Facial Storytelling for Comic Art and Storyboarding

1. Introduction: Hey, how are you doing? It's Clayton here. And in this lesson, we're going to be learning all about how to tell story through the faces of your characters. And believe it or not, the human face is one of the best ways to tell a story, especially when it comes to the personality of your characters, the emotional experience that they're going through within the story. But also on top of that, we can lay the context, the mood down for what's happening within the scene by lighting the face in specific ways and also capturing from certain angles. I'm going to show you how to do all that. In this lesson. I see that we jump straight into this and get started. 2. Standard Head Construction: So here we are in Clip Studio Paint. My favorite drawing application of choice. It's just beautiful. It gives you a really traditional feel when it comes to drawing, especially if you're using the Mark Brent Legendary Linear brush, which you can download for free from cube brush. Amazing little tool gives a very just natural feel not only to the action of drawing, but also the drawing itself. Okay, well, we're just going to jump straight into this and we're going to warm up with a few different heads. All right, I'm going to show you the simple structure of a head, how to actually draw it fairly quickly, in fact, and just get something down onto the page. And also do some tighter heads later on. These ones just to start off with are going to be a little bit more loose. Alright, so let's warm up here. The basic head, whether you're drawing a male or a female is always going to consist of a cranium, which is basically nothing more complex or complicated than just a sphere that we're going to draw down onto the page. You can see that the spheres that I'm drawing down are a little wobbly. So if you need to just practice some spheres to get started, then by all means, do that. But once we've got a circle down onto the page, you know what? It doesn't really have to be super perfect. I've said that it needs to be perfect in the past, but you can kind of just sculpt this stuff out. As time goes on. Now, you do want to establish an axis. So see this little line I'm putting through the top and the bottom? That's like the tilt of the head. Think of it like the Earth. The Earth has a tilt that it rotates on. Alrighty. So we call that the axis. Then we establish the front of the head. That's this line that runs right down the middle. And then we have another line that intersects That's going to ultimately be the eyebrow line. You'll see how that works out in a second. But at this point, we have a ball essentially that's been divided up in two quarters, and then we establish the side of the head, which is the temporal area. It's flattened out there, so we're really just lopping off a side of the head there. You can see how that appears flat now and you can bring this sit in a little bit too if you want to. Just make sure that you've got an even amount of space on either side of the face there. Now, I know I'm running through this fairly quickly. I'm giving you a bit of a recap here just because the aim of the game, the main theme of this lesson is more about expression, okay? Emoting through the face. And so if we can just get the basic foundations down for the head right off the bat, do a little bit of a warm up exercise here, we will be able to jump onto that ASAP. Alright, from here, we extend the front of the face down to the chin. Alright. I'm gonna lay it down about there. Now, how long do you take it down? Well, you know, these days I can just kind of eyeball it, but really the idea is that if we've got the full length of the cranium here. Alright, we're going to go boom and then we're going to measure that out. We're going to run a line down to about here. Okay? And it's kind of a straight line, kind of not, but that's okay. We divide that in half. And then we take the top half and we divide that into thirds. Okay, that's not very good so far. Let's try that again, so divide this into thirds. All right. That looks about right. And then we divide the bottom half into thirds. And then you see the third at the top and the bottom, that's like one third in, right, from the top and the bottom. Well, we run a line across here. That should give us basically the base of temporal area of the skull. We'll run another line across here. That gives us the top al area of the skull. Okay? And then if we continue that line across to the other side of the head, you'll notice that we get these squares in the middle of the face. The idea here is that all we got to do to find the length of the head is measure the front of the face down one more of these squares. Okay? So we want to try to keep them as equal as possible. We measure it down one more square, and that should give us a proportionally accurate length for the face. Okay? So pretty simple. You just lay down a measurement stick for the head, divide it up into two halves. Up half will be divided up into serge, bottom half will be divided up into Serds as well. You take the the topmost third, draw a line across that'll give you the upper area of the temporal portion of the cranium, and then you do the same thing at the bottom. The bottommost third, boom, put a line across there. That'll give you the length of the temporal area. It's very, very technical. I promise you, it's not that technical after a little while because you can just guess your way there at a victory, but that's how we get this next segment. Anyway, I'll leave that there as a little reference for you. But once we've got the length of the face established, we can draw in the jaw line like so. Jaw line is pretty simple. We've got the back edge of the jaw, this edge in between, the back and the chin, and that's really it. You'll notice that there is two corners here. Where the corner of the jaw is and the corner of the chin resides, and that becomes pretty important later on when you want to start to tilt the head into multiple positions. All right, I'm going to do the same thing on this side. Now, what happens next is I like to lay in my facial planes or at least just sketch in, like, a representation of the cheek bones and the muzzle area of the mouth. Okay? And that looks kind of like this. What that does, especially on a three quarter representation of the head, is it allows me to be able to shape this far side of the face a little bit easier. Because at a certain point as you rotate the head away from you on the far side of the face, you'll notice that the muzzle of the mouth area, it actually starts to form part of the silhouette. Once that's done, we're well on our way to wrapping up the head. I'm just going to bring in the back there, some more. Keep in mind some sculpting will be necessary here as we bring the head through to completion. Going to give him a neck. So we're just going to sketch that in real quick. And then we start to draw in the eyes. Now, as I said before, this is the brow line here, that initial line that we laid in around the cranium. What you can do is place a little line just below that brow line if you want to if you need a little bit of a guide, but the eyes are usually going to sit at about the midway point of the overall length of the head. So if you take the full length of the head from the top to the bottom of the chin, and you divide it in half, it's at that halfway point that we're going to find the eyes. Okay? And we can just sketch those in like that. We're going to keep it fairly rough. This isn't going to be a polished drawing or anything. We're not trying to create a masterpiece here. We're just trying to sort of go through the overall construction process that you'd execute whenever you want to draw a head. Now, there's variations of this, of course. There's looser approaches, there's tighter approaches. You find the one that works best for you. You might even notice that over time, as you become more accustomed to drawing the head that your approach to it actually shifts, and you wind up going for a looser look going to sketching the eyebrows. Okay. Got an eyebrow over there. Eyebrow here. Okay, we're just keeping those fairly brushy and messy, too. And then we got the nose. Now, the nose is going to sit on this line, okay? So we're at the bottom of the temporal flattened out area of the cranium stopped. We get the nose line. Nosline also sits between the brow line and the chin as you might have noticed. Once we've done that, by the way, we can go ahead and divide this bottom section up into thirds because on this top third, we're going to find the mouth. Once that's done, we can draw in the nose. Nose is going to look a little bit like that. Okay. Et me redo that nose, actually. Not super happy with that one. All right, that'll do. And then we got the mouth, as I said before. We just draw that in. We start out with the opening of the mouth. Opening of the mouth is usually going to run out to the corners, which will stop at the midway point of the eyes. Then for Gaius, really, you just want to define a bottom lip, maybe add some shadow in underneath that and be pretty much good to go. That's the hardest part. Once that's done, we got the ears. Now the ears are going to align at the top of them with the brow, then they're going to drop down to the nose. This is the basic proportions of the human face. Obviously, it can vary from one character to the next, but now, typically, if you don't want your characters to look too odd and weird, then you'll be sticking fairly closely to those standard idealized proportions. It's really just more unique characters like villains, for example, that you might want to change the shape of the head for or more wacky cartoonia looking characters because you'll notice that further you veer away from these idealized proportions, the stranger your characters might end up looking. And once we're happy with what we've got, we can just kind of go over the top of what we've sketched down there and define it some more, okay? Sculpt it out a little bit if we feel that we need to. All right, little detail there, maybe add in some definition for the cheek bones. But that's really about it. Now, of course, we can jump down to the neck and add in a little bit of neck anatomy. You know, I like to think of the head and the neck as being one sort of I guess mechanism within the human body because as the head turns as it moves, you'll notice that the neck moves with it. There's also a lot of gesture that comes through with the neck as the head moves around. Okay? So that's head number one, done and dusted, right? So that's the warm up that we've completed there. 3. Expressive Female Faces: Now, let's do one more warm up. This one's going to be of a female head. Alright? My as will cover all bases here. We will give this one a little bit of an expression, though. So we're going to take this as an opportunity to start incorporating a little bit of emotion personality within the head. So in order to do that, there's a few different chicks that tricks rather, not chicks even though we're going to be drawing one, tricks that we can employ. Alright, so we'll start out with the cranium again. And I really wanted to do a male and a female here just to show you that it's always going to be the same, right? Like, no matter what kind of head you're drawing, I want to start out with this cranium. Sometimes you can get away with, like, just a really basic oval head, but because we're going through it for a little bit more of a structured approach here, reason being that we're really focusing in on heads at this point, the cranium really works quite well just to establish the orientation of the head right off the bat. Okay. And just as before, we're going to place down the tilt of the head, and this time, we're going to mix things up a little bit because we're actually going to tilt the head in a downward direction while also being on an angle in the other axes. So in order to figure out whether or not the head is looking up or down. That is determined by this horizontal line that runs around the equator of the cranium. All right. There we have it. So you can see because it's dipping down that this suggests the head is indeed faced in a downward direction. But if we were curving this line upward, like so, then that would suggest that it was tilted in an upward direction. So pretty easy to get that established. Now for this head, we're going to have it facing toward us a little bit more. Okay, towards the front. Now, you might notice that there is still a slight three quarter view applied to it, but for the most part, we're really looking at the front of the face here. And then when going to chop off the sides, you might find that when you first start learning how to draw the head and you're trying to figure it all out, that there's a certain amount of stiffness that comes with it. As an artist becomes more confident in the subject matter that they're drawing, you'll find that loosen they'll find that they loosen up quite a lot. And that's a good thing. In fact, what you want to do is as you become more competent, you want to speed things along and not think about it too much because the more that you think about it after you've already learned something, it tricks your brain into believing that, well, you don't already know it and starts to make you second guess yourself. All right? Like, you think about it too much and you can very much indeed overthink things as an artist. As I'm sure you've probably well encountered before. Regardless of the level that you're at. So I've lopped up the sides here. We're going to drop down the front of the face at a certain point you have to ignore some of the structure that you've drawn, trade that out for actually capturing what you want to see in the drawing itself. Like, sometimes that structure can be confining if you stick too rigidly to it. So I'm sort of ignoring this upper side area right now because I'm feeling like I'm going to need to sculpt that out anyway in the final artwork. Okay, cool. So now that we've got sides chopped off, we've got the bottom of the face established. Now, as you can imagine, all those measurements we talked about before as far as figuring out how long the face needs to be, they're all going to be foreshortened. So, you know, there'll be a little bit more space up here. They'll be You know, you can see that it recedes. As we move toward the chin. Why? Because we're looking at the top of the head here, and I'm going to add a little dash up the top just to show where the center of the top of the head is going to be. Okay, wonderful. So I've got kind of like an abstract looking face set up so far. Funnly enough, I'm going to add in the ears here now, and then I'm going to draw out the neck. That neck's a little bit too thick for a female character. It's not going to look quiet right, so let's go ahead and just wonder what we can come up with here. You know, maybe her neck is actually facing in that direction. We'll bring it in some more there. And you can see that she's doing a little bit of a neck turn. So that neck positioning really does introduce a little bit more context to the actual pose that we've given the head. And you can even add in the shoulders sometimes if you really want to get some personality happening in there. Okay? So I notice that I'm going to go through here now with the eraser and just do a little bit of rejigging as we work. And the reason for that is just because this is one of the stages that I typically will go through, which is sculpting, just working the image, shaping it into what I want it to be. So you can think of that initial foundation as just like a generic ball of clay that you're using to place down the base foundational building blocks of what it is you want to draw. And then you've got to go in and actually start to refine it some more. Just as with the guy, we're going to lay in some cheek bones and just a little bit of an idea for where we might want the mouth muzzle to be. This brow line has almost become more like an eyeline where I might want to position the eyes, and sometimes it happens for me, just because I don't know. I picture it as the eyeline more so than the brow line. But usually, I'll just get a little bit of an idea of where I want to position the eyes based upon that guideline, and sort of, again, I somewhat ignore it and end up doing my own thing anyway. So let's ask ourselves just to get an idea, what kind of expression do we want to give her? I'm just going to draw one out the hat here and say something a little bit more seductive. Okay? So we're gonna draw in her eyes, they're going to have this nice, like, seductive look to them. Now, you could practice these facial expressions on their own for sure. This is less about facial expressions, as you'll see soon and more about, you know, telling a story through the face. So we're going to go through quite a few examples here. But just as a starting point, this is how we start to construct the face and really lay down the facial features in a particular way. So how does the eyebrows of a seductive face look? Well, I'm going to have the eyebrows sort of raised up here, okay? So you can see they almost look like angry eyebrows in a way. And then I'm going to add a little bit of variation to the eyebrow on this side. Okay. So we might lower this one even a little bit. There's a slight amount of variation there. Sometimes you don't want to keep things entirely symmetrical. Now, keep in mind that this is supposed to be her forehead area here. So I'm actually going to undo that for just a minute, place down where I think the hairline should be, which will allow me to make sure that these eyebrows don't go up too high, which I think is what was happening there. So almost had an Osi daisy, but I caught that pretty early on, which is good. Always be cross checking your image, make sure that things are coming together in the way that you want them to. And, you know, when it comes to female characters, you do want to really push the amount of eyeline or M mascara that you're seeing. So at least for me, I'm going to go ahead and add some of those nice eyelashes in pupils in the IRS will be right up against the top of the eye there. And then just as before, we're going to divide the brow line and the length or the distance between it and the chin in half. Okay, like so. And then we'll divide these up into thirds down here. That's done, we're going to draw in the nose. Now, the noise really doesn't do a whole lot in terms of its expression, unless you've got a very, like, angry, enraged character that's flaring their nostrils. The nose isn't a super expressive facial feature. Now, because the head is looking down, we might notice that the nose actually protrudes beyond that initial point that we laid down for it. Okay. Like so. And then the mouth, this is where we're really going to hit things home. We're going to give her a little smirk. Okay, and that's going to give us that nice seductive appearance. She has some nice full lips, although the top lips are going to be a little thinner since we're looking down at the character here. Okay, add a little bit a shine there. Beautiful. You'll notice that added some rendering to the lips, too, just to emulate lipstick. And then once that's done, what we're going to do is a tiny bit of erasing here just to clean up the face. Bring that nostril in some more. Especially on a female face, you do want to try to keep things kind of clean, even on a sketch. All right. And for her hair, because hair is another really big important sort of asset that we've got when it comes to expression through the human head, we're just going to lay something down real quick here. Nothing too fancy because hair wow it can really increase the amount of time you might find yourself spending drawing the head. So we're just going to lay something down like this, okay? Just a very basic shape, a really rough gesture of the kind of hairstyle that we might want to go with, right? We're gonna wrap that hair around her shoulder there. Really beautiful. Okay. And you know what? I'm going to see if I can maybe just, you know, the shape of the hairstyle is really what you have to worry about when it comes to the hair. So I'm going to bring it over here a little bit more, okay? Just the flow of it. But I'll take it over there, like so. And, ah, right? Like, you can see that even without a whole lot of detail in rendering, we've got a bit of a hairstyle going on there that sort of does the trick, gives us what we're looking for. If you want to erase parts of the hair, and this is the thing you can easily get stuck doing on focusing on the hair, then by all means, spend a bit of time on it. I'm not going to spend too much time on it here since this isn't a hair drawing tutorial. But once you're done with everything, you can go right in over the top and start to lay down a more refined line for your face. Remember, we're just doing sketches here so it doesn't have to be ultra clean. However, that's not to say that you can't take any of the heads that you draw here throughout this demonstration through a more refined finish level. By all means, if you want to do that, go right ahead and do it. I definitely encourage you to. But remember, this is more about just getting some expression down. And that's the important thing here. We want to bring our characters to life. We don't just want to give them the same facial expression from one panel to the next. That's not what we want. That's going to make things very, very generic. We do not want generic. Okay, so as you can see, this head kind of boring, static, generic. This head has a lot of life to it. So you can see the difference. You can see the power here. Now, how many times do you see a comic book where you're looking at a head like this, right? Just some guy, you know, very default with a very default expression. That's not what we want. 4. Expressive Male Faces: Alright, let's move this to the side here, and we'll come up with another example. This time, we're going to do a male face with a little bit of expression. And then we're going to draw out some panels after that that actually take us through a sequence of events that changes a character's personality, takes from one emotional state to the other, which is really what this whole lessons about telling story through facial expressions. Okay. So for this next example, we're going to draw out a character that's sort of looking in an upward direction. Okay? So again, a male character this time. All right. Remember that if we can get this horizontal line that wraps around the equator of the cranium in right off the bat, that gives us an idea as to what the Well, both the axis is going to be and also from which direction the head is going to placed in as far as looking down or up. So we place the camera now below the head or either that or it's tilted up away from the camera lens, whichever is going to be the case here. And now we're ready to establish the front of the face. Now, the front of the face, this time, we could have it placed around, you know what? Why don't we place it around here? So we'll have looking to the left, right? Like, so. Hmm. Will that work, yeah, that'll work. Then this will be the side cranium area. Now you'll notice that I've actually positioned the head on the side a little bit more here. Notice how when I lay this line in down the side of the cranium, I'm following that axis. That's going to be very important. We want all vertical lines to follow that axis. The front of the face, we're going to run it down that same trajectory to where we want the chin to be. Now remember that there's going to be some foreshortening applied to the head here as we're looking at it from the bottom up. Corrections will need to be made along the way. This is one of those quirky angles that the head is sometimes presented on that just requires a lot of re jigging for it to look correct. Now, the more you practice it, the easier it's going to be for you in the long run. You'll notice here that I'm really starting to sketch in a little bit of the anatomy there just to help me get the shape right. All right. I'm going to get rid of that chin line. Do you notice, I am working quite quickly here. Just if you need to slow down the recording of the lesson once it's, you know, available on demand, and you'll be able to go through this at a much steadier pace if you need to. I'd highly suggest you do that, too, if you're looking to really get a handle on drawing these heads and mastering them because, you know, it's certainly one of those things when it comes to comic book illustration, where you're not going to be able to get all of this properly processed in one fell swoop. Like, it's going to take time. And I think that's probably one of the hardest things for most artists is just having the patience for themselves to learn and to develop. It's not an easy thing, okay? And don't worry. I completely understand how that can be sometimes. Now, that's going to twist his head around way too far. So we're going to have the center of his collar bone be about here. Okay. And yeah, as I was saying, you've just got to make sure that you give yourself that opportunity to actually learn this stuff, because let me tell you, I am not the fastest learner, and I truly mean that. And one of the reasons I'm not the fastest learner in the whole wide world is because I I don't see the, you know, the revelations that I get as a learner aren't always super obvious. You know, I don't take notice of them as much as I probably should. And so, you know, for me, I have to do things the wrong way a lot of times before I realize that that particular way I'm approaching it just isn't working, okay? And this applies to multiple areas in my life, not just drawing, by the way. So, yeah, I had to have a lot of patience in order to get to this point. But after a while, the learning process becomes less of a a thinking activity and more of a feeling activity, okay? And that's a really good place to be in as an artist. It really is the most ideal place to be as an artist is to go with your gut, because that's where I think we get the most satisfaction as artists. Like, we're not supposed to be technical drawers, necessarily, even though we might find ourselves in that position, especially when we're drawing more man made elements such as buildings and mex and that kind of thing. But, you know, even when it comes to human beings, drawing the head here, you can see that we're using a lot of construction techniques in order to create some of this. And you do become, as a result, a bit of a draftsman, and you really are. You really are a draftsman. You've got to be able to look at things, kind of perceive them on different angles, get them right, adjust the proportions, adjust the foreshortening of whatever forms it is you're working with. And, you know, eventually, you do that so many times that it just becomes a well, it becomes actually something that's fun more than anything else. You know, the challenge is always going to be there, but it becomes a fun challenge. So what I'm doing here is I'm just laying in the eyes, I'm placing them where I think they should probably go. It doesn't mean that I won't adjust them later on. There's a high likelihood that I will unless I kind of, for some reason, just happen to be lucky enough to nail this. You know, I think the brow line, honestly, more often than not becomes an eyeline for me is what I've noticed. So I'm going to draw in his nose now just because it's going to, for the most part, be obscuring a lot of the far side of the face. In order to draw the nose from this angle, I like to establish the base plane of the nose. So you'll see me placing that onto the front of the face there. Okay, now, why would I be showing you how to draw these tricky angles in a story telling through facial expressions lesson. Well, it's because the human head, depending on its angle, can also tell somewhat of a story, right? It can set an emotional context. Like, when you're looking up at this head right now, he kind of looks majestic, doesn't he? You know? And the lady with the seductive look, the fact that she's tilting her head in a downward direction, it enhances the seductive feel of the emotion that's coming through there. So yeah, head tilt and the mic presentations that you place the head on, they're quite important. Very, very important. Now, obviously, you need to know how to draw the facial features themselves from a variety of angles in order to increase your confidence in drawing the human head on a position such as this. So if you do find it difficult, then make sure that you go through and find a lesson specifically on, drawing the human nose, and that's going to take you through, ideally, how it looks from a variety of different viewpoints. All right. And then we're going to place in the mouth here. Now, the interesting thing about the muzzle of the mouth is that it's actually quite cylindrical. So there's a curvature to it, right? I like to lay that shape in sometimes if I need to remind myself of that. So what we're going to see is an upward curve here of the mouth, and the corners are going to land right about there. So the actual width of the mouth expands on an angle like this. Why? Because well, of the foreshortening that's occurring, as we well know, when it comes to perspective, anything that's closer to us actually expands in scale. Now, we actually should add an emotion, some personality to this guy's face here. What we're going to give him is a look of surprise, let me get the eyebrows in there and then we'll jump back to the mouth. The eyebrows are going to land about here. They're going to be raised up off of the top of the eye, especially because we are looking up at the at the head here, and, you know, there is a plane that runs down from the brow into the top of the eye, which sometimes we can't quite see from the direct front view. All right. But here in this angle, we get a much better look at it, for sure. Alright, so we got his eyebrows raised up there, and now we'll jump back to the mouth. Now, if he's surprised, we might have his mouth slightly open here. It might not be as stretched across his face. You know, I might be something more like this. If you're wondering, how do you just draw down different facial expressions Well, I think that it's important to when you're watching a movie, notice the facial expressions that the characters are exhibiting. If you're out in public, if you're, you know, just taking a walk in the park, if you're on the train to work, look at people's facial expressions and see as a challenge whether or not you can tell how they're feeling, what they're thinking, you know, because that's really what you're trying to get across to the audience in your comic book when you put your characters and their faces into these different emotional presentations, you know, you want some level of emotional relatability that the audience experiences when they're reading your book because it makes it feel like they are the character. And so there's this idea in psychology that is sort of related to mirroring, I guess. It's called state transference. And what that means is that when you walk into a room and somebody is feeling a certain way, you know, maybe they're really, really angry. Uh, you'll start to feel that coming off of them, and it might even start to make you feel kind of angry as well, because they are in that state. You, you know, if you live with somebody, you might be able to kind of just take note right now and ask yourself whether or not that actually happens to you. I know it happens for me as well, with my partner. So that's definitely something to take note of. But ultimately, how that relates to your comic book art is well, you're going to find that as the reader is taking in your story and they're seeing the characters be sad or angry, they feel that anger. They feel that sadness. And that just makes it a more immersive, more memorable experience for the audience as they read your comic book. So it's not just the nose, by the way, that you need to know how to draw from certain angles. It's also the ears, of course, and the mouth, et cetera. So right now, you're just kind of going through and probably copying what you see, which is a really, really good start. But later on, actually study all of these different facial features and see whether or not you're able to really become a more dynamic artist with them. Now, what I've gone ahead here and done is I'm placing down where I think the mouth muzzle should be and then drawing in the cheekbone. Okay? So I'm just sketching that in there really lightly. Once that's done, we can give this guy a little bit of hairdo. Why not? Okay? Similar to the female character. Now, we're not going to go too crazy on this. Let's give him a little bit of a fringe here. You know, something like this. Maybe there's been some kind of explosion, right? And again, I like to add hair into the equation here just because it increases the emotional impact of the human face. It really does add to it. And it's just a matter of getting the hairstyle to look good. The overall silhouette, I think, most of the time. And then you can just add in the details of the hair once you've got that down. That's looking pretty good. I think we'll you know, that's a good start for the hair anyway. Maybe you'd have, like, his fringe or something blowing across there. You know, once we've got a bit of a hairdo going on, we can erase everything underneath those construction lines, you know, around the neck area as well. Just get rid of those. Kat the sketch up somewhat, make it look kind of presentable. L when it comes to sketching, you still want to have some level of clarity to what it is you're laying down onto the page, I think. And so, you know, that really does require you sometimes to just go back over the top of what you've already done, like we did with the female character like we're kind of doing with the male character here and defining the shape of the face, defining the shape of the hair. There we go. All right. And then we'll think about, Alright, well, what direction is the hair going to be going back in here? So we'll lay that in, give him a bit of a side burn there. Feeling like some hair needs to come out in this direction. I can't tell you why I did that. It's a feeling thing, like I said, after a certain amount of time, you just start to feel this stuff out, and it comes from experience. It's why a lot of experienced artists can't really tell you why it is they do what they do, because it comes about it really does come about naturally on its own. It's not something that can necessarily be taught. You can be mimicked, but it won't truly assimilate until enough practice has been had with it. Okay, cool. So Gay's pupil drawn in there. Great. All right. I'm going to scale this up just for presentation purposes. Alright. There we go. So we got our three head examples there. They're looking pretty good. What we're going to do next up in just a moment is we're actually going to go ahead, as I said before and just whip up a few panels with some heads in them and come up with a narrative. Maybe we'll have someone who starts out happy and gets told some bad news and all of a sudden is quite sad about said bad news. We'll see how we go with that. All right. Let's jump down here. 5. Panel Layouts: First things first. We're going to grab our ruler if you've got one handy and you're working traditionally, or you can use a digital ruler like I'm using here in order to do up some panels. So we're going to have panel number one. Panel number two. Make pedal number two. Look, let's try to You know what? We're going to try to keep these pretty much the same size. So here's what I'm going to do. Center this in the middle of the page here. Let's say around about there. Alright, great. And now we'll go ahead and give this really nice, obvious dark frame. I'm gonna delete that ruler. You know what? Let's make that frame a little thinner. I feel like that's a tiny bit too thick for what we want. Even thinner than that. You know, I don't like this idea of doing really thick frames around panels. Said it before, but I feel like it's very distracting. Distracts from the interior art. Okay. Beautiful. Now we're going to control see this and control V it. If you're working on a mac or something, then you'll want to hold down Command Shift instead. Okay, you'll want to hold down command and hit C and Control B, rather. And if you're doing it traditionally, then you'll just need to manually rule up these panels. I'm sorry to tell you, digital does make things faster. That's the reality of the situation. Okay. Now we're going to merge these together. I'm going to create a sction around all of them. Once again, centering them on the canvas. There we go. And we are ready to roll. So we've got a three panel sequence here. Now, if this was a comic book page, of course, you know, these panels could be designed and placed down and laid out in whatever way you want. But just to keep things simple, we've got three panels lined up beautifully in a straight line next to one another. Next up, I'm going to take a sip of hot cocoa here. Because it's important to keep yourself hydrated as you're drawing and clear your throat if you're teaching people how to draw. Now, let's figure out first up what we want to actually show in the sequence, as I said. Now, I'm thinking it would be good to show a character sad going from happy to sad maybe or even sad to angry. What would be the most fun here? Maybe we could start them out. Hm. Yeah, this is where I go to use my imagination a little bit. And I think it'd be cool to incorporate multiple characters here just to show them interacting. So we're going to have one head over here, and I'm going to use ovals just to begin this process, by the way, and we're going to place those ovals onto a whole different layer so that we can maneuver them around freely without ruining our beautiful panels here. 6. Drafting The Sequence: All right. So what I'm gonna do because I'm a big fan of Dragon Ball Z is I'm going to do like maybe, like, a cocky character who's really, like, powerful and strong, and they think that they've got their opponent just beaten already, but then maybe their opponent powers up, and ultimately, they end up being a little bit shocked by that power level. So we'll do something like that, right? So start out. This will be the character with the really big power level. He's gonna be looking down, kind of all confident. And if you're a fan of Dragon Ball Z, I'm thinking of Sal right now. All confident and kind of feeling good about himself. Like he doesn't have a worry in the world. Okay, now, the good thing about using the oval it kind of establishes the proportions or the length of the head. It's a bit more of an advanced technique, though, I would say. And you know what? We're going to focus this all the way in on the head. Alrighty. Just to start off with. And then in the next panel, we're going to have a female character, right? So we're going to have him here. And we can just say that she's over here in the background, right? We're just going to do something really basic over here. Gonna be powering up, like, so give her a nice hourglass type figure. All right. We'll work on that. I'll just get rid of it for now, and we'll work on this guy's face in just a moment. But what I like to do is actually lay everything out before I start to jump into the details. So it's kind of like drafting the sequence. You'll see me flip back and forth on different decisions as I work here because that's what the creative process for me entails. All right. So I am going to put a little bit more effort into this figure. That's why I wasn't happy with it initially is I just wasn't thinking about it enough. All right, so we're going to have a powering up that. It's a little bit close to the side of the frame there, so I'm going to maneuver her in. Well, let's just look, I know this isn't about figure drawing this lesson, but we're going to incorporate it in here, with comics, there's usually going to be multiple elements. And then what we're going to do is jump over to this next panel, and we're going to have a close up of this female character. And for this one, we're going to be looking up at her. Okay. You'll notice I varied the size of the heads here just to keep things interesting. So she's gonna tell him something. We're not going to know what it is, but we'll be able to discern based upon the facial expression, how the situation has changed. You know, there's some kind of exposition that's going to happen here that's gonna turn the tables and everything. Okay, great. And then what that is going to cause to have happen is he is going to look back over his shoulder. I'm going to do a super zoomed in close up shot here. Why? To increase the amount of drama. Now, you can see I don't start out very fancy when it comes to my heads, do I? Very rough looking oval. It's getting something down on the page, and we're going to draw a shoulder in here. Well, actually, you know what? That's probably a little bit too big. I think what I'll do is I'll shrink this head down to about the size that I first established for the head in the first panel. And I'm just going to I'll go back to the first panel and shrink that down even further so that once again, we've got that nice variation there between each of the head shots that we've got going on. And so what we're going to do here just to once again mix things up is we're also going to well, we're going to go ahead, actually, and tilt his head in a downward direction. All right, so he's looking back over his shoulder. That's why his head's now turned. All right. There we go. Beautiful. So this is kind of like an establishing shot, right? Like, we can see where the characters are in comparison to one another, which is really great. And if we can shrink them down, then that's going to allow us to actually make a little bit more room between them. Alright. So we'll put this one. You know, I'm not sure that I'm liking her pose, so I'm just going to rejig it once again. I think I'll give her pose a little bit more confidence. You know, this will be a little bit of an extra bonus where we see how body language comes into play. So they're both being kind of cocky toward one another. She says something he doesn't expect, and then the tables turn, right? And we can see that through their facial expressions. What I might do here is just give her some hair that's not too crazy, something like this. All right, so it's going to be hair that just runs down. Her body, like, so some nice long hair. And maybe we'll give her some kind of pigtails too. We're getting into some character design territory now. But that's, you know, this is the beginning of our sequence. That's how it starts. Starts out with a scribble, ends with a beautifully polished, hopefully, nice looking presentation. 7. Penciling Panel 1: Alright. So let's actually create some head structure here. We'll get into the facial features and how they're being expressed, and we'll go ahead and complete this sequence. Alright, so what you're going to notice is that this base that I place down on the page, it's just a it's just something there that really is standing in as a placeholder. What I'm going to do is go way outside the boundaries in a lot of cases of that initial oval that I placed down here. Okay, now, go ahead and actually draw in the cranium right over the top. Um, it's going to look a little bit messy until I start cleaning things up here. So if this is coming across as confusing to you, I apologize. Just keep in mind that really I'm going through the same process that we went through earlier. It's just that I'm drawing right in over the top of that oval on constructing the cranium, right? And I'm going to reposition a few things. So this might be like the eyebrow line here. We got the length of the face pretty much established. We just kind of did that instinctually with the oval. And the reason I like to get the cranium in there is it just helps you to figure out where the side of the head is going to be. Okay? So that's the most important part. Now, once that's done, I'm just going to start to draw in the actual facial features. Why do I do that? Okay? Why do I do that before planning everything out? Well, the reason for it is because I know where the front of the face is. I know where the top of the head is. I know what tight and tilt it's on already. I've got a general idea where the proportions are going to reside. And now I just need to get the facial features in there so I can kind of rebuild the rest of the face around them. And now I got to think about the facial expression that I want to go with. So he's going to be kind of confident, you know? Like, I'm thinking, we're actually going to close his eyes here, right? And we're going to maybe raise one of his eyebrows. And he might have this eye open, just a tiny bit to sort of glance over at her. Maybe, in fact, both of his eyes sort of open a tiny bit, but not too much. All right. So something like this. Now, when it comes to how far apart the eye should be, really, there should be one eye width between them when you're looking at the head directly from the front. Now we've got a little bit more of a three quarter turn here, so there would be some foreshortening applied to the eye on the far side of the head, but not too much. It's not going to be that obvious. All right, so got the eyes drawn in there, and now we're going to draw in the nose. All right? The nose is going to run down to about here. You notice that it passes the initial little anchor point that I added there for how long it was supposed to come down because we are looking at the head on a downward tilt, which means that the nose is going to protrude further down because it comes out of the face, and from this angle, we're going to notice a drop. He's going to have a smirk. I mean, to be honest with you, I'm not loving that eye shape that I've given him, so I'm probably going to adjust that. Like, I know where the eyebrows are, so that'll do. That'll do for now as a placeholder. And I'm going to have one side of his mouth kind of lifted up while the other side's down. Gonna create a little bit more of a strain here in the middle of his eyebrows. He doesn't think he can be beaten, right? That's probably one of his greatest weaknesses, in fact, you know, because when you think he can't be beaten, you underestimate your opponent. Now, he's closing his eyes, his eyes are little slits. So what we need to do is avoid falling for the trap of making the width of his eyes too minimal. Because it's only the height of the eyes that are actually being shrunken as he squints. Maybe this one can be a little wider over here actually. I you should be able to tell even without dialogue, what the dynamic is between these characters. Now, at this point, they could be friends, but once we get to that last panel, we're going to see that actually, no, they're not friends. Now this guy here that we're drawing is actually freaking out a little bit. Let me redraw out his eye altogether there. Look, I'm still not loose enough, and in order to draw good facial expressions, you do have to loosen up. All right. So go ahead here and mess around with his mouth a little bit more. And now I get to design the rest of his face around these facial features. Gosh, that eye is just bugging me big time. So you can see I jump around a little bit as I work. Yep. We'll get the ears drawn in there. Of course, and now it's time, like I said, to restructure the rest of the face around those facial features. And for me, I don't know. Like, once you get the proportions of the facial features down themselves, it's not hard to build out the rest of the face around them. In fact, I often find that I have to do that anyway, no matter how careful I am that initial constructive phase of the head. In fact, sometimes you can just erase whole sections and redraw them, like I'm about to do. He might seem a little bit too kind of bony and skeletal there, but I'm gonna somewhat fix that cause I want him to look strong. I don't want him to look weak. Alright, so we're going to give him a nice big chin in order to ensure that that is the case. But we don't want him to look like a buff head, right? Like, he's supposed to be a super powerful being. So at least that's the way I want him to be. Which means he might be a little prettier, you know, kind of like cell or freezer from dragon ball Z. Alright. And then we got the other side of the jaw there. So we're gonna lay that in. Now remember that I don't expect you to be able to draw heads in using the same technique here that I'm showing you as a beginner. What you really want to do is, of course, focus on that underlying structure. When you're first starting out, definitely do that, because you need that to be able to actually get to this point. See that I've just changed up his face shape a little bit. I've given him a really pointy looking chin. Sometimes I'll go back and forth as well and maybe adjust the shape of the eyes and their length in certain ways. Getting rid of some of those underlying construction lines now. I'm gonna give him a much thicker neck. Just look at how this changes his vibe, by the way. Just look at that. So maybe she's just showed up to join the fight, right? And he's like, Oh, hello, who's this? Who's this that thinks they can oppose me? So you really got to get into the mood of whatever it is you're drawing, right? He might even be cocking his head back a little bit, so I'm going to actually make it that his head is leaning back on his neck there. A, All right. Now, I've given him very little trapezius muscles there, so I'm going to just correct that, get my eraser out. Rejig things a little bit. You can see that nothing's ever set in stone. You can always go back, redo things. If you make a mess of it, it's no big deal. It's really no big deal. The art form is very forgiving. It's not like you can't correct your ways later on. And I highly suggest that, you know, if you do see opportunities to improve your work, definitely take them, 100% take them. All right. Now, I'm going to I don't know, what could I add to this guy to make him even more unique? Let's give him some kind of horn, maybe. Did we give him a horn on his chin there? No, maybe not. I really want that to be a bone structure. But maybe let's see now. Oh, I like this. I'm going to make his head a little bit more of a point at the top. Yeah, something like that. That looks good to me. I like that shape. So we are doing a little bit of character design, as I mentioned before, just to keep things interesting, I think that's a good thing. You know, in a certain sense, the design of you are designing the expression of your characters, of course, they're going to have a bit of a design to them. I'm going to bring out the sides of his jaw. Okay, so we're going to expand those. All you can see that I'm just being a rebel here. I'm erasing bits and pieces, reconstructing them. So don't stick too rigidly to what you first laid down on the page. If you see area that could be adjusted and maybe you feel like there's something more that could be done with it or you've got a new idea that you want to try out, by all means, try it out, you know? Absolutely. I'm now going to go ahead and add in a facial wrinkle there. Okay. And also draw in some rendering underneath his mouth. I'm going to create, like, a chin here that's sort of a little bit weird and wrinkly and strange looking. Maybe something like that. There we go. Very creepy. I want to give him the same sort of shape here on the sides of his jaws. So it's clearly like some kind of alien or mutant. And I want to give him, like, some thickness around his eyes. So I'm actually going to make them smaller here. I can see that I've drawn in a bit of a pupil and an iris there. Okay, so we're having some fun here. Got a pretty good strong expression going on for him. Remember, if you're looking for ideas for expressions, definitely go out down to the real world and just see what you can see. You know, take your sketchbook with you, obviously. And if you see an expression that really catches your eye, Make sure you sketch it down. Alright, now, for his ears, I'm going to make them really long like this. But I'm gonna make his ear lobes super long, too. Okay, so we got a cool little alien design going on for this dude. I'm just gonna stretch out the anatomy of a real ear for a moment and mess around with that. Make it look realistic. Believable. Run a darker outline around the face for a moment there. Now, as for the details that we add in around the head, I'm just going to kind of create a division that runs up center of his head there, maybe, like, splits off at the top, something like this. That looks great. Okay. And now, draw in his other ear. It's going to come up over there. I have that ear lobe dropping down at the side. Okay. Feeling like I need to expand that chin out some more, so I'll go ahead and do that. Yeah, I'm going to get rid of this line here because I don't think it's really serving the role that I want it to. All right, then we'll put in a few more wrinkles around the nose there. Beautiful. And so it doesn't really have any, like, eyebrows, just more skin folds around the eye there. And I'm going to add a thicker outline around the eye to add some emphasis to it. So on the facial features, it's good to add some emphasis to them. All right. A few lighter details around the face. We definitely spent probably way too long on this guy. But hey, let's create something fun here while we're here. You know, because that's what drawing is all about. Okay, now this lovely lady in the background, what I'm going to do is actually attend to her face in the next panel before I tackle her design there, just because we'll get a bit more of a close up look in this next panel. 8. Pencilling Panel 2: All right, so for her, a bit of a different story, right? For her, we're going to be well, she's actually gonna have a cocky look of her own. So let's see here. Um, we do want to get in the spherical form for the cranium. But at the same time, because we're looking at the head on this sort of upward tilted view, sometimes it's better to keep it a little bit abstract and like I said, just get in there with the facial features and start to build out everything else around them. You know, I'm going to inevitably make mistakes. That's what I've found with my art. And so I just accept that. And I try to do the best that I can with what I've got. Now, what I will do is I'll first go ahead here and just place in a little bit of a skull form for the shape of the face. This might not work out for me, by the way. This could come back and bite me if I don't properly just get a general idea for the proportions of the head first. I'm feeling it out here. Alright. You know what? I am going to use that cranium. I want to use that lumus method because I just feel like things could go real haywire here, otherwise. If in doubt, if you're not feeling confident, then make sure you get that lumus method working for you. Okay? Lumus method is what I was showing you before in those initial examples, getting the cranium down, a simple sphere to begin sketching it in there, keeping it nice and loose. We've already got a general orientation that we want to go with for the head, so I will get it drawn in there, and you'll notice that I'm changing up the axes of the head, so the tilt of the head rotation. I'm drawing in that horizontal guideline. Then what we're going to do is lay in the front of the face. Well, actually, yeah, front of the face here. It's going to run down to and remember that we want to be following the tilt of the head as we do that. So that means the chin's probably going to come down to about there. I'm just estimating that, but I feel like that'll be the case. Which'll mean the jaw line. Well remember that we got a few corners here. We've got this corner, Okay, the back corner of the jaw, and then that's going to run down to the chin. Boom. All right, so we just link those together. And that's got our general setup for the head sorted. And now I'm going to draw in the face plane. It's going to look a little bit like that. All right. Once that's done, we're ready to start drawing out the facial features with a little bit more structure there to help us out. Now, it might be worth even before we do that to just place in the neck, figure out what we're going to do for it. We're going to make her chest pretty small because she's a female character, so we want to be careful not to make that too broad. However, her chest is going to be sticking out here, let's just keep that in mind. I'm going to erase redraw out the arch that we see at the bottom of the rib cage. And have it just pointed out there, and that's going to be good, right? We could also kind of very loosely just lay in the breasts there too. Alright so that's all done. Let's go ahead and see how we do with the facial features now. The head very likely is going to be completely reconstructed around her facial features once we draw them in there. Alright, I'm going to undo that redrawing the art. You'll notice that it's gonna take me a few attempts to get this, right. And as I'm drawing a character with a certain emotion, I really do try to make sure that I'm feeling what they're feeling. You know, I really try to put myself into the role. It's like you're you're an actor, you know? And you want to become that character for just a moment. Okay, so we've got a bit of an eye drawn in over there. I'm almost squinting my eyes at the moment just to get the general composition of the face down. We're going to say that the nose will land about there. And because we're looking up at the character, that means we're going to start out with the nose plane, underside nose plane. Get it drawn down. I'm going to get rid of this line that we placed in earlier just because now it's starting to get in away a little bit. In fact, I'm going to get rid of a whole bunch of that constructive line art that we were working on before. I go to feel out where I want that eye, loosely kind of establish it there. And then we draw in the nose. Getting these nostrils right is not easy. So it might take you a few goes to produce what you want there. Now, the question is, how do we get from this angle a cocky looking expression on her face? A right? Maybe something like this. Now, the funny thing is, I'm not hugely good at actually reading facial expressions, believe it or not. I did this test once where it showed a range of different facial features on the faces of people who were conveying certain emotions and I couldn't read them very well. I didn't get very many of them right. So I'm not sure how good I actually am at this, but usually it turns out okay. You know, I feel like you're going to be squinting a little bit. When you're in a really, like, confident pose where you're sort of mocking someone. Okay, we're going to get a little bit of eyeliner happening in here. Of course, one of my favorite parts about drawing women is the eyeliner. Beautiful. A there we go. And then I'm going to do some more erasing here will soften things up. It's important to soften things up for the ladies. I'm going to redraw these nostrils for just a minute because like I said, getting them right is just sometimes a matter of trial and error, but if I can picture that underside plane, sometimes it's better to just imagine where it should be as opposed to actually laying it down there and there we have Still, I'm feeling like that nostril is a little bit too big, so I'm going to take it in some more and I feel like it needs to be taken down as well at the top. There we have. So yeah, that's the thing is that drawing is not a straightforward process. You do want to really get to know the fundamentals, but this stage that you get to where you're still running into some problems from time to time, like you see for me, guess what? That isn't as bad as it looks. It's actually, uh, It's fun. It's fine. It's like working out a puzzle of some kind. So what I'm gonna do here is I'm gonna take her mouth around and then lift it up at the sides. And I'm going to have her sort of maybe bearing her teeth a little bit. You can see that it's just a subtle smirk that I'm giving her. And sometimes it is about subtleties. What I'll do in the last panel is I'll give the guy a more extreme expression. How does that sound, just to show you how that would look. Okay, so this is going to be her upper lip there. And then her bottom lip I What I'm going to do at the sides is just get rid of some of those lines there, like so, and there we have it. As gonna go ahead and do some erasing. Cause I definitely don't like the way that chin is shaped as it is. We'll draw in the ears. Alright, so let's get dose laid in. And you'll notice that the bottom of the ears and the top of the ears, they're going to drop down a little lower than what they would be if we were looking straight at the front of the face at an eye level view because why? Well, the proportions shift as the head is foreshortened in perspective, just as with anything else. Then we'll take side of a jaw there and we'll move it down, let's say about here. There we go. That's looking pretty good to me. And then you can see that we've got the far side of the face. So we'll have her cheek bone there, and we'll just sort of merge everything together, okay, into one form. All right. And we'll sort of try to present, like, the muzzle of the face and whatnot there as well. This cheek might be coming out a little bit too far. That's what I suspect. But we want to spend a little bit of time around here just to make sure we get right. You, getting the face of a female character, right? Oh, my goodness. I mean, you saw the previous guy, we messed around with his proportions and did all sorts of things to his face. He still looks cool. It's not gonna be the same case for this lady. Like, we can have ugly looking male characters, but I guess we can have ugly looking female characters, if that's what we want. It's just not commonly what we're after, you know? So and even when you kind of ugly up the face of a female character, somehow there's more of a masculine appearance. I think that it might be just I think it's a biological thing, honestly. You know, as you have more growth hormone injected into something, it's gonna start to I think that's what causes mutation to happen. You know, things have to grow. Like, tumors have to grow, for example. And they need growth hormone in order to be able to do that. Now, it's known that women don't typically have as much growth hormone, at least as male do. And that's why men and women actually look quite different a lot of the time. We've got her face pretty much drawn up in the view that we wanted with a cocky looking facial expression. Now, what I'm going to do here is I'm actually going to add in a little bit of rendering to indicate lipstick here. It bit of rendering there. Then down here as well around this side of the mouth. Then also add in a little bit of a glint. Over here, there we have it. The other thing is that I feel like potentially the eye that's closest to us might be a little bit too far over, so I'm just going to get rid of some of these construction lines to get a better look at that. Actually, that's pretty good. That's almost exactly where we want it in fact. We'll have her eyes slightly relax there. If we wanted to, we could give her some eye shadow. Okay, so her eye, by the way, is going to be, having the iris kind of come up at the top of the eyelid there or the edge of the top eyelid, rather. Okay, so something like that. All right. And then what we're gonna do is actually start to design the rest of her body here. So we've got the facial expression down. We've got that looking good. We've got the angle of her head kind of sorted, as well. I'm just going around the lips here and defining them some more where I feel like they need it. Now, for her hairstyle, you can see that it actually kind of comes down around her face, her body. It's going to come down and around there, probably. And we're going to run it around the side of her head there, too. So we could probably actually get rid of a lot of this entirely. I always feel like this part here around the front of her head is kind of like a fringe. So I'm going to undo that, actually. Let me undo that. Let's reconstruct this out because I really like what I had going on there initially. So I'm going to kind of tie this back almost at least having running around her face there. Like so. That's cool. Looking good. And then we'll jump back over here and you can see that she's got this extra kind of part, which, you know, let's see if we can get the top of it looking right first. So we're just going to cut that back. Like so. And then this part's going to run down the side of her body there. Okay, so draw in a few strands of hair running down the side of her face. And same with this side. You know what? Probably we will still see those ears. Maybe just a glimpse of Maybe not. I don't know. Let's see. Maybe something like that. And then, of course, she's got her little pony tails. I guess it's not really a pony tail. What are they when they're doubled up like that. I don't know. Her hair's tied up on either side. That's the main thing to remember. So we're gonna get that drawn in there, like so. Beautiful. That's looking good. And now, as for her costuming, well, you know what? I'm feeling like we're gonna give her some kind of I don't know, jacket. Let's do that. Something like this will work, I think. I mean, we could have kept it simple and just given her tights or something. That's what they typically do in comic books to just make it easier to draw them out, the characters, but you know what? I like to think keep things complicated. So here we are All right. There we go. Just a very quick jacket design here. Just for the sake of the demonstration, to give you something fun to look at, as well, maybe inspire you a bit. You know, it's not fun when you just half the time you're learning, you're drawing something that looks like a study. Like, let's actually make something that potentially an ink could go over the top of and turn into a finished illustration. Like, why not? Okay. There we go. We'll put some love into this. We'll spend a bit of time on it. You can see how the whole process unfolds. Look, at a certain point, you'll probably get bored and you'll be like, All right, Clay, I get the point. That's really good because it means that you can pay less attention to what I'm doing and actually work on your own sequence with the characters that you've created and give them some life. Because that's what this is about. Whenever you're drawing a comic book sequence and you're including characters within it, really make an effort to ensure that those characters have some level of expression coming through. If you're looking at them and they all have the same default face, there's nothing happening, no personality coming through with any of them, then change it up, change it. Okay, because that's what makes a comic book compelling is when you've got characters in it that obviously look alive. I look like they're there for a purpose. I look like they're reacting to what's happening within the story. It just makes it more impactful in so many different ways. Alright, I'm going to just run my pencil over the top of this hair do here around the outside shape of it. Okay, just to bring some clarity to what we've got going on here. It Okay, there we go. So you can see how her hair is actually sort of folding over the top, going in and around the back of her neck. All right. That's looking good. Adding a bit of rendering around the side of the breast there. Maybe a bit of rendering up here, too. Let's see. Wonderful. Now, of course, we got the side of her body as well. And well, you might notice that there's a fair bit of hair actually coming down and around her body in the far off shot, which I really like, so I'm going to get that in there. And that'll pretty much, for the most part, wrap up this panel. So she's just told him something kind of crazy, as I said, and that's why we're going to have such a dramatic change in emotion in that final panel. Alright. So over here, what we're going to do is just give her, like, you know, a skirt maybe. We know that she's got a jacket on, so we'll lay that in there in a bit of a face. You can see that the face that I've just laid in from a distance looks creepy. So I'm going to undo that and just be really careful here about how I lay it in. A Okay. I'm just drawing something in real lightly there. Alright, beautiful. And yeah, she's got her, like, arms and stuff on her hips. It's just a very basic gesture. You're not really supposed to be paying too much attention to her facial features there when you're looking at such a distanced view of the character, but at the same time, you may notice that there's a bit of a smirk. Okay. And then on top of that, let's add in, I don't know, maybe some background elements. Maybe some broken down buildings or something in the far backdrop. Okay? So buildings that have somewhat collapsed. It's like post apocalyptic, right? Cool thing is with a background like this, you can just fog everything out at the bottom. That's what Mark Sylvester was talking about in one of the latest interviews I've seen with him, he's like, you just fog it out toward the bottom, and it looks really good. Now, probably I'm creating a little bit of a tangent there between the background and this dude's ears. So I'm going to be careful not to take those too close to him. Alright. There we go. Adding in some buildings, nothing too fancy. There we have it. All right. So now we are indeed ready to move on to the next panel, right? And then that will wrap up our little emotive sequence that we've got going on here. So far, they're trading subtle smirks with one another. Alright, and that's all good and well. That's a little good and well until, you know, she says something that rings his cage, rattles his cage a little bit too much, a little bit more than maybe he wasn't anticipating. All it takes is little little upward turn of the mouth over here. For him to get his heart racing. Alright? Cool. So we'll jump over here now. I'm gonna go back and just add in a little bit more definition to his eye there. So you can see me jumping back and forth. I do that from time to time. 9. Penciling Panel 3: So now we're back over here and we're going to draw out this cranium. Once again, we just want to for the most part, see how far back his head is going to come. This is just to ensure that the construction is nice and solid too. All right. And of course this will be where the side planes of his head resides. We're going to drop down the length of his face. Now remember that we extended the length of his face quite a lot in his design. But once we've got all of that in there, I think we're actually quite ready to kind of go in and start laying those facial features down. So let's go ahead and do that extreme expression. That's what we're going for here, right? So his eyes are going to be basically popping out of his head in this one. It's like, No, it can't be. I can't be beaten. You're lying. It's not possible. Okay, so it's very clear that something has just gone down. You know, on this side of his eye, we might actually have it sort of starting to squint up a little bit. And we might change the way in which his eyes look there. We don't want them to be too cartoonified, right? Now, the trick is actually keeping his proportions intact. So I have to be very observant of those. Um, his nose is actually quite long, so we're going to pop the bottom of it down here. Flare his nostrils up somewhat. And now his mouth. It's gonna look something like this. Okay, so it's hanging open. Here's gob smacked. All right, so we just draw in the outline for the mouth open. We might have him gritting his teeth, too. You know, just mess around with the shape of some of these areas, some of these facial features. You know, you never know what you come up with. Like, I've got this weird, wacky looking shape for the far side eye, like, you know, what? What else could you come up with here? I'm gonna go for something like this. All right. And, you know, he's I got a pretty big brow, so I'll describe that. Once the facial features are in, like I said, we can pretty much go and start drawing the rest of the face out around him. One of the best ways to make a character look surprised is when you have the pupil in the iris sitting directly in the middle of the eye, and you make the pupil very small, so pinpoint All right. And now, as for his teeth here, um, I'm going to do something like this. Okay, I'm going to have those coming up and around. There we go, beautiful. Have the top teeth running in the opposite angle. All right. And like I said, we can always go back and adjust the shape of these facial features if we want to mess around with them some more. Okay. Now, obviously, we're going to have to adjust the point at which his chin ends once again. I'm gonna go in here and just run that down to about there. His cheekbone is quite prominent, so I'm going to draw that out. Do a whole bunch of erasing here now. It's important to erase because otherwise, you think that you need to stick to the confines of those foundations, and you really don't? You really don't want to actually adjust everything according to the changes that you're making and just looking at the facial features, having the face wrap around it with the correct proportions accordingly. So this cheek bone is going to raise up somewhat there. We could have the jaw popping around from that side a tiny bit, maybe, but what I'm going to do here is I'm going to get rid of that eye completely and adjust its shape because I'm not happy with the shape that I had going on for it. Okay. All right. That's looking a little bit better. Now, in order to get the proportions of his head correct, not only from the front but also the side, we're going to need to draw this head back quite a decent amount. Okay, so time to get back out the eraser once more. All right. I'm going to guesstimate that his ear is actually going to sit around about there. Oh Don't forget, we're going to be looking at a decent amount of that ear from the side. I feel like his head's a little bit more turned in this particular example. Okay. So there we have it. And then we got the top portion of the ear. It's running up and then down and around Like so a Alright, there we go. Now don't want his ear to be larger in appearance. Like, we don't want to look too big in comparison to what we had initially with the first panel. Now we are looking at it on a different angle, which means it may stretch out along the profile view. Okay, so there we go. We're pulling head back further, too. He's got a very big thick neck, so I'm just going to draw that out. And Now, as for this shoulder here that we laid in initially, we're going to have to adjust it too, probably. Let's just draw his jaw line in first. All right. I've gone ahead and actually protruded his chin even further down. You can see lots of adjusting here. Make use of the razor. It's a beautiful tool to use. It's going to help you out in a big way. And all we need to remember here is that he's actually turning his head around, okay? So he's turning his head. That means his trapezius muscle is going to be there. The back of his head, the back of his neck is going to sit around about there. Okay. We might have a shoulder over here, depending on well, actually, probably won't see that, to be honest with you. Now, his trapezius muscle is quite large, so I would say it's going to come up further and probably obscure some of the bottom of his chin. All right, we got his ear lobe kind of dangling down. Or maybe actually, it will kind of sit tucked in against the neck there. So it's not just about the facial features, it's also about the physical state of the face, too. Like we want to apply physics to the head as certain situations occur. And I'm feeling like his ear lobe is definitely going to tuck in against the neck, so. All right. Just getting the positioning of the head right, the proportions of the head. And then once that's done, we can feel free to go in and actually start laying in the details around the facial features. All right. And, look, I think that ear is actually coming over way too far toward the front of the face, so I'm going to erase that. And then draw out some of the structure of the head. So we've got cheek bones, which once again, quite a prominent feature on this guy's face. That's going to run back to about there. Okay? So I think based on that, the ears will sit here in fact. Now, what did I just do there? Well, I figured out where the ears needed to go in relation to the placement of the cheek bone and how far that was coming back. All right. So I could see how far the cheekbone was coming, I could determine where I wanted the ear to sit. And I am going to still apply what I was talking about last time, which is actually having that ear lobe run down and tuck in against the neck because I just think that's an important little detail to incorporate. You know, ears should come across floppy at the base. All right. There we go. Wonderful. And this will be the side of the jaw up here. Okay. Now I'm erasing some of the details that we added in around the face there for the cheek bone, just because some of them we might not necessarily want positioned where they are. His mouth is very exaggerated here. Adjusting the shape of the chin now coming down and around to form the base of the face. All right. Now, here's where things get really fun because this is a bit more of an extreme expression. We're going to see more details, okay? Because the face starts to really scrunch up. It's using more muscles in order to compose itself into these expressions with more intensity. And so in order to show that, to show that it's a more intense emotion, that's exactly what we're gonna do. Gonna add more lines in there. And you'll see just the effect that it has. It's pretty powerful. Now, in order to pull this off effectively, it's important to understand what's going on underneath the surface of the skin. So what that means is having an understanding of those underlying facial muscles. Okay? So you're going to have the we'll go over those in just a moment. Actually, let's do it now while we think of it. So you're going to have the mouth muscle here. Okay, so this is the muscle that surrounds the mouth. You're going to have the muscles around the eyes. All right. And then you've got a muscle that runs down here around here as well. Okay, you've got the chin muscle. And you've also got the jaw muscle up around the back of the face around this section with the cheeks, normally they weren't so bony, you'd have, you know, a bit of a cheek muscle there. And once you get to the top, you've got the brow muscle. And then you got this big band of muscle that sits around the forehead and some more muscles that sit around the temporal area of the skull. Okay? So that's what I'm thinking about as I add in these lines is just what muscles are there that are scrunching up and getting all wrinklfied. So as I said, we got this muscle that's going to run down and around the mouth. You can see, right? Like, how much did that intensify the emotion just then? Like, it really pushed it. Okay, there we go. And then we have the underside of the mouth muscle, as I like to call it. You could even go ahead and place in some wrinkles going up around the chin. You might notice this, like if you're crying or if you're really upset, you'll see the chin muscles actually wrinkle up quite a lot. Alright, now we won't put too many details in there, just enough to indicate that the chin muscle is tensed. All right. And then on this side, same kind of deal. Kind of go in there, represent the muscle around the mouth and around the face in that section. This kind of muscle actually separates the cheek bone from the rest of the face. In fact, you got a whole bunch of different forms layered on top of one another in this far side representation of the head. At least on this guy, due to his design. I feel like, you know, this bottom part of his chin, that could come out some more. You know, I don't want him to appear skinny. So let's give that some thickness there. All right. Looking good, looking good. And now we'll run a darker, more define outline around the eyes. You could even add some veins into the eyes if you wanted to. Okay, so here's some details for the bottom eyelids that we're defining. We'll do the same thing around the mouth. We'll define that some more. We actually want to see it. You'll notice that as you darken up the outline for these different areas of the face, it starts to look more complete, even though you're not really going over any of the other details. Okay. But speaking of the rest of the face, let's draw a more defined line around the outside of it. We've got this center line that we need to place down the middle of his head just to keep the design consistent. We'll run this back around. Once again, I'm feeling the emotion. I'm really trying to make sure that I'm pushing that through into the character. All right. Get my eraser out, get rid of some of those additional details that maybe we don't need so much. We only want this to be a subtle detail here in the middle of the head. Pulling up some more wrinklege around that brow muscle. Look how much more extreme this emotion is now. That is great. Now, because we're looking at the nose on much more of a three quarter view, we do have the opportunity here of actually defining the nose bridge some more. So I think we should definitely do that. A. Right? And as you can imagine, you can easily go in and start rendering bits and pieces of this out, which I am resisting doing simply because that takes time. And you have probably been sitting here watching me whip up these heads long enough. Allright? So I don't want to if you're still here watching completely bore you to death because, look, watching someone else draw, it can be monotonous, especially with an artist like me, which I'm always kind of rejigging my drawings. So it's an ever changing animal, a lot of the pieces that I do. It's constantly transforming. There's no knowing where it's going to end. And, I mean, look, that can actually make it kind of more exciting to probably watch, honestly, just because you're as surprised as I am by the time we're done. But still, now, I am going to add in some more neck action going on here just because the neck muscles tend to tense up a little bit as well as you start to pull the face and contort it into a more stronger force of emotion, null expression, as I said, the same thing happens to the body. But we'll generally add a few details in there. We don't need to add too much. The last thing that I'm going to incorporate is just some of these lines. You'll see this in comic books a lot of the time, these speed lines that sometimes are there to just emphasize the extremity of an emotion. A so I'm pulling those in now. And that'll just, you know, really, you shouldn't have to rely on those, but it does add to the effect here, doesn't it? Alright, I'm going to get rid of some of those overshots that run outside the confines of the frame. And I would say that that's about it. That completes this demonstration. So let's do a really quick recap on what we've seen so far. All right? We've got our first set of heads here. You'll notice that there is definitely a structured approach that we can take in order to get a well proportioned, solid look in the head down onto the page. And then we can take that same structure and we can tilt it downward and upward, orientate it in any way we want in order to create the kind of expression that we're looking for and the emotional force of it that we'd like to present to the reader. Now, once we apply the principles that we learned up here, we can go ahead and actually create a full blown sequence. And as you can see, we don't need a whole lot of dialogue in order to bring these characters to life. And for us as the reader, the viewer, to understand exactly what it is that's going on. Now, we didn't talk too much about how lighting actually affected the way in which storytelling comes through a character's face, but it does have some impact sometimes, especially if you've got a very dramatic lighting condition such as you've got a character in the dark slowly emerging. That's going to be a huge and prominent storytelling tool that you can employ. However, that's probably more so related to storytelling with lighting. So we'll save that for another lesson. But for now, you've got plenty to work with when it comes to expressing through the facial features of your characters, thus giving them more personality, more emotional capacity and more impact just on the audience and how they're feeling about the situation unfolding within the book, which is, like I said, it's visual storytelling. You know, that's more often than not where you're going to be pushing that narrative through the characters. You know, it's the characters that tell the story most of the time. So there you have it. 10. Conclusion: And that wraps up our lesson on storytelling through faces, facial storytelling. I hope that you got a heck of a lot of value out of it and that it's given you some ideas as to how you might be able to start pushing the personality of your own characters, making them actually feel alive like they're there, giving them some unique diversity as far as their personality is concerned, because that's what's going to help them to stand out, not just in the way that they look, not just in their design, but actually how they act throughout the story. Remember, to put what you've learned here into practice as fast as you possibly can while it's still fresh in your mind, because looking at it, without applying it, listening to it, without putting it into action, it's not going to have the same amount of impact on your skill set. So you've really got to make sure that you pick up your pencil now, draw up a sequence if you haven't already, and get those characters expressing as potently as you possibly can and tell a story through that. All right. Until next time, keep on drawing, keep on creating. I'll see you again real soon. Bye bye for now.