Drawing your MINI YOU in your journal!

1. Trailer: Hey guys. My name is Ramona Mclean and I am a freelance illustrator and art teacher. During my time working, I came up with this cute little character named Freckles, which is a little mini me. I use her to express myself in my daily journal nearly every day. In this class, you will learn how to create your own mini. You make rules for how they are drawn, draw your character in five different expressions and poses using a simple trick. After you are comfortable drawing your character, I will show you how to use those skills to make a page in your journal and then color it in with colored pencil. For this class, you will need some paper, whether in a sketchbook journal or loose sheets. A pen or pencil and some colored pencils. That's it. I can't wait to get started. See you in the next video. 2. My Story: Hey guys. I wanted to go over why you would even want to make a little mini character for your journal. I'll just go over my story and why I got into it. I was working at an animation studio and I was not having a good time. A lot of my work got redone and I just felt like most of the stuff I was doing was not mine. I was not being creative. I ended up looking at a lot of people's comics online then in drawing my own character. So I'll show you what it looked like when I first drew her, It does not look the same at all. This was before I made my character. Like a human character. These are me practicing, oh gosh. Some of these. I look at them and I'm like hole. But I love that I have these because, yeah, they're just so helpful. Anyways, I drew these first and that gave me an outlet for dealing with my emotions. I drew some really weird poses just to show how I was feeling at that time. I think these are the only ones I have in here. It was really helpful just to get it out on paper and make fun of what was going on by exaggerating the emotion that I was having it. Let me laugh a little bit. Blow off some steam. Yeah, it helped a lot. I started out with these and then I turned to drawing my comic character in real life settings. I started looking at the studio I was working in as a world for a small creature. I take photos with my camera and then use my ipad or computer to draw my character in those worlds, which it just made it a little bit more magical. That was why I started. Some other reasons why I do it is because it keeps me creating every day, even if it's just a little bit in my bullet journal. So I'll show you an example of what I do every day here. I just have some notes and then have a little character just giving a little emotion that our pose that goes with that's super helpful. It's visual keeps my book, visual keeps me present in the moment. Allows me to process my emotions by drawing it out and laughing at it. Just like I did with my drawings at work, I can look back and remember how I worked through something or see the patterns in my life. Drawings help you connect to the moment. When I look at a drawing, I typically go back to the place I was when I drew it. Now because I've drawn so many of her looking at this pose, I might not fully go back there. But if it is a drawing that's a little bit different than the rest, then I definitely remember where I was, how I was feeling that thing. It's helpful to add little words beside it, That's why I do it. Hopefully you can find some reasons in there as well. Maybe it's just fun. A good way to stretch your drawing muscles. That's why I do it. Join me for the next video and I'll show you some examples of my drawings. 3. Inspiration: Let's get into some examples. When I first started drawing freckles, by the way, freckles is half unicorn, half fox, and a little bit of magic, something. But when I first started drawing her, I drew her in like a fatter, less small way. The way that I describe small is body small and head larger. It makes such a difference between these, where her whole body is quite large. Coming up, you'll see I did this experiment where I saw some really cute little drawings online. First of all, this is very funny, me and chips super excited. Anyway, I saw some drawings online of some characters that had a really big head, really small body. And I was like, I can do that, I can draw freckles, cuter. This was how I was drawing her originally. And then I tried drawing her tiny like this, and I loved it way more. So this is her just saying that she's cuter than the other. Here's some sketches. Here's a big coat, which is a coat that I bought. Yes, very large and I tend to wear it before winter. Even really has hit. Here's a few more of trying to make her body smaller. This was a fun time. Generally, when my period comes, I start to draw freckles in so many different poses. Something I can fall victim to is drawing her in the exact same pose every single time on this day. I was like no more of that. Each draw her in crazier poses to explain what emotion I'm going through and I really loved it. There's me eating my snacks, period. I was drawing this little dot when I have my period. I was going on a trip and I was like, all right, let's see how this is going to go I had my little bullet journal with me and then, yeah, it went well. I draw this little pose a lot like a little thumbs up. I just think it's pretty cute feeling sore. So I added some shaky lines there then I wish it would rain. So holding my hands up hoping that the rain would come. This was talking about going to the gym. It's feeling pretty good, sticking out a little booty and get in some muscles here. I was just practicing different poses, coloring them for this class. Actually, sometimes the poses do not turn out amazing. That's just part of it, and that's okay. But that just means that you're trying new things. If you come across poses you don't like, good job, you're trying out, stuff got really narrowed eye there. This was when I went to a birthday party, and so I drew my little dress that I was wearing. It was fun when it was really cold out. Yep. Sometimes I like to use colors to go around the shape to give it a silhouette. Instead of just coloring in the main pose, I normally use color pencil to color it. Here's a mind blown, sometimes I'll draw like the head coming full off the body. But I like to draw like tiny little slits for eyes going in opposite directions when something crazy is happening. Drying a little sweater, pencil. The thing about freckles is she can fly. She's got wings. Every so often I draw her in a flying pose, but I honestly, I don't do it enough. I should do it more. Here's some water color period should be coming today, I hope. And then Crazy Eyes brain is all over the place. Me excited about my new ink. Because she's drawn so little here and her body is so little. It just gives her this tiny cuteness. I don't know. It's similar to like animal crossing proportions because the body is so tiny. And just gives it this really cute look. I don't know. And there's her sitting in my tea cup. I love doing that too. Just added some color around there. Lots of thoughts. Come here, I'll write about a certain thing on my to do list. Give it a little drawing, write some more stuff. Underline it. Here's a bunch of poses. We'll be going through some of those that was just practicing for this class. Here's a flying pose, there's some as going on. This actually the other day it was hourly Comic Day. I just drew a little bits from my day. I didn't worry too much about exactly getting comics for every hour, but I just drew a little thoughts and added little poses and it's really fun. Do it on the back as well, but I didn't color that page. Thanks so much for watching. I hope you got inspired, and we'll be getting into how to draw these poses. 4. Character Design: Before I get into this, if you haven't designed your character yet, I would definitely go back and watch my other comic class on designing you as a comic character. That goes a lot more in depth on how to actually design the character. This one is using a pre existing character that you already have. Let's talk about your character. Say you really like coffee, right? Maybe you draw a little coffee cup. All right? Pretty simple. Your, some legs, eyes, and a body, right? Maybe that's your character. You don't want it to be too detailed because you're going to be drawing these over and over and over again, right? So if you have something that has a lot of detail, a lot of hair, that's just going to be really difficult. Really like bread, this is your character crust. All right. Something simple. You can do eyes or you can do more expressive eyes and just make the pupils whatever size you want it. When you're designing your character, think about how your character moves. Does it have feet? Does it have a tail like a mermaid tail? Does it swim? Does it walk on land? Does it fly? Does it float? Maybe you have a C character and, uh, he's got feet. Or maybe you have a cloud character that does not have feet and just floats. So you could draw a little shadow underneath it. Maybe it's a little nervous. Maybe it's got arms but no legs, right? Think about these things when you do your character because that's going to give it rules for how they move. Do you want a head that's really big and a body that's really small? Animal crossing, you've got your big head and your little body like that, Maybe it's got one curly hair, looks a little bit creepy. Looks like a baby. But hey, maybe you are going for a baby character, right? Just keep it simple though. Does it crawl? Basically come up with rules for your character. From freckles, she can fly. So I can draw with her legs in basically whatever position I want. I can make her wings flat. When I draw my character, I draw her sideways. I'll draw one eye on this side and one eye peeking out from the other side of her head. You can draw them straightforward, or you can choose to make a rule that you draw them mostly sideways. Every so often I'll draw her flat. But she actually doesn't look that great. When I draw facing forward, I'll try to show you what that looks like. Her nose would be there. She just kind of looks like a totally different character when I draw her like that. Get her here. So cute, but just different. Mickey Mouse. His ears are always drawn as full circles no matter which direction his head turns. I'm trying them like Disneyland. It does not look like this. It will look like this, and maybe one on the side, but they're always, you can make, these are called chats in animation. As long as it looks good in whatever position you're putting them in, it's fair game. Think about that. Write a list of your character's character traits, how they move, Did they float, walk, swim fly, et cetera. What is their basic personality? Freckles is very sassy and imaginative. She's similar to me, but she has a few other little differences. Think of them as you with a twist. They have tendencies to get maybe more dramatic or maybe more melancholy up to you, but just write it down and play around with different designs. 5. Expressions: Let's get into expressions. When I draw freckles, I just draw her standard like this. Maybe a little smile. Eyes facing forwards, eyelashes. That's your basic freckle look. If I was to make her look happy, I could draw her like that. Or I could push it, give her a big mouth, and suddenly she looks way happier than this. I could push that even farther. Give her squinty eyes. Remember we're just doing expressions right now. I'm not going to pull any limbs into it, but this is pushing it just a little bit farther than this. What we're going to do is we're going to go over the different expressions. And what I want you to do is each one of them start with a base, This is happy 123. Next, if we're going to go to sad. So I want you to write or draw your character in just a basic sad face. Now I want you to push that, how do you make it even more sad? Maybe add some tears bubbling up there. Could fill it in with blue so it looks a bit more tear like. And the third one I'm going to go really intense, give like sobbing. Lines 12, three. Next one we're going to do is angry. Start off simple. Make sure to get those nice eyebrows in there, not happy. Second one going to push even more. Make more intense eyebrows. Give her eyes that are looking kind of up. Give her more of a frown. Maybe some lines under her eyes. And for the last one, move her nose down. She's like snarling. You can go even further than these, but use this as a jumping off point angry. I want you to do the same thing as that. 32 more poses. We're going to do disgust and scared. Maybe the first disgust is grows. The next one is like that is disgusting. And the third one, they're vomiting. Scared can be just a little nervousness. Then go, oh my gosh, something's in the dark about to attack me. A screaming to pause the video. Take a second and draw those out. 6. Mirror Tip: When you're drawing poses and expressions, a really good idea is to use a mirror as you're drawing. Just put a mirror near you, make the face into the mirror, and then look at the different things that your face is doing. What are your eyebrows doing? What is your mouth doing? Is your eyes squinting up and your lids covering part of your eye? Then for full body poses, go stand in front of a mirror and do a pose. You can even take a photo of it. But just pay attention to the positioning of your body. Is your chest puffed out? Is your legs bent? Are you putting weight on a certain leg? What are your arms doing then when you go to draw it? Just push that pose or push that expression a little bit further than it looks like on you. And that's a really good way to figure out how to draw something. 7. Poses: You should have drawn your character with those five different emotions. Now what we're going to do is we're going to take those ones that we drew and we're going to add oppose to it. So let's start with happy. You could just draw your character standing there smiling. Yeah, I'm happy. But it's kind of boring, right? And there's always levels to this happiness. But maybe you draw your character with its arms up a little bit more excited, leaning forward, maybe give it a little strain under the eye because the mouth is kind of pushing that up. All right? And then you can push it even more. Oh my God, I'm so excited. Maybe limbs are flailing. Something like that. So there's so many poses you can do for happy or excited. Now it's sad, All right? You can start with kind of sad eyebrows up, looking down, so that's sad, but it's not sad. Sad, right? So maybe we tilt the head down a bit, maybe shrug up. The little hands bend and maybe the tails is kind of flat and the wings are flat as well. All right, so that's happy, sad. Now let's do angry. So you could go straight, two arms clenched. Maybe get a little fist going there. Maybe get tiny, crazy high, standing up. Maybe tail is a little fizzy, Got some lines under the eyes. You could also blow the character's head right off their body. Get some smoke lines. Similar body shape to the last poof exploding upwards. There you go. Try things out, try those three, and then disgust and scared. 8. Lets make a page!: Let's make a page together. I've already written down my to do list for today. And this is about the point in my day or my page where I will start drawing little doodles, adding stickers, just filling up the day. I'll just show you my day yesterday just for some context concept. Yeah. Here I printed out the sticker of macrame knots that I made. I've been getting into some macrame yesterday. I just started practicing different types of knots so I could understand it before I started making all these crazy things that don't spend much time on the knots themselves. I printed that out because that's something that I've been working on recently. It's heavy on my mind. I'm going to stick this down. I'm going to add a few Tes to this. Just what the name of the knots are. Now I want to add some thoughts about this with my character when I think about doing these knots, I'm excited about it. I'm proud of myself for actually sticking it out because some of these were really difficult to figure out and I had to do them quite a few times before I realized what I was doing wrong in my little cartoon character. I'm going to show that she is proud and happy. I'm going to draw her out here. I give myself a bit of space, I'm going to give her closed eyes because that looks more proud and smile, maybe. Hands on hips. I could have her pointing upwards at the knots or I could do double hips. As I'm thinking this out, I'm imagining myself doing these poses just like I showed in the video before. I could do the pose myself and think, okay, what pose would I do if I was trying to show this? I could definitely do two hands on hips. I could put one hand out, or I could do a finger giving some information. I think I'm going to go with two hands on the hips for this one. Sounds a little wonky, but it's okay. You still get the point. There's my main character there. I don't have a ton of space up here to write. I might write one little blurb there and then maybe something longer underneath. Maybe up here, we proud of myself, I had a little bubble. And then down here I'll say even though some not were difficult, I stuck it, I exclamation mark. Then I'm going to add another bubble here. You can write as many bubbles coming from the same illustration as you like sometimes I'll do that. Then I'm going to add another comic over here with her saying, excited to make the heart pattern. I've been looking at this heart pattern, I finally understand the knot that I need in order to make it. I'm going to draw her down here. I'm going to draw a really big, some larger teeth. I can either draw your pupils little like that or I can make them large. I think I'm going to draw hands together like some lines underneath the eyes just for like some strain. Yeah, I think I'm going to keep the smaller. Sometimes I'll add like a little ring around the eye just like to show some extra intensity. Then I'll just because I have this little printer, I might just go in, grab a photo of that heart pattern and stick that right here or right there. And just draw an arrow to it so I know what I'm talking about. That's what I will do for drawing. Sometimes I'll go in and I'll add little doodles like this, some sparkles. I have to be careful with this pen because if I put my hand over it, I'm going to smudge it. That's what I do for my main drawing in the next video, where you are going to color it. 9. Colour your page!: I added a little sticker here of that heart pattern key chain that I wanted to try out. And I just had a little sticker here actually drew a character under it and it looked really ugly. So I covered it up with a sticker. I'm going to pull out my fancy colors. I typically color with either colored pencil or water color. But in this case, I'm going to do colored pencil with this pen. I can't use water color. I like to take the colors and blend them. The main color that I will color freckles with is yellow. I'm just going to color this one because I want to do something a little different with that one right there. I'm not putting too much pressure as I color because I want to be able to add more colors to this and blend. Start with light layers, can do circular motion or whatever you like, gives you different looks. That's my starting one. Then I'm going to take this neon orange. Just add in for some reason. When you blend colored pencils, it looks so much better than just one color. Even if I had a color that was this color in general, it just looks fully better if you blend them. I'm just going to add that. And then I think I'm going to use my neon pink to add a bit of color under the eyes, lit like intensity. Then I'm going to use a teal blue for the horn and around the eyes and the wings. I want to use maybe this other non green color to add just a little of more than one color to that as well. Then I want to, for this one, I want to color around the image. That's something I do quite often, I think. I don't. It looks really adds a different onto your coloring. The D I'm going to color is just right around the silhouette of freckles. Then as I go out, I'm going to get lighter and lighter, just going in little circular motion there around the drawing. This just highlights her shape and separates her from the rest of the page. I'll start with my base color. Blue is a really good color for base. It tends to mix well with a lot of things. Then I think for my second color, I'm going to take some green, Light green. I don't want to do this everywhere, but I just want to a certain spots, slightly. Sometimes I'll go in with another color as well. But I think for today I'm maybe I'll add a little bit of neon yellow. It's a good color. Neon colors are just so good. Then I'm let's add a little bit of pink. I'm going to color in this arrow, I'm going to use yellow and build it up Some reason this yellow color mixes really well with the neon pink. Then I would like to underline a few things, going to the names of the knots, then I'm going to go over it with that yellow as well. Just brings out that color fun circle that underline that. And there you go. And then use the green. And go over it. Lets see what I mean about the two colors. It just, it adds a lot. I don't know. Go forth and make your own page. Start simple. Just ask yourself, what am I feeling today? What am I thinking about today? What's on your mind? And then go from there. Thanks so much. 10. Closing: Hey guys, thank you so much for taking this class. I hope you had fun and got to know your little mini you a little bit better. Feel free to follow me on Instagram or Youtube. All the information is below. Please post your drawings, your sketches, all your exploration of poses and expressions. I would love to see what you've come up with. Thanks so much and see you soon.