Flat-Art Character Design Made Easy in Affinity (by Canva)

1. Welcome to this Flat-Art Character Design Course: It's project time, and this is one of my favorites, as you can see. I love illustration, and this particular one is done in a very, very popular style where you draw a simplified version of a person. And in this case, you make the head much, much smaller. And you can do that with feet or hands. But I want to take you through this, and we're going to be using or we're going to be starting with the photograph. You can see how the photograph and the illustration are kind of close together. And what I want to do is take you through this step by step, so we use the photograph and then we'll draw from the photograph, but we'll change it and we'll simplify it. You can see how her face looks nothing like the illustration face, and I want to show you how to do that. And each of these parts are going to be separate. So, you know, the head, the hair, the face, the glasses are all separate pieces, and you can change them later on, and they're not hard to do. Now, you can take this technique and put it onto people. You can put it onto animals, you can do it on things. It's such a cool technique, and I can't wait to help you with this. Let's get started. A 2. Place the Reference Image & Draw the Head: Et's go and get a new document. I'm just going to use an A four, make sure it's RGB and click on Create document. Now, we're going to work from a photograph. So although our final result is not going to look anything like the photograph, it's going to be a rough representation, but we're going to use it for poses and how hands look, et cetera. I'm going to go to file and place and find this file called reader. I'm going to bring her in like so. So let's just go up here and lock it down and change the opacity so we can see what we're doing. I'm going to click on the padlock to lock it. Now, we're going to start off with the back layers and start working forwards. And we'll start off with a head. Now, this whole style, as you saw in the intro video, it's a very a flat art illustration style that's quite popular where you have these very small heads and big bodies and small feet, sometimes people have very small hands or sometimes they have very big hands. Now, this one that I'd like to do, I want to have the small head, small feet, big body, but big hands, as well. So let's start off with a head, and I'm going to use that to redraw. We'll zoom right in. And I want to start off right at the back with the back parts, which is probably going to be the neck. And then we'll look at maybe the ears, then the face, the hair and the features. We're not going to be going heavily onto the features, just some very simplistic ones. So I'll start off and I'll use and you can use the pen, sorry, the pen or the pencil tool. I'm going to start with a pencil, and I'm just going to draw the neck in very roughly with a pencil. So starting here, I'm going to go in and go down across and then up over there. So let's get rid of the stroke from that. We can do these things later if you forget, but I'll remove the stroke from that. And then the next thing is, I want to draw in the head shape over here. Once I finish this, by the way, I'm going to scale it all down. Now, you could use an ellipse to do this, or you could use the pen or the pencil. I'm going to go with a pencil again, but without all of this stabilization on it, so I'm going to take that down. I'm going to reduce the amount of stabilization from 90% to something a lot less. Oh, I need to do the ears first. I've just realized, so let's draw in the ears. Over there, there's one, and there's a second one over here. If you find like mine, they're a bit too large, use some of your tools here to just reduce the size a little bit. Remember, this is not an accurate representation of this person. This is just a rough getting the rough for our illustration. Let me go in and do the head now. So I'm going to start over here where the head goes underneath the hair and then move over there. Now, you can see this is a problem because I don't know what I'm doing because I can't see what's underneath. So let's stop there, and I'll just hide those layers. And I'm going to start that again. So from the top round. Ah, that's looking better. I can sort of see where I'm going. You don't have to be too detailed at all. We just want the rough idea over there. I think that that'll be absolutely fine. Now, so that I can see the rough idea that I'm going for here, I'm going to switch them all on, and I'm going to just change the colors over here. So I'll go to color, and we want to find the tone that we want to use. Now, I can go through all of these colors and change them later on. Now, here, I've chosen a sort of a rough color that I want. So let's go with, say, something like that, have there maybe make it a little bit more brownish. You know, something like that, I think would work. And then I have all these shades. So this is brilliant now because I can then go along just very quickly, and I can go to my curves. But the moment that I hit curves, you can see these options disappear. So let's go back in here again. And what we're going to do is we're going to save some of these out as swatches. So we're going to make a new swatch, and this is going to be a document palette over here. I'll call this reader. And then I can start to work my way through those colors to save them in there. Now, I'm going to go back to color here. I'm going to say, Okay, let's save that one. And once again, I can just click on there to save it. I'll go back to this one, save that one. Let's have a slightly darker brown I'll just go back to that one again there. So I'm just going back to the sort of first one to start off with to get back to my shades over here. That one I'll add in as well. Once again, there are slightly faster ways of doing what I'm doing here, but I'm just going about this the long way to show you how easy it is to work with these colors and just change and find different shades and tints and tones in here. Maybe I just want a lighter tone over there, and I'll bring that one in as well. Now, I can then go through this really quickly and say, Okay, well, this is going to be the slightly darker color, and then this will be her face color. And then the ears. Well, I'm going to take both of those and make them ever so slightly darker. Now, if I find that things are too dark or too light, I can just go up here and tweak it and just lighten it up in there a little bit. You can see how I can tweak the color of her ears a little bit, as well. Once I've done that, I might probably take those, select them all, and group them together over there. And that way, they're all in one group, and it's easy to switch them on and off while I'm actually doing the next section. I'm going to stop there. So what I'd like you to do is bring in your illustration, sorry, your photograph over there, just place it in the middle. Do some rough drawings around the face where you think you want the face to be remembered. You just use the rough shapes over here, and you can then choose some skin tones over there. I've chosen slightly darker skin tones than she is, but you can choose lighter, you can choose darker. You could go to the Simpsons route and make her yellow if you wanted to that would just absolutely fine. Whatever you do, save some of those in the swatches by just pulling your swatches out and choosing a base color, and then you can have shades of that color, and you can save that into a new swatch, and you've given that swatch or palette a name. Try it out. 3. Add in the Face Details: Now, let's do some face details. Because the hair is actually in front of the face, I'll do the face first. I'm just going to click on my group, and I'm going to zoom in a bit over here. Now, we're going to keep this really nice and graphically simple. So I'm going to go and get some circles, so some ellipses here and just say, let's have a little ellipse. Over there. I'm holding down the Shift key to get a perfect circle. And this is going to be the one eye. I'll just make that black, and I'm going to hold down the alter the option key and do another e over there. You can see really, really simple. Let's put in a little mouth over here. Now, for the mouth, all I'm going to do is the top lip. I'm not going to draw the whole of the mouth in. So I'll just use my pencil. I'm going to switch my stabilization off so I can be a bit more detailed about it. Zoom right in, and I'm going to draw just the top lip in over there. Around and back again. That looks appalling. Let me do that again, but I think I might need a bit more stabilization over there, use that was really bad. It is quite difficult. I'm working with a laptop, and I've got a track pad on it. So I'm trying to draw with a track pad with my finger. So over there, up to here, round, I will have to change this a little bit. And just gonna go back along there. In black like there, it looks like she's got a moustache, doesn't it? And then I will use my node tool and just move some of these in a little bit and tweak it round a bit like that. Of course, that would have to be red over there. Remember, this is an illustration. We're not going for real life. If you didn't like that, you could then still go in and say, Well, what about if we just did a bottom lip over there? Just a little one like that. And just take that down a bit like so and then move that up a bit over to there. Now, let's switch on the background as well or her face over there and have a look. So we've got something along that line. I could remove that bottom one and just have the top lip over there if I wanted. Lastly, we need some glasses. So I think this time, I will use elliptical tool. Once again, we're going for stylization here. I'm going to do a shape like that. So it's a slight it's not a perfect circle. It's a slight ellipse. And with that, I don't want a fill. I just want a stroke on there, so I'm going to go to the stroke. I'm going to just increase the stroke a little bit like that. Back to my move tool and I'm going to rotate it a bit, like so. So I think that's sort of roughly where it is. I'll just used my arrows to move it up a little bit and across a little bit like so. And then I'm going to hold down my alter option key and make a copy to go on the other side. Now, those are going to look like eyes if we just leave it like that. So I'm going to put in the line between them. I'll zoom right in, get a pencil, and I'm just going to draw in from there through to there and increase the stroke width on that. Now, that's kind of sticking out with that sort of rounded part. I'm going to go to my caps and just switch off those caps so it's a straight line. And then this side here, we just bring that in a little bit, like so. It doesn't matter if these are not perfect. If you wish at this stage, you could still go a little bit further, so I could say, Well, let's have another little line out there, and another one over here, and even one that went behind here. Over there. It might look a little bit better once the hair goes over the top. Anyway, do have a little bit of for go. We're not bothering with the nose. If you want to make a nose, that's absolutely fine. But just put in those little details in there, and then we'll do the hair as the next one. Try it out. 4. Hair & Eye Direction: I'm going to take all of these things that I've put on the face, select them all. I'm using the shift key to select and group them together, as well. So we've got that group in there, and I'll just turn that off for now. Let's draw in the hair. If you want to use the pen, that's fine. Otherwise, I'm going to go with a pencil. And I'm going to draw in a shape over here, which is going to be her hair. So I'm going to start over here and draw this shape in. Going to kind of go to there. I think let's just do a few little lines. Not too much detail. That's going to go round to the top in there. It's kind of sticking out the top a bit, but it's a cartoon, so it doesn't really matter. It's an illustration, shall I say, so it doesn't matter. And that I'm going to change, so we'll go to the color, and I only want a fill on there, not a stroke. So let's go and choose a color for that. I think I'll go with maybe a dark brown in there. I don't want the stroke, so I'll get rid of the stroke from that. Now, you notice there's some hair over here that I haven't done, and that's because I want to put that behind her face, not in front of her face. So let's go back to the pencil over here, and I think we're going to have sort of something which is going to go up to there, just around I think that'll do. Let's do the same thing, get rid of the stroke from that. So we're just left with the hair. And if it's like mine, not looking very good, just click on those points and pull them out a little bit like that. Now, lastly, we want a few little sort of hairs down the bottom here, which will be slightly darker in color. So we'll use the pencil and we will just draw some hairs in Now, you can see it's in front of everything else, but don't worry about that. We'll get rid of the stroke. We'll go to the brown, and I'm just gonna choose a slightly darker brown over there. And I might even need to pull these out a little bit like that. Okay, this one is going to go all the way down behind the head. So it's actually behind that. When I switch on the head, you'll see that that's behind the head, but I'm behind the hair. The hair is in front of everything else, and then we'll switch that on, and there we've got the face of our reading character. Now, our reader seems to be staring straight at me. So I'm going to go in. I'm going to click on the eyes, so select one eye and select the other eye and just move them down a bit. So you see over there, by moving them down in the glasses, she actually looks now like she's actually reading the book rather than staring straight ahead at me. It's because we don't see the whole of the eye in there. We've got nothing to associate it with. So looking at it in the glasses and moving down to the bottom of the glasses, then it appears to be looking down. Over here, just go through this and put everything into groups again, so I'll select those two and group them together as well. So we've got all these different things in groups. Finally, we can take all of those, select them all, and group them together as well. So this is the entire head, but we've got lots of groups inside the head, so we can go back and edit anything in there. Try that last bit out by doing the hair, so use a pencil to get some rough hair shape in there. If it's not right, don't worry, try it again. It's not the end of the world. Put some hair which is going to go behind the head, and then we can go in and just move things into the right stacking order in there and group them all together until you're left with a little head like that. If you want to move the eyes around at this stage, if she appears to be staring in the wrong direction, have a bit of a go. Anyway, do try that out. 5. Draw the Hands & Shirt: Let's look at creating the body. Now, we're going to work as before, from the back through to the front. So I'm going to start with the torso over here, this area in here and I'm going to do that as one shape. This is going to be quite easy. It doesn't have to be perfect at all, so it's going to be hidden by the book. So we're going to just go down across to there up to here, and stop there. I will move that below the head layer, so you can see it's behind the head layer. In fact, let's hide the head for now. And I don't want a fill on there. Sorry, I don't want a stroke on there. I just want to fill, and we will just use any old color for the moment. I'm going to go with sort of this sort of pinkish color in there. And then I'm going to hide that. So what is the next thing to do? Well, let's do the arms over here. So we're going to have an arm which comes round there over there and back and up again. So over to the pencil. Let's go with this arm. So down there, round up to there, B and up. That looks funny, doesn't it? Let me go and grab this. Pull that in a little bit, like so, and maybe this can be moved up a little bit like that. Now, one of the things that really shows these type of illustrations is the fact that the bodies are really quite big. So we can take some of these points and start to move them out now and say, Well, why don't we pull this one out over here and that one out over there to just make it a little bit bigger. Let's do the other side. Oh, I've just noticed that that's not quite the right place. I'll just move that around there. As before, don't worry about getting them perfect. I'm going to leave the stroke on there so we can see it properly when we switch this on like that. Let me go over to the side to create the next one. So once again, over to the pencil. I'm going to do the shoulder, which is kind of going from there. In fact, I'm going all the way out to the right the way round. Now I don't know quite where I'm going, so I'm just going to go across like that and down a bit. Now, you can see the problem is I'm going to get to that stage there. And then this bit over here, which crosses over is going to be a problem. So instead of doing something like that, we can do it in two sections. I'm going to draw in the bottom section first. I'm going to do that over there. And let's hide that so we can see it. And then I'm going to do the top bit as another one on top of that. So I'm going to say, Okay, we've also got this one here. Which kind of goes down like that. As always, do not worry about the details here. That's not very important. Let's fill those with color as well. So when I switch these on, you can kind of get an idea that we've got the two arms over there. I know they don't look like arms yet, but do bear with me. We've got the two arms over there. We're going to put some hands in there hands in here. We will make her head much, much smaller, so we're not having to worry about making this even bigger still. Let's get in some hands. So I'll hide all these. And draw in a hand, and I'm going to zoom right in to do this hand. I want to make them a little bit wider. The fingers a little bit wider than they are at the moment to go with that kind of sausage finger type of style that I'm looking for. So I'll get my pencil to. I'm going to take the smoothing down a little bit more, not too much, and the stabilization down as well. So I'm going to draw in the hand here and I'm going to go all the way up As I said, don't worry about the details. You can see these are quite big and chunky and wobbly. Those are very, very wobbly fingers. I'll go round to the beginning again. Now, that is a very wobbly finger there. I'm just going to pull it in a little bit. Like that. Now, if you're looking at this and thinking, Tom, that'll never work. That's the way I feel sometimes when I'm doing these sort of illustrations. I look at it and think, Oh, my goodness, this is just looking awful. But once you've finished it, it looks great. So we'll make that a little bit wider over there. And, of course, that being a hand, we need to fill it with a color. I'll just pick one of these colors that I've got over here, skin tones, and I'm going to get my fill sorry to my stroke and switch it off. Let's turn on the rest of the things for the moment so you can sort of see the idea. So they are a little bit too wonky. I'll zoom in and over here, I'm just going to pull some of these out a little bit. So they're slightly less wonky than that. Maybe I should have had a little bit more of the stabilization on Anyway, just pull them out and see what you get from that. I'm gonna live with that, honestly, you're probably looking at it, thinking, No, you're not. That looks awful. Anyway, I will just pull these out a bit. Like so. Let me do the other hand. And so same again. Let's hide everything. Go to this hand. This one's a little bit more complex, and we can do it in two parts. Maybe we can have sort of the back part being a slightly darker skin tone, and then these fingers being a lighter skin tone. Let's try it out and see. So I think this time, I'll increase my smoothing a bit and just take my stabilizing down a little bit more. So I'm going to do this bit over here first. And that bit will be a slightly darker skin tone. And then I'll hide it. And then I'll do the fingers. Let's have a finger that goes over here. Once again, nice and chunky ones, another nice and chunky one here, another one over here. And one last one, which is going to go all the way up to there I think I need to move this one down a bit as well so we have something more like that. Once again, don't laugh. Your turn will come. Okay, let us, lighten it up a little bit. These ones will be lightened up, too. And I'm going to get rid of the stroke from those. And stroke from that goes, as well. So let's pull that out. Like so. And we show the thing that's behind it, which is that shape there, which is slightly darker. We'll show the other hand, and then all these bits down here, and this sort of gives us our sausage finger hands for this particular character. Anyway, do well, first of all, enjoy yourself doing that so far. Once you've got the shoulders in over there, go and do your hands like that as simple as possible. And don't worry if it looks really, really weird. That's not the point. It will look great when you've finished it. I promise. So try it out and do some shapes like that. 6. Draw the Book: Now, one of the things that makes my hands on here look so weird is the fact that the wrists are so narrow. So I'm going to use my node tool, click on the wrists and just widen them up quite a lot. There. Make those nice and wide like that. And this one as well, let's widen that up. I will have to go to this one and pull that out a little bit as well. Move that down to there. Okay, we now need to do the book over here. The book is going to be very simple. It's going to be the pen tool. I'm going to hide all these items. Oops, we've still got a few fingers up there. I'm going to just click from point to point there, there. Oh, let's do a little curve there. One there. Just guessing which is underneath her fingers and up to there. And then we can take that, give it a color. Let's just make that red for now. And then we need to do the pages as well. So I've done this the wrong way around. So when I do the pages, if I click from there to there, that's going to be filled with white. And then the same on the other side as well. So it's going to be there. Let's just go around there. Now, I've done them, as I said, the wrong way round, so I will need to move the two pages underneath the book. Oh, wrong way. Let's move the book up. It's easier. Over there. Select those items, group them together. And then when you switch all these layers on again, we can then decide where to put the book in the whole layering system down here. So we move the book behind the fingers and the hands, I would imagine. There we go. And we've got the book in the right position. Let's zoom out and have a look so far. So I'll just hide the background for now. That's not looking too bad. I've just noticed there's a bit of a gap by her hair over there with her head. You don't always notice when you've got the photograph in the background. So I'm going to go use my node tool, go to the group that's got the hair in, click on the hair group. Click on that bit of hair to select it, and then I'm just going to move some of these across a little bit, like so to try and cover that up. Think that's okay? And we'll just fold those up again. A look, that's getting there. The clothing obviously needs a little bit of work. But do have a bit of a go with the book, so make the rough book shape, then make the pages or do the pages first, whichever way you want. Make sure then the right order, group them, and then move them below the hands. Try it out, see how you get on. 7. Save, Group & Draw Legs: Now, really, really important before we go any further, have you saved it? Got a file and do your save as, and then you just keep going save as you go along just in case. I want to clear up some of these little shapes over here. So, for example, these ones over here, not that hand there. Those ones, I'm going to just select them, and I'm going to group them together as well. So we've got this hand group. We've got another hand group, we got the book group. These ones here, I'm going to leave those separately at the moment, although the head. I'm sure that can go right at the bottom over there. I don't think we need it to be above those two. Now, let's draw in the legs over here. They're gonna be reasonably easy. I'll use the pen and sorry, pencil. And I'm going to just draw in the shape. Now, I just need a bit of a stroke on there so I can see what I'm doing. I'm going to start with this leg here, and I'm just going to do a really big big knee. Over to there. There's a funny kink in it. So we'll go over to the Noe tool. Click on that and just get rid of that kink, like so. We can make these a bit bigger, actually. Let's have them that knee being quite large. There. If like me, you've just got something like this, which is weird, you've got that cusp, don't forget you can always click on it, go up here and just reset it to being a curve in there. So we'll just reset that like so. So there's the first one. We'll just hide that one. And let's do the second one, as well. Now, the second one, I'm going to go around here up and over all the way around to where her jeans are. And let's go up to that point there. And, of course, that's not quite where her clothes are, so I'm going to pull this across, pull that across as well. And you can tweak any of these that you want. I think I will tweak that and make it a little like that. Now, having done that, I've just realized I've crossed over these two. So, in fact, I will need to take it down to there and reduce that one that way, too. I think that'll possibly work. Let's do the foot. That's going to be really easy because it's going to be very small, so we're going to do a foot like that. Over there, and it's going to be small rather than big like the hands. So I'm going to just reduce the size down over there. Let's give that a color, so I'll just use purple for the moment. Get rid of the stroke on that. Let's switch these two on so you can kind of see where the legs are. There's a bit of a kink on there. I think I'll go back to my tool, click on that and make sure that that is a smooth curve. All that across. Like that. Now, let's switch on some of these other bits and pieces and have a look at what we've got so far. Not too bad. If we hide the background, you can see where we're going. Now, we've got a very, very small foot, which should be underneath the jeans or whatever she's wearing. Our hands, Oh, we've got a stroke on there. Let's get rid of the stroke, and same with the fingers, I should actually select them and make sure I get rid of the stroke on that. The hands are quite big, but we want the head to be smaller. So let's use the move tool, click on the head, and scale it down before we scale it. Go to your stroke, and in the stroke, check about the scaling. I'm going to say scale with object. So when I scale this down, the glasses will scale as well. So we're just going to scale that down, so it's going to be kind of quite a small head. I know it looks a bit funny at the moment. But this style of illustration has got small head, small feet, and big hands in there. If you want to try it out without scaling, do that. Scale that down and you'll see that the glasses will get bigger, as well. Maybe that's something that you want with those big old glasses or thick glasses in there. Now we're still not finished by any stretch of the imagination. So I'm just going to say stop over there, have a bit of a go with a sort of bottom section in here, very, very simple shapes. Make a small foot to go in there, or you could go the other way and you can have a really big foot to match the very big hands on there, and we're gonna have the small head at the top. It's up to you. Try it out. Get to this stage. 8. Color & Details: I'm going to change the color of her leggings, so I'm going to select that. And instead of white, we'll just pick a different color for the moment. And I will go with sort of blue jean type of color. Flick those over and get rid of the stroke from that. And the same with this side as well. So the same color. Get rid of the stroke over there. But because we can't see it properly, and it is behind the other one, I might then decide to change it and go, Well, let's make it slightly darker so we can see them both, kind of like we did up the top here. I'm going to get rid of pretty much all of the strokes now. So selecting all these objects, going to stroke and choosing none for all of them. The only one that I don't want to get rid of is on her face, which is the glasses, which has got the stroke in there. And let's go now, put in some details over here. Now, when you're doing this, have a look at your shapes as well. So I'm going to go to the fingers. I'm going to click on that because that's a bit of a weird shape that I've got going on in there with that finger, and let's make that more of a sort of a chunky shape. Over there. You can just work your way through these if you don't like what you've done and just try out different shapes in there. Remember this whole style is all about big solid looking pieces. Now, we're going to add a little bit of detail here so we can kind of get the sleeve going down there, show the sleeve going in there, and, of course, on her leg here as well. We're going to do that with a stroke. I'll use the pencil. Well, I'm just going to draw a little line from there. Down like so. So that's where the sleeve is going to go. And I'm going to use this tool here, which is our little linewidth tool to just make it a little bit thicker in the middle to give it a bit more. Well, interest, really. Let me do that again. So over here, we're just going to have the sleeve or the feeling of the sleeve, and using that, we'll just pull it out a little bit. Like so, once again to get the feeling. Same over here, I think, although, actually, I've just realized I don't need it down here because this one is actually going to be the same color as that one. So I will just go over here to my color and just use a slight different color pink for the moment, purple, and maybe we just lighten up just a little bit like that. Zooming out a bit. Don't worry. They look at a bit extreme at the moment. We're going to make them look a little bit less shortly. I'll do the leg, as well, so I'm just going to go up over there and use that tool to just make it a little bit thicker. Like that. Now, of course, these little shapes over here, this one and this one we've got are on strokes. I'm going to go to the stroke, and I'll then go and choose the pink, but maybe just darken a little bit. So it gives the feeling you can see of some sort of shadow. The same with this one onto the stroke, and I want to use the same blue that I had on that, but darken that down a little bit. Over there. Have a bit of a go with those and just do some little lines in there to get an interesting feeling. And then we'll start to look at finalizing the colors on this and the different fills and what we can do with that. And at any time, remember, you can move these things around as much or as little as you want. 9. Color Adjustments: Et's look at some colors that we can use with this. Now, I do like the blues. I really like that blue there. So I want to find a color that will work with that. And in my color wheel, I'm going to go across to the color that's diagonally opposite, which is this orange over here. So it will be over there, that orange. So I'm going to just start off with selecting some of her top over there and choosing an orange I kind of quite like that orange there. Now, I will just add that to my swatches. And then I'll go to this section here and choose the same orange. And this bit over here, I think I'm going to use the same orange that I've got there, but I'm going to darken it down a little bit in there. Let's go to these two bits, which are the shadows. And same again, I can just darken them down. Now, I've done the wrong one. I've done it on the fill, not on the stroke, Alex, flick that over and get rid of the fill in there. If you find they're too dark, just go back again. Pick the orange once again, making sure that you're on the right one. Pick the orange and just darken it down ever so slightly or change it ever so slightly. You just want a subtle amount in there. Let's go to this one here. This one is blue, and I think it's a little bit too dark at the moment. I would just have a subtle amount on that. And for her socks, I'm going to choose the same orange again. I keep going and getting it on the stroke and not the fill. So let's remove that and flick that over to there. But I think that could be darkened down a little bit like that. Now, what about this red over here of the book? Well, I need to first of all, make sure that I'm actually on the book, not on the whole of that layer. I'll click over there so I can see choose the book itself, and we can then pick a different color from that. I might try blue. That actually works very well. I can try darker blue. It's up to you just experiment and see what would work very, very well for that particular document. That light bit over there is better because we've got the darker colors at the bottom, which hold the image in place. Of course we still got to do a background, but have a little bit of a go with that. Don't forget getting these shapes in here and using darker colors of whatever color you've chosen. When you go to your colors, remember you could pick a main color, whatever that color might be that you want to use, and then look at using a color which is diagonally opposite that as your secondary color in there. And then use lighter and darker shades of that color. 10. Create the Background: I've switched on my background so I can see where the couch is, and all I'm going to do is to take a rectangle, and let's have a rectangle that goes over there and another rectangle. I'll just hold down the old key to make a copy of that, which is going to go over to there. And I can then change the color on these, as well. So let's just make that a slightly lighter blue, and this one maybe a slightly darker blue. And we're going to take those two, group them together. And send them all the way down to the bottom over there and hide that picture. So that should give us this interesting background. Now, it is a little bit too blue because we lose her book on there. So one or two things I could do I could either go to her book and change the color of her book or I could change the color of the background. I really actually like the blue on the background, so I'm going to go to the book and change the color on that book and make it a lot lighter or a lot darker. There we go darker. That works beautifully. So we've really only got two colors in here, blues and yellows and technically the brown, as well. Have a little bit of a go with that. Put in some sort of background in there. 11. Adjust the FInal Lines and Export: I've tweaked mine around just a little bit. I went in and I clicked on some of these, and I made the shoulders slightly bigger, the arms slightly wider, and this slightly bigger, as well. And you can just keep fiddling as much as you want. Once you've done a save and you made sure that you've saved it, why not try other ideas in here? Have a look and see what it would look like if you did small hands as well. So if I went in and made the hands really, really tiny over there and got there to hold the book and would just make them really small. Like that. And the same with this one, with this one here, we've got this in a group so I can click on the group and make that tiny. There's also got these really small hands. We might have to tweak this around a little bit, so we'd actually go in here with this line and maybe pull it over to there so we get something which is more closer to that that sleeve. Same with this. This would have to be moved up a little bit, like that. Maybe that would move over to there. And we've got a mini version of that hand. So, which is interesting, really. I think this one here, I've made a bit of mistake on that. So I might just have to reset that curve in there as well. Now, if you've never seen this style before, let me show you that it's ready, ready popular. I've just gone to the web and I did a search for flat art characters. And this is in Google. And straightaway, you can see lots of them come up, and this is one of the styles over here where people use small heads, big bodies, either small feet or some of them use large feet as well. So this style is actually really, really popular at the moment. Once you've tried this one out, why not try variations on it? Do a save as, and then change it, and then save that as something else, as well. Small hands, try the small feet thing. All you've got to do is selected. Change the size of the feet to make them tiny as well, like that. And you can get all sorts of wild and wonderful results from that. Anyway, have fun with that, and as always, please post your results. I'd love to see what you do, especially with this one. This has been one of my favorite projects. Really enjoy doing it. 12. Well Done & Thank You: Congratulations. You've reached the end of this course. I'm sure you're creating amazing work. Now, don't forget to leave us a review. It really helps us to help to build more courses for you. I also do courses in Adobe, as well as Canva and Procreate. Don't forget to follow me and have a look at my profile. I'll see you in the next one.