Easy 5 Minute Characters In Adobe Illustrator - New Technique

1. Class Overview: Hi, my name is Dickey and I'm a graphic artist and illustrator from Nairobi, Kenya. In over 10 years as a pro, I have been able to work on countless incredible projects all across the world, with some notable names like Coca-Cola and MasterCard. More recently, I've received a lot more work requests around character animation and illustration, which typically takes a lot of time. To improve my workflow and turnaround times, over the past few months, I have worked to develop a simple and efficient technique in Adobe Illustrator, that allows for fast character development, posing, and styling. In this class, I'll walk you through the full technique, starting from a basic sketch, all the way to a final colored and detailed character who you can pause and style in a matter of seconds. Join me on this little journey, where you learn to quickly create style and pose your characters in Adobe Illustrator. 2. Project Setup & Building Our Character: Welcome to the actual start of this class. I'm trying to go a bit slower, just so that anybody doesn't have too much experience with character illustration. Illustrator will be able to follow. But for anyone who already has good experience with drawing characters and limbs and heads and that sort of thing, please feel free to maybe scrub through this class and just head towards the end where I'll be showing how to group the limbs just so that it works for the rest of the class. Otherwise, for everyone else who's interested in drawing this character with me, let's get started. Cool. We're already here in Illustrator and I already have it open. So what we're going to do is to go straight to File, click on New, and prepare our new project. First thing we need to do is to set the dimensions. Mine is ready set here, you enter a width of 1920 pixels by a height of 1080 pixels, on a HD screen. Then the next thing that you need to do is to make sure that if you have this option for raster effects, you want it set to medium or 150 PPI, and that's it. Click "Create". There we go, our project is created. First thing we're going to do in the project resources that you should have already downloaded, there is an asset, that you need for this part of the tutorial. Go to File, click on "Place", and maneuver to the the asset folder that you've already downloaded. Click on "Asset 1 Character Sketch". Before you click "Place", if you have the option, click on "Template". What that does is that immediately you click on "Place", it sets it up in a layer of its own. The layer is already locked, and the opacity is dulled down, just so that it's a little lighter in the background. That's exactly what we need it to be. Now we're going to get into the illustration. As you'll see, it's a fairly simple illustration. We're going to use very basic shapes to try and create a character that looks similar to this dude. Hopefully you guys are able to follow through with me. Here we go. We're going to start with a very basic rectangle. I'm going to use these lines that come out of his body as guides. For his head, I'm going to start from the top line, I'm going draw the rectangle from the very top line and just draw it across. I'm going go for around 90 px and the height is up to you, but as long as it sticks above this second line, then you're good to go. So don't worry about that too much. There we have it. We have our first rectangle drawn. I just selected again and make sure it has a little stroke on it just so that we're able to see it. There we go perfect. Now I'm going to draw this middle section or his torso. For that we're going to draw, once again from this third line all the way to this fourth line, I guess. Once again, just a simple rectangle. So you just click and drag. For this one, we're going to make it around, his head is on 90, so I'm going to say around like 150. Make sure it touches the next line. I think that's pretty close. Hit "V" for the selection tool just to look around. I think that looks good. Then we're going to draw a third rectangle. This time we're going to take the rectangle from around the center of his torso. I have an indication here, that allows me to see the center. If you don't just estimate, guesstimate or whatever, it's not really important, but as long as it sticks into his torso then you're good. For this rectangle I'm going to draw it out again. If that was 150 I'm going to go for around 135. You already have your first three rectangles drawn and that's already a strong start. What we are going to do to these is we're going to align them. In order to do that, just select all three and then hit your "Horizontal Align Center". If you don't have this available already, go up to your Window in your menu, click on "Align" or "Shift F7", as you can see there, it will pop up somewhere on your screen and then just hit the "Horizontal Align Center" here. Now all of your rectangles are perfectly centrally aligned, and that's exactly what we need. Next up we're going to click on this most recent rectangle or the lowest one, and simply right-click on it, go down to Arrange and click on "Send to back". We do that just so that this crotch area can be all the way behind the torso. Now we're going to go ahead and round off this dude's head. Obviously in my version of Illustrator, you have these little handles, that allow you to quickly round off areas or round off corners and that's what I'm going to use. If your version doesn't have this, feel free to just draw a perfect circle or an oval using the Ellipse Tool L. That should work just as well. Next up we're going to round off his shoulders. As you can see, he has nicely rounded shoulders on his torso here. We're going to do the same for this character. How we're going to do that? Select "A'', click on these two top anchor points, and then just drag in. I'm going to see around. let's go for 50, around 50, I like that. That looks good. Perfect, so his shoulders are rounded off now. We're going to do the same for these bottom two corners here just to form his little lake crotch area. Once again, hit "A" on your keyboard for the Direct Selection Tool, select that one anchor, shift, select that second anchor and once again, round it off to the maximum. Hit "V" and select outside. Perfect. So his crotch look good. His torso looks good, his head looks good. So yes, we're moving. Next we're going to do his legs. His legs are quite simple, even if they look like pretty complicated right now. All we need to do, I'm going to zoom in a bit here, is draw a rectangle from where these two shapes intersect. Straight from that intersection, just drag out a rectangle. Mine shows me where the center line is, so it's a bit easier for me. I hope you have that little function. I'm going to drag it down as low as we like. I think around there is where his pants end in my illustration. I'm just going to release it there. Click "V", just to take a look, that looks good. Then we're going to taper his legs. Right now the lines are perfectly parallel on the side and I like to have my pants become a little slimmer at the bottom. He's a fashionable dude. His pants are a bit slim fit. Once again, Direct Selection Tool or A, click on the anchor point on the right, then just hold "Shift" and hit the "Left" key just to move that anchor point one position. Then do the same thing for the left one. Click on it the A, Direct Selection Tool, hit "Shift" and hit the "Right" button. Now I'm hitting V just to click outside and see how it looks. Yeah, I'm feeling that. Now his pants are sort of tapered to the bottom and it's starting to look a bit like a leg. Now, let's take the rectangle tool once again. Now we're going to draw out his ankle. For his ankle, it's really simple. It's just a rectangle. I'm going to make it 30px wide, and then just all the way to the bottom line. Then center it, just so that it's at the center of his leg. I think that ankles looking nice. Let me zoom in a bit. Now we're going to draw his foot or shoe. For his shoe, we're going to draw out a rectangle that starts from around the center of this last rectangle, all the way down to the ground, and then let's for go for 99. There we have it, so we have this foot ready. This is how we are going to fix it. First of all, align this backline here to the back of his foot here or the back of his ankle and just try and get them perfectly straight, perfect that looks good. Then we are going to click on the Shape, go up to this Pen Tool, click and hold and select the Add Anchor Point Tool. What that's going to allow us to do is to add a point where this ankle and the shoe intersect, we want an extra point there. Now hit on a for the direct selection tool and let's make this look a bit more like a foot. First thing we're going to do is click on this bottom right anchor, point shift, click right and just send it out a bit and that's going to form his heel in a second. Then we're going to take this top left anchor and drag it down and in and you can leave it straight or make it slightly lower than straight. It's up to you, but leave it above ground for sure. There you go, now you can have a sharp foot if you like the style, you can leave it that way, there's no rules here. I like that style, but now I think I'm going to round off his toes. Once again, for the heel with a selected or my direct selection tool, click on that point and once again, drag him the handle just so that it's rounded. You can see it's ankle sticking out back there, but I'm okay with you that. There you have it. Now you have one leg completely done and I think that looks pretty good. Now I'm going to select all the elements of his leg and I'm going to go to object and I'm going to hit group or you can just do commend G straight from your keyboard. Now this entire leg is a single group, and that's exactly what we need. Once you have this leg ready, we're going to click on the leg copy and instead of just paste, we're going to paste in place, which is command f. What that means is that, the leg is pasted in exactly the area where you copied it from. Now there's basically two legs in this same area. Now I'm going to click on the top leg, right-click once again, transform, reflect, make sure it's on vertical again and click okay. Now you can clearly see these two legs. We want to move this leg that's facing to the right over to the right of his body. Click on the leg, hold shift just to keep it in line and drag it over to the left of his body and there you go. There are two legs ready. Now again, select the legs, right-click, arrange, and send it to back. What that does is allows his crotch to be in front of the legs, which is going to be important in a few minutes. There you go. Now you have a character, you have his torso, his crotch area, and you have his legs and that's already a great start. Next we're going to do his arms. For the arms, we're doing to select the rectangle tool. Come to this third line and that's where you are going to draw a rectangle from. As you can see, we need it to go all the way down to around crotch level. That's where his current crotch is. We're going to have the width at around 25. That's cool, now we have his basic hand. Next, we're going to give him this little collar that sticks out from his main body, which is like the shirt. For that trans again, same tool, rectangle tool and just draw a shape that's going to be slightly thicker than his hand. I'm going to go with about 40. Now we can zoom in a bit and just see what that looks like when I overlay them. I think that looks pretty good. Then finally, we're going to give him just as light collar down here and we're just going to make it a width of a round, let's say 46, make it's height to maybe slightly taller and just make it nine. I think that looks pretty good. Once again, select all three of these shapes and click on horizontal align center. There we go. Now we have his hand, we have this little sleeve that we've given him and then this will also act later part of the sleeve, but also a part of his shoulder. I like how that's looking, I think I want this to be a bit longer, so I'm just going to drag this down a bit and also drag this top part of his hand. I think that looks good. Finally, we're going to round off this top area of his hand. To do that, all we need to do is hit A or the direct selection tool. Once again, click on that little anchor shift, click on that second anchor, and then just drag out this little handle to round it off. As you can see, we have the arm peeking out from back there, but that's an easy fix, just click on this rectangle and make this slightly shorter so that it's hidden behind the shoulder and sleeve. Now we have a pretty basic arm done. Now what we're going to do is to group this hand, so command G, and we are going to click on it, copy and command F, like we did before, which is just to paste the same hand in the exact same spot and then just click shift and drag it over to his left side, okay, cool. I think that's looking pretty good. Finally, let us give him a little neck. I'm going to make his neck quite slim and just center it. I think that looks pretty good. Now what we're going to do, in the next section, we're going to try and give these characters some color, some details, and some flair, if we can. 3. Colour And Detailing: Now what we're going to do is to give this character some color. The way I'm going to do that is, I already prepared a color swatch that I think will work well for a character. You can basically import that color swatch if you'd like to follow along with how I'm doing my character or if you'd prefer, please feel free to pick your own color swatches and give your character some uniqueness. In fact, I would love that. If you're able to do that, please go ahead and pick, select your own colors. But anyone who wants to follow along, all you need to do, click on file once again, place and maneuver to the folder where you've downloaded all of the assets for the project and click on asset 2 Character Palette.svg. This should work on any version of Illustrator and just place and you can stick it up maybe in the corner just for you to have it as a reference. But what I like to do is to actually have these colors be available to me just clearly here when I click on the color menus. What I choose to do, and what I think you guys should do is to click on the svg that you've just imported, head over to your swatches panel. Once again, if your swatches panel isn't open all you need to do is click on window in your menu and click on swatches. In your swatches panel, click on this little folder icon, which is new color group. Click on new color group. You don't need to do anything here, just call it character color or something. Finally, make sure selected artwork is checked and then click okay. What that does, as you can see in the swatches panel, is that it imports all of these colors directly into the swatches here. Now if I delete that and I still go into my swatches panel, I have them here perfectly for me whenever I need to use it as a fill or as a stroke. Then now there's no guesswork anymore or having to color pick and that sort of thing. Now, what we're going to do is to color in our character. What I thought is that for the head and neck and basically the body color, we're going to use this kind of an odd color. This is peach, I guess. like that peach, is there such a thing? Let's go with that a dark peach color or burnt orange. Anyway, so that color, let's go with that. For the body color, we are going to give his torso the dark blue color. [inaudible] I think that's a nice color. For the crotch area and for his pants we're going to give him this little blue jeans color, which I think is quite nice. I'm just going fast forward from here, because now it's basically just coloring these parts in and you can do that to whichever you choose. But just make sure that this shirt area is the same as his main shirt color and then the pants, legs, basically up to there are the same color as his crotch. I'll meet you back here and I'm done doing that. There we are. We now have the complete character colored in with hopefully no strokes. Actually, I can see one there so I'm just going to get rid of that. No strokes anywhere, it's all just fill colors. I think my character is looking quite nice already. The last thing that I want to do is one, to give him a clear crotch area, which will help with positioning later and secondly, to just add some fingers or something that resembles fingers just so that you can tell how his hands are oriented. First of all, let's go ahead and group his torso and his crotch together. Select those two and hit command G or control G. Then now that they're together, just double-click into that group and once here, let's select the pen tool. You could hit P on your keyboard and just draw in a little crotch area and to do that, just click on one side of his crotch and onto the other side of his crotch and just drag out a little curve that almost touches the edge of the area. Once you've done that, just click on this last point that you made and hit escape. Right now it's a field and that's not what we need. We need to come up here, get rid of the field. Come here and make the stroke white and just make it maybe slightly thicker, again, make the stroke like three, I think that works nicely. Now when you go back, you'll notice that your character has a clear distinction between where his crotch area starts, and where his legs begin and I think that that's like a nice distinction to have. The final thing that I'm going show you guys how to do is to create just some simple fingers. I'm just going to draw in some fingers, but keep them very basic. What we are going to do is draw a line, give that line the same color as the rest of your body or the rest of your hand and then just make that stroke slightly thicker. Let's go with five. Now, let's even go higher with seven, I think seven works. Align it to your hand and then just draw out so alt, click, shift, drag a second finger and alt, shift, click drag a third finger. We're just going give him three fingers. I don't see any need for him having anymore, then just one more line to imitate a thumb. If you guys have the time and are able to please go ahead and make some really cool hands. I just needed some rudimentary ones just to be able to show which direction his fingers are basically facing and I think those will got quite nicely. That is basically the end of his hands. First of all, I just want to copy this so alt, click, shift drag and then once again use the transform tool, which is right-click transform, reflect. Just make sure that that is on vertical and reflect and align it nicely, so that they're nicely aligned perfect and that's it. I'm going to group these once again just so that the whole hand is one single item and the same for the other hand, and group that just the whole one item. Now my characters basically done and yours should be at this stage. At this point I'm going to give you guys a section in the video where you can just pause and allow yourself to do a bit more creative stuff with your character. At this point I want you guys to add in some eyes, give him some character, add him some ears may be give him some, like a mohawk, maybe some cool graphic on his shirt I think about look pretty dope. Just give him some character. I really want you guys to go wild at this point and do something that you really enjoy. Yeah, let's see what you guys come up with. Then we'll meet up in just a few seconds and I'll show you what I did with my character just to finish him off. Cool, so here we are after our little pause break. I hope you guys had some creative juices running and managed to create a super dope character, I'm looking forward to seeing those. Yeah, so this is where you left me before we went on the creative break and this is what I did finally. As you can see, there's not that many changes. The only things I added were these stripes to his shirt which are both just regular rectangles, I can just show you that in case you want to add them to yours. I gave him a little face. I just added these little beady eyes, some eyebrows, his ears, gave him a little smiley mouth and like a pretty rugged beard and that's about it. Now actually, which is funny, I've just realized that this dude kind of looks like my best friend, which is hilarious, but it is what it is. Yeah, that's my final character and am happy with him. The next step, first of all I hope you guys have been saving your work because that's super important. I'm just going to do that before I forget and lose everything, you should do the same. Now, the final step is basically, I'm going to create a new document with just this character there and that's where we are going to start the next section from. The next section is where I'm going to show you how to rig this dude up. I'll catch you in the next section. 4. Final Setup: So this is a section where all the magic happens. No, no, seriously, if you made it this far into the class already, great job because the majority of the work in this class is already done. From here on out during this section, I'm going to explain basically the fundamental idea behind this illustration technique. Then from there on out, it's basically all fun and games. Great job for getting this far. Let's get into explaining how this all works. If you've been with me from the start, right now you have your character. The limbs are separate, all on their own. Each leg and each hand is its own group. Now we're going to convert these limbs into brushes. That's basically where this illustration style is going to take you from having something quite regular to being able to do pretty amazing things that I'll show you later on. Let's begin, first of all, we're going to select this right-hand. Once you have the right hand selected, come over to the right side of your panels and click on brushes. If you don't have the brushes panel open, go to your windows and select brushes and it will pop up. So while you have the right-hand selected, go down here and click on new brush in the brushes panel. Select "Art brush", click "OK". Here you don't have to mess around with too many of the settings here because everything is pretty well done already. All you really need to do is name it. We're just going to call this R, for right, and hand. Then come down here and click "Okay". I'm going to do the same thing for the left-hand, just show you get again. Click on the hand, come to the brushes panel, select "New Brush", click on "Art Brush", click "Okay". Once again, no change is needed. Just name it and click "Okay". We do the same thing for the legs, select the right leg; New brush, art brush, okay, R leg, click "Okay". Finally his left leg; new brush, art brush, okay and L for left leg, boom. If you're done, if you've made it this far, then you're about to witness the magic. At this point we can effectively delete his legs. We no longer need the shape versions of his legs. We only need his torso. Say we want to draw his body parts back in. You can use a line tool or the pen tool, whichever you prefer, for now let's use a pen tool. So draw a line, for example, where you would expect his right leg to be. I'll just highlight it and give it a little stroke so you can see it. Secondly, draw another line for his left leg may be. Boom. Now to see how magical this technique is, here we go. Click on the right leg, come over to your brushes panel, and click on the R leg and boom. Suddenly, using simple lines, you're able to create pretty complex characters with zero hustle. I'm going to do the same thing for his hands. I'm going to move these aside so that it can be a bit more neat, boom. Now quite simply, you have his legs there. Let's do his hands next. For his hands I'm going do things a bit differently, because if I just decided to draw a line for his right hand, I'm just going to draw the line. I think that looks pretty good. Now we're going to come and click on his right hand. Perfect. That looks good but it's quite clear that it's not really connected to his body, is it? What we're going to do instead, is to draw a sort of L shape out of his shoulder. So straight from his shoulder, straight out and then straight down, and an escape. At this point, we're going to give this guy, obviously it's his left hand. So boom. Now that's still weird but what we can do because this is just a simple line, is to use the direct selection tool or A. Click on this little anchor point in the corner and round it off. Suddenly, you have a hand that's actually connected to his body. That's pretty fine, I'm going to do the same thing for this other side. I'm just going to take this same line that we've drawn. Drag it, hold shift, drag to the other side, right click, click on "Transform", reflect. Make sure it's on the vertical reflect and click "Okay". Then slide it over so that it's in his chest again, neatly perfect and we're going to change that to his right hand. All of a sudden, in almost no time, you have a pretty solid looking character. That's pretty amazing. I'm sure some of you are looking at this and are okay. You're trying to tell me we spent all that time so that we can have a character that looks exactly like the shaped characters that we had already drawn. Fair enough, it's a good point. But actually this is just the beginning of it. This is the fundamentals and have gotten this far and being able to convert his limbs basically into lines then super walk. In the next three chapters, I'm going show you the real power, the real magic of this character illustration technique. Then maybe afterwards you'll see the real reason that we did all of this work to begin with. I'll check you out in the next section. 5. Fast: Strike A Pose: The first advantage of using this technique is speed and to illustrate that, I'm going show you how you can quickly pose your character in a couple of different ways, no hustle. Let's get straight into it. Here as you can see, all I have is my character as done before, rigged already. His arms and legs are all lines, which is exactly how we want it. When you put him into a couple of different poses, first thing we're going to do is to copy his head and torso and just ALT, click, shift, drag just so that you have a new body to work with perfect. For this first post, I'm just going to put him into like a weird squatting position. I don't even know what he's doing but we are just going to try and see what that looks like. The first thing you'd imaginary squatting is probably he's lower down. Because his legs are folded and then his legs are obviously going into shoot out of his body like that and then come down, quite vertical and then we're going to hit escape just to break up that line. Yeah, I think that works nicely and then we're going to copy this onto the other side: Transform, reflect, same "vertical" reflect and just stick it into to his little crotch area. Yeah, I think those looks dissent. Let's go and add his legs. That's his right leg, so we are going to click R leg and that's his left leg, so we're going to click L leg above it. Now you've got him into this weird squatting position. I'm just going to adjust it to the direct selection brush or the direct selection tool rather, and just move his legs in so that they are all within his torso so that he doesn't look weird, yeah, there we go. Now already we have his legs in squatting position, and how long that take like 10 seconds and secondly, we are going to do his arms, his arms I think might be the opposite I guess like so maybe, hit escape and just copy that onto the other side. Once again, transform, reflect, vertical reflect, and just stick it back into his body, and then same thing. Actually that looks more natural even though it's his left-hand. Yeah, we'll just reverse the hands. It seems to work nicely and kaboom. There we have him, we have him in a squat position and he already looks quite natural. This technique allows you to really create super-fast illustrations with basically no hustle. There we have it, our first character is already done. Let's try and do a second one. Same thing, we are going to copy his entire body, stick him there and this time I think let's try and have him lean against a wall or something. We'll put the wall there and now we're going to add his legs. His legs, I think let's go one straight leg, maybe his right leg can just be completely straight. Now, let's make that, his left leg can be completely straight and then his right leg, we're going to try and do a little nice casually standing against this wall so maybe this one is hanging, just chilling. Let's see what that looks like. For his right leg, once again go in, click on right leg and for his left leg go in, click on left leg. Our left leg looks weird, so lets use his right leg and see if it that helps a bit. A bit, yeah it helps. Yeah, you can now just switch it around to see what works, trying to use what works. I think maybe his left leg looks more natural. Say, I'll be going with that. Now we have him just casually chilling against a wall, we can draw in his hands using the technique I showed you, straight angle out, straight angle down and put his left hand there. Then round off this little corner here and now this hand can just be hanging around. Again, make it a little longer, it's just a bit more naturally yeah like that. Then for his other hand, maybe we could make it look like he's maybe pocketing. Just stick it there, hit escape, hit his right-hand and just send this to back so that it can be behind everything and adjust it so that his fingers are orderly hidden inside his pocket area. I think that looks pretty dope. I mean look at that's less than three-ish minutes, I would say. He already looks two completely different ways and I think that's really simple and that's absolutely one of the more powerful things about using this technique. Just how quickly you can get your character in different poses and position and having looked professionally done. Yeah, that's advantage number one. 6. Easy: Quick Wardrobe Change: Our second main advantage is I'm going to call it ease. What that means is really how easy it is for you to change up your character, put him in different attire and in different situations, super, super easily. That's what we're going to look at here. To start with, I've brought in my little squatting character from the previous section. I'm just going to use him as an example. I've also brought over our Shape Layer legs from one of the previous sections. You need to do that if you want to follow along in this particular part, although it's not really necessary. But yeah cool, so here we go. Here we have this guy in kind of like a squat position and what I want to happen is to just have him look a bit different, maybe a bit funnier. Let's try and make him be doing these squats. But instead of wearing pants, were going to give him some tiny little shorts, like he's doing it maybe at the beach or something. How are we going to do that? Pretty simple. First, just go into the Shape Layer legs that you brought in from a previous project. Once you do that, we need to convert his pants in to shorts, which is pretty simple. Just drag this all the way up and now suddenly he has a nice little pair of shorts. Next you want to drag up this ankle layer into the shorts. Now you have him kind of wearing shorts already. I'm going to just expand this higher area, so that it sort of tapered off at the top so that it's kind of thicker at the top and at the bottom because your thighs are on the same size as your ankles. I hope. But otherwise don't keep it pretty basic. There we go. Now he's a dude in shorts and he has his little shoes on. Actually I'm going to change his shoes and give him just like bare feet or okay, no, even better. Even better than that. I'm going to give him slippers. We're just going to add a little deck down here, just beneath his feet and were going to make it the color of his original shoes. I'm just going to use a Color Picker tool or Eye, which we haven't used before, and just pick this color of issues, and just add a little strap here to make it a slipper. As you can see, it's kind of detached, let me just zoom in a bit. It's kind of detached here. Once again, direct selection tool, select that top point and just push it up. Perfect. Okay, so now this guy is wearing slippers and he has shorts on and that's excellent. Maybe just one more thing just to make it a bit more interesting, we're going to give him a bit of leg hair. Yes, sir. Let's see how we are going to do that. I've just picked a really simple brush, like a uniform brush. I'm going to to make it really tiny. Just see, Yeah, I think that size is quite nice. Just go ahead and just throw in little leg hairs all over his leg. No need to be particularly neat about it, hair doesn't grow that way, at least mine doesn't. Just go ahead and add those legs hair everywhere. Okay. Now we have a nice little half-naked leg and I think that looks pretty dope. We're just going to delete this leg because we don't need it. We're just going to alt click shift drag and then just right-click "Transform" and "Reflect", vertical reflect, remember and click "Okay". Now we have two legs for this guy. But now here's how simple it is. Instead of having to re-do the whole turning his legs into a brush, yada, yada, yada. Watch this. The [inaudible] his left leg and we are going to drag it into the brush section. But instead of making a new brush, we're just going to drag it over the old brush. Click on your leg, hold "Alt" while you drag it and just drag it over the old left leg which I hope is this one. I think it's that one. Okay. Yeah, its our leg, perfect. Once again, no changes here. Click "Okay". Apply to strokes when this pop-up comes up and look at that. That's hilarious. Now he kind of has pants on one leg and now has shorts on the other leg, and I actually kind of like how weird that looks. But yeah, look how quick that was and I'm going to do the second leg. But only because I have to, because I really think that he looks dope this way. But yeah, so same thing. Hold Alt while you drag it, drag it over the old right leg. In your brushes panel, no changes. Click "Okay", apply two strokes like we did on this pop-up, and boom. Your guy now looks like he's ready for beach times and how awesome is that? That's taken us definitely under three minutes to just change this guy's look completely. That's one of the most powerful things about this Illustration technique. Yeah, have fun guys have some fun, figure out some weird things you can do with him. Maybe give him skeleton legs that might look nice. But just mess around with this idea, it's really, really powerful and really easy to do as you can see. Have a bit of fun with it. I'm looking forward to seeing what you guys come up with. 7. Flexible: Who Needs Elbows?: I hope you guys enjoyed those last two parts. The final advantage that I'm going to take you through is something I'm going to call flexibility. It's really easy to have your characters posed in really weird and spicy ways and that can be a real advantage when you're trying to make up unique and interesting characters. I'm going take you through that final bit. This is a guy you came up with in the last section. I really like how he came out, that was an unexpected. But I think it looks really dope. I figured, yeah this guy actually now looks like he's ready for the beach. We're going to use that to our advantage. What I'm going to do is to copy everything except his right-hand. Just unclick his right-hand, Shift to click his right hand and then Alt drag the rest out and there we go. I missed his leg. I'm going to take his right leg and then Alt Shift. That's exactly what we need. Now I just want you to imagine that since he's at the beach, let's imagine his holding a little beach ball. We're just going to give him a little yellow beach ball. Now we need to draw in his hand to look like it's holding it, right? Here we go, using the technique we've already developed straight out. But this time obviously because he's holding a ball, we're not going to go straight down but we're going to go to where his elbow might be which is around the edge of the ball there and then down a bit, okay? That looks good. I'm just going to change this into a stroke. You can do that by just coming down here where you see swap fill with a little arrow switching thing and there you go. Now we have a stroke and we're just going to turn that into his her left hand, correct. There you go and now we're just going to round off this corner as we've done before. Now just position his hand nicely aligned with his body. I think that looks pretty dope, okay? There you have it. Now you have a character looking really nice holding his beach ball ready for whatever they're going to play volleyball. But now I want you to imagine that he's holding a giant beach ball. A beach ball that's ridiculous larger than what his hands should comfortable hold, okay? We're going to copy the same things that we copied before, so no beach ball and no left-hand and just alt drag that out. There we have it and now we're going to alt drag his beach ball. But this time we're going to make it like, I don't know, four times the size of a regular beach ball, okay? Let's say we wanted to make him look like he's holding this ball. If we tried to use this arm technique and just have like edges. He might look a bit weird. What we're trying to do now here and the reason that I call the sections flexibility is that it allows you to have your character not only have a regular human looking figures but it allows you to do a lot cooler stuff. Let's say we wanted to make him hold this ball instead of having an elbow. Who needs elbows? Instead of having an elbow, we'll just have him have this circular hand that goes around the ball and holds it. At that point we're going to double-click and escape. Now we have this curvy hand, hold in Shift X just to have it be a stroke only. Click on the ''Stroke'', come to your brushes and click on left-hand and now suddenly your character is weirdly holding onto a beach ball that's about the size of his body. It allows you to be just create a bit of humor with your work and not have to stick to just regular human-looking elbows and knees and that thing and just introduce a bit of humor into your characters and I think that looks pretty dope. Actually maybe it's good that they did this because there's a little thing that I have now noticed that I could teach. If you see how right now, his fingers look just so ridiculously long compared to his other hand, right? Also his sleeve is also just a wildly longer than his other hand. To fix that, there's actually something that you can do while you're creating your brushes. Here in brush scale options, you have scale proportionately which we're not going to talk about. We have stretched to fit, which is by default what we'd been using. But instead, I want you guys to use stretch between guides and what that allows us to do is to set an area where the stretch wouldn't be happening and where the stretch will be happening. For example, we want his wrist to not stretch. What we need to do is to adjust the endpoint to be a lot lower, once we are at his wrist we can say, ''Okay, cool.'' Now, that's outside of these dotted lines and so that will not stretch and the same thing for his sleeve. If we just start the start point much later. Now, his sleeve is also outside of the dotted line and so that will not stretch. How does that translate? Let's see. Click on ''Okay'' and here, once again, apply to strokes and just watch how that affects his hands and his little sleeve. I'm going to click ''Apply to Strokes'' now and boom. Now, his sleeve is perfectly normal, about the same size as his other sleeve and his fingers, as you can see here are also the same size as his hand. You can use that to your advantage. You can use it if you wanted his hands to be weird, that's all good. But yeah, really it's just a way for you guys to be able to play around with your characters and give you some flexibility that really other illustration techniques I have seen don't really give you. There you have it. That's our third and final advantage of using this technique. I hope you guys have some fun with it and make some weird awesome characters. Super looking forward to seeing those, so check you out in the next section. 8. Thank You: There you have it. You finally come to the end of the class. That was actually a lot of fun to do. I hope you guys had some fun going through the class with me. But more importantly, I hope you've learned something valuable that you can use over the course of whether it's your career, your hobby, or whatever it is you're going to use the technique for. I hope you learned something valuable. I'm also really looking forward to seeing all of the stuff that you've come up with, all the wild animals, creatures or humans that you've created, I'm really looking forward to seeing those. That is the end of our class. If you enjoyed it, please rate it to help with my rankings. Also share it with a friend that would be really helpful. For me, that's goodbye and see you next time.