Fill a Sketchbook: People Edition

1. Welcome to Class: Hello, Skillshare. Let's fill a sketchbook together this time with people. My previous Phyllis sketchbook classes, I went over my basics of sketchbooking in a way that makes sense to me, and I also did a pretty spreads edition, too. I hope that it helped you out, and you have gone on to fill many gorgeous or ugly, like I've mentioned, spreads. There's no judgment in multiple sketchbooks. This time, I'm specifically going to be going over how I develop people and get better at drawing people and characters in my sketchbook. Sketchbooking has become one of my favorite things ever. Through my sketchbook practice, I have developed my skills as an artist, experimented, had fun in the process, too. As much as I adore getting better as an artist, I really mainly enjoy sketchbook time as me time, a time to be enjoyed. My sketchbook is a safe space and it doesn't need to be shared unless I want to, like with you all. But I mean, I also really enjoy getting to hone my skills and noticeably see that I'm getting better. And this has been a long journey with drawing people, and I'm so happy to share what I have learned with you all. In this class, I will be taking you through different exercises that you can do in your sketchbook to help you to develop people and characters easier. I will share simple exercises to help with character building and my tips for drawing and painting interesting people all in the safety of a sketchbook. Hello, everyone. I'm Christina Hultkrantz, an illustrator and surface designer from Marie Fred Sweden. Welcome to my CheeryPink studio. I am mainly a digital artist. I work in Procreate, but I really love playing with art supplies. In my sketchbook, too, I have a whole day dedicated to it called Fun Friday where instead of real work on Friday, I play with art supplies and hone my skills and take creative classes, and it's obviously the best day of the week. Drawing people has been a journey for me. Drawing people photo realistically is kind of what I learned through school and art school, but trying to break that to create characters that reflect me and how I want to show people has been interesting and fun to go through. I don't know how to explain it. But, yeah, I have been for years trying to hone how I want to represent people in my way and not just looking at photos for reference. So I'm really excited in this class to share what I have learned and how I have honed my personal way of drawing people. And also, I want to mention it's not done. Like, this is a constant process that I'm developing and getting better at, and you will, too. So let's get started. 2. Supplies and Class Project: To follow along in this class, you'll be needing a sketchbook and drawing supplies, and they can be any drawing supplies that you prefer to use. You could just work with a simple pencil and a simple sketchbook. But if you would really like to follow along with the things that I like, I will be sharing my favorite materials in a coming up section. For the class project, you will just be sharing a page from your sketchbook with the different characters and people that you have developed in this class using some of the exercises. You can choose whichever exercise or page that you are feeling most proud of to share in the class project gallery. 3. People Sketchbook Journey: In this next section, I want to show you my journey of drawing people and characters in my several sketchbooks that I've had over the years, especially my latest sketchbook called Menkuan, which is Swedish for the person. And, um, yeah, let's take a look at that. Alright, my friends, it's time to talk about my sketchbooks that I use for drawing people. I mean, you can draw people in any sketchbook, obviously, but I wanted to show you two that I have dedicated to my journey with drawing people. So I've had this one since 2023, and I keep adding the year because I'm a bit of a slow sketchbook user sometimes because I have so many because I have different themes, so I never get done with just one and then move on to the next. I have like 20 going at the same time, maybe not 20, maybe like ten. So anyway, one this is the ostrem 1917 in the A five size. And I really like it because it has tons of sheets of paper. That's why it takes so long because it has, like, 250 sheets. And the pages are nice, that cream color, and they're very thin. It's 80 GSM, so they're very thin, so you definitely can't use paint in here. But just to use just like a traditional pencil in here is so lovely. I think the pages are so smooth, and I really like it. So for just taking notes, ideation, coming up with characters, I really like this sketchbook as a place to start because it doesn't feel so precious. These are quite expensive, but when you factor in that there's 250 sheets of paper, I don't think that it's that much. Am I lying that there's 200? No, 250. Look, 249. There's actually 251. See? And here I've used marker, so it does take a little bit of but you can see it buckles a little bit, and you can kind of it doesn't totally seep through, but you can see it on the other side. So I'd say it does take a little bit of, like, marker or colored pencil and dry media, but for the most part, yeah. So this is, I would say, if I'm gonna sit down and draw something, I'm not really sure what it is, I will sit in here and fiddle with something, make thumbnails. I have written lots of notes about different characters that I want to create. Here, if I'm trying to figure out how a character is going to look, I can redo their head a couple of times and, like, just test out before I draw in this one that feels a bit more precious. And like I have to create final work there. Let's see. So I don't really want to do a tour of this one it's I don't know. This one feels a bit more personal because it's a little bit sloppier and, there's lots of stuff for my kids. They draw stuff on postts and I shove them in here 'cause they're so cute. Like, What is even. I think this is a portrait of me. Anyways, yeah, here I was drawing a little character, my daughter Tilly and she's so sweet. My daughter, I think, helped me draw her body, which is, darling. Way better than mine turnout. These are good. Anyway, so I just wanted to mention that I have that I really like this kind of sketchbook to have just, like, reference, and we'll go over soon how we draw the face. And yeah. It's nice to have a place where you just put your ideas, and this is where the ideas get going, and you can sketch freely and kind of low pressure that it doesn't have to be beautiful in every single page. But you're just coming up with stuff, and I think this is here where I am making the most advancements in my artwork because I am testing out stuff and I'm not being too precious about it. That has to be perfect. Like, these characters aren't perfect, but they're really acute and they're getting somewhere. And I just Oh, and then, like little characters. How cute are these? The flurps. I want to do something with these. Look at these ones. Then I'm gonna do a little little kiss. So precious. It's okay to be obsessed with your own artwork, I think. Oh, here, I was trying to figure out what a hedgehog looks like. Look at the progression, like, from this, and then I finally got here. Sometimes, you know, you have to draw something one, two, three, four, five, six times. Alright, so that's that one. And then I have this one. This is a beautiful sketchbook from is it Fabriano? Where are Wait, Fabriano? This is the Venezia Sketchbook. It's really big. This is the biggest size I have. I'm sorry, I don't know what size it is, but I'll make sure to link it below. It's a beautiful cover. The pages are like 200 GSM, so they're really thick, beautiful crisp white drawing paper that's relatively smooth. There's like a classic grain to it, but it's very slight. So if you prefer, like classic drawing paper, then this is a sketchbook for you. It comes in different sizes. It has, like, the A five size. And a smaller A six size too, but I really like this one. I've called it Mincun. This is in Swedish. Mencun means the person or the person. Or people inequan but people, the person, humans. So I've dedicated this sketchbook, and I started this in March 2024, and in the hopes of bumping up my game with creating people, so I started off. And here's going to be all kinds of different things that we're going to be doing in the class. So I hope that you'll get excited for different exercises we're going to be doing together. This is the 40 faces challenge started by Sarah Dyer and we're definitely going to be doing that because it's so much fun here and then doing another version. But with full figures. And it's fun to see, I don't think that these are bad at all. They're really good, but we'll see how my artwork progresses, even just like in a year because now it's more than a year, actually. Now it is September 2025. So how far have I gotten in these pages, and I'm almost done. I have like five pages left or something. Anyways, here. So just playing with mixed media, different materials and layering things up and trying to exaggerate colors and forms and things like that. This sketchbook is great for mixed media because the pages are so thick. It really takes paper, takes paint and different layering. Maybe if you really use a lot of watercolor and a lot of water and a very wet media, it wouldn't be so good. And I would get a proper watercolor sketchbook, but for, like, just slight painting, it's pretty good. These ones not so happy with the color. I wish I didn't do the backgrounds. It It just looks messy, but there's some nice characters in here. I like this guy. He looks cozy. And who else can we find? He looks also very nice and he looks very content. She looks angry. And then, yeah, little people to have in backgrounds is really fun to remember to do or have, like, a reference. So when I'm doing a painting, I can open up this page and pick out different little people that I played with, creating. Right. Here's a full painting that I tried. You'll recognize this girl that I just showed you in my other sketchbook. So I had sketched out the dog first to get a feel for the shape of the back and how it was standing and same with her and her face. So mermaids. And here I went last year to the castle that we have in the place where I live in Sweden, called Grips homes Castle. And they have a huge Mongos portrait gallery, and I, of course, had to go and sketch all of the funny portraits of the different here's Queen Kristina. And lots of others. And these are more in my realistic style. So when I'm sketching an actual painting, this is how I would try to depict as realistically as I can without major stylization. And that is a good practice, of course. Here I drew my children. Looking at the Griolm castle. We live in a really beautiful place. Even though I really like this sketchbook and even though it has relatively smooth paper, I still find that it's a little bit more texture than I prefer. So I prefer other sketchbooks for when I do painting. Here's some more portraits. And here's another exercise that we're going to be doing drawing a person and then seeing how you can stylize them further. Here's some learning I did with Rebecca Green. Here's some more black and white kind of portraits in my more realistic style that I like to do. Here this is from Emma Carlisle Sessions. More of that. Here's a little portrait I did of a character I came up with called Rosie. Here she looks like a giant child. I supposed to be a child, so she should be like Edy bitty. So Can't Ovie always do well? It's just like my journey as I think about stylizing and exaggerating people's poses and their clothing. I think it makes characters more interesting when you pull out something of their character to make it more interesting to look at. Like this woman with her nose here is a more realistic nose and then pulling out, her face just became more interesting to look at with that nose, I think, or here with big eyelashes and this woman and that she's leaning back, walking is way more interesting than if she was just standing straight. What else? Yeah, this old woman's coat and dress is way oversized than what she probably looked like in the photo. Here again, just trying to draw the same face over and over again until you find something that feels more like what you're going for. Like, I drew this portrait, and then I tried her again and again and this one looks more realistic, but this one looks more like a character in a book and I really like that. Here's Rosie again. I was trying to recreate her. And here's the 40 faces challenge, but this time because I was annoyed with all the color that I used last time I used a very limited color palette. There's some really fun characters in here, too. What do we like? This girl with her pompom hair is really sweet. I like this girl, you'll see her again. So it's also like, once you draw characters like this, and you've just done their faces, but you can pull out them later for other paintings and drawings. See, here I used her again and gave her a body. And here's another nice more painterly I forget to fix my pages so they get a little messy. It was just a random page where I was testing out some materials and mediums to see how that worked on this paper. And then some more sessions with other amazing artists like Emma Malaka. I really like how this portrait turned out. And here, I usually like to use dry media when I draw people because I feel like I have more control, but it's fun to add in the paint to also test out that. And I of course love using paint, but just constantly trying to figure out what materials I like to use. Like, here, I was using oil pastels. I love the look of that, but it also they get so it gets a little messy sometimes. This is a self portrait of me when I was ice thing. This past winter and trying to, like that. Here, I don't know if that face is good enough, but, yeah, here it's more like, it's so cold and delightful. Here, I started working with PanPastels, and that's something that I'm going to be focusing a lot on in this course, because I just adore them so much. So here's some group drawings that we did with another artist teacher Emas Moka. And here's some more portraits and people. I just love this medium. I love how soft it looks. I like the effects that it gives, especially when you're drawing skin and hair, it has this because it has a see through texture that you can get. I just really like it. And then with pencils on top, it just works really well. I also like that you don't have to wait for paint to dry. So pastel has become something that I've really enjoyed working with, especially when drawing people. So I feel like the rest of my sketchbook is filled with this pan pastel. Here's some more character work. Here's the pastel in the background just to give some color for my little character study. I really like these are fun. If you have kids, you know that they don't just sit still and, like, sit pretty. Like, if they're sitting or doing something, they're like, they have they're doing they're doing things. And here's a little ballet scene. Honor me as a ballerina. Here's another 40 faces challenge. My daughter helped me again with a couple of them. Those are really great. And here, I've been really trying to push the shapes of people's heads, so they don't have to be a perfect oval every time. So shapes like this that are a little wonky are starting to find really interesting because it just gives them more character, and that's something that I would like to achieve. Maybe you are trying to achieve something a little bit more realistic, and that's fine, too, obviously. And again, the limited color palette is really helpful in this kind of situation when you're just trying to figure stuff out and you don't have to think about 5 million colors. Here's a I'm getting ready to do a little exercise with you later in the course. So that would be fun to do. Here's some paintings that I tried to do. This girl's very cross eyed, which is unfortunate. But yeah, and I, whatever. You learn every time you create something new. Very green on green. I've been enjoying the greens. Here's some more fun exercises. Here setup so we can do the 40 faces challenge together. Here I did another really exaggerating arms on two characters, and I think that is, again, really fun to do. Like, I saw this image and she was wearing a rather large coat for her size, but I really accentuated that. And here, just thinking about walking home with groceries sometimes feels sometimes like it's this big. I really like how these turned out as well. This one, again, I need to fix. I need to fix that. Because they turned out really beautiful. Alright, here we're going to work on some more full figure people, and we'll finish this page together. Again, I just love the look of the soft pastels with colour pencils. It looks so pretty. I hope that you'll enjoy learning about that, too. And here, character transformation, I use the same reference image for these four people, and then just saw how I could pull that and make different ideas and think about that. So we'll do that together. And here is set up a page so we can do a similar finished drawing like I did here. With washi not washi tape, with a wallpaper tape. I really like that tape. It's from Swedish brand T Tessa Tesa. And here's another one that I did recently, did this yesterday, actually. And again, drawing a figure, trying to accentuate different things, testing different faces out. Um, yeah, I really like. This one I had drawn her head big. That's why I colored out the background and tried again, and I really like how her head just makes more sense in the contrast between her large body and her huge feet and her teeny little head. And that just looks way more fun. And when she had a head that was, like, in proportion to her body, it just looked boring 'cause everything was big. It was a big head, big body, big legs, big feet. And then working on expressions, I really like this one. She's really giving good side eye there. This one's pretty good too. This one's more side eye, a little bit suspicious. This one looks like curious and kind of cheeky maybe. This one's just kind of sweet. Alright, so that's it from my sketchbook. So I hope that you're going to be looking forward to filling more of these pages with me together, and we can learn more about creating really interesting fun characters that you can then pull out of your sketchbook to create maybe children's book illustrations or posters or in your illustration work or maybe even character design within your surface design portfolio. Okay, let's get started. 4. Materials: Alright. Time to talk about drawing materials. I'm especially going to share with you the kinds of drawing materials that I like most and feel most comfortable with when I'm drawing people. Since we're going to be playing with materials now, I thought that I would bring out my play sketchbook because this is the royal talons. It's a little bit more affordable and doesn't have as snazzy paper as the other one. So I'm going to bring out that to talk about materials. So for this class, we're going to be working a lot in just traditional materials like a colored not a catalog pencil. A regular pencil. So this is the black win pearl. You can use whatever pencil you like. I like this one because it's very dark and it's very smooth and it's very nice. I also like the Caveco sport holder, and you can buy replacement leads. I believe these are five. This is the five millimeter size, and the lead that I purchased is from Fabri Castel, and I think it's five B. I think so. So it's also very, very dark. So that one's also similar. It's very even smoother. It feels really soft, and I like the chunky size. So those are some pencils. And if you're an eraser person, using any kind of eraser, this is from Sabra Castel too. It's fine. Then we can talk about colored pencils. I enjoy creating all the details of my works with colored pencils. So I really like the colored pencils from prisma color. I think they're very nice. I like that they also are the color on the pencil. So I use those a lot. I think they're really smooth and they have really vibrant colors, and you can also buy them individually, and you don't have to just buy them in a pack. They have interesting colors. So here are some colors that I really like like rosy beige. And clay rose. They're very similar, like, the darker and lighter version of each other. We also have henna. If you want something more warm, that's a nice color. I like these colors, too. This one is called beige sienna. It's very pink. This is the only one I would say that does not match the color on the pencil, but it's a very interesting beige color. And then what else? This one sandbar brown is nice, very greeny brown. Like those. So those are the prisma colors, and those are really beautiful to use. I also really like der went drawing pencils. They are so thick and creamy and they have beautiful colors. I like those. So this is the light Sienna. I have also seen on the Internet that they're coming out with even more colors because it's been a pretty limited color palette that they have. And then polychromos are a classic. They are also nice. They're nice because they're affordable and easy to find here in Europe. It's difficult to find the prisma colors in Europe. Um, yeah, and you can see, like, they layer nicely. I don't usually layer much, but anyways, and I like those. Those are those. What else? We also, of course, have the luminans by Carendas that are beautiful colored pencil, but they're very luxury. But this one, Sepia is just insanely pigmented. So it's nice to have a few of these in some, especially the dark colors, like sepia and they have a dark indigo color, a dark blue. That's just ridiculously pigmented. So I definitely suggest picking up those, but the regular kinds of colors, I would I would choose polychromos or Prisma colors. So that's the colored pencils. And now I want to share with you these beautiful pan pastels. And so I bought a set. It wasn't a full set. I think it was, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven colors. It was the portrait set, so it had, like, these browns and this in the blue, and I've added a few other colors, and I have other colors that I've purchased separately on the side. They usually come like this in little they almost look like makeups, I guess. And in comparison to regular pastels, soft pastels are beautiful in texture, and there's, like, the stick kind, like regular soft pastels that are quite they're quite chalky and they're really pigmented, but they get a lot of this dust. So yeah, you have to, like, work them really into your paper or really use a fixative. And it's really, really messy. There's also not col it pencils, pastel pencils, so it makes it less messy, but they still have that. There's so much dust when you use pencils, and it's not recommended to blow that because it blows into the air and then you breathe that into your lungs. So using a little brush to brush away is ideal or bringing it outside is better. We're letting it fall working. So that's something to consider when using soft pastels like that, but pan pastels they have some kind of other binder, so they really stick well to the paper. I would compare it to working like with eye shadows, and they come with these funky little tools, or you have to purchase them, but they are made for these, which is fun. So you just dip them slightly, and then there's a lot less of that. It was I have tons on my page to begin with. Lots of dust, but I need to show you that it's not that dusty. You can kind of work them into the page. And many times in my sketchbook, I don't even fix them because they're like, they're on here. But these ones, they're just so messy. Like, here it is messy. If you are rubbing your hands all over it. But there's just a huge difference, and then using these tools just feels fun. And because they're such a weird shape, you don't have as much control painting like this as you do drawing with a pencil that you have a lot of control. So I just really enjoy this medium a lot. And they come in tons of colors. They're quite expensive. So look for them on sales and things like that. But I just if you enjoy this texture of soft pastels, but have just hated how messy they are, this is for you. I don't like how much plastic it is or anything like that, but sometimes. It's just, I don't know, I have to deal. They mix quite well. You can layer them beautifully. It's just a really interesting new texture, and I really just like how they look. They get messy. You can have several for different types of colors. I usually keep one for light colors and one for dark. I also use a rag to just lightly dust or wipe off the excess colors so I can choose another color. I have some of these pinky one and a light yellowy one and a brown. These are great for skin tones. They also besides these funky little tools, they also have other tools like this one that's more straight, but I find this one just breaks a lot. I has like a silicone cap, but it, um, just breaks. It's a little bit more awkward to use. I prefer the other ones that are flat. But this works, too. Just feels like you're painting, but it has a soft effect, and they layer beautifully. And if you do an underpaintings with different colors, you can, of course, fix that with fixative. They also have these funny tools. I have them in an old dam jar. They look like, again, like beauty tools, beauty sponges, but they're a little bit more compact. They're not super soft, so they still have, like, some I don't know, form to them. They come in different shapes, so you can get different um like detail you can see the layer quite nicely over other things, doesn't completely wipe it out, but it just gets, like, a hazy effect, so they're just so pretty and fun to work with. So there's that. I also want to show you the fixative that I use in case that's interesting. This is just a cotton rag. I prefer that over single use paper. I have found this one I really like. It's a a giant fix basic. And it doesn't stink super bad, and it's quite affordable. So this is the one that I have found where I live in Sweden that works nicely. And again, it's not stinky and it doesn't it doesn't feel like there's a weird coating or anything. It's just really nice. You can use just regular hair spray, but it's not as good, and I feel like it doesn't spray as nicely sometimes, and your papers going to stink like hair spray. Okay. Okay, so that's all the fine materials that we are going to be using in this. In this class, for the most part, I might whip out some paints, and if I do, I'll talk to you about them in the class. 5. Drawing People Basics: All right. In this section, I'm going to be sharing you everything that I know, all my little tips and tricks that I have learned over the years of taking 1 million classes from different teachers and going to art school and just drawing and drawing and drawing so that you can also feel comfortable creating images of faces, of people, of characters, bringing your own personality to things. Let's go through it all. I take a very relaxed approach to most things. I think you would notice that if you've taken many of my classes. I'm not very particular about being super realistic or big huge rules or anything like that. I like to just be casual with my art making, and I think I prefer that. It's less stressful. It's less pressure on yourself. This is me telling you some things about anatomy, but if you want to take a proper class, there's many here on Skillshare that will actually teach you about drawing people properly. I'm just going to share with you the absolute basics so that you can create people, and then you can learn how to break the rules. So I'm going to choose a nice colored pencil here. I like this one. It's called henna. So if you're going to be we'll start off with faces. So if we're gonna be drawing a head, you can, of course, do the normal, ovalis shape. And here is the top of the head and here is the chin. And in the middle, I'm sure you've seen many times that people who draw will break this down into halves and then here. So in this half of the face is where your eyes sit. So you can put the pupils there, and then your eyeball sits on top of that or your lid, I guess. Now I didn't do that very proportionately because also the next rule is that one eye one eye should fit in between here. So there should be another eye that fits here and an eye on each side. Again, I don't think that it's important that this is exactly perfect. That's what's going to make your characters have some character. So here I made my character have quite wide set eyes, and I think that's pretty. But if you wanted it to be a little bit more realistic looking, you would make sure that your eye are approximately one eye apart on all three, A one, two, three, four, five places. Alright. So there's your eyes. And then in between your eye line, there's halfway mark and your chin line, you're going to make a new mark. So it's halfway through. And that's where your nose stops. So here you can put your little nostrils and create a nice little nose. And then your nose goes all the way up to your brow bound. So if you're going to do that and the brow sits a little bit over your eyes. And again, this is something you can play with to make it your eyes more. Like, men have eyebrows that are thicker and closer to their eye, and women might have more eye lid space and have thinner browns. Depends on, again, the type of character that you're drawing. And between the nose and the chin, again, we're going to half that, and that's where the bottom of your lip sits. So here you can draw a little mouth. There. You can do the little cupid's bow in here if you like. Then you have space for the chin. And it looks to me sometimes like you have a huge forehead, but right now there's no hair on this person. We also need to talk about ears, and ears sit. They can start at the middle of your brows to the bottom of the nose. But, again, this is, like, preference. If you want to make somebody have bigger ears maybe more Hmm This is a quite big ear. Yeah, there's something you can play with having more sticky outdi ears or just, like, a simple ear or small, you know. So this is just, like, a realistic face and where you foot stuff. This again is the top of the head, so maybe you draw pull the hair line a little bit down onto the forehead where it feels. Good to. I don't have like I don't have, like, a mark. It's not like halfway. It's less than halfway down. And then here we can give them something have to give them a little sideburns. We give them a nice middle part. Also, this is the top of the skull so the hair can also go up. I mean, you can have really fluffy, big Texan hair, or you can, you know, keep it a little flatter. But, I mean, this is, again, where you can add flair. If somebody has big curly hair, their hair could be all the way up here, you know. So that's good. Men have thicker necks than women. So a male, you might have a much thicker neck like to hear to give them that masculine look, and women have thinner necks, you would bring in the neck a little bit further. There you go. Same thing with noses and ears on men would be larger, noses would be bigger. So these are all things that you can play around with, but now you at least know where you put things. If we just go over it really quick again, here's just a simple oval face we can do the lines to begin with. Here's the middle part. Here I'll try to do this better by making the eye a little bit. Bitter. So here, it's like one eye space there, one eye space there, and one. Again, I'm not very good at those. I did, like the same. I make them a little bit too wide set. But I don't think it's needed to take out a ruler. It's okay. Here's the middle point. That's where the nose nose goes. You'll do nice funny. I've been liking to do kind of piggy noses. You can bring up this to the brow boon. Again, with eyebrows, you can do a lot of expression. If you make the eyebrows like this, they look really surprised. Or if eyebrows like this, you look angry. In between the bottom nose and the chin, you have that middle line, and that's where the mouth goes on top of that. So if you're just doing a simple character, you would put just, like, the bow like that. Or if you're gonna add in upper lip, you would do that. Here, again, I thought I put the ears a little bit too high. So I'll do it maybe somewhere in between and make the ears a little bit smaller. A, stopping there. So And this is more of an adult face or a young adult. I can teach you some tricks for other things. So here we bring the hair line again, not completely halfway down the forehead, but a little ways, maybe one third. And then you can draw in some hair, give them some volume so their hair isn't slick to their skull. And here we have a nice part. This one looks more, I would say masculine, so I'll give them a thicker neck to show that they are man. If we're going to start talking about like a kid, so maybe you'd make their head a little bit more round than oval, we do the lines on their face. One thing that one little trick in the cartoony world is that you add the eyes underneath the line instead and give little kids bigger eyes, a large forehead. All their features are just cuter and smaller. So I would say, like, just making everything smaller, compactor on the face. So not doing this with the lines, like keeping the nose and the mouse and the eyes quite close to each other and eyebrows. So see that it looks more like a baby. You can exaggerate that further, and that's things that you can try out. But even more round and here's the middle of the face. Here's nice big eyes on the little baby and you can do like a mouse and all this much closer. You see that they look younger? I don't know why. I assume 'cause kids, you know, they just have, like, big heads in comparison to their body. You just give them, like, a little hair on their head. Uh, old people are the same. Like, with kids, you're gonna make sure that you don't give them any expression lines. If you start giving a baby expression lines, like, cheeks like this, they automatically look like old person. So if you're gonna do, like, old person here, the usual if you think about the face, maybe you get more jowels and things, but same thing here with the the eyes in the middle of the face, and here's the middle where the noses, noses and ears get bigger and bigger as you age, the old people have nice chara noses, maybe the eyebrows are a little bit more sparse or the old man, they might have nice extra hairs. Halfway through halfway from the nose and the chin is the mouth. You can add that in. Here, if you add these like the lines around the smile line and then like crow's feet, you can even give some eyebgs. This is really where you're going to make them look older by having the face maybe more everything's hanging a little bit more. And then wrinkles in the forehead. Ears can be really big here because people have they keep growing, which is really sweet. I'll give them a nice make them thicker. There you go. So here's some simple ways of putting up the face so that you make it look so that the human eye can recognize it as a face. And then in this class, we're gonna be further playing with this. These are what the things that you're going to do to make it feel weird. You're still going to recognize a face by having the eyes, the nose and the mouth, but if all of a sudden you will play with this a little bit more. If you change your eye line to appear, what does that look like? And then you can choose to do what you want. Do you want to do this? But the nose is down here. We can try that first. So you still recognize it as a person, but they look funny. They look interesting. So, or we can try you can also make everything smaller on the face. So like, really small features. Here I'm just gonna go for it instead. Just also looks funny. And interesting gives a different look. So there's so many things to start off with, but yeah, test out in your sketchbook, just creating different people and see how if you play around with different details, can you make somebody who can you do a progression from a baby to a teen to an adult and see how you can make this person with the same maybe the same hair. But as they get older, you could even do a fourth and make them into a grandpi by just, you know, adding more wrinkles and jowels and make them look really great. So this is something that you can play with in your sketbok. To quickly go over the rules of drawing a figure, I want to use this example that I have drawn in one of my sketchbooks, and you use the measurement of a head to signify what age somebody is, which is really interesting. So an adult is, if you think about the size that you created your head, they would be nine heads tall. That's an extremely tall person. Maybe a regular adult is more like seven or eight heads tall. And a baby is two heads tall. So to really just accentuate how big babies' heads are, the head is the same size as the rest of their body. A three to 5-year-old, small child is three heads, and like a five to 9-year-old is four heads. When you get to a teen, maybe you're five or six heads tall. So that's something that you can think about to get the overall, proportions of people correctly, especially if you're trying to draw adults versus children. I think that's the biggest difference. I don't think you need to again, bring out your ruler and measure out that you've done exactly seven heads tall a person, but it is interesting to know that so that, again, you get the proportions correct. Something that you can make. Obviously, you're an artist, and you can choose how you want your characters to look. And if you do play with these proportions, that's something that is going to be really fun and interesting. And I like that. But, again, you have to have some thoughts within that, like that babies do have such if you draw a baby in the same proportions as an adult, it's just going to look like a shrunken, adult rather than a child. Again, I would look up proper anatomy classes on Skillshare if you want to learn more about that and drawing figures and, like, the framework of people. I really don't want to go over that because I don't feel like that's my expertise. I think you should just go for it and see what happens. And then if your people are a little wonky, like, that is a stylistic achievement. Alright, so now we have felt comfortable with the general proportions of a face. Now it's time to get started drawing in our beautiful sketchbook together. 6. Grids of Faces: Mm in the following lessons, we're going to jump into the different exercises that I suggest that you can do to start getting better at drawing people. So to start off with, we're going to do grids, and that is a great way of setting up your papers so that you're forced to create different characters. I will show you several exercises that you can do in order to hone your skills and develop lots of different characters. Alright, my friends, time to get started on our 40 faces challenge. And again, this is from was started by the Illustrator Sarah Dyer. So if you do this and you want to show it on social media, definitely tag her in it. And use the hash tag Sarah dire Patreon because it's only fair. I don't want to steal her steal her idea as my own. But I think it's a really good one. I think this is the only time where I suggest taking out a roller and it's really fun to sit down and make your grids. I have done 40, so it's four by five on each page, and you just have to make sure to do some simple math and figure out how big your squares can be on your specific size paper. I believe mine are 5 centimeters square each, I think. And yeah, just sit and take some time doing that. And then once you've done that, you can get started on adding your faces. It depends on what kind of person you are. If you like to start in the corner and go row by row, I'm more of a jump around kind of person, so I'll do that. I will bring out my PanPastels and I'll just work on a few on this page. Again, I have my funky little tools here. I'm going to stick to these more skin tony colors. I like to be diverse when I draw, so I'm going to do several different types of skin tones, and you can mix them slightly because this one's a little bit too yellow. This one's a little bit too pink, and this one's quite brown. So you just, go for it. But also, this is characters. So if you want somebody with purple skin, then go for it. So again, in the last section, we learned how to properly draw a person, and I mean, you can go for that if that feels good to you, create like proper ovals here. Here, we can do one. We can start off with just a nice, simple, regular oval head. Again, I like these tools because it doesn't make them too crisp. And I have a little fluffy brush here just to simply take away the excess without blowing all over my page and getting in my lungs. But hopefully that delicately just moves it aside. And there's not that much. I also like to when I'm drawing, make sure to include a neck because people aren't just a floating head. So I'm going to go in with this color for a little bit and add in. But also at the same time, you can just make more interesting shapes. Like I was talking about, I've been enjoying creating shapes that are different. He makes some heads a little bit bigger and some smaller, some rounder, some squarer, some funkier. So here's really quite square head. I'll give them a pretty thick neck there and just kind of randomly adding these in. Here, I want to make some really long and skinny. That could be fun to play with. So that's that. And then I'll just brush that color off here. I have my rag down here. Brush up that color, and I can use the more pinky tone and then add in a few of those figures, again, like, just going for it because you can't be super precise with this tool, so I'm just gonna Yeah, this one looks more like a bean. That's fun. And also, we didn't talk about that, but drawing people at an angle, again, you just move the center line. Here. I do another big head over here. This could be a row of big heads. Oh, another thing that you can add in, of course, are ears if you want to add in ears at this point. Like here that become very big here, and then they can have really skinny neck. So that's something that we forgot on other figures, so I can add in a little ear on some of those. Who else to do? To another really tall, skinny person. I'll go in and give ears to a couple of these characters. And they're approximately in the middle of the head. That one's maybe a little too low. Okay. So there's some light skinned people and shades of pink and yellow, and then I can go in with a sponge for darker color and bring in some darker skin toned floating heads. So, let's see. I can make someone with quite very round head and a really small neck. We didn't talk about that either, but little kids have really tiny little necks. This can be a sweet little child. And I think maybe while you're working, you kind of figure out different people and I like to do everything in stages, so I'll do all the heads and then I'll add in all the hair, and then I'll add in all the shirts as you see. That's how I like to work, but maybe you prefer to work on one character at a time. But I think it just feels like it goes quicker and I don't think so much about each character if I'm moving from one to the next. I don't do really, like blobby head. Like no neck. That's kind of fun, too. I've been trying to disperse them. I like that bean shape, so I'll try that here again. Okay. I'll do another, like, more I don't know, safe, normal oval type of face. I would like a nice neck. We'll give them some ears. And one more. Do them right here. What else should I do? I'm tempted to go back and look at the other characters that I've created previously in this sketchbook. Oops. It's not to do that. But as you can see, it doesn't give off that much dust, which is so nice. And even, like, this is a very fluffy brush, but it doesn't, smudge it all around. It just takes away. It does a little bit, but not noticeably. So it's so nice. So there I've done all my little heads, and I think I'll stay I'll keep it sparse like this because I don't want again, I don't want to be here all day with you doing this, even though actually, I do want to be here all day with you doing this, but you get what I mean. And then I'm going to use some of these nice candy colors to add in some just simple shoulders just so that they're not floating heads. So I'll give Like, the kids, again, like, their shoulders are tiny. Like, their head is so huge, so I'll make sure that that is really exaggerated, that the head is big. And then men have squarer shoulders. And then you can make somebody look more hunched over if you bring the shoulders up. So something gives the look of somebody being, like, upset or looking down or something like that. But this is just simple simple things. It's just to bring in some color and personality. Okay, this person. So so that there's that let's use this pretty purple color on the other people here. Like, this person looks pretty big, so it makes them fill up almost the entire bottom area here. And this one, too, women's shoulders are usually a little bit rounder. You can really make these your own by having people do things with their arms or having other details, but I wanted to just focus on just simple quick little portraits of faces, but including shoulders so that you do get Yeah, you get more of a sense of the character when you can see more of them. Okay, one more down here. Okay, so that's really simple adding in. So now we're getting somewhere with these people. I am just doing these from my head, but you could, of course, bring up a Pintresbard of different people that you saved or hairstyles and things like that. Now we're going to get into hair, which is always fun. Alright, so let me maybe switch back to my other one that has more darker colors. We can start by making a couple of people blonde. So I'm going to use this, like, ochery color to give a couple people nice bond blonde hair. So here, this looks to me like I'll give them a more. Short hairstyle. Again, I just love these tools that you get these smooth unexpected shapes. It's not perfect. Who should I else make blonde? Here, this person can be blonde, too. Like, I just really like how this looks, and it's not so perfect and precise. Okay, so there's some blondes. And then I unfortunately don't have, like, a nice orangy red. That would be nice to make somebody a redhead, but that's alright. We can give Let's give somebody some, like, interesting blue hair just to be fun this person can have some blue, curly hair. I feel like curly hair and these pastels really mesh well. Okay? So that looks fun. And then we can give some people some normal brown hair. So, um, here. I also want to this dude can be a little balding and maybe we can put in a mustache mustaches are excellent. And then this person, I feel like we've done a lot of dude, so I need to get some more slightly more feminine hairstyles, possibly, just to represent different people. And obviously, we're going to do androgynous people as well, non binary people. You're a nice, like, regular, flurry mom haircut? I don't know. Um, okay. This person, again, I don't know. Should we do some, like, cool bangs? This can be I don't know. They can have kind of like a mullet with banks. I don't know what that is. Also I could be like a librarian with a nice bun with banks. I'm trying to carve out a little ear space there. That looks nice. Who else are we missing? Got two more down here. Um, you can do other hairstyles, here, I'll do another with banks 'cause banks are fun. Then we can give them kind of like a Wednesday Wednesday Adams braids. There we go. And then the last one, we can also keep somebody bald. So maybe they should be bald. But then I feel like they need to have they need to have ears then. So I'll give them really big ears. Okay, so this is my bald man or bald woman, whichever. So that's nice. Okay, for my figures here with darker skin, I need to give them darker hair so there's more contrast there. But also would be beautiful. Let's give somebody see that one was a little bit dark and it that one's smudged a little. That's too bad. Alright, we'll give somebody a little blonde 'cause that's fun. Who should go blonde? This This one can have a nice blonde look. Nice, big blonde man. Beautiful. Not much contrast here with With the skin tone, but we're going to go in with colored pencils to give, um, contrast and details to everything. So that's fine. I have this dark brown. I think it's a umber dark umber raw umber. So, this one's great. We're gonna give this little boy nice curly hairstyle. Pretty. Um. What should we do? This is where it's nice to have something to reference so you can reference hairstyles. This one I want ears as well. We can do braids and things like that. Uh, let's do this one. Since there's no ears, I'll cover it. So we'll make them have a very beautiful. Fluffy here. It's going into the other one. That's slightly asymmetrical afro. It's beautiful. Alright, this person. Mm. Quite like let's do another man with a mustache. Ooh, get nice and fluffy in there. Should this guy have more hair on top? Maybe can have a nice little do. Again, I didn't draw ear, but I can kind of dig that out. Should we do another bald guy so we don't have to deal with hair? We can do can do some braids. Some nice rows of braids braids. Looks good. You can bring them down. See, it's beautiful texture. For those because they are so dark and they seem to be I'm going to just dump this on my studio floor that make up. Okay, so now we have some people and they have some the basic colors on them. So now we can go in with our colored pencils to bring in all the details. I have some colors that I like to use on my people. I like for light skinned people, especially the ones with the pinkier skin, I like to use a more reddish colored pencil. I think that looks really nice. But this is something you have to figure out, like, do you like something more peachy or brown? That's what something like this is really good to do. I also really like, this one's really good is the polychromos caputmrtum. It's also a brown that's quite red, but it's not as red as this one. And then for the dark details in the dark hair or dark faces, then I have dark umber. I don't like using black. I think it's too harsh, but I like a really dark brown. So who shall we start on? And here so I I don't know. I'll use the cap put mortem on some of these faces. So we learned about these proportions, and of course, these faces, I don't want to draw a line straight through them. I'm just going to go for it and try some stuff out and think about, like, Oh, generally, where is the middle of the face and try to get two eyeballs in there with an eyeball in between an eyeball on both sides. Here I'm going to accentuate the ear a little bit like this. Depends on how much you like to do. Here, I didn't give them, any sideburns this character, so I'm going to just accentuate that the inner ear a little bit. I don't like to do outlines around the face, so that's just something I prefer not to do. Here we need to give them eyebrows. I could pull out a blue pencil to match the That could be fun to match the hair, and I could pull that down to you're gonna give them nice fluffy eyebrows. I kind of general face. I have other sketchbook classes where I have gone through lots of different expressions, and I can link that in the description of the class. Here I'm going to do one of my little piggy noses because I think they look cute, and I'll just give them a simple smile. There's a first character done. To accentuate the hair, I think I'll use my dark brown just to give them a few, like, just some hair, accentuation aligns. There we go. And then the shirt, we're going to bring that out, here's for my teal one, I'll just make a collar like that. I don't want to put too much emphasis on that. So there's my first character done, and now we'll do another one. Let's do this one with a nice fluffy mustache. I'll make sure to accentuate his mustache, and then we'll go in with his bigger nose there and his lip is just slightly re there. And here's his ears. I'm going to accentuate that. And his hair just get that look of that nice fluff, curly texture. I'm just gonna give some shading to the bottom area. I think that looks really natural and nice. Accentuate that nice. That nice texture of curly hair. Okay, and then figure out, is he going to be happy? Maybe we can, test it also with eye positioning, so we'll make his eye like this. I'll make them looking to the side. Since they have such a fluffy mustache, you need to have fluffy eyebrows. This one character is quite hunched over, so I have to make sure that the collar looks more like that. You could add like arm. You could go in and add some details just for funzies if you want to show. Like, obviously, you can put as much time into these little characters as much as you think is fun. So there's that person. I can test out more of this peachy color on this skin tone to see how that looks. I think I like that as well. It's a little bit more subtle. I think it looks, just sweeter. I think this would work well if you're doing drawing children to use not as high contrast as you do on adults. For eyes to accentuate them more, I do think it looks better with a little bit more contrast. So here's darker for the pupils. You could even do different colors for their hair. Their eye colors could be different. This is all stuff that you can play with and how you want to draw people. So this person looks quite young, even though they don't have any hair. Some people don't have hair. You can also think about rosy cheeks as something you can play with. Freckles are always sweet. Also, I think, really gives somebody a youthful look if they have freckles. So there's so many fun things that you can play with to make your characters your own and look really different. And this is something that you just keep going and playing with. Since we're working on this area, I'll work on this characters braids. I'm just going to do, like, a criss cross here, so it looks like it's been braided a little bit. You get that idea. And then then I'm going to accentuate the ears. There's different ways that you can draw ears, figure out what you like to do. Right now, I've been filling them in. Sometimes I like to just do here, I'll do up here, a little accentuate some lines like that. Okay, then this person, should we have them more like I don't know, not sad but a little sad. Different noses, here just like everything looking down. It just looks kind of content. All right. And then for the purple here we need to get one. Does this show up? Yeah. There we go. So they look nice and content. Alright, who should we do now? We go do her. She has an interesting hair, so maybe didn't accentuate that we should have a different color. Here's more like a burnt ochre kind of color. Does that match? So it doesn't it doesn't have enough contrast, so maybe I'll go in with my more like brownish try to get some curls in there. I don't really like that. I like drawing in curls. And some outside of the pastel, too looks really fun. Here, I'm just going to make that more dark because I don't like I didn't like those strokes, but I can make sure this side's a little bit more in shadow then. I can give the hair some shadow over here, too, then became more contrasted there for the face to show up better. I can also show, how the features look with a darker brown pencil. It gives a softer look, so we can have this person. Again the eyes. Now I'm making the nose quite close to the eyes. Again, makes them look a little bit more useful. I can make fuller mouth. Looks pretty and here's a nice brows. Here we go. Sometimes adding white to the eyes on darker skin to make them pop a little bit more is nice. I can do that on the other skin tones as well, but it doesn't show up as much. But it just looks it just makes them more prominent. So that looks really nice. Again, you can think about different colored Rouge. That's too light. So I'd have to choose something a little bit darker. That looks really nice. And shall we do one more? Because yeah, because it's so much fun, but I also, we have other stuff to do. This one's getting quite smudged. You could, of course, do all the bottom with the pastels, fix it, and then go over with colored pencils, but I like living on the wildside and having lots of smudges. The smudges do erase quite well, too. I have to mention that with your eraser, you can go in and clean up the smudgy bits of the pastel before you fix it. So it's all hope isn't lost. So even, like, up here it's smudged a bit, so that's easy to take away. And then be a little bit more careful with your brush. See, I did that again. But the color not the colored pencil. Their eraser does nice work here cleaning stuff up. Okay, so we up that. So we're going to do our little brown hair Wednesday atoms down here. So I'm going to accentuate the hair again. I'm gonna, you can, color it in a little bit to make shadows or some kind of, like, braid dish pattern to signify braid. For their face, I'll continue with this one or I'll show you how it looks with the more ready color. Um, we can try something different. This person has such a long face, so let's give them a long nose. I'll do a different shape there. And then eyes like this. And then mouth, simple mouth. Give them some eyebrows. All right. Coloring a little bit of that shirt that green color kind of went away. Anyways, there's another character quickly came up with. And again, just there's so much that you can play with here and the different shapes and the different ways of drawing eyes and eyes and nose and hair and what colors you want to use to accentuate the face if you prefer something a little bit deeper like this or something that's more close to the skin tone, like here with a warmer brown and here with like a peachier color to accentuate the light tones of the face, and then also think about how to make somebody youthful or a little bit older. Um, yeah, have fun with this. Fill up your page with different faces and characters. And if you do this several times, you can, of course, go back and work from other characters that you've created before and just keep going from that and creating the same character over over, but improving them or accentuating something different each time. It's just really fun, and I like doing these every few months just to get out more ideas and test out different things and figuring things out that I like and what looks best with what skin tones. Like, here on the blonde hair, I used that more like um what did I use this kind of color, burnt ochre, and it looks more reddish in tone. Looks really nice. So just go for playing with different things and testing out different things so you can learn something and what you prefer the most. Out of all of these characters that I've created, I really like this one the most so far, but we'll see what happens when I continue on in this page by myself. 7. Exaggeration: Alright. Since we worked on those 40 faces, I want to show and teach you how you can bring that process further. So here I've set up my grid a little bit longer so that we can really accentuate and work on a few at the time. So I've created a few of my characters. I pulled them from my previous 40 faces, and I pulled out the ones that I liked that I want to play with further, and I tried to recreate them here. And then we're going to take this one step further and using our reference as a reference. So I'm going to take out my PanPastels again and make sure I have all my materials at the ready here. So we're going to choose some of these characters, and we're going to continue to exaggerate them a little bit. So here we can start with this young man. And I made his neck quite large and his face. Quite wonky. So he is quite exaggerated already, but how can we make that even more noticeable? So here, I don't know, like, make the neck even longer, make his head even shorter and stubbier. And like square there. His ear was quite large, down and quite low and weird. So that's a step forward, maybe. It's a little bit different. They're quite similar, so how can I make it? What if I make his whole head like more like a blob. I don't like I don't know if I like how that turned out. There we go. We'll see. And then I'm going to do their purple shirt. Trying to make the shoulders a little bit more angular here. So we have that one. And then we'll do their neighbor over here just so that we're in the same vicinity. So I need my other So we'll get the brown tone for her. And again, her face is also quite so I just maybe really accentuate that angle of the face that I created. It could be interesting. And since I have that brown, I'll use the brown for this hair, and, like, we can really accentuate that hair curly hairstyle. So I make it really quite silly there, and then I'll give her a nice hair. She almost looks like she's falling over. But how can we recreate that? Making the hair also have nice more interesting shape. This is quite round. So here I'm going to try to make it a little bit more asymmetrical. That looks interesting. And I just need to bring in her green shirt, maybe make her shoulders a little bit more rounded. Okay, so now we have two people to accentuate. There we go. So those are the base layers there. So I'm going to go in with this character first. I'm going to use that warm brown color, and I'm going to give them some nice curls to their their very, like, Buffonti hair. And here by the edges, I thought this looked nice. I'll continue that as well to accentuate the side burn area here. Hmm. Definitely like how I did the curls on that one better, but, you know, sometimes when you try again, you don't always succeed better. But then you can learn, like, Oh, well, that wasn't it. I'm gonna use this peachy color. It's not quite the same as that one, but it's alright. And I made their face quite smooshed together, so maybe I'll try that as well again, but maybe even more exaggerated. So here's my little, like, upturned nose that I like. This and they had a I don't know, Broy expression there. And give them brown eyes can make them look a little bit more to the side, give them some nice fluffy eyebrows. That's interesting. I can't say that I think that it's way better. I prefer the first one, but I just, you know, I got to try stuff out. But this one's interesting, too. Let's see how we can work on this lady's expression. I'm going to use this dark brown for the hair, and I liked how I did the large circles to signify larger curls on her and a little bit darker around the face to give that contrast between the face and the hair. And then it gets lighter and lighter as it goes out. That looks so beautiful. I think it gives that like lightness of curly hair. That looks nice. Okay. And then I'm going to use that warm brown for her skin, 'cause I also prefer that, I think it just looks softer than using the dark brown for the features as well. Let's see. I've made her also. Like, I don't know. Really exaggerate her. Since she's so long, maybe I'll bring her nose down further. And she's sad for whatever reason, which is not fun. And then to accentuate the sadness, you have upturned eyebrows. Mm, I don't know. She looks silly. But anyways, again, I don't know if I'm doing such a good job at this one to show you. But my idea is that when you use your own work as a reference, you can push it somewhere else and try something else and you can understand, does this make it better? Does it now, I feel like does this make it worse? Like, yes, I feel like I preferred the features. I made them too exaggerated. So it doesn't look as good, but the hair was doing really well. So we made the hair look more interesting rather than more round, but I like this shape, it looks really good. Shall we do one more? I almost want to try one on this side because I thought we had some good contenders. I like all of these. I quite like this girl, 'cause I like her the size of, like, the angle of her face. I think that turned out really nicely. So we'll try her if we can get that. And then she had this, again, really long neck. How do we make this even? We can make her face, like, really wide. And then small ears that are quite low. That seems to be a thing that I've done on many portraits that I do the ears too low. It gives a nice kind of appearance. And then I will add in the curly hair. How can we make this more exaggerated Again, just making the shapes a little bit more asymmetrical. So more angular. That could be a little bit interesting. There. So that's not so round. This was so round. This is more like accentuating the angle of her head. Okay. I'm going to use that warm brown. Here I'm going to do the middle part and here around the ears. And then behind the side of the neck that it gets a little bit darker there. And then here, there's, like, a curly cue there. Okay. And for the features, I'm going to use the nice more What is this nectar? Like a warm pink. Okay. For the angle of the face, again, I want to make sure that I get that and then the feature is smaller because when I make the features like I did over here that I learned, I just exaggerated that a little bit too much and I just eyes are too big. So I'm going to make sure to do the smaller eyes. Here, I give her nice, like accentuated eyes, which look nice, almost looks like makeup, so I'm going to give her the darker, like, eyeliner, almost. Oh, alright, don't miss this up. Make this eye a little bit tall higher up, and then I can make this one lower. Okay, that's a good size. And then I like that her nose, her face, everything's tilting this way, but she's looking that way. So that was good. And then with the lips, accentuating the upper lip and then just a bottom lip, here we can give her some rosy cheeks, too. I think she would look nice with some freckles. We need some eyebrows, 'cause that's something that you're gonna give her slightly, like, uneasy look. Like, she's thinking about something. Alright, and then gonna try some lashes. Okay, so here I feel like we at least tried something. We didn't make it too wild. We just, like, accentuated another aspect of this character. Gonna put in her purple. It was away. It was a little dirty, but that's right. Okay, so there's that character, so it's same but different. So that's mainly that was more of my point. What can you do to just slightly tweak something to make it hopefully better? I can quickly just go over the other examples that I had done previously quite a while ago. Let's see. Where are you? Here, I did these examples, and some of them I tried to make more, like, very characterized. I did my more like a realistic look and then tried to simplify them with simpler noses and eyes and forms like that. So that's something you can do, draw them more realistically and then make them a character. So that's another option that you could try. Alright, so hope that you found that fun, as well. 8. Exaggerating Even More: All right. If you want to talk about exaggerating your characters further and how you can practice this without having to do all the color and you just want to focus on what you can change in a short time, I would love to present creating a page like this just in regular old pencil. All right. So rather than using photo reference, I'm going to use this face, which is done using my regular method of, you know, halfway the proportions that we learned in the beginning. So here's the face, and I use this one to manipulate and create these characters, but we can continue to use this. You can pull up images on Pinterest of different faces or just make them up as you go. So I like to start off with creating different head shapes and how we can and adding in the neck because that makes it more interesting to me. Here's three versions, and then we can think about, again, the proportions and doing them as they are more realistic proportions or we can just play with different things. I love squishing the face features together to give a thicker neck and more of like a plump person appearance. I think that's really sweet. Making a face really small is also really interesting. Pulling the features down a little bit, making lips bigger, eyes bigger, nose is bigger, longer, ears bigger, smaller. There's so many different things that you can try. And they create all different effects, but it's interesting to have certain parameters. So if we think about this person, very simple hairstyle, few curls coming out and freckles. So how can we make them? They also in the photo, very square jaw. Here I decided to make it quite rounded, but you could really exaggerate by making this person have a very square head. So I'm just gonna go for it. I also have my references here, so how can I further develop the ones here that I enjoy? Like, here I enjoy, again, I really like that look with the squeezed together face. We could try that on this long one, rather than making the face really long, we could squeeze it together. So let's see if we do some simple eyes. I'm liking the eyelashes on her. It kind of looks like she's looking up, and we'll do my character nose, and I'll give them nice freckles. I like to smog that in to give, like, the blush look. I'm gonna give them quite full mouth. Lower lip there. If you upturn the lip a little bit, then they always look like they're smiling. It's very simple just to make sure that the ends of the mouth are just going up slightly. And then we have to have eyebrows. Since it kind of looks like they're looking up, I'm going to have the eyebrows looking quite up like that. And then we have the ears. If they're looking up, you can tilt the head a little bit, so the ears are a little bit lower actually. And then they need hairs. We need to add in some. Just some simple curly curly hair. We can have some curls that have escaped. We can have some down here as well. There's one version, and then they're adding, like, the clothes. Just looks a little bit more interesting. Looks little wonky and silly and different. Okay, so for this one, maybe, I do kind of feel like the angle of the face is a little bit. So if you think of, like, the invisible line here of the face front of the face, you make sure that the nose is sitting on that. And here we can make the mouth upturned like this. And then one eye you would hardly see and then the other one. Here's some eyebrows. So here I'm hardly looking at my reference just taking a few aspects of it. You wouldn't see the other ear, but this ear would be here. And then we bring in the hair. And here we have to figure out what the back of the hair looks like. Maybe we give them a nice a bun here in the back of their head. And then, again, some curls that are just There we go. So that simple? What else can we try? If we look about my other examples, like, making the features really big, really small. We can do a really small version and see what happens there, what that looks like. Could look really silly. Mm. Set the nose. Then some eyes quite close together, too. A in her nice eyelashes. Make the mouth smaller, maybe. Die start out? Kind of looks like a ridiculous egg. But, you know, like, it depends on what type of mood your character has. Like, are they kind of Do you want them to have kind of, like, a big baby effect, like, a huge, like, baby? Like, imagine what kinds of characters and what their features say about them and how they become as a character, L it's interesting how you can change how a character looks. So, yeah, you can just keep going and testing different things out. And you could even write a list of things you want to try, like, squeezing everything together, making everything smaller, elongating everything. Um what else can you try? Accentuating the eyes, accentuating the mouth, the lips, the eyebrows, then it's just yeah, just test everything out, like accentuating the cupid's bow, making this area really long. I really like that look too, having everything realistic, but then pulling the mouth down much longer or further down. That's something that I test a lot that I like. Long noses are interesting, especially if you have a character who has a really long face. So just go for it and play around, pull up, either draw realistic portraits, and then use that as a reference to reference that further, so you can really make it your own or get photos from the Internet to play around with and just use this reference. You don't need to look like a photo realistic thing. The whole point is create characters who have a lot of personality and interest. 9. Full Figures and Groups: Alright, now we're going to get into drawing full figures, and I just go for it. I don't like sketching out and mapping things out, but that's because I've been practicing for a while. So if you need to map out your characters a little bit with some light colored pencil or a light regular pencil, you do that. But I like just going forward and seeing what happens. For these, we do actually need some reference. So I pulled out this book that I have on my bookshelf so I don't have to get out something else. And I'll just do the girl in the covers, and then we don't even have to hold the book open. So I'm going to copy. Obviously, this is for just learning, so it's okay to copy other copyrighted images. These are by Scott Schuman, so they are his copyright, so you're not allowed to recreate them. And sell them, but this is just for my sketchbook and just to learn, so that's fine. But if you're going to create characters that are going to be in a children's book or going to be printed and you're going to profit from them, you need to make characters that are fully your own from your own imagination and and you've used lots of different types of reference. Okay, so I got that out of the way. It's always important. I feel like with students, sometimes you maybe have missed those kinds of things. So before we get started on a portrait like this, I want to, like, think about this person and how they're standing and what I want to get out of this. I mean, we can focus on really just making this person realistically, kind of like I've done with these. Simplifying their shapes. But you can also think about, she has a beautiful curve to her body. So that's really interesting. We could exaggerate that or we can think about exaggerating that later. So let's just jump into it. She has a nice green jacket. I think it's easy for people to start with the head. And I would like to say I would give you a big tip to not start with the head often you get the sides of the head wrong when you draw a body, and then you've done the head too big, usually. So I would suggest doing the the body first, and then you can make the head size. All right, so let's just go for it. I'm using this again, this shape is just easy to carve out the details. I'm just going to make and I'm going to try to accentuate the nice curve a little bit more. So here's the arm. It's a weird jacket. It's hard to kind of tell what's going on here, and stuff like that makes sense in photos sometimes. But in your illustrations, you have to simplify things so that it makes sense. You understand what things are. I'm sure there's some interesting cutout in that jacket, but that doesn't make sense to us as the viewer of this photo. So I'm going to simplify the silhouette. And then I need to accentuate this arm a little bit more. We'll accentuate it further with the colored pencil later, but there's the jacket. And then I'm going to go in and make the big wide pants. And again, these could be created even more wide. I didn't clean off the green because I kind of like that they melt into each other. I'm gonna make that really large bell bottom. And here, it's kind of like I can't really tell right now where one pant leg starts and ends, but I kind of like that, too. So I got a nicer curve to this person's body. They're holding a bag there, but that doesn't really interest me. I think I'll just focus on this portion of their look. I'm gonna grab my other one to use for her skin. I will do the more yellowy tone, and here they have a hand. I lucked out on this photo that the hand is in a pocket so we don't even have to struggle with drawing hands. That was very nice. There we go. And then the face and the head. So here I've made it really angled already. I think also because often, I think it looks a little bit more interesting to make the head of adults slightly smaller than they should be. So I'm going to make it quite small. So it's a very tall skinny person. But again, you could totally redo and accentuate and create proportions differently the next time, or you can try it several times and make them short and stout or something. I know I said that you're not supposed to, like, blow, but I'm being very careful. I'm not blowing, like, a ton. But it's just natural to do it easier cause this one kind of smooshes the darker colors in. Anyways. And then we need some L, the shoes are pretty much, um, non existent there, but I'm gonna have some, like, pointy toes sticking out just to, like, mimic, again, shoes. Again, to, um, just make things make more sense in an illustration than they do in a photograph. Okay. I kind of feel like I have to go in a little bit more with this green here, the back of the jacket I can make it more shape like that. Okay, that looks good. So that's a base of that. And then I need. They have this red hat. I don't know if I want to add the red hat and we'll just go in with some interesting hair. So I don't know. We'll kind of hair, we'll just try to give them some kind of flu fy up de kind of thing here. Okay. So that's the base of my illustration. Also, when you create people, it's nice to give them, like, shadow so they feel like they're grounded. So so we do a little purple shadow down here just to make sure that it definitely feels like they're standing. There without. Okay, so that's my person very simply. Created there the base using my pan pastels. And we're gonna go in and create all the details of the person. So I'm going to start with bringing in some structure to the hair so that ear comes out. There we go. And then I'm going to create I kind of want her to look a little bit more pensive. So I'm going to do closed eyes and, like, content. That went a little funky. All right. And then some eyebrows, I guess I'll do also in this brownish color. I want to give her color in her cheeks her skin got a little, like, grayish there, so I want to bring in some warmth there so it doesn't look so sickly. And then her hands also became a little dark. You can't really see the fingers, but I think I will add in fingers there, so you kind of get more of an idea that that was the hand, right. And then I'm going to add in some hair accentuating lines and make the hair look more for real, if there's hair coming out of out of it, it looks more lively. There we go. And then I'm going to add feel like she does need, like, a pop of color 'cause it's kind of boring. So it is kind of sad that I didn't add in the hat, but it's alright. Alright, so if I want to accentuate these dark pants, I have this one. Is this dark indigo? No sepia. Like a dark blue would be nice. Is this one like ultramarine can try that. Just Just accentuating certain areas there. Um, the ground, I want to give some textures. It looks a little bit more interesting. I need to give this coat a little bit more structure there. Again, because I use the soft tools. They don't get super tiny details, but you can get quite a lot. But here, I like, change the type of collar this jacket has, but we kind of kind of bring in other here, the jacket has a nice seam down the arm. And again, I don't need to make it look exactly like the photo. It's actually way better if I don't because then I make it my own so that if you see this image, you wouldn't really think that I drew the same thing. As an interesting pocket here can do that. We could do could do buttons, you know. Um here we go. So there's a very simple, full figured character trying to think about exaggerating their pose or exaggerating their features or exaggerating the feeling. This is all comes with practice, like with everything everything in this course, I may be making it look quite simple. I just go for it and I created a character that looks like a person. And for you, maybe you sit there and you feel like you really struggle. So it is always really lame and boring to hear that practice makes progress. I don't think practice makes perfect ever, but progress is good to think about. And if you do work on things like I did, I've shown you the progression of my sketchbook here from these images where I didn't like they were good. But, I mean, these characters are a little bit more awkward. Here's the same character that I drew like a year and a half ago. And then now today it looks like this instead. And yeah, maybe I'm more happy with this character than this one, but, I mean, it doesn't matter. It's okay. Um, here, I want to accentuate certain areas darker, it looks nice there. And then the bottom of the shoes, maybe. But this one would look pretty cool like a bag hanging off or something. But anyways, that's how do approach a full figure. And again, it's just a matter of practice, working with your tools and what you like. I want to quickly go over people in groups. I just want to show you some of my examples and talk you through it and hopefully make it feel less daunting. When you see an image with like ten people, it can feel really overwhelming. And one way to really break it down is to focus on one thing. So for this image, I saw all of these string instruments, and that's what I drew first. So I drew those in first, and then I blocked in the people's heads. And then I did their hair. And then I started pushing in the arms. And, I mean, there are some weird empty spaces here where there should be a person. But when you're doing a crowd, it's not important that you are filling in every single person exactly as they are. You have to make it understandable, and I think that if you work in that way, like, step by step, you add in one thing, like, the most prominent thing. Like, for this one, it was the instruments to me. I thought that they stuck out the most. And then the individual people, then maybe their hands, and then I pulled in the arms. Same one with these musicians to start off doing the instruments or I don't know. Maybe I did the bodies on this one. This one I don't remember. Just doing one section at a time, like putting in the heads when I'm putting in the arms or something like that. Do I have more with groups. Here's another No, that's not that. Where's the one with the ballet dances? Here. This one, I believe I started with the tutus. So I drew in all the tutus because they were kind of meshing together, and then I probably did the legs and the arms, and then I did the hair, and then I did the details. So you just, like, find something and simplify it even further, even further than how I was simplifying the shapes and proportions of one individual character. Where is that? I can't find anything in here. Here we go. Yeah. So just remember to simplify things at the same time as you're exaggerating things. And then I think you will find that you will make really interesting characters. 10. Final Character: Okay, in this final section of this class, I want to show you how I go about creating more finalized image like one of these. I'm going to be doing that and I will use let's see the I'll use the character pose that we created in this one, but I wasn't so excited about her expression or her face. I'm going to look through some of the characters that we created previously in the class and see if there's something that I like better. I quite like this girl, so maybe I can incorporate her in that pose. So because I will be using this sketchbook to create my artwork, I want to just do a quick sketch on a simple other piece of paper so that I have her to reference without having to open my Without having to open up my sketchbook and switch pages all the time. So here I'm gonna roughly, and I liked how the hair became more like angular like that. And then, so that's something we didn't discuss, but working faster also is a way to make here almost look like a mustache. Alright. But anyways, the ear is a little too low there. Okay. So just to have some reference so that I can see that face. Better. Correct. And then I have this and I can reference the photo again rather than this, but to think about how I did it before. So I'm going to go to this page and I use tape to tape off my page so that I get that crisp edge. It just makes it look so much more finished. To make the background, I am going to use the PanPastels, and I will what did I do before? I like I did a purple one and more yellowy one. And she's wearing this person's wearing a lot of green and blue. Maybe this, like, really beautiful teally aqua kind of blue would be nice. So I'm going to rub this into the entire page so we get that crisp background. I can put it in a little light blue just to have some variants in it, so it's not perfectly solid. And this one is a little dirty, so it's bringing up some other colors in there. I'll bring some more blue over here. Oops. I think, just to make the ground seem a little different, I'll bring the purple. Nick, not making it perfect in any way and not like a perfect line. So that's a nice start to that. And then I'm going to bring my reference again. So I'll have this here. And then I need my tools. And I started with the jacket, and I think that worked out nicely. So I'm going to do that again. And I'm going to make her fill out the page a little bit more. So we're going to test out slightly different try to make her maybe we can make the top of her very skinny. Again, I made this very jacket sticks out like that. You can kind of layer them a little bit and get slightly darker areas and lighter areas in other places. That's also another reason why these are so nice to work with or rub off a little bit of that green before I go pull in that blue. And again, like I can remember that beautiful maybe I'm exaggerating the size of the pants again even further in this one, and then remembering to make sure that I accentuate that there's two legs there. Like, stuff like this, that's the thing that I like about this material that it it's just nice. That part, I want to keep for the hand, so I'll erase a little bit where the hand is gonna go. I liked how the little shoes stuck out a little pointed boot or something sticking out there to show that. And then I thought that it was missing something in the previous image that we did, like, Well, so I'm gonna bring in this pink, and I'm going to give them a bag, and the back we're going to make really long, too. Yeah, I have so much of the pastel, so it's not going on so well there. But I'm gonna do best I can, and I'm gonna have it, like, hanging really. Quite. Just do a simple bag shape like that, and it's kind of flying in the wind. That's kind of interesting. Okay. I'm going to do my legal blowing the blowing of the dust here, but it's okay. Again, like, I love that this they don't horribly. It's not It's not a complete disaster. Alright, so I need to bring out this color. So here's my face. I'm going to try and get this look in this angle of her head, making sure not to make her head too big. Bringing her hand collar down here. Okay, and then hair. Yeah. Okay, interesting. I kind of want to bring some of that down into this bag. Make that brighter. Okay, so that is the base of my illustration. I'm gonna keep my little face here. I go start on her face first, just to get that out of the way and try my best. So I'm gonna angle her nose this way, but make sure that her eyes are looking that way. And then I'm making the mouth look less like a mustache. Okay, and then doing this dark umber. I'm just gonna give it a nice sharpen. Okay. Gonna make nice to find eyes looking like that. I'm gonna skip the eyelashes on this one because her face is quite small. I don't want it to get too mottled. Okay, so I'm just going to accentuate the hair a little bit here. The ears, give some eyebrows. There we go. The hand a little bit just showing a little bit of fingers there. Okay, and we can give the bottom of the shoes a little dark darkness there. Mm hmm. Okay. And then what else can we do? We can give her face a little bit more warmth. I think the lips there a little bit too light. Can I make them a little darker. Okay. Interesting. I'm more happy with her face than I was on the other page. So that's interesting. And now I'm gonna go in and accentuate these pants and make sure that we have some, I can show that that's a pocket. Like a little creasing by the backs of the knees. Make the knees. You can make them darker or lighter. Accentuating that there's two pairs here, more creases you could put in. Some interesting stitching at the bottom. I want to add some darkness a little bit more to accentuate that there are two pairs and two legs here a little bit there. It's interesting. Okay. So the dark jacket, again, I'm going to create kind of my own collar here. M. Yeah. And then this bag, if we want to I don't know, can we bring in a more bright color? Does that show up? Yeah, just to make it more vibrant. Can make it stripy. And of course, like, go in and make these patterns and different colors, and we could have stripes in the pants, and she could have glasses, and there's all kinds of stuff we could do. Shall we give her glasses just to, go for it? Oversized orange glasses. It's kind of fun. Maybe a little bit funkier, very tall and skinny character. I think that it really shows that, you know, when people are really tall and sometimes they hunch over because they don't want to appear taller than everybody else, they, crouch over a little bit. My dad does that, who's quite tall. Now we just again, like, we have the bottom a little bit different color, but I want to accentuate that it is ground. So I'm gonna is this dark enough? Hmm. I want to do something maybe more purple. Let's see what this looks like. Clay rose. Yeah, maybe this. Just to get some shadow in there. I got mixed in there, so I'm gonna just keep using a little bit on there, too, so it doesn't look like I messed up place. But it looks like it was supposed to be like that. So here's just my simple take of creating a portrait, and I think it looks quite sweet. It's not the most amazing character that I created, and the exaggeration isn't that exciting, but I mean, it's good enough. And now we're going to do the fun part, which is revealing it the final. Look, when you take away the tape, everything just looks so much more exciting. I'm just gonna blow that excess away, even though you weren't supposed to. I'll save that tape on the side over here and put it on a different page. Just look how gorgeously crisp that edge looks. If there's any smudgy bits, you can erase them before you fix the page with some fixative if you want to do that. So this is just a simple page in your sketchbook where you practice all the different things that we've gone through in the class and I hope that you enjoy creating something like this. Find your own reference image or just build off of different characters that you have created in your sketchbook so far in this class. I really look forward to seeing what you come up with because the possibilities are endless when it comes to creating characters. There's so many things that you can do to make a character feel like your own and your thing. This is how I do it, and I'm so happy that I was able to share all that I know about creating characters and depicting people and having fun with that in your sketchbook in this class. So yeah, thanks for being with me. 11. Next Steps: Mm. Alright. So that's it. I hope that you have enjoyed learning about drawing people with me in this class. I hope that you feel a little bit more inspired to draw people or have found it fun or found it easier. How cool would that be? A few next steps that I would like for you to take. So you can continue the momentum of drawing people is to, of course, continue to draw people, do the exercises that we did in this class over and over again, especially that 40 faces exercise. I love doing that one, and every time I do it, I swear I come up with better faces. I learn how to draw people in a way that I like way better than the last page that I did. And then just continue to draw force yourself to maybe. Maybe you have to give yourself a little kick or push to put people into scenes. If you usually just draw landscapes, just like, put a little figure in the background, even if it's just a teeny, tiny little thing. Like just push yourself to continue to draw and add people to your work. It's maybe not as scary as it seems. Even though drawing people, I don't know. It's really difficult. Well, we can do it, right? I needed that message mainly for me. 12. Where Else Can You Find Me: I Alright. That's it. Thanks so much for taking this class with me and learning all about drawing people and characters. I hope you really found it fun. If you did, I really hope to see also your spreads from your sketchbook. Can you share a few with me or one or two or three? In the project gallery? I would love to see how you are developing people and characters and has anything that I've shared in this class helped you in any way, that would be so fun to hear. So please be brave and share those with me. If you'd like any feedback, please let me know. Otherwise, I'll just give you some encouragement and it thumbs up. And if you'd like to hang out with me outside of Skillshare, you can find me on my website, Kristina hultkrantz.com or on Instagram on occasion at Kristina Hultkrantz. I also have a beautiful patron community where we draw together every month at a different theme. We've already done People twice, so there's two months of content already plus over years worth of content for you to check out. We have drawing prompts every Monday for that theme that get more and more difficult. And every Friday, I share a video where you can draw with me or learn more about materials or just nerd out about other drawing and fun Friday kind of stuff. So I'd love to see you there as well. Until then, make sure that you are following me here on Skillshare so that you'll be notified when I post my next class, otherwise. See you. Bye. See you next time.