably over and over again. One of the most important discoveries for me has been in truly learning how to draw toward illustration. Now, I'm excited to show you what I've learned, so you can use drawing more powerfully in your own illustration process. Join me as I guide you first through a series of mini-lectures, telling you everything I know about drawing toward illustration. Then we're going to try it all out in some exercises, building up some fundamental skills and drawing, first from observation and then from heart. Then in the final project, we're going to put it all together harmoniously in a full-page illustrated scene in your style. No matter what kind of artist you are, drawing is about question your most important skill and the key influencer of your style. The more confident you are on how you draw, the more effective you'll be in your art, and ultimately, the more free and less anxious you'll be as you draw toward illustration in your client work.
2. About This Class: This class is broken down into three main sections, the primer, the exercises, and the final project. The primer is where I lay down some of my key insights and principles to help guide you through the exercises and final project and of course, through your own journey as an illustrator. The exercises are where we get to put the theory into practice. Here, I'll guide you through some challenging but fun drawing assignments. Together, we'll experience what I call the mode shift, the experience of drawing first in observation mode and then later in ideation mode. Don't worry, I'll tell you more about these in the primer. The final project is where we get to put everything we learned in the primer and exercises to the ultimate test, a full-page illustration of a scene with a subject and a background and lots of details. We will be focusing primarily on the drawing and sketching aspect of the process. My hope is that any student can apply the principles taught in this class toward their own style of illustration using their own preferred tools and techniques. That being said, I will be showing an overview of my own illustration process as I complete my own scene to show an example of what the transition from sketch to final can look like. In terms of required skills and equipment, those with at least some traditional drawing instruction and experience, who are struggling to make this drawing work for them in their illustration will benefit the most from this class. In terms of equipment, you really don't need much, just a pencil and some paper or a sketch book, at least up until you take things into your own illustration style in the final project. Whether you use Procreate or a good old pencil and paper, it's really up to you, it really doesn't matter. For the final project, again you can bring your own tools and equipment. What you use is totally up to you. If you're on a fast track to complete this class, you could probably complete it in a day, at least the drawing component. You might find you need another day or so to work on your final project though. Of course, there really is no time limit on this class, and you're welcome to go through the exercises quickly, all at once, or slowly one at a time as you can. In terms of what you'll get from this class, it's going to help you develop your drawing skills to help you draw with more confidence from heart and to connect how you draw with your final illustration style. I just want to stress once again that this is not a class to help you draw realistically. I will of course be showing you some really helpful tricks in drawing from observation. But if anything, I'm probably going to encourage you to let yourself draw badly. In my experience, it's not what you can draw, it's what you can't that is the key to your illustration style. I think I'm ready to get into it, so let's go.
3. Primer: Drawing for Illustration: Drawing for illustration is different from what most of us think of when we think of drawing. When I talk about drawing for illustration, I think specifically of the process of developing ideas using drawing with the end goal of a finished illustration in mind. The final product is not a drawing, it's an illustration, or more importantly, it's a visual expression of an idea. If we illustrators don't draw things, but express ideas, where does drawing fit in? Well, let's make no mistake. Drawing is crucial to the illustration process. But I think we're tie in traditional settings. Only one kind of drawing that's drawing from life or references in a more realistic representational way. The goal with traditional drawing is to mimic reality. The more accurate the representation, the more highly we value the drawing. I'm not saying this is not impressive, and I'm certainly not saying this is not a valuable skill. I do believe, however, that there is a gap in most of our training as illustrators, where it comes to connecting our drawing abilities to our voices as illustrators. I think it's understandable why teaching other people their voice or style is almost impossible. You can't find your own voice in someone else's book, video, or class. However, I believe it's possible to show others clues to finding their voice through certain techniques. That is what I want to do in this class. One of the biggest discoveries I've made is that our voice comes not from being technically accurate in how we draw, but actually in how we express ideas in spite of how we can't draw. Let me explain it by describing my two-step illustration process that we'll be using in the exercises later on. When I'm working toward an illustration for a client, what do you think is the first thing I do? You might guess that I start by sketching out what ideas. Yes, I do start sketching, but at first, only observationally. I'm not working toward ideas just yet. Let's just say I need to illustrate a full page for a running magazine. They want me to illustrate something about staying safe and healthy when running in the hot weather. The first thing I'll do is go out and collect some image references around the topic of running. Of course, search out specific images that relate to ideas found in the article. Now I have reference photos of people running, perhaps images of places people would run, hydration gear, sunscreen, sunglasses, basically a mishmash of images that relate to ideas in the article. Now I'm ready to start sketching, but at first, I'm not drawing ideas. I'm just drawing what I see in my reference images. I call this observational or mode one drawing. In my sweet sports class, I call this free sketching. It's free of pressure to have any ideas, it's just a way to download visual information into my mind that I can literally draw from later in the second step, or what I call mode 2 sketching. So at a certain point, I've drawn my references observationally, and now I'm ready to kick into the second mode, ideational drawing. In this mode, I'm no longer looking at my references. I set them aside and I try as hard as I can not to reference them unless absolutely necessary. By doing this, I start to draw things a little bit wrong. While this may seem like a disadvantage, it's actually my biggest strength. I know enough of the general idea of my subject or the content of my illustration to know what should be included. But then I have to make up or invent how it actually looks, how it all fits together in the composition. It is in this translation from drawing what I see, to drawing what I remember, and ultimately what I need to symbolize in the drawing where the most creativity happens. That is why I believe ideational or mode 2 drawing is more creative than observational or mode 1 drawing. Ideational drawing is not better and it's almost not possible without observational drawing. The two are partners and one leads to the next. In the same way that a car's first gear is needed to get the car moving fast enough to get into second gear. To summarize; drawing for illustrators is all about understanding these two modes of drawing and knowing how and when to use each. Our goal as commercial illustrators, especially those working in a more stylized graphic way, is to draw symbolically rather than literally. Since our images are visualized ideas, everything we draw into our art becomes more of an interpretation or a symbolization of the real thing. The active interpreting, we must first see an object for what it is, but then express it for what it means to us.
4. Primer: Tools and Techniques: For drawing and sketching, the tools are always simple; a pencil and paper or their digital equivalents. In terms of techniques, in this class, we're going to focus on some very simple drawing techniques. For some, these may come naturally, while for others, they may feel forced, at least at first. But for those who want to aim for a more graphic style and the illustration and relate their drawing style more in this way, the following techniques are essential. The fundamental technique I use is contour drawing, which is basically drawing the outlines and inside details and edges of your subject with continuous lines. I find that many artists tend to draw more tentatively, building up their forms with a series of shorter light strokes, sculpting the forums on the page lightly before committing to a more confident stroke after. I don't recommend drawing in this way, even though it may be how you're used to drawing, rather aim to drop more confident, continuous strokes that lead you almost as much as you lead them. What will happen is that the stroke will take on a life of its own. You'll see unexpected shapes emerge that looks like what you were going for, but like I said, they'll have a bit of a mind of their own, especially at first. As you practice and develop this technique, you'll gain more control, but it's this method of drawing, more confident, continuous lines that will define your drawing and illustration style more than anything. If this way of drawing is just too unnatural for you at first, of course, draw however it comes out and focus on the overarching goal of drawing what you see in observational mode and then drawing what you remember or think in ideational mode. You can always trace over your sketchy tentative lines after the fact. Even I trace over my contour drawings to give them an even greater sense of resolution and confidence. In pure contour drawing, the subjects are expressed in pure line with no shading. The effect is flattening of everything in the picture, whether there's a foreground and a background, these things all get merged on the same plane. For a flattened graphic style of illustration, this is actually ideal and a huge clue to how to marry your drawing and illustration styles. Because we're headed toward representing everything on a flat plane in the final illustration, it makes sense to flatten our drawing style as well. That's not to say we don't sometimes want to express a sense of depth in our work, it's just that we want to be careful in a more minimal style not to lean too heavily on other rendering techniques, especially shading. Shading is very useful and does find its way into my work, but only to the extent that it is needed. We need to keep in mind that when we're sketching toward illustration, our client will be seeing and approving the sketch before you move into the final illustration. Our aim in our sketches, especially more to drawings, our ideas, should be focused on content, composition, and concept and not get too into the details of shading and depth. The more simply the sketch shows your idea, the better. It exudes a sense of confidence to your client and it eliminates opportunities for nitpicking on extraneous details that shouldn't matter at this stage. To summarize, drawing toward illustration should be done with a simple pencil and paper, and you should aim to draw in both observational and ideational modes using contours. Use confident continuous strokes rather than building up shapes using short, tentative strokes. Aim to express all forms as flatly as possible, avoiding the temptation to give things a more voluminous, mottled appearance. Of course, permit yourself to throw in choice moments of shading or other expressive marks that can help clarify the image or add more personality.
5. Primer: The 3 C's of Sketching: When drawing toward illustration, that is when developing sketches that will ultimately share with our clients before moving into our final illustration, the key things you want to work out are what I call the 3 C's of sketching; content, composition, and concept. Content is what you will include in your illustration. Basically, what objects or symbols you will be representing in the art. Composition is how you arrange this content on the page. Concept is ultimately what the illustration is about. How the content in composition work together to clearly express the intended message or meaning. These 3 C's and nothing else should be the subject of conversation, at the time you share your sketches with your client. You don't want to derail the conversation by getting into details, with colors or patterns or textures, or other stylistic decisions that should ideally land squarely in your domain as a creative lead. A sketch is an opportunity, of course, for the client to weigh in and influence the direction of the art without stepping on your creative toes. You want them to be able to confirm that you've met their needs, solved their problem in your sketch, or to offer them to tell you why you haven't. But the last thing you want to discuss is whether it's in the right style. You can keep the conversation on track by making sure there are as few opportunities for distracting feedback that can derail the overall conversation of content, composition, and concept. Sharing your first sketch is always a vulnerable moment and rightly so, but you don't want to expose yourself to more critique than absolutely necessary. Keep your sketches all about content, composition, and concept, and you'll have a better chance of seeing your best ideas gain your clients approval. By guiding the client through the process in this cleaner way, you'll actually more quickly earn their trust. Just one note on client feedback on style, you might ask if or when it is okay for a client to offer feedback on your style. I'd say anything is fair game when discussed respectfully. Of course, we artist types need to build up a fixed skin just in case respect seems to go out of the window. That being said, the best time to bring up style is not in the middle of the project, but before you even start. At this stage in my career, I've worked very hard to build up a style of illustrating that I believe my clients come to me for in the first place. The style I work in is no longer up for discussion. But if I ever feel like it might be, I ask up front. I ask the client what work of mine they saw that inspired them to come to me in the first place and even encourage them to send me images of my work they like and think relates to their own vision. This is a great way to open up and give the client a chance to weigh in on style without it becoming a question of whether you do it in your own style or someone else's which is usually not very fun. If you're new at illustrating and don't have a single style, you feel like you can enforce, that's totally normal and expected at the beginning. In such a case, I would highly recommend having a conversation about style at the beginning. You can ask why they came to you and whether it was a particular style they felt you could do that led them to do so. Or if you're excited to try one of a few different possible styles, try creating a Pinterest board with two or three possible directions or styles, and use this to get a better sense of what your client wants. Of course, be clear to your client about not imitating someone else's style, but simply that you want to make work inspired by it. Whether you're confident in a single style or just beginning and trying different things, or somewhere in between, it's really important to make sure your client's and your expectations align. Have that style conversation in the very beginning but in your sketches, keep the conversation to the 3 C's; content, composition, and concept.
6. Primer: Right and Left Modes of the Brain: I wanted to talk briefly on an idea that has influenced my drawing from the very beginning. When I was in my early 20s and just starting to discover Art and Design as a possible career choice, my friend's mom noticed and gave me a book called Drawing From the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards. This book changed my life. Without reading you the entire book, I can say the single biggest idea is in its distinction between right and left modes of the brain. These are not to be confused with the two modes of drawing that I talk about in this class, although there may be some overlap. In short, our left brain is responsible for language and reason, while our right brain is responsible for spatial and more creative abstract thinking. When drawing from observation, the trick is to shift into R-mode where your brain is not thinking about words and logic. If we allow the left brain to interfere, this is when our drawings start to break apart, when we become discouraged by not being able to put onto paper what we see in front of us. Edwards characterizes the left brain as being very task oriented and even impatient, with drawing. When we're drawing something, say our own hand in front of us, our left brain wants to speed up the operation with shortcuts it has. It says, "Oh, I know what that is, those are fingers, that's a hand, those are fingernails.", and for better or for worse, the left brain has symbols for these things which are often quite simplified and unrealistic. That's why when many people try to draw their hands, they draw a bunch of sausage fingers fanning out from what is supposed to be the main part or palm of the hand. But if you can quiet the left-brain and train it to step aside for a moment and give the right brain a chance to do its thing, then suddenly you're drawing starts to resemble the reality before you. Your right brain, free from the trappings of language and symbols, doesn't come prepared with an answer or prefabricated symbols, it just traces the contours of your hand or the object before you that you're trying to draw. When drawing observationally, both in this class, and in my practice as an illustrator, I start in my R-mode as much as possible. This is one of the most enjoyable experiences you can have with drawing where you lose track of time and get lost and just seeing what you're drawing. But unfortunately, where your R-mode can draw doesn't always work for an illustration that must have a communicative linguistic layer to it. The paradox is that for the kind of illustration we are aiming for, that is more stylized and symbolic, we actually must convert what we draw in R-mode into something that is more like L-mode. As we develop, as illustrators, we build up a repertoire of things we've drawn before and to a greater or lesser extent, these become symbols more in the command of our left-brain. Ideation mode, the second mode or stage of drawing in my own process flips back to Betty Edwards L-mode. Ideation mode is more symbolic and linguistic. Instead of trying to draw in the more [inaudible] way of R-mode, we let our rational side takeover again. But it's always a balance. As we practice these illustrators, we want to be able to switch back and forth between observational or R-mode, in ideational, or L-mode, depending on the needs of the situation.
7. Primer: 5 Pain Points of Drawing: When I announced to my students and following that I was going to be putting together this class about drawing, I asked them what they consider to be their biggest pain points. There were many different responses, but I feel like they can be summarized in these five ways. The first pain point is being able to draw from heart without using references. I think this is the dream of every illustrator, being able to draw without hindrance freely, in the same way one might feel once they become fluent in a second language. The reality is that even after years of experience, I still have to draw from references from time to time. But the good news is that over time, as I keep drawing and illustrating, I'm becoming more and more acquainted with how I draw from within and I grow to accept what I draw because I recognize it as my own. Of course, by drawing things from life, from references over and over again, I gradually build up a repertoire, however imperfect of these things in my memory. The biggest cure for this pain point that I can offer is the promise that as you draw things over and over again, you'll find a way to draw them in a more natural and fluent way. I want to give you permission to draw those things exactly how they come out. Give yourself permission to draw, how you draw and to let that just be what it is. You'll find a pattern over time in how you draw certain things: hands, shoes, cars, houses, cats, trees, and become more confident in turning to these to tell your stories and ideas in your illustrations. The second pain point is being able to keep a drawing simple without feeling you need to add more to it and feeling confident in that. For me, keeping things simple is not something I aim for directly. The truth is that I couldn't make my work that simple if I tried. The moment, I'm trying to make my work simple and not over thought is the moment I'm over complicated and overthinking it. Instead, I aim to make the message of my images as clear as possible. I'm not asking, "How can I make my work more minimal and simple?" I'm asking, "What is necessary and what is not necessary? Either to express the intended meaning or to create a compelling image." Drawing with simplicity is the result of my aim toward stylization in my work. I talk about this in both my odd bodies and sweet spots classes and I'll be touching on stylization more specifically in the next video. The third pain point is drawing and illustrating cohesive scenes with backgrounds. Well, this is actually less specifically about drawing and more broadly about a certain illustration. I think it's worth addressing in this class because of the role drawing plays in building up a full scene type of illustration. I believe the underlying problem with this pain point is more about not knowing how to go about composing such a scene. Referring back to the three Cs, this problem is all about content and composition, about what to include and how to include it in the drawing. The big assumption here is that you are trying to create a scene from your imagination. If you had a model of the scene you wanted to illustrate in front of you, you can just draw from that in observational mode, right? The big insight here comes in building up a scene first in parts and then together as a whole. But it's not exactly what you might think. The way I draw scenes and make decisions about what to include in my images always comes from taking some time to gather reference images that give me ideas about the scene I'm trying to build up and then studying these through observational drawing. The good news is that the exercises in this class all demonstrate exactly this process and you're going to have a chance to put it to the test in the final project. So the first part is downloading the visual information you want to include in your scene, from reference images or from life. That's the easy part. The second part which can be harder, especially at first, is letting this all come out in the composition of your sketch. Here's the main trick though, when drawing a scene in a flatter, more stylized way, we get to arrange and modify things on the page anyway we want both toward telling their right story and in getting the composition just right. Because we're not drawing from references at this stage, we're not bound to reality, we can boldly change whatever we want to frame our subject or fill in the frame. The fourth pain point is drawing with confidence. This is very connected to drawing from heart, but I think it's worth expanding on this point a little bit more. For drawing from heart, I use the second language fluency metaphor. If drawing from heart is knowing how to speak fluently, drawing with confidence is in knowing what to say. The underlying problem with this pain point is in not knowing your voice. It's not unlike when we're younger and trying to find our identity, who we are as we come of age. The less we know ourselves, the less confidence we have. But then as we grow older, we hopefully become more confident because we begin to understand who we are and it's from this that we have our strongest voice. The cure for this pain point is to work out how you draw in both observational and ideational mode over time. I'm sorry to say there's no way to gain this self-knowledge except by experience and experimentation and that means time and there is simply no substitutes. If there's any hack I can give you, it's just giving you the permission while only you can give yourself that permission. But giving you the permission to draw badly, let what comes naturally out of your hand as you draw happen. Use those more confident, continuous contour lines rather than those shy, short strokes that you build up your shapes with. Most importantly, find ways to accept it and embrace it. If there's anything you feel unhappy with, it's okay to challenge it. But I would say ask yourself, "What voice do you want to have if it's not the one you have right right? Whose voice inspires you most? What can you learn from theirs? How can you integrate that in an authentic way with your own?" The fifth pain point is in connecting the way ones sketches with how they want their final illustration to be. I think this is the single biggest pain point out there and it's what pushed me into discovering what I've been talking about so far in my own journey. I said in the intro when I was starting out as an illustrator, my way of drawing and illustration where two separate things and it was always a struggle to find a way to bring these things together. The underlying problem here is a conflict between how we've learned to draw mostly realistically and the style of illustration we want to be working in. Chances are, what inspired you to learn drawing from a young age was quite separate from what inspired you to become an illustrator later on. Therefore, from the get-go, these two things don't match up. It doesn't help that there's little official training in how to draw toward your illustration style of choice. There's only drawing instruction which tends to favor realism and literal representation. The cure for this pain point is in understanding the different modes of drawing, that there is a time and a role for observational drawing and a time and a role for ideational drawing. Both modes of drawing should be nurtured, but if your style of drawing and illustrating don't match up, you should work on developing how you draw in mode 2. Aim to develop a way of drawing that is more symbolic and which comes from how you draw without references. Of course, it's completely acceptable to also be inspired by your heroes in illustration and to let these influence the way you draw and illustrate. For me, I've always been inspired by mid-century illustrators like Paul Rand and Alice and Martin Provensen, so I have and still do allow some of their approaches to stylization influence my own. The second part of this cure is in reverse engineering your illustration style to work more with how you draw. What I mean is you might find it helpful in finding a middle ground between how you draw more naturally and how you illustrate. In fact, this might be the exact combination you need to find your illustration style. The key insight with this pain point is that your drawing style and your illustration style are quite possibly two very different things, at least at first and it is your job to find out how to bring these things closer together. The best way I know how to do this is to first separate how I draw from observation from how I draw from heart or in an ideational mode. Then to make sure that what I'm sketching can be actually fleshed out in my illustration style. You might be very attached to how you can draw something in a more observational way or even in an ideational way, but if it's incompatible with your illustration style, you have to be willing to let it go. This can be very hard, but you have to assure yourself that your job is not to draw the most beautiful drawing, but to communicate an idea for your client. The most important thing is not being able to illustrate one thing this one way in this one instance, but being able to illustrate anything in a stylistically consistent way over time. As you grow as an illustrator, look for ways of drawing things using the same shapes and styles, making sure they always make sense in your final illustration style meaning you can actually deliver on the goods when it comes to turning that sketch into your final illustration. If you need to, you can always test it out in your style before sharing with your client and then modifying your sketch to bring it closer to what you can actually achieve. It's always better to under-promise and over-deliver to your clients. Never share sketch no matter how beautiful, if you're not certain, you can carry it forward in the final. Of course, ideally, you can illustrate many things in a style you love and again, this class is all about helping you get there.
8. Primer: Stylization and Curation: As we dive deeper into the idea of uniting our drawing and illustration styles, we inevitably come to the discussion of stylization. Stylization in simple terms is depicting something in a non realistic way. Stylization can be broken down into five principles or elements, which actually go into more depth in both sweet spots and odd bodies to other classes I have here on skill share, but I'm more than happy to touch on them quickly here. The principles of stylization conveniently work in the acronym faces, F-A-C-E-S. F is for flattening, A is for abstraction, C is for clarity, E is for exaggeration or eccentrification, and S is for simplification or symbolification. Flattening is of course, reducing what we observe in reality to a flat space, removing the notion of depth and volume in favor of a simpler, more graphic depiction. Abstraction is boiling something down to its visual essence of depicting the idea of something rather than its literal form. Abstraction is key to stylization in that it permits us to depict more complex things in a simple way. My favorite example is in using just the green triangle, perhaps with the rectangle at the bottom for a Christmas tree. You don't need to draw every needle and bit of bark, you simply need to show the general shape of the tree and perhaps add a few colorful circles as ornaments. Clarity is making sure that what you are depicting is clear to your audience. It's one thing to depict something in a non-realistic way, but if the idea of the thing is not clear that it misses the whole point altogether. When styling a subject, you should always aim to depict it in a way that is clearly identifiable. Exaggeration is although being free to play with scale in your work. Just because things are a certain size in real life, it doesn't mean you have to depict it in this way in your art. You're allowed to modify the sizes and scales of things to make your composition work. I also mentioned the word eccentrification for this point, and that's really just allowing quirks to enter into your work, into your style because these ultimately what make your work more identifiable, if it's too crisp and too perfect and you don't allow for a few carefully curated mistakes, then might just seem a little bit mechanical and robotic. Allowing some of that humanity to enter into your work is also really important when stylizing. Finally, simplification is all about including only what is necessary to tell your idea or story. What's related to abstraction in that you want to boil something down to its essence as much as possible. Of course, you want to balance simplification with interestingness. You don't want to simplify something so much that there's nothing left to look at. You don't want to simplify a room so much that you only have white bare walls. At the same time, you don't want to include more than what's necessary or else your mean idea might get lost. Another word I like for the S in the faces acronym is symbolification. What I mean is developing a way of depicting certain elements in your work in a highly abstracted way over and again. All symbols are by nature abstractions. The letter A, for instance, is a pure abstraction because it has no representational meaning, the shape of the A is not a picture of anything we find in real life. For illustration, however, we use many abstractions as stylistic shortcuts. For instance, I have symbols I use abstractions for trees, grass, waves, and even buildings in the background. I've symbolized these objects so that I can use them to suggest the idea of these things without having to get into drawing them in more detail. This is especially useful if they're not the focus of my main illustration, they are extras in my movie set. By symbolifying certain less important elements in an illustration, you can build up the sense of a scene without having to literally draw out the whole scene, which would otherwise be very distracting and possibly more time-consuming than they're worth. When drawing and illustrating, a great way to add style and personality to your work is in how you choose in use stylistic shorthands, effectively simpler symbols in place of more complex things. Squiggles for springs or smoke, zigzags for mountains or zippers, chevrons on a stick for trees, that thing. Aside from stylization, I want to touch on what I call curation. Curation is the act of selecting, and organizing, and presenting things according to a specific purpose or taste. A gallery curates a specific collection of art according to its mandate. There are certain works it will accept to hang on as walls and others that no offense don't fit in. In a very obvious example, painting would have no place in a sculpture gallery. Titian would have no place in a Museum of Modern Art. One of my dirty little secrets as an illustrator is in the fact that I curate or choose to depict certain objects in certain ways based on how I can draw them with the most ease, or at least with the least possible feeling of effort in my style. It's not about being lazy, but about drawing on my strengths of my style rather than trying to force it to act like a different style. Because my particular way of illustrating is highly stylized and simplified, it is in my best interest to work with subjects and viewpoints that lend themselves most to this approach. A great example is in how I draw cars. Well, an illustrator with a more complex realistic style would have no problem drawing a modern car in three quarter view. In my own style, I might have a hard time working something out. Instead, if I had to illustrate a car, I might use my curatorial sense to choose a car I can draw more naturally in my style, say a 1980, Volvo 240 wagon inside view, which is basically a brick on wheels. Curation means choosing objects that work best toward the goals of your illustration. In such a case, the goal might be to simply represent the idea of a car. A 1980 Volvo is far more iconic in its interpretation or representation of the idea of car than say a 2018 Ford Taurus. It should also be noted that I simply prefer a 1980 Volvo to a modern sedan of any make or model. That can be as valid a reason to include it in my art as any other. When I talk about curation in illustration and in drawing towards illustration, I'm talking about being selective in what, in how you draw certain things. Curation here is about choosing subjects and vantage points that work best in your style and toward your intention. How you curate, what you decide to use as your references, and how you decide to include ideas in your art, this is a huge part of your style. If you ever wonder why an illustrator chose to include one thing over another in an illustration, there's a good chance it was based on their curatorial sense, both in terms of what they feel confident in illustrating and in what they like.
9. Primer: Iteration (The Secret Sauce): This is the last primer video and then we can move on to the exercises. But before we do, I just want to give you one of the most powerful tools I know in illustration. Iteration. Iteration means doing something over and over again until you get it right. Rarely do ideas present themselves to us in full form right away. That's where iteration and its cousin, refinement come in. As we draw toward illustration, especially as we work to develop our concepts, we must first iterate in terms of quantity of different ideas. Just try lots of different things without being too critical. After spending some time exhausting all our options, we can step away for an hour or overnight, basically take a rest. Then we can come back to it later with a fresh mind and choose our strongest concept. Then we can iterate again, but this time over this one strong concept and refine it to make it clear or to fit the composition more, or to make it more interesting in some way. Refinement is just a different iteration that focuses on quality rather than quantity. Iteration and refinement are the secret sauce in terms of stepping your way from zero ideas to more ideas than you know what to do with. Iteration and refinement help you build up to an idea you would never have imagined otherwise. There's a myth that illustrators just spill ideas directly from rich imagination onto the page, like magic. But the reality is that ideas rarely come out of nowhere like this. Instead, strong concepts are developed iteratively step-by-step by starting with rough marks that feel unsure, and building on these until the big eureka moment occurs. As we draw through the exercises and in the final project and as you draw toward illustration in your own journey, keep in mind that ideas come iteratively. If you ever feel stuck and you don't know what to do, start by making marks and then respond to those marks and then respond to those responses, always looking for that idea or asking the question, is this working? Is this doing what the illustration needs to do? Only by iteration and then stepping away and coming back and looking for those things that are working in a more objective way, can you really build up to ideas you would never have thought of before. Just keep that in mind as we go through the exercises and projects in this class.
10. Exercises: Kick-off: It's time to get into the exercises. There are four exercises, each one being similar in that they have two parts. In the first part, we draw from observational mode, from either real life or from a reference photo. In the second part, we draw in ideational mode, using what we know and remember from the first part as our only reference. For all exercises, you should use contour drawing to describe the form. Avoid the temptation to shade and model volume excessively. As you go through these exercises, take as long as you want. But I will suggest a target time for each part of each exercise and this will help you stay fresh and not overthink things. But again, if you want to just get lost in the drawing and not worry about time, that's totally fine too. Finally, before we get into the first exercise, remember, these are learning exercises, not performances. Exercise makes you stronger, which implies we are not yet as strong as we will be. The biggest way to avoid frustration or impatience here is to first set a timer and not give yourself too much time to fuss with details and overthink things. Second, give yourself permission to be bad, and third, just pushed through no matter what. When you feel like you made a mistake, just accept it and keep going. Whatever you do, do not stop to give yourself that time to take a foot forward. There's a time to be critical and doubtful, but this is not that time.
11. Exercise 1: The Chair: In exercise one, we will be drawing a chair. Find a chair in your home or if necessary, find an image of a chair online. It can be any angle although I suggest that drawing a chair in three-quarters view where you see some of the top and two sides at the same time. This gives you the most possible visual information about your subject in a single view and becomes useful for drawing from heart in the second part. For part one, observational mode, give yourself ten minutes or less to complete. Just draw the chair as you see it using contours. For Part 2, ideational mode, try taking no more than five minutes. I have a picture here of a chair from my workspace from my studio. I'm just going to draw this as best as I can, as faithful as I can, remembering to draw only in contours and to avoid doing too much fancy shading and thinking in terms of making it to look too realistic or anything like that. But I am drawing from observation using nice bold contour lines. So I'm just going to get into it and let's go and see what happens. Right away, I've gone in and decided to trace the outer contour of the chair itself in one bold stroke. When drawing any object, you're looking for any feature edges or features of the object that helped define it. Especially with a more curvy surface like this chair, I'm going to need as much as I can to help me describe this surface using contour. These bolts that hold the legs onto the seat are very important for helping describe the overall contour of this chair without using shading. Again, I can use a little bit of a contour line here. One here that I see that help's coming get that sense of contour. If it helps, if you're drawing from life, it helps to flatten your subject in your mind by just closing one eye so you're not perceiving depth as much. I'm looking on my screen on my reference photo and seeing where these legs sit in reference to one another but also in reference to the bolts holding the seat onto the legs. Again, you look for any reference points in your subject that you can use to make your next move so that I have tennis balls on the legs of my chair to protect my floor. I just like how it looks. This bold sits a little higher in the plane then this one and this one comes down actually a little bit further. Again, I'm doing my best to describe this chair only using contours and avoiding them to shade if possible. Now, I might want to just give it a little bit of a shading here, kind of what I'm seeing in my photo just to give it a bit more of a sense of the curvature of this surface. These kinds of services are just much more challenging to draw in contour style. But even just these lines, I think were enough. I didn't really need to add the shading but the shading is just satisfying to add in there when sketching. But as you can see, I could just keep going and going and overworking it, and that's exactly what would happen. The search would just look over overworked. It's going to lose that spontaneity but of course this is a study image. It doesn't really matter how good this is because this is not my end product. My end product is going to be some final illustration for my client. This is an observational image. This is something that I do in what I call sweet spots. I call this free sketching where I'm just downloading visual information so that the deed has been done, I've downloaded information about this chair. There it is. I'm just going to leave it and move into Part 2. In Part 2, we're moving from observational mode into ideational mode. I'm going to put my reference away. I'm not looking at my chair photo that I had up before. I'm going to do my best to just draw this chair using contour lines from memory. I remember that there is this shape of the seat. There were bolts in this kind of diamond pattern. There was a contour here, may be something there and that really helps describe that lip of the chair. There were the legs that related somewhat to the bolts of the sea. I also remember that the tennis balls on the bottom of each leg where they form a diamond shape, if you think about those balls in terms of maybe constellations. We have those balls making the shape and I remember that. I'm just going to undo that line there and these heads, these kind of cuts where the leg kind of went into the balls. There is the tennis ball motif, that little tennis ball line on each one of those. Here's my chair. I do that totally from memory and I'd say it's probably pretty close. I remember these legs were black. Now, here's an interesting thing I'd like you to try as well. Now that you have this reference of this chair in your mind, try and play with the angle of this chair without turning the actual chair in real life around looking for different angles. You'll have to do this, especially if you're only working from reference images because you won't have other angles. But it's just an interesting mental slash visual exercise. How can you rotate this chair in your mind in different ways from your imagination? Just imagine, what would this chair look like in all these other angles and challenge yourself to draw it without having to have a visual reference. You'll notice that my front view of the chair, my side views, they're not actually technically that good but they're fun. They're whimsical and wonky and ultimately that's my voice, that's my drawing voice, and I like that. Again, what I could do if I wanted to kind of go over these, I have a new layer here. I've set drawings that I just did as a kind of lower opacity, so now it's like I have tracing paper over it. I can go and try to trace over these in a more clarified, confident way. Maybe make up for any of the mistakes that I thought I made in the first pass. For instance, I can go down in here and really make sure that interaction between the crack in the ball where the light goes into that slit. I can kind of make that a little bit more clear about what's going on there. This may be necessary or unnecessary in my final illustration, it all depends. But these are the kinds of things you can do when you go over an illustration. Here, my line quality is really wobbly, which I think has a lot of movement feeling to it so I could choose to just leave that but perhaps the illustration style I'm going for in my final art needs to be a little bit more crisp. I'm going to crispen up what's going on here. I did a little oopsy there. So I'm going to do it one more time and I can iterate on this as much as I feel like I need to until it's perfect, especially if it's digital. It's really no skin off my back except for a little bit of time. Simplify that slit to just align. If I don't want to get into describing it in a more three-dimensional way. That might be all I need. You can see there's a move, a progression toward or confident crisper lines that describe my drawing. Again, I want to bring in some of those little details that tell the story of this object that's more interesting than the chair itself is that I've put tennis balls on it. See how many different angles you can draw your chairing. Then when you're done, compare what you drew in the second part with what you drew in the first part. I'll do that here with you guys, my own art. Here we have the chair that I drew from life and then here we have my most refined version of the chairs that I drew in different angles. You can really see here we have much more subtleties in the observational drawing like the subtlety of the curve of the legs bending back toward the other one. You have everything more in a realistic place. Even the way I've described these contours with these simple lines works and makes sense when you look at it. Here in my second part where I drew only for memory, I've straightened out the legs, I didn't remember that detail here. I really simplified the contours of the seat. While you might look at this and think this looks better. This first observational drawing looks better, that's a fair observation and a fair opinion. But you can also look at this as its own thing separate from what you drew observationally and see the value in as well. This is just more fun, it's more whimsical, and it would be really interesting to see how this would look If I were to add, I'd color and texture and use my final illustration techniques to render this out. There's something bold and courageous and fun about going with this in spite of what you know you could have done. That's one of the creative decisions you make as an illustrator, is the level of realism in detail and subtlety you bring to your work. If you want to develop a consistent style, consistent go-to way of drawing, I believe you actually have to get used to your quirks and the things that aren't perfect about your work. Because ultimately, you need to be drawing from your heart. When you draw from heart, it ends up looking more like this than like this. This second mode of drawing is going to be for better or for worse, what you can draw more consistently. I'll leave it at that. This is the first exercise, and now we're going to move into the second exercise which is the plant.
12. Exercise 2: The Houseplant: In this exercise, we'll be drawing a houseplant. It can be a hanging or potted plant, large or small. It's up to you. I'll be drawing one of my potted houseplants. For this one, I suggest drawing a plant with leaves and features you think would be hard to draw versus say, a simple pear cactus or a snake plant, a palm or ficus are ideal specimens to draw, for instance. For Part 1, observational mode, give yourself 10-15 minutes to complete, depending on the complexity of the plant and how accurately you want to draw. From our complex subjects with overlapping parts like plants, it will be harder to entrust yourself with the drawing task. Also, just as I go about my own, that it is easier if you spend most of the time looking at your subject, then at your page. Letting your hand trace what your eye sees as it scans the edges and contours of the plant. For Part 2, ideational mode, give yourself 5-10 minutes. Okay, this is the second exercise. Now our assignment is to draw a plant. Now, why a plant? Plants are organic, they're complex, they have lots of overlapping parts, and they overall just present a challenge to our patients and definitely a challenge to some of my ideas about drawing in contours only. It's actually a really great opportunity to try and get your brain into that r mode when you're drawing observationally, allow your right brain to take over where your drawing, what you see. Your left brain is going to get really frustrated because it's like that's a leaf, that's a leaf, just draw leaf. It doesn't really have a symbol for the way all these leaves in your plant or the stem or the bark or whatever it is you're drawing in your plant. It probably doesn't have a very clear symbols for all those things, it's either going to want to tell you to quit, it's going to tell you that you're doing a bad job and it's just overall going to be very impatient. I have in front of me a picture of one of my houseplants and it's in a pot on a stand. I can just draw that whole assembly, but let's just get into it. Maybe just to trick myself into drawing the single, I'll start by drawing the planter itself because it is not an organic object. Problem here is that I actually started a little bit too big, I want to just clear this and start again. Nothing precious here, and you're going to need to give myself some room for this plant. Again, I'm starting with the planter drawing in nice, confident contour strokes versus tentative, sketchy strokes. Don't be shy, don't be too careful, see if you can describe all your edges and contours. Nice, confident, clean strokes, not perfect, just clean and confident. While I'm drawing in observational mode, I'm thinking about size relationships as well. I'm asking myself, how big are the legs on the plant stand compared to the planter? Is a planter of this big and the legs this big or if the plant of this big and the length this big, based on what I'm measuring here from my eye, the stand and the planter are about the same height. Okay. I can deal with the planter later I've got that. Now I can draw the stem of the plant coming out of it now to start with actually quite easy, I see the stem and then suddenly once it gets to about here, it gets lost in all the separate leaves of this plant. What I'm going to do is just go with anything that I can see and articulate easily, and then trick myself, ease myself into just starting to draw by contours. Now, one thing about drawing, complicated things like this. A trick is to actually look more at your subject then at your page, because if you're looking at your page, you're not looking, you're not seeing what you're actually drawing. Here I'm just allowing my pen to trace these lines, I'm trying to forget that I'm drawing leaves and just drawing shapes, lines, contours, undulations. It's not going to be perfect. It might even get messy, you might lose track, it's okay, do your best to keep track, but draw by looking, not by thinking. We're drawing from the right-hand side of the brain, retelling the left-brain, sorry. You got to have your way later, right now, we're just drawing these abstract lines that we see in front of us. They have no names, but you'll find even as you're drawing from life, you start to you moving your hand, especially with leaves. You moving your hand in the same pattern as you dry each leaf over and over again. Notice I'm not taking a ton of time here. You could be more careful, you can take as long as you want to draw your plant. I've looked at my screen. I've glanced at really a couple times, but I haven't really looked, now I'm looking. This plant that I've just drawn is really a blind contour. A blind contour is really just a contour drawing as I've described it before, but you spend almost zero time looking at the page itself. Now I'm just going to fill in some of the details of my planter. Drawn on grid pattern, these are wood they taper. I think that's about all I can do in this mode, otherwise, there's just, it's already a mass. But this is part one of the plant drawing and it's taken me less than 10 minutes to get here, and that's really all I needed to really see the plant for my purposes. What I'm going to do is I'm going to hide that layer for now, I'm going to open up a new layer. We're going to go into the second part of the plant exercise, which is of course, drawing the plant from memory. I'm moving the plant a reference from my view and no looking, no peaking, no cheating. We're going to draw our plant coldly from memory, and of course now we're looking at the screen. I like to start with the surest object or edge that I can remember or see, and that of course, was the plant stand with the planter or pot. Really, I'm just procrastinating the hard part, but here we go. I know that the stem of this plant have these lines, and the leaves just started going on like this. Little bananas really, and they overlapped, and sometimes they didn't, and sometimes they unrelated and sometimes they didn't, depending on the edge, my left brain is getting its satisfaction right now, because these are symbols, these are symbols for the leaves, my left-brained found a hack, a way to draw these complex leaves as symbols, as quick notions or ideas. My right brain has done its job, it can relax. I can just draw those plants and now it's really just up to me to determine when enough is enough. Do I have enough in this drawing? Maybe I need to just throw one more thing in there. I can always undo if I feel like there's too much, I can always add more. Something like that, I might have already overdone it. But there's the plant from memory, a very complex organic organism. Yeah, I feel like this form from memory is a lot closer to the way I would illustrate it. it's removed from the pure observational form and it's certainly a lot cleaner than the blind contours that I used in the observational mode, but let's just see what happens if I just try to stylize this a little bit more using some of my stylization principles. There's flattening, obstraction, clarity, exaggeration or eccentrification and simplification, or symbolification. This plant drawn from memory is so very representational, it's very close to the original. But let's just see what happens if I remove it even further from realism. What can I do with that? I have the planter, I flattened it. I'm doing away with the sense of the inside of that planter, maybe with the legs, I just turn those into sticks. I'm not going to worry about the pattern just yet. Then with the plant, the question is, how can I make it plantae, but really move it away from reality? How can we capture the essence of this plant? I still don't know what this plant is called. What I really want to do is keep these simple and flat. I don't mind a little bit of overlap, just a little bit though. Otherwise, illustration could get too busy. This drawing, what I'm doing right here is closer to what I would call my illustration style than this. It's more stylized, I've symbolic things more, simplified it, it's even more eccentric. The way I drew the legs, it's totally not how it was in real life. There's something quirky about it, but it adds character. If I wanted to, I could add back in some pattern, and now I'm totally flattening of this pattern. I'm not suggesting curvature at all with this pattern. Just a grid waffle thing, something like that. Then I'll play around with this, I might decide that when I'm illustrating it in my style that it doesn't need the pattern, or maybe I want to change what that pattern is. I don't have to go by exactly what I saw in the reference image or a real life, maybe it's enough to have horizontal stripes on the pot, or maybe I have a squiggle as the pattern. You can really play around with reality. Reality is different from illustration because in illustration you get to do what you want, your world is plastic and malleable and party in your hands. Let's just compare the original drawing that I did to the stylized ones that I did in the ideational mode. Now, I like this a lot, I think this is really cool. There's a lot of feeling and expressiveness to this drawing, but I would question whether I'd be able to get it just like that another time if I needed to. Of course, I might be able to draw another blind contour of the plant and would have some of these features, but one of the things we want to get better at as illustrators, is being able to repeat past successes reliably. We want to be able to do our greatest hits over and over again, be able to have a repertoire that we can draw from. The chances of doing this, again, are not as great as the chances of doing this again. This is my symbolified stylized plant. This I could do again, and maybe from now on and I'm drawing houseplants and scenes, for instance. I'll end up doing some variation on this subconsciously or consciously, because now I have it, and it's now a part of my symbol language, my visual language that I use in my illustration. This concludes the draw a plant exercise Parts 1 and 2, and we're going to move on now to the third exercise, which is drawing our workspace.
13. Exercise 3: The Workspace: In this exercise, we will be drawing our workspace or some other interior scene of a room in your house. You can also find a photo of a workspace that inspires you online, it's your choice. It should be clear that your workspace does not have to be in pristine shape in order to draw it. In fact, I think it would be much more interesting if you just draw things as they are without too much styling. Give yourself more time to draw this if you want. For part 1, give yourself maybe 20 minutes to complete the drawing. Remember to focus on drawing contours with confidence strokes, not being shy and tentative. As always, avoid the temptation to shade and model a sense of volume. Be sure to give yourself enough room on the page to draw as wide of a scene as possible. If you're intimidated and don't know what to start drawing first, just start with an edge of the most dominant object in your view, whatever your eye is naturally drawn to. For part 2, give yourself about 10 to 20 minutes to complete. You may find that you remember everything you drew in part 1, or that your memory is a bit foggy, but as you go along, you'll hopefully find, as I do that, my memory is jogged with each new mark that I add. Each new mark helps me remember what my next mark should be, what the next thing in my scene was when I drew it observationally. This one's going to take longer than the chair and the plant exercises, but really it's the same exercise, drawing with contours, what you see, start with the edge that your eye is drawn to first, and just go from there. Don't worry about your starting point. The only thing maybe to think about is scale. You don't want to run out of room. I'm going to just start with the most visually obvious thing which is my screen, maybe procrastinating and filling it in because there's so many details that it seems more satisfying right away to just fill in that screen with some shading rather than just do what I'm supposed to be doing. You'll find that even though drawing is a wonderful and enjoyable exercise, it's something we tend to want to procrastinate and avoid because it requires a concentration to truly draw from observation. As you draw, you might find that mismeasure, and it's okay, just edit as you go along, I drew my monitor a bit too small. I'm drawing some of the bookshelves that I have, I can use that as a way of measuring in my overall drawing. Drawing from observation doesn't necessarily mean accuracy, it just means that you're open to actually seeing what's in front of you, and to some extent drawing it, recording it down on your drawing surface. The more complex the thing that you're drawing from observation, the more sketchy it might start to look, the more mistakes you're going to make, so you're going to have this effect of things looking a little bit less clear and confident, which is the ideal but not always the exact result that you get. The photo I'm using as my reference, I just took a photo of my studio, as it is now I'm recording, so there's lots of recording day mess here, including the lighting. The nice thing about drawing from observation is, certain things aren't necessary or desired, you can leave them out. I may leave out the lighting of my setup here, but you know what, because it's there, I'd rather just draw them, I think I'm just going to include it. You'll notice that you may totally be mismeasuring in terms of relationship like in my image, my screen and my MacBook are much closer, so if I wanted to, I could go and move everything this way erase and start again. But I'm just going to keep going with it in the interest of proving to you guys that things don't need to be exactly perfect even when drawing from life. You're really trying to download visual information and record that down on the page. This is not our end goal, we're not drawing this as our final destination. Again, using, like my shelf has these brackets that hold it up, I can use those evenly spaced intervals as ways of measuring where things go. In my composition, I have a big glass jar full of tape and rulers, it's my tape and ruler jar. I have a ball of paper there that I crumpled up at some point. Here, I have a light, and are just tracing the contours that I see even my desk and just let my right brain do its thing here. With this more complex scene, I'm interested in the overall scene more than I am about every tiny detail, and yes, I'm using shading in addition to contours because it's helping me give reference for all the other elements in my composition here. There are some books here, and you'll see that I'm not too worried about exactly what those books are, maybe later, if it felt important, I might actually go back and try to reference what some of those details are, I may add to the story, or they might just be too much detail. Again, you guys can be as detailed in this as you want. I can get really into drawing every little detail and being accurate. For me right now, I'm just trying to get in the overall visual information, key idea here, the key story is my workspace. I'm working fast enough to just get through this, not worried too much about accuracy and precision, more about just mapping this all out on the page, and in my heart and in my mind. As I'm drawing, I'm going faster and faster, and the reason is, I'm actually just in a mode right right where my mind is not thinking, I'm not looking at my page as much, I'm not trying to be critical. The edge of my desk is here and it goes down here, I have some drawers. Again, my mind is seeing patterns here with these little pulls, the little holes in the doors so you can pull out. This might look like a mess when I actually look at my screen, but for now, I'm just in the zone tracing reality with my pen on the paper. One thing that as I was developing this class I thought about was how this, what I'm doing right now is not unlike tracing, and if you want to flip that around, tracing is just drawing your subjects with the least possible space between your pencil and your subject. When you're tracing, you are just following the lines that are right beneath the tip of your tool. But when you're drawing in observational mode, you're tracing the lines in front of you is just that those objects within your tracing is just a few feet away, a few meters away or a hundreds of meters away if we're feet away or whatever. If it's a distance away, it's still tracing. When you feel satisfied that you've described your workspace using these confident contour lines, you can end this whenever you want. I am looking around just seeing if I've missed anything important. I can't really fit anything else, and that's okay. I could draw some more like a brack on my light table, but I feel like that's going to be overkill. As I'm trying to hurry now, I'm getting impatient and really scribbling things down, this is my carpet, and to just get a sense that it's material, I'm just going to do some squiggles at least to get a sense of carpet. Sometimes when I'm drawing more complex things, and I want to keep track of what I actually drew, I'll even just label it sometimes, this will be like this was carpet, this looks really random, this was a heater. I go back and name things, so I remember what they were, if I felt like they were important. But there's my contour drawing of my workspace. Just when you thought we were done, we now have to draw this workspace from memory. Now this is Part 2, and this is going to be really cool because of how detailed a workspace is compared to a chair or a plant. There's just a lot more parts. It's in a bigger space, but it's really the same thing. It's drawing from our ideational mode, and I'm really trying to see what it looks like when we draw from memory. What does our drawing look when we forget certain details? How do we make up for that? But don't think too hard about that as we go along. I would say just do your best to draw from memory. Now for me, I think I usually start where I started my observational drawing. I think because I was drawing to that screen in my observational drawing of my workspace, it's the thing I remember most and it's very possible that I'll follow very much the same steps that I took on my way to drawing this in both modes. One thing to really take from this part of the exercise is that right now, I actually don't remember all the things that were in my workspace. There's a lot of stuff, and that's a bit intimidating, but one line can lead to the next. One line can remind you what line came from that line, and so that's just one little word of encouragement. I had forgotten my iPad was here. Then just looking at the corner of this book that my monitor is sitting on, I remembered, "Yeah. There was something there. Yeah. It was my iPad." Then of course I recall that I have a shelf. I recall that I have my camera, my overhead camera, and then my laptop being here. There's a bunch of chords in here. I'm not trying to draw exactly as it was in reality. Now I'm taking some liberties. I did things like these chords. I just use stylistic shorthand, a squiggle to represent the way all those chords were tangling around there. I recall there was a spotlight. Of course, I recall there being a light table right here. Honestly guys, I'm not looking at my references. I'm not looking around my room even though I could. Remember there is a hat here, these brackets that hold the shelf up, equally spaced and these have these parts here. Then under the desk is also some brackets. A radio back there. I'm trying so hard not to look right in front of me because it's right there. A little bit abstract. But yeah. Now I'm remembering that it had a bracket there holding it on, which means there was a bracket on this one as well. This light is a bit high. Now I can't draw what was there, but that's okay. I know there's picture frames. My goal with this first iteration of drawing from heart is really, again, map things out as I remember them. This is a map of what I remember from my first drawing and later on if I wanted to, I could refine this iteratively. This picture is actually an interesting example of really imposing your style onto something that previously wasn't. This drawing is done in someone else's painting style. It's not my style. But as I'm drawing it from memory, because I draw faces a certain way, I'm imposing that way of drawing onto this other person's painting style. I think that's okay. I'm not trying to reproduce and imitate someone else's painting style. In fact, if I can interpret something like that in my own style, it adds value to what I can illustrate. Let's just say I have the Mona Lisa hanging there. I could faithfully draw the Mona Lisa and all of its likeness or maybe I can draw the Mona Lisa in a way that is more based on my style. So it's like a mix of my style and the Mona Lisa style. Besides my laptop here, I know I have a scanner. I'm just drawing this in. I didn't draw this in the first part of the exercise, but I'm going to just draw it in there because I need to fill in the space where the blank used to be. Yeah. Interesting that I just can't, for the life of me remember when in these spaces. I'm going to stop now and we'll compare these two, the original and this one and just see what I remembered, what I left out and overall what the difference between them are. Take the original and move it down to this side. Yeah. That's interesting. I'm looking at these two things and there's some things that I forgot here and here. One of the things I notice and remember is that when I got here, I wasn't really thinking about what I was drawing. I was rushing too far and I didn't describe this at all. I didn't give my mind anything to hook onto in its memory of this thing. So I didn't remember what it was. But now that I can look, I know that there's a little bottle and a hat and it's all sitting on a little box. But overall, for such a complex scene, I remembered quite a bit. The fact that I have drawn this twice now, once from observation, once through ideation, the objects in this scene will stick in my memory for some time. For the next few hours and for the next day or so, I'll have some very fresh memories of what was in this scene and that's help me use this in the event that I need to illustrate a scene that's like this workspace. A little spoiler alert at this time, we're going to be using the drawing that we've been doing here, our workspace and also the two other drawings, the chair and the plant in our final illustration altogether. But before we do that, we're going to just do one more of these exercises where we do observation and then ideation and that is going to be a human figure. If you've come this far, if you've being able to draw from your workspace, from observation and then from ideation through memory, congratulations for making it this far. I know it's a lot of work. But my hope is, at this point, you're becoming more comfortable with this shift from mode 1 to mode 2, the shift from observing, and recording, and taking data, information in and then spilling it back out in your ideational mode to drawing. Good work. Let's keep going. I'm going to see you in the next exercise video.
14. Exercise 4: The Figure: This is the final drawing exercise. For this one, draw a full human figure. Someone sitting down in an interesting pose will work best. You can take a photo of yourself, you can recruit a volunteer to live-model for you, or you can find a photo of a person online. Have your models sit or stand in an interesting pose, or find a photo of someone somehow in action. Avoid photos of people that are just standing straight on or in a boring straight-on pose. This might be the hardest to draw because we'll be tempted to want to capture likeness in our figure. This is not about capturing likeness or about drawing realistic people though. We're simply drawing another subject just like the chair, the plant in the workspace, first from observation, getting a sense of its overall essence and form, and then drawing it from memory. If you've taken my eye Bodies class, you'll be familiar with this method of first drawing the person from reference and then from memory. In this video, you'll see that even I get stuck on wanting to capture the likeness of my model, and I almost scrap my exercise and start again. But then I assure myself that capturing likeness in this instance is not important. We're aiming to capture the idea of a human figure, not the exact likeness of this particular character. For part 1, give yourself no more than 10 minutes to complete the drawing. Again, express everything in contours. Look for interesting lines and contrasts that occur between clothing and skin, watches or jewelry, and even wrinkles and pleats. Every line you see in your model becomes a reference point that can inform your next mark. For part 2, give yourself about five minutes to complete. Again, focus on the overall figure. Don't worry about getting into the details. Especially, do not get lost in trying to draw the face. Your left brain is going to have a fit but fight it and just aim to get the idea of a figure in a particular pose down. You can rough in the general markings of the face if you want or you can leave the face blank. Anything you can do to just avoid trying to draw that face in full likeness. Again, just aim to get the idea of a figure in a particular pose, that is your only job. Welcome to the last exercise, drawing a human figure. Again, you can draw from real life or from a reference photo as you please, and of course, in my own exercise here, I'm going to be using a photo I shot of myself here today and I just thought it was a funny pose, and I'm just going to work with it and we'll see what happens. I went probably with one of the most dominant edges, which is the line under my thigh and my seat, and I am just drawing overlapping contours. Again, I am not thinking about anatomically correctness, I'm only just drawing the contours of what I see. I'm wearing all black here which really helps bring a lot of contrast between where my skin is showing and creates these dramatic contrasts of dark and light. But then, of course, when it comes to the clothing itself, the black on black provides almost no contrast, which can be a challenge to draw. Here I am just tracing my hand shape here. As you'll see is it's different from drawing, say, in a life drawing class that you might need to take for animation or certain kinds of illustration. This is not drawing in that way where you're more analyzing volume of the human form and stuff like that. I'm just drawing this in exactly the same way that I have been drawing everything else. Same approach, the only thing that's different is the subject. Yeah, so if I was going for some likeness, I might be more careful here, but right now, I'm just trying to commit some of these things to memory. I'm really overworking this shoe for some reason. It's okay. This is just a study, it's just an exercise, not a performance. Can see that I came a bit short here, see that my shirt comes around here. If you run out of room and you're working digitally, you can always just move your page down a bit. Now, I'm going to get hung up on my face here because as soon as we see the face, our goal is going to be to get that face to look like that person, because that's how we're wired. You just have to resist that temptation to try and work in the details of the face and make it look exactly like it. Don't think about those things as much as just doing what you've been doing all along. Draw what you see. It's not a face, they're not lips, it's not a nose, these are just the contours of what you see. Of course, here I am using some stylistic shortcuts, which is actually getting in the way of me drawing what I'm seeing, to be honest. Now my left brain is coming in here and saying, no, it doesn't look like you. You're not a good drawer, the people taking this class aren't going to respect you and they're going to stop taking this class because you can't draw. But this is what the left brain is saying. I'm just telling you guys I'm not actually believing this. This is the stuff that the left brain will say when you're drawing because it needs everything to be perfect and it doesn't want to make any mistakes. It wants to be sure and right and I think that if you can just push through that, you can just break through a lot of junk and get to what you actually need to do. I really like how there's this contrast of my black clothes. I think there's some things that I would want to improve on in this if I were to do it again. If you want to take a few different takes at drawing your human figure, go right ahead. It's good to practice and I wouldn't want to discourage you from that. But I would just say if you find that you're hitting a wall, leave it. This class right now is not about capturing the likeness of the people that you draw. In fact, I rarely go to capture likeness in the people that I draw. Just because I'm not a realistic illustrator, and if you've taken my odd bodies class, you have a sense of how I draw people. Anyway, there's a guy that looks like me, there's so much I would want to change about it especially because it's me. But just some tips when you're drawing people in this contour style from observation whether from a reference images or from life, it just helps if you have features on that person that you can use as reference points. Just like in the drawing of my workspace, I used the desk and the shelf brackets and certain objects in that scene to cue what was next. Same in this because there's contrast between the clothes and my actual body like my skin. I can use those areas of stark contrast as my reference points and leverage that built-in visual cue that it gives me. Now, I might just try one more illustration from observation just to test the waters a little bit, and here I have a different version of me. This time off in the front, and again, here I have my legs and a foreshortened shoe or foot can be very hard on the left-brain because there's no symbol for that and it starts to look really jumbled. So what you have to use is draw what you see as best as you can and maybe come back and correct it later. Here I have some crisscrossed fingers, which yikes, this is where I really have to let the right brain take over, looking only at the picture, I'm not looking at my Canvas at my drawing. Here, I'm wearing a shirt. I wanted to do one where he's wearing just a t-shirt and one where he's wearing a buttoned down shirt because I thought the buttons would create a nice feature to draw from. The collar, some of the crumples of the shirt, the wrinkles. No, I could just fill this all in and work with the black versus the lighter tones of my skin, again, just to describe that form in general. With the shoe, that's just insane. I'm going to leave it. One thing you can rest assured about when you're drawing things, if they're hard to draw for you, that's just a reality, that's just something you have to embrace and accept, and then ask yourself, what do you want to do about it? Do you want to get better at drawing those things that are hard or will you just work around them? I think each approach is valid. You could choose to just avoid drawing things at angles or you could choose to avoid drawing entire subjects that are hard for you or that don't interest you. You're not interested in getting better, you're more interested in ideas versus exact representations of things and that's okay. I do that in my work and I talked a little bit about that, and a primary when I talked about curation where I leave things in or edit things out based on what I'm interested in, based on what I'm able to draw. Sorry guys, I'm just here drawing and not able to do both talking and drawing at the same time. I have a little fight with my left brain right now. With curvy surfaces like faces, it's actually sometimes the only way to use a little bit of shading in order to describe what you see, and of course, you have to try and reconcile that to your final illustration style. Something's weird here, but of course, I'm being highly critical of this because it's an image of me and my ego saying that doesn't look like me, but there is something interesting about it. But there you go guys, maybe just going to finish a chair just to get a sense of the thing on which the figure sits. Okay. That's me drawing from observation. I'm now going to go into Part 2, drawing from ideation mode. Just real quickly, I have these two versions of me and these are both drawn from observation. You can see they're actually, in a way, they're very different like the way I drew the eyes. There's some difference is, even stylistically I would say, and that's a big pain point with drawing for illustrators is when you draw from references, sometimes you're going to draw it a certain way and sometimes you're going to draw it another way and we want to be more in control of the style in which we draw, and the only way we can do that is by leaving observational drawing for what it is. We are taking in information about the thing we're drawing, as I keep saying, but then we need a way, a style, a shorthand, a way of drawing things more consistently in a way that is closer to our illustration style. So that's what I'm going to hopefully see emerge as I go into Part 2 of this exercise. Okay. So now I'm going to start drawing my human figure from memory and just work with the information that I learned and downloaded in the first part. Now, because I drew two different versions from two different photos, I'm having a hard time remembering, I'm mixing them both up in my head and I think that's actually a disadvantage. I'm wishing that I hadn't, but I'm just going to do my best to do the first one. This one where I had just my t-shirt on, and I remember my hand being splayed out a bit on my thigh there. I was wearing my watch. I think my elbow was actually out more. I'm just going to undo and go back. I think my shoulder was doing this. Okay, something like that. My shirt came down here and I got a room and just draw a bit of that chair in there just as a reference. Now, of course, I'm going to just draw things very stylized as I do with people. I believe this leg came up like that. I'm just really capturing the essence of my shoes without trying to get every detail realistically. Just keep the N on there, which says I'm wearing a certain brand. I'm wearing New Balance shoes, which is specific. Sometimes when you're illustrating having some specificity, you can add to the story in some way. I can't remember what I was doing with my hand there. I know I had a watch there. I was wearing all dark clothes and then of course I was looking directly at the camera. Now, when you're drawing a person, you might be drawing that person to represent a character or you might be drawing a person to represent just a figure. A character is a specific person that has more personality. You're going to want to inject some detail about the face and the expression. Whereas a figure is an abstraction of a person. It's a representation of a person. It could be a man, could be a woman, might have long hair, short hair. It could have those specific things about it, but it isn't about a specific person or character. So as I'm drawing my ideational mode drawing of my human figure, when it comes to the face, the question is, is this someone I need to know well or is it just a human figure? Is it a character or a figure? Perhaps, that question doesn't matter right yet, but I can at least say like, does it look like me? Is it supposed to be me? For the purposes of this exercise, it doesn't really matter. I think the thing that matters most is just that you are able to represent a figure because in the final project, again, spoiler alert, we are going to be incorporating the figures from our memory in a scene. So it's really just about having a figure in a scene and then it will be up to you whether that person is very specific, whether it's actually you or whether it just more represents an abstraction or an idea of a person more in a figure sense than in a character sense, if that makes sense. I love things like wrinkles where they just show expression and gesture. I'm wearing this shirt and then I remember as my legs are pointing toward the wall beside me, but then I'm looking directly at the camera and as I'm twisting my upper body, there's some wrinkles on my shirt happening. To express those in this drawing here, really captures that feeling of me twisting my upper half of my body like that. I did look for opportunities like that, especially when I'm drawing people in clothing where they have just like a little undulation or wrinkle that can help describe more about that gesture that the character's make it. This is a stylized person, it's done through ideational drawing and I was only able to do this because of the observational drawing that I did before. Otherwise, I might not have really had this pose available in my head in my repertoire to draw from. But why don't I just see one more time what happens if I try to draw the other figure, the one where I'm wearing the button down shirt. I do remember in that one I think I was also looking at the camera. In this one for a reason I'm starting with the head. I'm just going to draw some guy's head just to start, doesn't matter that it doesn't look at all like me. I remember I had a shirt with buttons and I had a more foreshortened leg here with the shoe pointing more forward and less even. Then this, she was totally foreshortened on the floor pointing directly at me as far I remember. Then I believe my hands were criss-crossed. I can only express that in a very loose way without it looking really complicated. I'm just going to leave it. This is, again, what I was calling a stylistic shorthand. I could try to draw the way fingers overlap like a woven basket the way I was doing. But I would definitely need a reference picture for that. I'm going to say just for now in the sketch, it's okay to leave this loose and gestural. I have my sleeves rolled up, the clothing I'm wearing is very dark except for my shoes. Of course, I'm sitting on a chair. I'm not worried about how super unrealistic this looks. I'm just drawing in the way that I draw based on what I remember. There's something really cool about what happens when you do that, especially as you become more acquainted with how you draw, what kind of lines you make, what your favorite tools are? Now of course, the challenge will be, how do I take the information I've gained in this exercise and make it work more for my flattened illustration style. I'm going to choose, first of all, let's take a look at and compare ideation on observational drawings. There's this guy here and this guy. This is what I didn't quit get right in this drawing is where my arm was resting on my thigh there and of course I really exaggerated the way my other arm was jetting out, but otherwise that's the pose. Again, you can see that I really got that foreshortening wrong. But, I really like this so much more than I like this.This drawing from observation was really just me working with the information in front of me. Well, there's certain things I really like about this image it's the face that ruins it for me and that's because the closer you try to get to a likeness, if you're unable to do that, it's going to show. One option is to, like I said, get better at doing faces so that you can more reliably capture likeness every time, which of course is the ideal. But you can also just work around and not draw likenesses. You could just draw more stylized and abstracted. Let's take one of these and just bring it one step further toward how I might illustrate in my style. I'm going to just turn off my observational guy here and bring up my ideational guy and I'm just going to trace over it. I'm going to iterate, I'm going to refine it and bring it closer to my flattened illustration style that I know I can work with. Here, I know that I use shape more than line in my final illustration style. I'm looking for ways of making sure I have clean shapes to trace over when I bring this into Photoshop. I'll use lines to describe subtle details and edges into separate fingers, things like that. But mostly, I'm describing my figure here in shapes. Now, there's some things I might change about these shoes once I take this into a final. But right now the idea is there it's enough, it's not over fast, it's enough for a sketch. Of course here's the face. I have to ask myself, how am I going to draw this guy in my final illustration? Something like that might work. There's something about this here that I don't like. I remember that my arm was extended a little bit more on my thigh, there's something weird going on there. I'm not looking at any references, I'm just working a bit more faithfully to what I believe I saw the last time I looked at the original drawing, the observational drawing. Just a note, because we're talking about taking these sketches and making them more seamlessly integrated with our illustration style, this is very much how I would illustrate. Of course, there is a sense where the software features like the hair and the beard. I will have to spend a little bit of attention to that in the final stage to try and resolve that to make the hair look like hair, if I were to just illustrate this as a solid shape, is that going to look to starchy and staticky and stiff? How will I make that look nice and loose like hair and stuff like that? That's stuff I can work out in the final and I don't really think I need to work that out at this stage, but I do have a reasonable level of confidence I can pull that off. That's why I'd have no problem showing a sketch like this to a client. This is my human figure, guys we are done the exercises. We've gone and done a chair, a plant, our workspace and now human figure, and we've done these both in observational and ideational mode. Now, it's time to put it all together in the final project, we're going to create a scene that incorporates all of these things. I'll see you in the next part and we'll do that together.
15. Final Project: Kick-off: Now that we've done the exercises, it's time to put it all together in the final composition. For the final project, your assignment is to create an illustrated scene of a workspace or room that includes the three subjects we drew in the exercises; the chair, the plant, and the figure. The one rule here is that you cannot look at your references. You must try to draw the whole thing from heart. Your final illustration will be eight by 10 inches in either portrait or landscape orientation. The final project is broken into three phases; rough sketches, refined sketches, and final illustration. I will walk you through my own process of building up from rough to refined to final, but I'm going to keep the focus on the sketching and composing aspect of this process. When it comes to the final illustration part, where I turned my sketch into a fully finished illustration in my style, I'll show you an overview of this process, but focus on the relationship between my earlier drawings in the final, rather than give you a play-by-play of my actual illustration techniques in Photoshop. My hope is that you're able to use the principles of drawing from the two drawing modes to first build up your own understanding of your subject from reference, and then to intuitively draw your scene from heart. Most importantly, as you sketch out and refine your composition, aim to create forms, shapes, and lines that translate seamlessly to your final style. Ask yourself, will that work using my techniques? Do I have a tool that can pull off hair-like that? Is it possible to show that perspective or depth using my style? And other questions like that.
16. Final Project: Rough Sketches: In my client work, once I've done my initial research and found reference images and studied them through observational drawing, that's when I can start rough sketches. Rough sketches is when I start to work out composition, content, and concept. For an illustrated scene, the concept is straightforward, it's a scene of a workspace. So now I just need to work out what elements I include in this scene and how. The most intimidating thing will be just starting. Here, I will encourage you to just start drawing the most dominant thing in your mind and go from there. This is not unlike when we were drawing the workspace from memory in Exercise 3. In my own example here, I start with my Thunderbolt Display, which is the focal point of my workspace. From there, building other elements, use your sense of curation to include or exclude certain objects, asking yourself whether they contribute to the concept or story you are trying to tell in your image and of course, whether it's something you can and want to illustrate in your style. This curation process applies not only to what you include but how you include it. What angle will it be presented in? Straight on or somehow angled and at which size? You're free to take the visual information you learned in observational mode in the exercises and to play around with it as you want in this composition. In rough sketches, work with bold confident strokes, but keep in mind, this rougher version will be a bit messier than in your more refined sketches. Save perfection for later. Focus on composition in this one. You can be loosed and rough at first and progressively iterated toward refinement. So normally in my process, I do what I call free sketching. That's where I go collect images from the internet and then I draw these freely. In this class, we've been calling that observational drawing. Now the good news is we've already done all the observational drawing or free sketching that we need to do for this final project and now we're going to move right right actually sketching out our sketch for our illustration. Like I said, we want it to be eight by 10 in terms of its aspect ratios. I think I'm going to make mine in this shape. Just to start, this little rough thing that I just drew is good enough, but perhaps I want to be a little bit more precise with my width. So I could actually like just make an eight by 10 document and set it up exactly in this. But when I'm sketching, I like to actually have a bit of room around to break out or so. When I'm working in Procreate, I don't want this to be the edge of my frame. So what I do when I'm sketching, especially my first sketch, is I set up using joined guides and I'm able to just use these big chunky guides here to set up the overall aspect ratio of my composition or my frame, the page size. So two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, and there we have an eight by 10 frame to work in. So I don't need those drawing guides anymore. This is all I need. I'm just going to bring that down in opacity so I can see it, but not too much. This net will now be my frame to work within. Now I'm just going to start working out my scene. So always, of course, when you're sketching, it's, "Where do I start, what do I use?" Because we're really in a creative mode here and the brief itself is actually pretty open, it's just to illustrate our workspace. So I'd say start anywhere and see what happens. I'm going to start with the monitor, the screen in my workspace. Right now I'm just being rough. There's going to be some mistakes made and it's okay. But the key here is just to map in what I want and what I need to include. There's certain things that I want to leave in and certain things that I want to leave out. I want to include some of the carpet that I have in my studio because I think it will create a nice visual counterpoint to everything else that's happening. It's like this nice broad area of shape and color that I can include in this to create interest. I have a suspicion that will work. We'll see. This is maybe the surface of my desk here. I had my light, I think this stem actually comes off on that side there. Really just roughly mapping things in. Even though it's rough, I'm not being too tentative about just slowly working things in, I'm probably just placing things and seeing if it'll work. Because I'm working digitally I'm not afraid, I know that I can always undo or erase with quite a lot of ease. I think now's a good time to throw in the chair, threw in my laptop and my iPad. Again, I'm not looking at any references, but I'm easily remembering a lot of the details that were in my exercise. The question I have right now is, "Is this just a picture of my workspace, or is this a picture of me in my workspace while recording a Skillshare class?" In which case, I could include some of the lighting equipment that I have set up here, which it's definitely a specific story. It wasn't what I was thinking at first. I was thinking that maybe I would edit these out as I did the final project. But now that they're there, what I like about what this light specifically is doing is it's giving me a foreground element and a framing element where I can throw everything else in my workspace in here. So my screen, I think it will be a little bit bigger. I had the tennis balls on the chair. Because this is an illustration now this is not pure reality, I'm not trying to faithfully record for all of history what was on my desk at this time in history, it's really about just some guys workspace who happens to be recording. So I'm going to really use some stylization techniques here and edit things out and change them and really just suggest what they are in more high-level way. So I have books, books, frames, more books. I'm just going to pretend there's a plant there. I have a few trophies up there and this desk is attached to the wall on this side, but the way this illustration is working, it doesn't necessarily show that. It's going to be hard to draw a wall here unless I wanted like draw the window here, but I don't want to draw a continuation of the window there I want this, even though it's full-page and it's going to the edges, I want there to be a sense of self-containment in the image. What I might do is include more flat file drawers here, which I do have on this side, but they're just not in this exact orientation, but that really sits well there. Think I like that. I have a garbage can under the desk, which I don't mind representing a garbage can in the illustration, but the garbage can under my desk at present it's a hard read. It would be hard for me to depict that in for people to get what it is. Having a more a cliche looking garbage can here might just do the trick if I want to have a can there. Of course, some chords and cables do twist and turn their way through under the desk. It does add some character, believe it or not, to include some of those, and I think that's okay. Lost our printer over on this side, it was behind the light. I can just block something in there. I'm missing a few things that I need to include in this scene, one is the plant. Maybe a plant could make a nice framing device here in this corner and I remember that plant having just bananas on a stick and there is a grid pattern on the planter. Maybe I just wanted to have some of that plant come above the desk, so it's not stuck under this line before, I'll just back up a bit before and I only stopped [inaudible]. The plant is getting lost, you don't really see it and then there's the top of the desk. Just by popping it over top the surface of the desk, now it gives the plant a little bit more prominence. The plant adds an interesting, I didn't mean this, but it adds an interesting as a parallel to the studio lighting here, in that it's one of the few vertical things in this image. I think it adds something nice there to counter just the vertical lines of the lights. There's also now a vertical plant and I like how it mirrors that but in a different way. I have the chair, I have the plant. I'm just missing the human figure, so here I'm just drawing a human figure based on what I drew as best as I can. Now, I know that in my drawing that I did in the exercise, I was sitting more like this with my legs crossed and so maybe I can bring that in and my head obviously exists, so I'll include it. I'm really roughing this in right now. I'm not really thinking about how to include it all because it's all self-evident because of the fact that this is a workspace, I know that a character should be in this workspace working. Sitting at a chair in front of the desk, it's built into this scene. It works to put it in the center and I didn't really have to think about it too much. Similarly, the centerpiece of my workspace is my screen, is my big [inaudible] monitor where all the work happens. The eye naturally gravitates there and of course, my mind gravitated there right away when I started to draw the scene, that's where I started. Then everything else, because I'm basing this on reality, it's easy to put all this in here. Now, what if we are talking about a fictitious scene that didn't exist? It's the same process. You go and find reference images of a workspace in this case and when it comes time to pour it out into a few concept sketches, then you have that imagery loaded up in your mind and you can split off. It might take a few tries, but you're way further ahead, having done all that observational drawing at first than you would be otherwise. Let's just talk a little bit more about what's happening in this composition and what decisions I'm making. One of the things that I decided as I was drawing this is that I want there to be a thin margin around the work. I could choose if I wanted to to bring the work right to the edge or in other words, crop it in, and then everything is rightful bleed, but I feel like this scene can be self-contained quite nicely. I'm going to try to have some negative space that surrounds the workspace as much as possible. That's a stylistic decision that I've made. One option, of course, would be to bring certain elements to the edge while keeping still an overall negative space feeling. I could draw the carpet on the bottom past the edges and then maybe choose a few other things to break off out to the site. Maybe in this case, the desk itself goes right to the edges and the shelves as well, or at least on one side, and then maybe I can bring in that picture frame that I have hanging. To make this even more of a full-page scene I'll do it like that, I'm going to just extend the shelves and the desk out to the left edge and then throw a framed picture here. Now, what I'm feeling is that there's something going off on all the sides except for the top. Now, what you didn't see in my drawing, but what I do have in my studio space is a pendant lamp. Suddenly I have an element that can let part of the top of the composition bleed off that edge as well and that creates a little bit more balance in the overall composition. The thing to take away here, however, your drawing and whatever scene you're trying to illustrate is that when you're thinking about composition, you get to decide what elements go where and what their scale is. You can exaggerate them, you can diminish them. You can make them taller or smaller, all working toward your goal of telling the story that you're trying to tell and create a composition that you like. You don't have to stick with what your references told you in reality. You take that reality and then you mash it up. It's plastic, it's malleable, it's putting your hands and you get to work with it to your own advantage. This is my very rough sketch. Now there is something that I feel is missing because I have the studio lighting. I think I need something that references a camera, so I could put the camera back up here, but it's a bit subtle. I don't think it's going to read in the image at all. Maybe instead of my laptop being here, I put a little tripod with the camera here. There's an opportunity for more cables and chords. What I also like with the camera being there on this little tripod is that it mirrors the tripods of the studio lighting, so some more interesting things going on there, but there are some things to clarify in this image. Let's bring this now into a more refined sketch in the next video.
17. Final Project: Refined Sketches: Once I've worked out my composition in rough form, it's time to refine. In this stage, I know mostly what will be in my illustration and where they will be placed. Now it's time to just clarify everything more. Here I traced over my rough sketch with more confidence strokes as clean and articulated as possible. This is my chance to figure out some things that I didn't really resolve in the roughs. I'll spend a bit more time being specific here, asking what each mark is suppose to be, and then making that intention clear. By the end of this stage, you should have a sketch that you feel confident you can finalize in your illustration style. In my client work, it is sketches from this stage that I'll show them before moving into the final art. In fact, after kicking off a project, the client won't see anything from me until the end of the refined sketches stage. I want to make sure they have a chance to see as much of my vision articulated as clearly as possible. It's only in a refined sketch that a client can properly give feedback on the three C's; content, composition, and concept. I want to avoid any questions like, what or who is that? If the sketch is not self-evident in how it tells the story or message, there's still more work to be done. So I have mapped out, from my memory and using some artistic decisions, a scene of my workspace, and I've decided to have me in the workspace recording with my studio setup. I've made a few changes to the reality of the situation to better tell the story, and I've made changes to the actual scale and size of things to help fit the frame better and to fill the frame better. So the next thing I want to do is just refine this. So I'm going to just take this sketch, I'm going to dial down its opacity so that I can see it, but not too much, and then add a layer over top and start refining over this with more confident lines. Now, of course, if you're drawing on paper, you can just put another fresh sheet of paper on top and use a light table to do your refined sketch. You can use tracing paper, that's basically what I'm doing by adding a layer over a more transparent version of my rough sketch. I'm just, again, going to start with the dominant shapes first. At a certain point, I'll feel brave enough to start doing some of the more tricky parts like the human figure. My illustration style is very flat and stylized, so everything that I'm drawing now in my refined version is aimed toward that more flattened style. Here I'm taking the opportunity to refine everything, make sure it looks better than it did in my rough sketch. Maybe paying a little bit more attention to some of those subtle details, such as what's closer and further away. I'm going to have a hard time with that hand right now, I think, so what I might do is just pretend that I stuck my hand between my legs, which no, I don't think that's going to work either. If you're stuck on something, come back to it later, or make a mistake now, and you can refine it in a further iteration, I think. The best thing I can do right now is just do something that looks kind of wrong and then I'll figure it out later. I often wear a hat. I'm small in that chair, and so I think what I'm going to do, maybe perhaps what's not working here, is that my scale is too small. So I think this is working out better. Again, I don't want to get too stuck on that, I'll probably have to reiterate on that again later. Now, as you iterate, you're going to lose the freshness of some of the sketch beneath. The rough sketch, even though it's not refined enough to be a final sketch, it has a certain life or liveliness to it that you may never be able to repeat again. That's just the reality of how things work when you're sketching toward illustration, and I've just grown to be okay with that. My goal, when I'm sketching toward illustration for clients, is always to have something that's clear, and that I know I can do in my final style. Along the way there are some casualties. I iterate over something's lost, some mark or doodle that I thought was amazing and had a lot of character. I put it away and never look at it again, because it may actually be true that it was better, but it doesn't matter that it was better, what matters is that I when I come and show my client my sketch, I don't want to confuse them with all these options of like, "We should take this good part from this and this good part from this other sketch, put it all together. It's too confusing and you lose a lot of your creative" leadership in this situation. So the best thing you can do is just except the next iteration as overall better than the last. It's more crisp, it's more clear. Yes, certain subtleties are lost, but the overall trajectory is that you're making the picture better. As I'm drawing some of these sticks in the illustration here, the legs on the table, the legs on the plant stand, the legs on the tripods of the studio lighting. I'm now expressing them with one kind of line, which is a lot closer to the kind of line that I'll use in my illustration. So I try to use just one or two line thicknesses and that creates a overall visual harmony. If you want to know more about some of these stylistic decisions, my class Sweet Spots has tons of ideas about decisions like this, what I would call your stylistic decisions, and then I talk about having style palette, where you actually preset what kind of line quality and thickness you'll work in before you even start the work, and then you just discipline yourself to stick to those throughout the piece, and it creates this visual harmony just because there's only one thing going on, instead of lots of different things going on stylistically. Sometimes I'll draw a reference line that gives me a sense of, for instance, this is a horizon line on the floor that I want to match up over on this side. There's more flattening going on in this than there was in the previous iteration. I'm seeing some conflicting lines that are getting really busy there that I'm not really sure about, but I'm going to keep going. I can edit that out in the next round. I have to move where my iPad was so can see it now that I've enlarged my figure, and I need to fill something in that space possibly. I can at least put a microphone here. I'm going to put my MacBook here just to fill the space. I also remember that I had shelf brackets. Now, with this light hanging down, there are some things that are being obscured back here, so maybe I just keep it simple back there. As I'm drawing these frames into my sketch, I'm undecided what will go in them. Because it's such a busy composition, perhaps just having frames with white space coming through will help the image to breathe a little bit, but it might also be okay just to sort very abstractly that these are posters, or pictures, or something like that. I don't know how specific I would want to get. Do I want to actually be specific and put 4chan then try to imitate the illustration that's on that magazine that I framed? It might be too specific. It depends on whether I want this to be more documentary or a little bit more of an idea about just a guy. Now, because this already has very specific, we have studio lighting, and it is, in a way, it's more documentary than more just cool guy in a cool studio, so I'll have to think about that. Even as I go along, I wonder, do I want to change some of the contents of what's here just to simplify it or make it look more familiar or recognizable to an outsider? Those are questions I ask and could answer just by trying different things i think one of the things that I'm going for in this is clarity. Whatever I include in here, I need to be clear about what it is so I know how to illustrate it in my final style. It looks like I'll be going into a next iteration of this. So I'm just going to hide the previous rough sketch and then I'm going to dumb this one down or make it less visible, it's like drawing over this. So I'm looking at my composition. I'm feeling pretty good about it. I just want to clarify a few things. I felt like there is some conflicts going on with the plant and the studio light here. So what I might do is find a way of actually removing one of these. I think what I might do is keep the plant and see what happens if I remove that second light. I think I might redo these leaves. Those felt a little bit too heavy through the middle, I like what I had before, and this guy, I like that where it was. I just snuck a peek at my light, just to figure out how this piece fit on there. So I cheated a little bit, but it was in the spirit of making things more clear. Now, I haven't really determined what color the carpet will be. Will it be one solid color? Will it be a pattern? I can figure that out later. Hands are a pin point when it comes to illustrating people. Now I've gone from t-shirt to button down shirt for some reason. Depicting this guy from the back of his head, you automatically don't need to worry about who he is, what does his face look like, that kind of stuff. This is one last decision to make and it actually creates more mystique in the image itself. Because I've made his hand like that, it really looks like he's now talking and doing something. There's something interesting just about the way his hand is positioned, there is some action happening there. I can't really remember exactly how my little microphone stand worked, so I'm just going to really abstract it hoping that you get the idea of a stand. If when you're drawing in Procreate, and you just want to make sure things line up, you can always just throw back on your drawing guide, and you use that just to make sure that, for me like I want this edge of the desk to line up on the site as well, so you can use the drawing guide to make sure that everything lines up like that, but I try not to rely on things like that too much where all things start to look really gridy. Somewhere along the way I lost my garbage can, I guess when I put the plant there. Avoiding the temptation to fill everything in. So draw that shelf right across, this shelf right across to here. This is the floor. I'll figure what to do with that later. Sometimes it helps to turn off the messiness of the underlying sketch. You can see what you're working on now a little bit more clearly. I'm just going to may be hint at a chest of drawers here without it being all the way, just the edge of it. From iteration to iteration, I do keep things, some things the same I just redraw them again, don't mind it. Here's just a stylized plant that doesn't exist, but I wanted something to fill that space and I had that available in my imagination so I just put it there. When other people look at a scene like this, as long as you put things in that seem familiar to them, they won't be distracted by them. As soon as you put something obscure in the mix, and it's not clear what it is, people will scratch their heads and wonder what it is. It can be distracting. If you just have the shape of a bottle, the shape of a plant, the shape of a picture frame, those things are pretty generic. It's not to say your illustration is generic, but you've chosen to just keep some familiar things in the scene that people can at least not be distracted by or ideally even identify with. It's weird that there is flowers and now we're overthinking in it, but it's weird that there is flowers there and little cups, so let me just add flowers. I'm choosing here to really stylize things a lot and remove them from reality, but it could actually make an interesting illustration to actually keep some of the things that are actually in my studio in. Like I said, it could be documentary, it could be more about the reality and that could also be interesting, but what I want to show in this class is how to stylize, abstract, simplify and in a way generalize to the effect of communicating an idea clearly. I've decided to move all the arms of these brackets going that way just because it works better to fit things in and keep things spaced evenly. I want a different shape here. I'm going to pretend that I have a pennant. I don't know what it says, but it's more interesting to have some other shape there, a triangle and the triangle nicely. Now that I look at it echoes the triangle there and here, may be I'll bring back my sunglasses, and may be I'll rough in some pattern here. I don't have to be specific, I can just imply there is some pattern, and if I have to show this to a client first for sign-off, we don't have to get into a conversation about what exactly that pattern is before I'm ready to make that decision. Let's turn off the underlying sketch, and I'm feeling really good about where this is going. I think it just needs one little thing. We have this big open monitor here with nothing on the screen, and what if it had this guy recording himself wearing a shirt in his studio. It's weird because the camera's way over here. I want something to be on that monitor, so let's figure this out. It could be me drawing this picture. It could be me with a stylus in my hand drawing this picture, working it out. I'm just figuring this out as I go along. I have the main idea of the scene done. If I wanted to, I could take it into the final, but I'm just dwelling here for a bit and seeing what fun little surprise details I could add to make it more interesting. There is something about this that I like. The drawing in here is going to be very simplified compared to the drawing that I'm actually making out here, but it's a nice little nugget to discover in the scene where this guy drawing a picture of a picture he's in, and there's a camera setup. There's just a story going on here. I'm ready to take this into final illustration. I'm sure there's some weird things that I'll find that I missed, but for the most part, I'm happy with this. Let's maybe make sure I duplicate this just to save it and then open one of these copies here. What I want to do is just compare the original with the more refined. Let's put the more refined on the right and the more rough on the left. As you can see, I very rapidly laid down all my things from memory in the first rough sketch. As I did that, a story about what was happening unfurled before my eyes. I didn't come in planning to make a story about a guy on his computer with a self-referential screen of the image itself and all that, all I knew was I was going to make a scene of me and my workspace or a guy in his workspace and I had all those parts already to work with. As I lay those out, I was able to work out what my composition was, what elements stayed in, what elements went out, what new things that I introduce, how did I simplify, all those decisions I made to make the composition stronger and to tell the story better, and to fix things like conflicts where there's lots of things overlapping that I thought could be cleaned up a bit. This process of improving and refining will continue even into the final art, but of course if I was showing this to a client, I would make sure that they're signing off on content, composition and concept, so I don't want to get too crazy in what I change between this in my final art. The client is now going to expect to see something very much like this but in my style and in color with some textures and in other magical bits like that. Things are going to stay more or less the same, but I may have some insights about what to do about what's going on here. For instance in the final, but perhaps everything's going to line up just perfectly and I won't need to make any adjustments to the composition, so that's what I'm going to do next, and I'll see you in the next video.
18. Final Project: Finished Artwork: [MUSIC] Once you've refined your sketch, it's time to work your magic and make it a fully finished illustration. Like I said, this is where you bring your own tools and techniques to the project. I'll show you an overview of my process but the big idea here is how my drawing style connects more seamlessly to my final illustration style. Now it's your turn to put the principles from this class to the test [MUSIC] in this class, all drawing and sketching leads to one final destination, the final illustration, this is drawing toward illustration and everything we've been doing has been with a direction and a purpose. As illustrators, we don't draw for a living. We create images that tell powerful stories and express meaningful ideas in visually compelling ways. When you're done your illustration, please share it on the class projects page. But please don't forget to show us all that process leading up to it. In fact, this is the most important thing to show in this class, to show the progression from Mode 1 or observational drawing to Mode 2 or ideational drawing. It's in this transition where your voice in confidence begins to shine through whether you like it or not. My hope, of course, is that you will begin to fall in love with drawing in your own way, that you'll become confident and bold in how you draw toward illustration. If you're excited to share anything on Instagram, please be sure to let me know by tagging me @mrtomfroese and use the #drawingtowardillustration. This is one of the best ways to show me what you're up to and I'm always grateful for the hype, but most importantly, I'm so thankful for the time you've chosen to spend with me. All right guys, it's time to finalize this illustration. I have already sent my sketch from Procreate to my Mac. Now I have it open in Photoshop and of course, Photoshop is what I use to finalize my illustrations and I'm encouraging you guys to finalize your illustrations using the tools and techniques that you love to use. For a lot of you that's going to be staying in Procreate and finishing it right there, I think that's great. A lot of you will have similar workflow to mine using Photoshop. Perhaps you're more into vector illustration, however you do it. To be honest at this point that you've learned everything you need to learn in this class. We have now learned to draw toward illustration and all that's left to do is actually finish the illustration in a more finalized style. With that out of the way, let's get this thing all illustrated. I have this sketch from Procreate open, but of course I need to make an actual final illustration file in Photoshop. What I'm going to do is create a new file and I want this to be my final print size, which is eight inches by 10 inches. Of course I want to make it 300 pixels per inch so that it will print nicely if that was ever what I wanted to do. I keep my color space in RGB and a lot of people may think differently about that, but that's just how I started. I do recommend working in RGB color mode. Let's just get this new file open and the first thing I want to do is just take this most refined version of the sketch and copy it and just paste it here into my document and just stretch it right to the edges. As always, I like to take my sketch down to about 30 percent opacity and then I create a layer group above it that I call Art. This is where I put all the art in the final illustration all ends up in this layer group and I just set the transparency of this entire layer group to multiply and that way everything I do inside this group will allow the sketch to shine through. So let's begin. To begin, I just start making a shape wherever my eye leads, which is in the center of the composition and right away, I'm working out color. Now I have a go-to color palette and I use this palette with almost every project, unless I'm required to by my client, I just stick to this, so that makes my decision of what colors to use very easy. Here I am just blocking in shapes of color and of course, I remember at this point to save my document, very important when you're working on a very detailed illustration. Here, I'm going to cut out the shape of the planter from the orange beneath so that I have effectively a negative shape there the page color is going through, and now I'm moving on to the screen. Here, I'm working out how to make those corners look rounded in a nice, clean way. Sometimes I have to start again from scratch just to make sure everything's as crisp and clean as possible. Rounded corners are really tricky to do by hand when you're not using an automatic feature like what you can get in Adobe Illustrator. Photoshop is a bit different. Now I'm doing the shells. This is a easy copy and paste but of course, when copying and pasting you get not only a duplicate of the shape but a duplicate of your quirks and accidents so you want to get rid of those accidents. Otherwise, you see two of the same accident which amplifies them. Now here's the first time I'm introducing line work into the equation and now applying what I did in the late, also to the legs of the chairs, always using a very similar and consistent lion style. I'm using a brush here to add the tennis balls for the feet. Adding some little details to make them more tennis ball-like and ultimately I decided here to make those cracks in the tennis balls with a very simple shape. Now working on the planter legs, using the exact same brushstroke as the legs on the chair. Sometimes takes a few tries to get those lines exactly the way I want them to go. Here I'm questioning whether having the desk right across is the right idea. Maybe I want to have the desk in the middle of the composition instead so the whole page isn't split in two with that big dark line of the desk in the middle. I always find doing human figures using the pen tool as I do, one of the most tricky parts of an illustration, just because you have all these overlapping layers and parts of the arm over the body and stuff like that. Slowly but surely I work it out getting some skin tone in there and of course some hair. I'm still working out the colors, maybe that light blue will work for my screen, I'm not sure yet and again, I'm I'm still working out whether I want that desk to cut right across the screen or the page. Maybe by making it a lighter pink instead of that dark blue, that will eliminate that effect of cutting the page in half. Here, I'm adding details to this drawer and what I'm going to find here is that just copying and pasting the line with a little pull handle there creates a nice repetition and harmonious look just by copying and pasting that and just not worrying too much about having even spacing. That adds a little bit more human quality to it as well. Now working out the shapes of the legs. Always a little bit of a process to work that out. At this point with the shoes, I'm trying to figure out what color they'll be so that they'll contrast both with my legs and with the background elements. I introduced the gray, which actually isn't unlike the color of my actual shoes in real life. Keeping those line strokes consistent with everything else. I basically I have two line strokes in terms of width. I have the thinner one like you see in the details of the shoe and the thicker ones like you see in the legs of the chair. Adding some white lines adds some nice detail and separation between the dark elements of my clothing, and then seeing if I can add some wrinkles to enhance the feeling of the bendiness of my legs. Again, just playing around, seeing what works, doing a little too much and then taking it back. What's that right balance between the line separating the two legs and having the wrinkles there and now I'm working on should I have stitching or other facets or features in the genes there? Then I say no. It was a bit too flashy, so I took it away. Trying to get those fingers just the right shape. Now it's okay to take away the sketch for a while just to see how the artwork is standing up on its own. Now I'm going to move into adding some brackets for the shelves and again, it's a copy and paste operation here because these elements are very minor, allowing them to repeat just creates a nice consistency in a very simple, clean way. Now I'm adding the shapes for the studio light and I'm going to be working out how I do these flaps on the light. Am I going to use strokes or am I going to use shapes? Ultimately, I decided that shapes are the way to go. Then I start fussing around with the details of how these flaps are attached to the light itself and of course what the details on the back of the lighter. I just need enough to suggest perhaps a little bit of depth just to give the light of bit of presence. But I'm going to fuss quite a bit over what details to include on the back, so it's not distracting. Now, I'm working out the pattern on the planter. What I'm going for here is just making sure it's natural-looking in a way, like the brush that I'm using. Actually, it doesn't look like a digital brush. Some of my pencil brushes here look too digital, so I'm working out which ones look the most natural and then working on the actual quality of each line in that pattern. Ultimately, I create a small set of lines that I repeat again just to have that consistency and simplicity. Now it's time to work out how on earth I am going to create the leaves of the plant, which in my style that uses a lot of shapes using the pen tool, is tricky. So I've found this brush, it tapers to an end and I'm just working it out here, and using an eraser to just sharpen the ends of each of those leaves on the plant. I decide now that the desktop is going to be yellow and then I second guess whether the carpet is going to bleed off the edges, instead, crop it tight almost to the edge and now I am playing around with what pattern I'll add to that carpet. First repeating the pattern and then adding a bit of variation so it doesn't look totally cut and paste. I also added the red stripes in there too, and then I decide just to add a fray to the ends of the carpet and this adds more visual interest and helps that edge of the carpet just not to be so abrupt. Now I'm considering what color my shirt should be. In the picture that I drew this from, I was wearing all black, but adding the shirt as a different color will create again more visual interest in contrast. Now I'm working at the frame of the iPad and the contours of the chair, just a very simple line will do, and now adding my MacBook. Now I wanted it to be black just like the screen, the main screen in the middle is black, but it doesn't contrast well, of course, with the studio light in front of it, so I make it light blue instead. Then, of course, working out what color that screen on the MacBook will be. I think I'll come back to that later. Again, doing the tripod for the camera in the same line quality that I did for the legs on the chair and the tripods at the studio lights, just working out some simple details for the camera itself, not feeling loyal to the colors of the camera in real life. I don't have a pink and blue camera, but I want some pink there. I figured that adding the same color of orange to this little clamp light, making that the same color as the pendant light above me makes sense. Checking without the sketch again, seeing how it's all coming together. Now, I'm finding that the tennis balls aren't contrasting with the yellow in that carpet enough, so I'm wondering if maybe adding some shadows will help the tennis balls pop more, but I feel like the shadow just doesn't really work here, it really stands out. So I instead shade the entire carpet and just make it a shade darker, which helps those balls pop out. Now adding the cable from the light and just getting that cable twist just right. While I'm doing cables, why not do the plug on the other side of the picture? Again, working out how to make that outlet look like an outlet without overworking it. In here, I'm working out how I'm going to do the two drawers, and I find that just repeating the drawer on the left and making it work on the right works perfectly. Bringing a wheel over to the right set of drawers, even though I don't have one in real life, works well. Now I'm working on the pendant. Setting up my grid here so that I can make some lettering for the pendant. At first, I was thinking I would put "Skillshare" on the pendant, but it wasn't fitting right, so I just wrote "cool" instead. I make my lettering a bit bigger than I usually need it in the placed final position and then shrink it down and that makes the lettering look a little more crisp. Now I'm adding some wood grain texture for the desktop. First I draw it over top the whole thing and then I'll place it later within the shape of the desktop itself. Now I'm adjusting the color to white because it's a bit more subtle. Now, on my wall I have different pictures and records with graphics that I really like. So that's what these are here and I'll be working out just how much detail I include in these records. Do I go to town and really add tons of details or do I pull it back and just suggest what's on the covers without being super literal? So here at the microphone, I'm going to work out how to do that mesh and I find that just a thinner line actually works well, and just repeating it in a hash like a cross hatching texture or pattern, works great. Adding a few details to the hat will help separate that hat from the screen which are the same color. Now I'm working on some of the frames on the shelf and around the shelf, and just like the records, I'll be working out how detailed I'll make what's inside these frames. So will it just be white shining through, like the page shining through, or will I add actual details of what's in those frames? That's something I'll figure out later. If I don't know what colors to use, I'll just use any color randomly, and make changes if I need to later on. Also, just trying to figure out the exact proportion of these books that I have lying on top of each other wasn't working for me, so I started again and then I realized that the phone is that red color, so I take read out of the books and use it for the phone that's sitting on top. I make that middle book white instead. Now here I spend a lot of time just trying to get that squiggle or spiral of the phone cord just right. Nothing seems to be working out until I do just a tiny little one there and there I've got it. Now moving on to these bottles. These bottles are on my shelf because I designed the labels. They are now empty, but I love the labels so I have them up on my shelf. Just a little white line to separate the two. Adding another record that's between the two shelves, moving those brackets, so they can accommodate the different things on the shelf, and now it's time to do some of the magazines and books on the shelf. So I find that just by doing a simple stroke to represent the spine of a magazine and vary the colors I've create a nice abstract pattern. It's a nice simple way of representing the magazines without getting too detailed. Of course, making sure that the variation between different colors is in a way unexpected. It's not all just random looking colors like I've grouped a few in blue and pink and red up there, especially the ones in little boxes that I'm drawing holes on now. I'm still trying to figure out what color those drawers underneath the desk will be. I found that pink was a little less intense than the red. Circling back to the MacBook again, adding just some simple subtle details. These things reveal themselves to me as I go along. If it gets stuck on it, I just leave it, come back to it later, and usually I have more clarity when I do. Now I'm doing some of the larger books on my bookshelf. These are coffee table books. So trying some more broad spines here in different colors, and seeing how that works. I'm struggling here to see what works, and thinking maybe I need some kind of separating element between each book. But I find that looks in congress with other things that I have going on on the shelves particularly. So ultimately I scrap that approach and decide just to go for the lines similar to what I have on the shelf above because it doesn't matter what's really there. Right now I want to just suggest that there's books on the shelf and have a level of visual consistency, and harmony throughout the composition. Keeping it simple and abstract and repeated allows me not to worry about what details are on those spines of the books. I was getting caught up in what those books were and what colors they were, so I just scrapped it and went with something simpler. It was a minor element, so it didn't matter. As soon as something say is drawing too much attention to itself, and it's not really meant to be a focal point of the illustration, I try to simplify it and dumb it down. Now I'm going to work out how to do a transparent like a glass vase. In my otherwise kind of flat and solid color scheme here. So just outlining that vase with a blue outline suggests clear where the water hasn't come all the way up. The flowers I haven't thought about what kind of flowers these are, just flowers in general. So any detail there doesn't really matter as long as they have a flower like appearance to them and looks good, then I'm happy. Here I'm just working out some of the details of that clip or clamp that were bothering me. I found that the contrast and shading on the carpet was too dark, so I lighten it up. Then I want to add just a few more little dots to those billy balls. Now I'm working out some details for the leaves on the house plant. Can I make the house plant look more interesting and somehow more complete? Nothing I'm doing is quite working out. Maybe something white will do. Just keep trying. There's something there. Now I'm overworking it. I decided to scrap it and maybe come back to it later. Now I'm working out a pattern for my shirt. One of my go-to patterns in my illustration for shirts is of course plaid, which I also tend to wear a lot. So there's an autobiographical element to this, and here I'm just trying to make that plaid pattern as nice and simple but effective as possible. Always trying to make things look loose and whimsical without looking sloppy, and on the other side, you don't want it to look overworked. Turning the sketch back on so that I can continue with some of the details. Getting as much color variety as I can. Balancing where the colors appear throughout the illustration. Here's another transparent vessel. This is a jar on top of my desk with some rulers and tape. So here I'm struggling to make that shape look even and ultimately I give up and cheat and copy and paste the side over to the other so that it's symmetrical, and then start drawing in the elements or the contents of this jar. Again, just, I'll be working out how I represent the objects in this transparent vessel using a pretty solid and flat color scheme. Takes me a bit of time here, but I get there eventually. A lot of things I get stuck on, I just leave it for now and move on to the next thing, here is a pair of sunglasses on my desk and I get them fussing over exactly how to do these glasses. Then I move on to some of the other unfinished elements. In this case the plant on top of my shelf. For the plant itself, I'm going to use the same color and the same brush that I used for the leaves of the plant, the main plant on the floor. This big gray box here is my printer. Now for the details inside the screen here, which is a picture of the picture here, I keep it really simple, I just use one stroke of line in one color and suggest this image rather than go and try and repeat the whole image in more detail here. It's enough for something at this size. I'll take time and care to make it look considered so that it doesn't look sloppy. But other than that, I keep it simple. Just harmonizing things more by creating a similar corner style to the screen behind the iPad there. Then of course, because I'm working on Astra pad, using my iPad as a graphics tablet, it is seeing what's on my screen as well, so I include that detail. just adding some finishing touches here, dimming down the images on my screens there. So they're not quite as obvious and dominating. Eventually, I find the color that works. I feel like I want to put some kind of element on top of these books and in front of that pink square. I land on this beer growler, which I actually have on my shelf, and leave it at that. Now, I'm finally adding the details to this darker record beside me on the wall, and I add a bit of hand lettering to it. Again, working on my lettering a little larger and then scaling it downs can make it look more crisp than if I had just drawn it in place, making more lettering this time for the yellow record. This yellow record is a cover that's designed by Alex Steinweiss, one of the great album cover designers of the mid-century. Not getting into too many details here, just suggesting what's on the record, and making sure I tuck that behind the rulers. Now I'm working on maybe adding some shading, just a touch and making the cable white here, I think was a good move because it's neat how it kind of disappears and the white near my feet and then leads you off the page on the bottom. So I was really happy with how that turned out. Fussing with some more details. Finally getting back to this jar of rulers and tape on my desk. Resolving that, working out one last kind of abstract detail on this cover. I don't want to be too specific and distract them, so I create a blob and refine the edge of it to make it look more considered. Get the tone just right. I play around with getting a tone inside this growler as well. Just something a little darker to suggest dark glass. Finally, I decide that yes, I'm going to put something in these frames. Just a suggestion of what's in them without being too specific. So again, doing some more hand lettering. This frame has a magazine with a cover designed by one of my favorite illustrators, Ben Shahn. I'm not going to try and imitate that in the illustration here. I just draw a general blob in there and that's enough. Same with the clown painting. Just something simple. Of course, don't forget this very important finishing touch. I think I'm done.
19. Conclusion!: All right guys, that's it. We're done. Thanks for working through all the lectures and the primer, for going through all the exercises and of course for bringing up all home in the final illustration project. I hope you had a lot of fun working through the assignments. I hope you learned a ton about Drawing Toward Illustration. I especially hope you gain some valuable clues to your own unique voice in all of this. If you have any questions along the way, as always, please ask me, I'm although answering your questions. For general questions about the content in this class, you can write me a note in the discussions page of this class. If you want more specific feedback on the exercises or final project, please be sure to post your work to the projects and resources page of this class. Posting there is the best way for me to see what you make. I make it my goal to see each and every project you guys post. Also by posting your project, you inspire others to do the same. Of course, I encourage you all to look at one another's projects and to give helpful feedback to one another. You guys are always such a stand-up bunch, always kind and respectful. It's always a joy to see our community of creatives building one another up. I highly recommend taking advantage of Skillshare's community of creative learners by seeking feedback from your fellow students. Perhaps offer a trade of your critique on their project, for theirs, on yours. If you share anything you've made in this class or directly as a result from taking it on Instagram, please use the hashtag drawingtowardillustration. That way I can really keep up with what you're doing beyond this class. You know I love seeing your work in the wild. Thank you so much for taking Drawing Towards Illustration. I'll see you in the next class.
Tom Froese, Illustrator and Designer
