Hairstyles 101: Draw and Colour Hair for Character Design

1. 01. Hello and Welcome!: Hi guys. Welcome to my third and latest class here on Skillshare. My name is Maria. I am an illustrator, animator, and story artist from Turin, Italy. I first started working in the creative field as a graphic designer at a London firm, and then moved back to Italy to pursue to the animation. In the past year, I've worked with international clients as a freelance animator as well as working with Indie Game Studio, not a member, as a character artist. To be honest, I've had a blast here on Skillshare with my last two classes, which you could find link below. They were all about digital painting. One of the things that I get asked about the most when talking about digital painting is how to draw and paint hair. This class is about that, painting hair. We're going to approach hairstyles from the perspective of character design. This means that we are going to be asking ourselves, why and how, give a character a certain haircut? What does it say about them? Another bit of feedback that I got on my last class, how to draw a digital portrait using Procreate app on the iPad, was to focus more on the shading and lighting part of the process. In this class, you get not just one, but two videos about shading and lighting. You're going to get some information on a theoretical level as well as a step-by-step tutorial. I'm going to be using Photoshop CC 2018, but you can follow along using any kind of digital painting software, even Clip Studio Paint or Procreate on the iPad, because in the end, the method is the same. You can just apply to very different softwares. You could even be following along with just pencil and paper because the fundamentals of character design are applicable to any kind of media really. Don't forget to update your project as you progress through the classes because this way I can give you feedback step-by-step. Also, I would love to give you shout-out on my Instagram account, which is Mlm_Illustration. Don't forget to include your handle when you post your project. I guess that's all. Without further ado, let's get started. 2. 02. Course Assignment: Hey guys! Maria here again. So I was thinking I should tell you a little bit about your course assignment. Feel free to organize your project as you wish, however, if you want, you can follow the structure. 1. Create a character in his/her bio using the checklist provided in the course materials. 2. Produce at least three shapes for the hairstyle. 3. Decide on one hairstyle and justify your choice based on your character's personality. 4. Render and color the final image following the process of sketching, inking, flood coloring, and shading light in your image. If you update your project as you move through these steps, you can maximize the feedback you get from me and your classmates. So I really hope you'll do it and I can't wait to see your characters. Let's get going. 3. 03. Create your Character: Hi guys, and welcome back. In this episode, we will learn how to put to paper are rough ideas and structure our original character, aka OC. For me, drawing started as a way to give a face the characters I created with my imagination. Growing up, I was always writing stories featuring my best friends in fantasy worlds. We would be witches, fairies, superheroes, always us, but always different, always wearing different faces and clothes. Drawing these characters their outfits was just as much fun as writing the stories, and as I grow older, it became even more fun, which is why I'm an illustrator and author writer. I'm sure a lot of you also have beloved characters in your mind. This is the time if you haven't done so already, to put their characteristics down to paper and try and draw them to life. If you don't have a character yet, no worries, we can create him or her right here, right now. A word of caution before we start; this process could take up a whole class here on Skillshare, but for time sake, we'll limit it to one video. If you guys want me to do a whole class on character design in a broader sense, please let me know in the comment section, and I'll provide. There are a lot of creative writing techniques to creating believable characters. However, when I'm stuck for ideas and I want to find a visual way to create a character, I use this app called What to Draw. I don't know if you guys ever heard of it. Basically, you just choose the genre for your illustration. Let's choose all genres here. The complexity of the sentence. Let's go choose low so that we can just get one character, and tap on random phrases. The app will generate some random scenarios featuring one character, and you can tap "New Phrase" until you get one that inspires you. Once you have found one, head to the course materials and download the character checklist I've attached. If you want a shorter version, you can also use the character passport that is also attached. As you can see, I'm going to feel my character passport with information about my character, which is a new character I'm working on. She's part of a potential comic that have been developing for a while, and I'm still trying to redefine her hairstyle, so this is the perfect occasion to do so. The name of my character is Gemma. I've decided to just call Gemma Wade, even though she's British-Italian. She has an Italian name, Gemma, which means gem, and Wade, which is a British surname of course. She's 26 years old. She's quite small. She weighs 55 kilos, so yes she's quite petite. She has purple eyes and brown hair. She has quite a lot of fecals, which is her distinguishing feature. In terms of character, she has one very special talent, which is that she can see people's and creature's true self. This is something that is related to the comic. In the comic I'm writing basically, people really are animals. I know this sounds a bit weird, but basically, everybody has a second identity, like an animal guy thing, and she can see that, but nobody is aware of this fact, so she's the only one who can see it, and basically this will make her freak out quite a lot. As a hobby, she collects crystals and other rocks. Her greatest flaw is that she believes herself to be a coward and is rather insecure, which is also why she freaks out [inaudible] the comic. Her best qualities are that she's intelligent, rational, and perceptive, and these are also qualities that does sound like another problem because her being so rational, she doesn't believe what she sees, and she believes that it's some delusion that she has. She's an introvert, logical, and she is girly but very casual. She wears mostly dresses but the mural ones, she's not flashy or anything. She wears headphones a lot because she's scared of crowded places and she wants to be within herself. Now that we know a bit more about my character, I hope that you can do the same for yours, and we'll see each other in the next episode where we're going to talk about hairstyles and personality. 4. 04. Hairstyles and Personality: Hi guys, and welcome back. Now that we've figured out our character's main personality traits, it's time to give him or her, a physical appearance. In this class, I'm focusing specifically on hairstyles, so I'm not going to go into details about other aspects of character design. But there are certain key concepts that apply to hair too. I'm going to quickly touch on those. All character design at its core is based upon three simple geometric shapes; square, circle, and triangle. The square subliminally reminds us of things that are solid, stable. This conveys a personality traits such as trustworthiness, stubbornness, and strength. The circle is a soft shape, it reminds us of comfort and can convey warmth, safety, and happiness. The triangle is a pointy shape, it's unstable. This is why it's mostly used to create villains and anti-heroes, characters that may not be evil but are self-interested or cunning. I'll show you what I mean by pulling up a few examples. Here we have the main character from Disney's Pixar, Up, Carl Fredricksen. He's a stubborn and grumpy old man. He's a complete square. Even before growing old and grumpy, you will see a very solid type of person. His other half, the love of his life, was an adventurer, the dreamer. That's why Ellie's character design is a mix of a circle, she's soft and kind and feminine, and a triangle, she's driven. I think it's amazing how the visual artists at Pixar managed to reiterate the characters personalities even through the design of their armchairs; square and simple for Carl and round and comfy for Ellie. Let's see some villains now. Here we have Jafar and Yzma, two of the best villains animated movies have to offer. They both display more than one triangle if we simplify their shapes. Jafar displays at least five obvious ones and Yzma goes up to seven, just in the top half of her body. When we talk about hair style shapes, we should follow the same rules I just mentioned; square for solid character, round for soft characters and pointy for dynamic characters. But hair styles can tell us a lot more about a character when we go more in-depth. Hair can be long, short, messy, tidy, traditional, dyed, intricately or simply pulled up. As a general rule, if a character is shy and insecure, they will have a fringe or banks that cover most of the face. Whereas if they're confident or even cocky, they'll have upward banks and their hair will be pulled back. Characters with shorter hair are more disciplined, or athletic, or practical, whereas characters with longer hair are more vain, care more about their appearance or are less active and less dangerous. Let's see some examples. Here's the characters from Disney's Big Hero 6. Wasabi wears his hair in dread locks, which is possibly a cultural statement, but also dreadlocks are a very cool kind of hairstyle and he's a cool guy. Honey Lemon is very girly, so she has long well-attended hair. Hiro has longish, unruly hair because he's a rebellious teenager. Go Go wears short hair in a bob, because she's an active practical girl and Fred has longish hair under his beanie because he is a bit of a [inaudible]. The hairstyle of each of these characters reinforces what we can read from their clothing and attitude to convey their essence. Just another quick example and then we'll bring this episode to a close. Here we have two pictures of Elsa from Disney's Frozen. The first pic is from the first part of the movie where she's pretending to be something she's not, because she's afraid people might not accept her for what she is. At this point, she wears her hair in a tight bun which makes it look denure and proper. The second pic is the Elsa we all know and love with her signature loose braid. Her hair style is one of the key signals the she has started to accept who she really is, and she's ready to show it to everybody else. The loose braid is much more wild and enticing while still being feminine. This is one of the best examples I can think of of how a hairstyle can really change how we perceive a character. Right now that we've done some theory, let's dig in and I'll show you my reasoning when I start sketching some hair styles. 5. 05. Sketch: Hi guys and welcome back. In this episode, we're going to sketch some options for our characters. The character that i'm trying to design these hairstyle for is Gemma Wade, whose passport I filled in in Episode 3. I've already prepared that drawing of a face with a very common expression for her, which is cheeky surprise cause she's a bit of a chicken at the start of my story. You can also draw your character face in a static pose, that's totally fine. If you have that image on separate layers, please compile them together in a group. Select all the layers and press the group button at the bottom of the layers panel in Photoshop and duplicate the group a few times. This way we can produce several sketches before settling on one. Here I have the three demos and i'm going to sketch three different hairstyles. For the sake of this class, I'll try three different lengths, short, medium, and long. When you sketch out the shape of your characters hairstyle, remember to draw the here on top of the head, living space for the skull underneath. This might seem obvious, but it will add to your design a lot more credibility if you account for the skull and for the puffiness and weight of the hair on top. I'm going to try and stick with round and triangle shapes because she's rather intelligent and not particularly solid the personality wise. Actually quite the opposite. It she's very insecure because she's insecure, she's definitely going to have bangs to cover up part of her face. She's also quite practical though, and doesn't follow fashion trends. She's probably not going to have a fashionable or well-tended haircut. As I said, she's intelligent and reads a lot. Perhaps a lot of fantasy so she might have a rather quaky haircut, perhaps something she's seen in magazines.[MUSIC] Very good. At this point at three options for my character. To be honest, i'm really torn between them. It comes down to whether her practical side would lead her to gather here to save herself the hassle every morning, or whether she has a soft, romantic side somewhere that makes her keep it long. I think at the end of the day, given her a short haircut would make her come out too active and resolute. I mean, she's a librarian who spends most of her time in an archive. She saw indecisive. She can't even choose between tomato and lentil soup. I don't think she'd go out of our way to cut their hair every month to keep it short. Long it is. Very well. Now that I've decided which shaped to focus on, I'm going to go ahead and clean up my sketch in the next video. 6. 06. Inking: Hi, guys and welcome back. In this video, I'm going to clean up this sketch and ink it. For my coloring style, I don't actually keep the line art once I'm done with the flat. But I like to have a clean sketch to make sure that the shapes are neat. For the inking phase, I lower the positive the sketch layer to about 50 percent and create a new layer on top. You can then activate the Pressure modulator on the top bar in Photoshop, which will allow you to modify the thickness of your lines according to how much pressure you put on your stylus. A little bit about the brushes I use, as you can see here, I have my favorite brushes and for sketching I use Kyle's Drawing Box animation brush and instead for inking, I use the Amazing Cartoon by Kyle's inkbox. Before we start inking, we need to wake up our hand and practice our hand-eye coordination. This can be done by tracing mainly straight or curved lines, one next to the other, always keeping the same distance between them. Try and breath in before you start drawing, and breathe out as you trace your line. It's a simple trick, but it will really help stabilize your hand. You can help yourself by increasing this mood in percentage of your chosen brush if you have Photoshop CC 2018, you can then proceed to identify one line that you want to keep instead of the many you drew during your sketching phase. This work has to be done with your inner eye. Once you've chosen which line you want to keep, you have to trace a clean straight line over it. [inaudible] now, it's important not to always keep your hand on the page, but rather you can break up your lines in smaller bits so that you can keep the freshness of the line. You can even go past the outline of your original drawing if you feel that you're drawing a good-looking line and then you can go back and erase the extra bits. Another important tip to consider is to modulate the thickness of your lines. This is done just by modifying the pressure you apply on your stylus since we have the pressure modulator turned on. The more pressure you apply, the thicker the line. A varied brush line is much more appealing to the eye than a static one, and it can also help to lead to the viewer's attention to certain aspects of your drawing. For example, if your character stands on a confusing background, you might want to draw the outer lines in a thicker way than the inner ones, which instead will be more delicate as they outline finer details [inaudible] [inaudible]. Very well. Now that we have a clean drawing, we're ready to start coloring. See you in the next episode. 7. 07. Flat Colour: Hey guys and welcome back. In this video, I'm going to fly the flag color to the hair. Plus, I will show some tips and tricks about brushes, the Lasso Tool, clipping mask and how to use them, and how to quickly get cool effects by changing layer blending settings. First of all, we're going to create a new layer on top of the clean sketch layer we had before. In this new layer, we're going to trace the shape of the hair. This is called flat color because as you can see, is just one basic color with no shading. It should be the main color of your character's hair, which in my case, it's dark brown. Don't worry too much about the actual shape of this color as it can be easily fixed later on by tweaking the adjustments as we'll see in a bit. It's important that you keep this layer above the sketch so that you're sure you're tracing exactly on the liner to underneath and you're covering it completely. As you can see, I'm tracing the shape of the hair, following the line art using the same brush I was using before because I personally like the texture edge of this brush, which gives the image a more traditional feeling. Once I trace the whole shape. I'm going to select a free formula Lasso Tool. The shortcut is L and make a selection of the insight of the shape. You can do this in more than one step. You just have to close the selection when it's more comfortable, then press shift on a Mac and alt on a Windows to add to that selection. Once the whole shape is selected, you can right click on the mouse and select Field. In the options dialog selected Foreground Color so you can fill in the shape with the same color as the rest of the hair. Now, we're just going to drag this layer underneath the group with the head, as this is the flat back color. Create a new layer on top of the clean line art again and call it flat color front. As in this layer, we're going to color the strings of hair that fall in front of the face, eyes, glasses, everything. To provide some chromatic difference, I'm going to quickly make an adjustment to the back layer. Having selected the back layer, go on Image Adjustments, Humans Iteration and lower the brightness of the back layer. Having done this, go back to the top layer and coloring the front bangs. At this point I'm going to turn off the visibility of the Clean Line layers and see if I like the flashlight. Usually there is some work to do at this point to even out the shape and very important step in coloring here. Break it up by adding some random strands of hair coming out of the main shape. This really helps the hairstyle come alive and regain the freshness of the sketch. I'm going to add some extra hair until I'm satisfied with the effect. You can judge it yourself both by looking at the shape and according to the level of tidiness of your character. In my case, I want her to look a bit messy. Now comes the reason why we inked the clean liner in the previous video. I'm going to duplicate the clean layer by selecting it and dragging it with keeping all selected. Either or you can right-click on the layer and select Duplicate Layer. One copy I'm going to give for backup. The other I'm going to use to provide some rhythm to the hairstyle. A very important aspect of Photoshop's layer properties are the blending settings. Here you can see by default, the blending setting is Normal, which means it doesn't blend with what's underneath. By changing the blending setting to Soft Light for example, Photoshop is projecting the contents of that layer on top of the one underneath, through a soft light. To draw the line art on my pieces I usually change the blend setting into either overlay or soft light according to how strong I want the contracts to be. In this case, soft light will suffice. Of course, the line artists still rather dark at the moment as it is a black line over dark brown hair. In order to change that, I'm going to pixel lock this layer by clicking on the little Check-in button. Which means that if I drawn on it again, I'll only be able to color over the pixels that are already selected. I'm going to change the color to something light like gray or yellow or blue. In this case, I'm going to use a light pink as it's more similar to the hue of the basic color. Using a round softer brush, in my case, is lowish, hard round brush, which I bought on our [inaudible]. But you can use any default soft brush with your opacity turned down to 70 percent. I'm going to go over the existing line art to give it a more valid software look. I'm already liking the effect with the lighter line art, and it's now time to add even more chromatic variation with a very simple tool, the gradient tool. I'm going to create a new layer on top of the back flat color, and I'm going to call it back gradient. Then I'm going to right-click on this layer and select Create Clipping mask. This means that I'll be able to draw all over this layer, but the color will only show over the shape of the layer underneath. I'll show you what I mean. I'm going to select the Gradient Tool shortcut is G, and select the option that creates a gradient using the foreground and the background color. One of the two colors will be the actual basic color of the hair, while for the other one, I'm going to choose something a little more saturated and creative like purple. I'm now going to create a gradient by clicking the mouse somewhere on the screen and dragging down to indicate the length and direction of this gradient. You might have to repeat this a few times before you get the right gradient. Cool. I really like the color ends of the hair. I think it's something a little crazy that give [inaudible] a little more edge. I'm going to keep it and repeat it on the front bands. Unfortunately, here I have a problem. To cover up part of her neck, I colored in some of the points in this front layer. When it was all the same shade, it was an obstacle, but now it's pretty obvious. I'm going to have to select this area, cut from this layer, drag it down on top of the back flat color, and come up with a different idea to cover up the neck. I don't like to delete parts of the body because I might need them later. Instead, I'm going to create a mask on the character group by clicking on the Mask button in the bottom bar. Masks are a great way to delete something without actually deleting it. Basically, when you color in black on a mask, you erase its contents, but if you color in white you will make them reappear. This way you can delete something and if you need it again later, you can get it back. At this point, I'm simply going to tweak the blending settings of the gradient layers to give it a more realistic look. Usually, overlay makes the overall color more intense and saturated, which is okay for the top banks as I want the purple to be very subtle. However, for the ponytail, I'd like the color to jump out a little bit more. I'm going to duplicate the gradient layer and put one of the two in overlay at 100 percent opacity to provide the depth of the deep brown. Another one in normal at 90 percent to make the purple a bit more obvious. I think the basic color is done. We're going to add more depth and detail. We've shading and lighting. But that's the next few videos. See you there. 8. 08. Shading: Hi guys and welcome back. In this video I'm going to talk about core shadows, cast shadows, and how to quickly paint shadows in Photoshop using layer blending settings. Just a few words on theory first, I'm going to draw a sphere to use as an example. As I was saying, there are two main types of shadow, core and cast. Core shadows are formed as a result of the shape of the object. If we have a light over here in the top right corner, because of the round shape of the sphere, the darkest shadow will be situated on the opposite side of it on a diagonal trajectory here. Guess shadows are instead the shadows cast by the object upon other objects or surfaces. Again, because our light is in the top right corner, the sphere work has its own shadow upon the surface it is standing on. The lower the light on the horizon, the longer will the cast shadow be. That is the reason why we cast as more shadow at noon when the sun is right above our head. Instead a long stretch shadow at sunset or dawn when the sun is rising or setting. I'm now going to create a new layer on top of the group chosen, which contains all the layers of the flat color and set a light. Often, I physically draw a little spotlight in my working progress files as I think it helps me clearly figure out how shading works for my characters. I then proceed to roughly indicate the areas that will definitely be in shade because of the shape of the character and because of other objects or parts of the body blocking the light. Very obvious areas with natural light coming from above are usually underneath the neck and nose, the eye sockets, the area of the eye right below the eyelashes and the upper lip. For hair specifically, it's important to remember the 3D shape of it. The ponytail, for example, is a round tube. It'll have to be shaded a little bit like a sphere. Just a few words on the colors I use for shading. Basically, the color of the shade should always be a complimentary color to the one I will use for the main lighting source. This way I can exploit the natural contrast between these two colors to make the picture pop. These are my two favorite combinations, light blue for shadows and orange for lighting, which is especially suitable for a warm scenarios like sunsets. Pink for shading and aquamarine for lighting, which is instead of more suited to a more neutral setting. Now I'm going to create a new layer on top of the group and call it shading zero one. Cause I might want to add more than one shading layer later. You can just paint all over it because we're going to create a clipping mask like we learned in the past videos. The color is only projected on the contents of the group. As for brushes, you can use a round solid brush, or a texture brush. You like to use Lloyd texture brush, which again, I bought [inaudible] cause I like this cartilages. Now that we have painted over all of the shaded areas, it looks a bit weird right. That's because we have to change the layer blending settings, the best friend of any digital artists. We are going to change the setting from normal to multiply. The blue shadow is projected over the flat color and we'll change each time with a different view. An additional step at this point would be to modify this shadow according to its distance from the light. That's right. Shadows are not all the same intensity and hue. Shadows that are further away from the light, are darker and less saturated, as opposed to shadows closer to the light, which are brighter. What we can do is revert the blending setting back to normal so we have a clear view or what we're doing, pixel lock the layer and paint over it with a soft brush. We're of course going to paint in a darker, less saturated color at the back of her head. Instead using lighter tones, even pink or yellow on their face. After we're done, change the layer blending setting to multiply and tweak the capacity level to your liking. I'm going to keep it at about 50 percent. One last touch, and we are done. Since I want to make the hair stand out more, I'm going to create a second shading layer, pick a neutral purple and outline the back of some of the strands of here to make them more 3D. After I'm done, I'm going to change the blending setting into multiply. You can add as many shading layers as you want, and each one will make the render of this picture more sculpted and more 3D. But I usually stop at two or three layers because I like my style to stay on the flat 2D cartoony style. I'm going to see you in the next video and we're going to add some lighting. 9. 09. Lighting: Hi guys. Welcome back. In this video, I'm going talk about two point lighting and how to use gradients to add that colorful finish to your drawings. Two point lighting is a very common photography lighting technique that makes images rather dramatic. As the name says, it involves using two different sources of light rather than just one. The main source of light will be a warm light, the complimentary color to your shading. You can place it pretty much wherever you want, but it's usually placed in front and above the character or the object, so that it provides good illumination for the face and body. The second of light, also called secondary light or red light, is usually a call color, complimentary to the warm one and it's placed behind or underneath the character so that the light up different areas and provide good value and chromatic contrast. It's really important not to overuse the rim light low. It's easy to get carried away with it because it's cool and gives a nice effect but it should only be used sparingly and only to outline the rim of the object or character, and only if it makes sense. To ensure I'm planning my lighting in a way that makes sense, I like to quickly sketch out my two points of light real quick. As you can see, the main warm light is positioned in front and above the character and is therefore going to light up our face, and the left side over here. It's important here to make the light bend around the ponytail to again enhance the 3D equality of the shape. The rim light is going to come from behind and below, and it's going to light up the back over here, neck and jaw. I like to use a rim light this way because it gives more contrast and more strength to the design and the turning motion of the head. Once I'm satisfied when my rough design, I'm going to create a new layer on top of the shading layer and turn it into a clipping mask. I'm going to use a textual brash and light yellow to paint the main light. I'm not too bothered by the color because I find that it's easier to find unit at the end by using the adjustment panel. I'm going to paint a bigger light inflection around the curve of the ponytail and then go in with the eraser tool and delete parts of it to make sure that it isn't too flat and obvious. When I'm done, I'm going to change the layer blending settings. For lighting, I have a few favorite blending settings. Soft light, overlay, lightened screen and add. I can change them around according to the intensity and the heeled effect I want to achieve with each drawing. In this case, I think I'm going to go with overlay. However, I don't like the tone of his yellow, so I'm going to select Image, Adjustments, Hue and Saturation, and alter the hue of the light layer until I'm satisfied. After I'm done when the primary light I'm going to create a new layer, make it into a clipping mask, and start painting the rim light with a light blue using the softest brush you can find with your positive toggle turned on so it doesn't color it full force with each stroke. At this point, I'm going to paint the rim light in a very subtle way on her back hair, jaw, under nose, all of the surface is exposed to my imaginary light point at her back. When you're satisfied with the result, you can change the layer blending settings to something like color dodge add or screen. However, I feel like color dodge is too saturated in this case, so I'm going to keep it in normal and lowered capacity at 75 percent. At this point, we only have to do one more thing before I declared this drawing finished; add a color gradient in multiply to enhance this iteration of the piece and create more color interests in the viewer. I'm going to create a new layer at the bottom of the lighting and shading layers and call it gradient. Then select the gradient tool using orange and blue as the two-point colors, because they are complimentary colors, and create the gradient. Then multiply it and lower the opacity to about 25 percent. I'm going to repeat this operation a few times with different complimentary color combinations to see which one is more suited to the character and the situation. I think I'm going to settle with the pink and orange combinations, which are not actually complimentary colors but make the drawing seem more warm and I especially like the effect of that they have on the ponytail. So I'm just going to choose the anyway. I guess this is actually my last tip. It's okay to follow tutorials, advise on color theory. But at the end of the day, if you experiment and you like the result, go with it, even if it doesn't follow the rules of digital painting. I guess this is it. I'll see you in the next video for a recap. 10. 10. Wrap-up!: Hi guys and welcome back to our final video, the recap. I really hope you enjoyed this class, so please let me know in the comments. If you found it useful, leave your review or some feedback on aspects you'd like me to touch upon more. I also really hope that you got some useful insight from the extra videos about the theory, shading and lighting. It was really interesting to make them as it got me to analyze more in depth my own process. Now I'm going to replace the time-lapse of the whole process and then we'll talk a little bit about it. The main takeaways from this class are; use simple geometric shapes to express your character's personality. Think about hairstyle and hair color in relation to your character's attitudes and hobbies. Sketch and play reshapes a lot before settling on one. When inking, remember to breathe in and breathe out, and to break up your lines. When you flat color, place each element on a different layer and use the selection tool to make your life easier. When shading and lighting, draw only the spotlight on your canvas so you can see the areas of your character that will be in the light and in the shade. At the end, play around with blending settings, opacity, and gradients to ensure all the colors pop out and work together in your illustration. Again, I really hope you enjoyed this class. Let me know what you think. I hope you upload and update your project as you go through the videos to get feedback from me and your classmates. Don't forget to include your Instagram handle so I can give you a shout out on my page, MLM_Illustration. Give me a suggestion on the next topic in the comment section, and I'll see you in the next class. Bye.