How to Design Comic Book Characters | From Concept to Final Art

1. Intro: Have a character in your head for your world, but you're not exactly sure how to get it out onto paper, my how to design a comic book character course is for you. I'm Triple Jazz, a working professional in the AA video game space. And for the last couple of years, I've been working on my very own personal comic book called Magic Punk. And I have to tell you, one of my favorite parts of designing this world has been designing the characters. So I want to walk you through my ideation process from concept to sketch to final presentation of how I design my characters. Going to cover the basics of design principles with chapters dedicated to shape language and color theory. I'll give you basic tips on anatomy, posing and gesture. Then we'll move into some tips and to dos for clean line art, rendering and presentation. Various chapters will also have accompanying assignments you'll be encouraged to complete as you move through the course. I look forward to seeing what characters you bring to life by the end of this course. Now, go and make good art. 2. 1-1 Design Principles: Are the design principles. These rules describe most of art making. Knowing these, mastering, and studying them will seep into all aspects of your art making endeavors. It is vital to know these, but you have to know the rules before you break them. The first principle is balance. This is the distribution of visual weight in a work, and it can be symmetrical, evenly balanced as seen here. It can be radial arranged in a circle or even asymmetrical balance through contrast, which leads directly into the next principle, which is proportion. Creating contrast through sizing relationships between elements. You can also think of these as big, medium and small, which I'll dive more into later at the end of this section and also in the shape language section. I'm going to be hammering home big medium, small, all throughout the course. We have patterns, which are repeated elements, whether shapes, lines or colors to create consistency or decoration. Next is contrast. The use of opposing elements, light versus dark, smooth versus rough, large versus small, to create visual interest and draw attention. Emphasis uses contrast to draw attention to a particular area or element as a focal point. Variety is the use of different elements and principles to create visual interest and avoid monotony. Rhythm and movement use lines, edges, shapes and colors to guide the viewers eyes throughout a design. And lastly, harmony when all the parts of the artwork feel cohesive and work together as a whole. These principles directly influence composition and Totimage making, and character design is a compositional challenge. To simplify, you can think of all these principles in two buckets. They're just handy tools to create either contrast or gesture. Here are a couple more principles to consider big medium, small or the one, two, three read. This describes a deliberate use of scaling elements to grab a viewer's attention in a descending order, starting with big, moving to medium, and finally small. In character design, we want elements to be broken up in three harmonized chunks of unequal scale, a big shape, a medium shape, and a small shape. Also, think of the PretoPrinciple, or Preto's law. This is the 80 20 rule. The vital few, the trivial many, or perhaps it's the 70 30 or the 60 40 rule. Different artists use different ratios, but the principle is the same. This ratio in character design helps guide where to keep something busy versus areas of rest. We either need to create a character that's 80% busy with 20% areas of rest or inversely create a character that's largely plain except for a small portion of its design that's noisy. It has to be a conscious choice, though. We need to focus on the vital few elements of a character that stand out, and the rest could be a trivial many. Creating something that's too noisy, for example, with not enough rest is kind of irritating to look at while creating something too plain is just uninteresting. Next, we'll talk about how to utilize these principles to make pleasing shapes. Your assignment for this lesson is to practice design principles by creating three different 16 by nine compositions, one using circles, one using squares, and one using triangles. Think about big medium, small relationships, contrast and gesture. 3. 1-2 Shape Language: The first question to really answer is, what is shape language? Here's my definition. Shape language is the repeated use of a shape's essence throughout a work to create a cohesive design. Like a leap motif in music, it's a repeated use of a visual motif throughout a design. All Toti image making can be reduced to shapes. Compositions, lighting shadows, lines, everything we do is in service of arranging these basic shapes in pleasing ways. But how do we create pleasing appealing shapes? In the last chapter, we cover design principles. Here are a few more principles to keep in mind when it comes to making shapes. First, the three basic shapes are circle, square, and triangle. And just like colors, shapes also express something. They have an inherent quality to them that the viewer and audience resonate with. Circles, for example, are friendly comfy shapes, representing larger than life characters who could wrap you in their arms or smile with large cheeks. It's not impossible to make villains out of circles, but it's certainly difficult and a little bit more subversive. Remember, we have to know the rules to break the rules. Squares are sturdy, maybe the standard banner waving hero or the immovable, large brute. They speak to objects that are hard to move and things that are strong and tough like a building or a brick. Triangles are sharp and pointy, a character who is quick, aggressive, lethal, agile. Swords, knives, daggers, all these things have triangles. They imply some amount of precision and speed. By combining different shapes, each with its own meaning, you can evoke different aspects of a character's personality. So think about that as you combine shapes to create new characters. Then we have big medium and small. We've talked about this already in the design principles portion, but shapes can also come in big medium, small sizes. You can also think of these as primary, secondary, and tertiary shapes, or principally, this is just moving from simple to complex, from big to small. We always want to think big and zoom into the details. And again, this applies just beyond shape making. This goes into color theory, into compositional reads, and basically anything else visual art related. This is a crucial principle to understand, study, and be conscious of as you make creative decisions because it adds variety and visual interest, and things that are too even or too balanced or all the same shape just look boring, and we want to create interest both for the audience and ourselves. So what are some other ways we can modify shapes? I'm going to do a demo real quick, Insight Affinity Designer, which is a vector based program. And I just want to use this to show you some ways you can think about modifying shapes as you draw them. All shapes are made up of lines of one of these types. I just think of it as ICS lines. This is our straight line, our C curve, and our S curve. In combination, these can create a variety of different shapes, and we want to use a variety of ICS to create shapes. Now, the three basic shapes that we have to start with were once again, circle, square triangle. But we can play with these shapes. For example, we can taper a shape pinch its ends, and now we have a trapezoid. Or in a triangle, we can also taper it and squish it down. We can also squash and stretch shapes. We can also push shapes. So instead of having an equilateral triangle here, we can start to move its point over and over and over as it creates more and more tension. And now this shape doesn't just imply something that's perfectly even and sturdy. It applies almost a shape that's moving in some direction. Likewise, for an ellipse, we can squash and stretch it. We can shear it and extend it. Basically to push shapes means to exaggerate them in some capacity. We don't want to just create boring shapes. We want to create something that's visually interesting and to create visually interesting things is to create shapes that are slightly exaggerated and have some variety to them. We can also use other shapes to carve shapes. So, for example, I could start carving circles into this square and create a whole new shape just by thinking of the negative shapes rather than just thinking of what the basic shape is. Think of other ways you can introduce shapes to either add or subtract from them. We can create a variety of new shapes by simply subtracting and adding shapes together. And again, I'm just showing you this in a vector program, but I want you to be conscious of this as you make shapes with line. So let's take Scarper here, for example. He's going to be the character that I'm going to be making from start to finish. But here he is in his final form and his foundational shape, it's a triangle. Everything about Scarper relied on a triangle, and I took it one step further, and I said, What if it was a bit more of a curved triangle? Like an archway. And so this shape is repeated all throughout his design. To the chip in his hat, to the filigree on his outfit and his boots, and even his cape. I knew I wanted this character to look lethal. He needed to be villainous. Now, of course, he still looks friendly. He's got a smile on, but can you trust him? Probably not. And, of course, the dark clothing as well kind of sets him apart as someone not exactly to be trusted. But really, if I had rounded out all his shapes, he would have lost a lot of that villainous intrigue that comes with something that looks sharp, pointy, and aggressive. And even when thinking macro, I knew I wanted his body type to be from the top down, even the shape of his face. While, all my characters have pointy ears. That's just a rule I have for myself in my world. Everyone has pointy ears of some kind. There's no humans allowed. So that's kind of a given. But Scarper's face and his whole body is shifted to look like an aggressive triangle. And again, this is by design. Now, we don't want to get too bogged down into a single shape, right? There's still so many other things to solve. So the fact that I introduced other kinds of shapes like these more sturdy rectangular pieces that function as decoration for parts of him create little contrast, but they don't upset the story of the character at all. And even his gun his gun is a lot more brick like. There's some story related reasons for that we'll get into later. But the story drives the shape. What is this character? What is their background? What is their story? He's tall, sharp, aggressive. He needs to look villainous, and he also needs to have all this functional wear on him. To create your own shape language, simply pick a basic shape, modify it, and repeat it as a visual motif throughout your design. You can extrapolate from the base shape you made to make more complicated shapes, thereby using shape language to inform more shape language, and this creates a style guide. Remember to keep in mind also big medium, small, to create interesting shapes, we need to keep all the design principles in mind to create appealing, pleasing shapes. Shape language involves the use of all of these things. We want to create interesting shapes that are exaggerated We want all the pieces and all the shapes we use to feel like they're part of the same visual family. That's what it means to repeat its essence. It's all in the same family. If you're going to make a triangle with circles carved out of it, then this needs to be repeated in the weaponry and parts of the clothes, we are keeping the ethos and the essence of this shape throughout the design. And that's what I did with Scarper here. The essence of this is this archway here. It provides direction. It looks lethal. It looks like the end of a bullet. There are a lot of reasons why this shape works. And part of the reason is using it throughout his design, unifies this character to look like he got his costume all from the same place. And the nice thing is, is once you pick a shape and you build a shape language, the rest of the design sort of just comes together on its own, because the hard part is creating a pleasing shape and then knowing when and where to use it. But once you have a shape in mind, you can start to think, Where can I use this? Where does this belong, and it'll help you create your big medium and small. Lines, as well can create big medium, small shapes. Remember, we talked about the three basic line types, ICS. Well, you can create boring ICS lines. Well, how do you do that? Well, one way is by always using a predictable line. This just becomes boring. Instead, think about ways that you can exaggerate your ICS lines, thereby not just making something even, but something that's slightly off centered with a big medium and small even inside the line. We have our big medium, small, big, medium, small, you can do that all throughout your shape creation process. And by combining IC and S, we can create entirely new shapes ICS ICS. ICS. So think about ways that you can combine these to create really interesting new shapes. Think of basic shapes, think of your lines that you have available to you. Try to avoid shapes that are even right next to each other or even in distance across from each other. Try and offset the balance in some way. Even when it comes to drawing characters, everything can begin to have very similar shapes. And this is just the way anatomy works, right? But we want to avoid that by making something a little bit more interesting. So pick one of these to exaggerate. When you make creative decisions like this about your shapes, you create visual interest, and people can tell. Even when it comes to creating characters, it's super easy to fall into a trap of evenly spaced elements. Instead, think about big, medium, small. Lines and other shapes break up existing shapes. When a character comes to this point and everything is evenly spaced, at some point, we need to make a decision. Something about this design isn't working because it's repetitive. We have too many medium chunks right next to each other. So we can use other lines and other shapes to break up existing shapes. And think of this dynamically. We can move shapes up and down. Let's just say that I move this piece down, and I just want the character wearing smaller boots. So by simply paying attention and being conscious of the shapes that we're making from macro to a micro level, we can create big medium, small, create a variety of interest, and create appealing characters. Your assignment is to create two pages of free handed drawings, focusing on pleasing shapes that have deliberate shape language, whether that's a circle, triangle or square, and big medium, small portions to them. You can do this in clumps of three shapes or focus on one shape that has all this in mind. I hope you enjoy this assignment. It's very relaxing. It might take you a couple hours. Be very deliberate with the shapes you're making. This should not be Willy Nilly. You can even copy from other artists or franchises that you enjoy and focus on how they're using shapes to create big, medium, small, and use a family of shapes to create a cohesive design. My favorite places to study shape language is from the incredible artists over at Right. Games. If you go to the Mapp room Tera on the Legal Legends website, you can begin to explore how shape language influences and creates cohesive cultures across this imaginary world. Just as one example, here in Damasia, everything is this sort of heightened, elegant, religious order. And so there's this wing like shape language throughout everything, throughout the structures and the ornaments and the armor, even the weaponry, everything has an organic gestural quality to it, because the shape language you can even see here on this helmet here is that of a wing. There's not a lot of straight parallel lines. In fact, a lot of lines actually taper together in organic curves. So again, study your favorite artists and what they do or your favorite franchises and really pay attention to the shapes that they're using to tell the bigger story and how those shapes create cohesive visual locations and cultures and characters. 4. 1-2b Shape Language Demo: I understand shape language can be really difficult to get a grasp on. It's a really ambiguous concept. It's one of those heavy intuitive you just have to learn as you go type of things. So even though I can point it out to you over and over and over again, it might just be most helpful to see some examples and then have a short demonstration where you can follow along and see the thought process that goes into building shape language. The second thing I want to tackle here is just to remember that there are more than just three shapes. The primary shapes are circles, triangles, and squares, but there's also pentagons, hexagons, septagons and octagons, and all of those evoke different things for different people, and they can speak to different parts of a culture or a character that you create. So here's a pretty clear cut example of a circular character, a triangular character, and a square character. Each one evokes a different emotion based on the shape language they use. But even the circular ogre character, he still looks menacing, despite him having softer looking shapes. Now, keep in mind the characters that I'm showing you are highly exaggerated, but they're exaggerated to get the point across very clearly. This is clearly a circular character on the left, the one in the middle, very obviously a triangle, the one on the right, very sturdy, very squarish. It's important to know how to push yourself far so you can always restrain yourself and come back. I also want to tackle another thing that I have yet to address, which is actually applying the design principles to characters in a practical way. And one of the ways people do this most often is by creating contrast and asymmetry in a character. You're often going to see this in characters where there's a Padron on one side of the character, but not on the other. This is a very, very common, almost trope in character design to put a Padron or some sort of cape hanging over the shoulder on one side of the character versus another. So you can see in this ogre character here, he's got this pauldron over here, and there's none on this side. In this sharper looking character, he's got these feathers hanging off his shoulder. And for this brute guy, the asymmetry is created by the shield taking up the majority of his character frame. So that's just something I want you to be conscious of as you see other character signs out in the wild. It's very easy to fall into symmetry when creating characters. And so while it is trophy and kind of almost predictable, there is something to be said about offsetting a character's silhouette in some capacity. Maybe you cut off an arm and give them a cyborg arm, you know, a cybernetic arm. Maybe the leg is the cybernetic offset. But whatever you want to do, there's some amount of asymmetry going on in your character, and it instantly creates contrast because a totally symmetrical character, while scientifically is more visually pleasing to us to have symmetrical faces and symmetrical appearances, it creates a lot less interest. This is why a lot of time character's hair is falling to one side, looking for ways to not create totally predictable looking characters. But what I really want to show you is how to actually think through shape language and pull from various objects. So here I have this photo that I took of a crystal, and it has all these interesting shapes going on. And I'm just going to pull apart some shapes that I'm gleaning from looking at this, and I'm going to show you how to manipulate them and build characters and worlds from a basic shape language like this. So we have the shapes of the light here. We have the actual shape of the crystal. We have the silhouette of the crystal. If I had to guess, this is a hexagon. So the front of the crystal or top down view would look something like that. When we stretch out this hexagon, we can build all sorts of shapes off of this. We could build structures from We could build shoulder padrons for a character and other parts of the armor. So as you think of a primary shape to build off of, think about ways that you can, again, use it as a visual motif. What about this crystalline language can we use to build more structures out of to evoke maybe a people who worship crystals or are around crystals. Think about how you can exaggerate these properties. Remember, it's a hexagon, so as long as it has six sides, it's kind of fair game. Right? Pulling lines, like I did right here on the building, pulling lines from this shape language. You don't always have to include the entire shape. Sometimes just a little echo of the shape would be enough to evoke that shape language. That's what we're looking to do. We're looking to evoke an echo of the same family of this shape. This is how you build shape language, right? You pick one shape, you break it apart, and you reuse it and modify it in different ways that stay consistent within the family, the shape that it is. Think about how shapes appear from the side as well from the top. Because all these things can be combined, rearranged, stretched, morphed, tapered, whatever you want, big, medium, small, arranged in asymmetrical, contrasting harmonious ways, there's so many things you can do with shapes that create interesting locations and characters and appealing locations and characters. And it all starts with fundamentally sticking with a shape language. So hopefully, you can see how just me doing this very quickly instantly creates so many ideas and opportunities to build off of when just using a single reference and just pulling a bunch of shapes from that. Your assignment, I want you to go and find an object in the real world, take a photo of it, and build shape language from it. Things like plants in your backyard, the grass, flowers, something that piques your interest in terms of how it looks and break it down piece by piece and push yourself as much as you can to create a shape language sheet from this photo. 5. 1-3Color Theory: Basic color theory creates the color wheel. It goes something like this. The foundational colors are called the primary colors, red, yellow, and blue. Combining these between themselves results in the secondary colors, purple, orange and green. Interspersed as gradations between these six are known as tertiary colors. And together, this is called the color wheel. We have a few terms to describe the relationships between colors called color schemes. Analogous colors are colors that are adjacent to one another on the color wheel. Complementary colors are colors that sit across from one another or opposites of one another on the color wheel. Split complimentary takes the analogous colors of a complimentary color on either side. Triadic colors are three colors equally spaced on the color wheel. Colors also have an inherent grayscale value. This applies more to an understanding of light and shadow, but it's worth mentioning. Combining analogous colors with a variety of values results in a monochromatic color scheme. For simplification, we can reduce all colors into two groups called warm and cool temperatures. Cool colors make us feel sad or alone, calm, or even chilled, hence the name. Warmer tones can lighten a scene's mood or make it scary through a proper use of fire like imagery, almost Doomsday, apocalyptic feel. Colors as well have emotions and meanings tied to them. They make statements. They tell a story. Purple, for example, means royalty, Affuence. Red evokes passion, anger, fire. Green can be envy, wealth or an earthy rural feel. Blue can be sad, quiet, remind us of water, something calming. Yellow is happy, spunky, joyful, or even gold and money. Even values can evoke emotions. White is clean, new and bright, Black is serious, depressing, sombre. Because shapes and colors both have archetypes and meanings, when we combine them, they start to take on the form of characters. Putting specific colors on characters should enhance their existing archetype, hero, villain, side kick, et cetera. Creating a proper color palette involves starting with the story of the character and applying good contrast between warm and cool temperatures. Some cheat sheet palettes involve using those principles we talked about earlier, as well as some helpful tools. We have a big medium small palette, so we think about the primary color, a secondary color, and a tertiary color in descending order. The 80 20 palette, one color dominates the conversation, and there's a small color that acts as an accent. We can use tools like the color wheel by Figma to generate color palettes and experiment with different types of color schemes. Some drawing programs, including Procreate, have built in color palette generators in their color wheels. Your assignment is to create three different color palettes that fit the story of the character you're going to be making in the rest of the course. 6. 1-4The Foundation: This is the foundation of all good art making, and it's not a technical principle. It's not a design principle. It's actually something that every human being fundamentally understands, and that is story. When you see a drawing, what you're seeing is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to everything else that preceded it. A good drawing is dictated by a good design. The drawing is the final product. Before we get to the drawing, we have to design it. And before we design it, we have to determine what the function is. So function is going to inform what the design is. There are other schools of thought on how to design something. For example, if you think of Apple products, Apple products are not functional. And this is not a value judgment on it. This is simply that the product in the end result is trying to hide as many bells and whistles as possible versus a functional design, lets you see all the bells and whistles, it lets you see all the screws Apple as just one example, does its best to hide all the functionality. But I believe function is the best way to design appealing characters and appealing vehicles and guns. And emotion guides the function, meaning, what do we want the audience to take away from seeing this object? And it could be something as simple as a barrel in the corner of your character's workshop. The emotion of whatever the workshop is supposed to be dictates, then the function of that object and then the design and then the drawing. And finally, what guides the emotion? It's story. Story telling is the foundation of all good design. So you need to ask yourself, what is your story? What is the purpose of this character you're gonna make? Next, you need to determine what the genre is. Is this sci fi fantasy, something in between, steampunk? And what type of world does this character inhabit? Next, you want to figure out, is this more realistic or is it more cartoony? Are we going for stylized realism? Are we going for stylized fantasy? We need to determine what the genre is and where this character belongs, which then dictates the setting. What is the background of this character? What region of the world are they a part of? Are they a local or a nomad? Try to approach this from the standpoint of knowing your character as a person. What are their personality quirks? What about them if you met them would stand out? So just as an example, Scarper is a part of my comic book world called Magic Punk. It's a sci fi fantasy romp about a mage who abandons his heir to the Weaver Imperium, which is effectively the Mj'sGildT find a mythical person called the ambassador, starting a chain reaction to hunt him down. Scarper is a villain and an antagonist. He's from the Dreglins, an elite assassin for the Mafiosos who run the town called the Marauders. He's a smiling, gun toting boots clean type of killer, and he is sent to find Machi. Start by writing some key words down about this character. You can write down a series of words or use a mindmap to help explore some concepts for yourself. Mind map is a helpful tool in your designer tool belt. It's essentially a stream of consciousness diagram showing all these different parts of a character, location, or idea you have, and how they relate. Simply write down the core concept and start attaching descriptions, thoughts, meanings or emotions you have to this. Then as you write down one, more are going to come to mind, resulting in a spider web like formation with the core idea at the center. You can use mindmaps to answer all sorts of questions, but the most important questions for a character in regards to the story are who, what, where, when, why, and how. An example, in my case, Scarper is tall, thin, and sharp from head to toe. He's a villain. He's a trained assassin. He's good at his job and he's classy. His attire speak to his particularity and his professionalism. Who is Scarper? What is villain? He's hired to take out the protagonist. Where is Scarper from? He sent from the Dragln Marauders out into the wasteland to find Machi When near the end of the first part of the story as the final confrontation. Why? To prevent Mache from reaching the dragons by request of the Don techs. How? Using his sniper rifle and a gang of thugs he brings with him. This is all story related stuff, but motivations are important for telling a good story and having good drama. You can do this for a whole host of characters or even to build a culture of imaginary people. Your assignment is to come up with a story for this character. Choose your genre, answer who, what, where, when, why, and how about this character or your set of characters. Bonus is to make a mind map. Now that the story is in place, we can finally design this character. 7. 2-1 Exploration: Before I show you my process for designing this character, I'm going to go over a couple of concept art techniques that you can use to help you get ideas out. So the first one is called shape carving. You might have heard of this in some capacity, but effectively, what you do is you start with the big shape of the character or creature, whatever you're designing. The big shape being the silhouette of the character. And a silhouette is a very important primary read for a character. Many characters that you think of are iconic because of the instant recognizability of them. Basically redrawing Scarper here just for demonstration purposes. And from here, you could lock your layer using the lock transparency tool or create a new layer on top and clip it I prefer to just lock my layers once I get a few thumbnails going, and now I'm going to carve into it. Or you can work without the carving and just use black and white. I prefer to use kind of a medium gray, and now I'm going to go in and start making secondary shapes. And don't be afraid to reuse a concept. So if you scale this down, move it off to the side, duplicate it by holding Alt and dragging it, maybe from here, we do another variation where I don't know, maybe the hat is not as white on the sides, and it goes, maybe it's taller, and there's no Padrons here. And instead he has, like, larger gauntlets. Maybe he doesn't have a cape this time. Maybe he has, like, a cape on his shoulder right here. You know, that's really the heart of concept art is just asking the question, what if? What if the character did this? What if he had this? What if they looked this way? What if the What if their story went this direction instead of that direction? So you can quickly create a variety of characters using this shape carving method. It's the method I'm going to be using mostly for scarper just because I wanted to practice it for my own characters. A couple other considerations when it comes to the shape carving method is the type of brush that you use and other tools you can use to help you carve. So I've just found that certain brushes make certain shapes that I like, and other brushes don't make shapes that I like. So the tip of the brush informs what shape you're actually making. And this is really important because your personal preference and what your goal is when it comes to designing a creature or character might conflict with the type of brush you're using, and you're going to be fighting your tool more than enjoying the process of carving these shapes and exploring. You can download my brush pack for Clip Studio Paint. It comes with the course. Use these brushes. Here's one of them. The Ellipse Carver is one of my tools that I really prefer. You get this nice flat look and also this sort of tapered round edge. I don't really like the feel of a hard round brush and carving with just not giving me the shapes that I want, and I feel like I'm fighting this brush too much. Also, remember that you can just erase to help you create shapes as well. So by erasing, remember back to the design principles phase, we can carve into shapes to create more shapes. As I'm laying down new shapes, I can also erase shapes to create new shapes. The next brush I really like is this solid carver, and it has more of a brushy look to but again, it gets that nice thin flat tip near the top, and then it can create kind of more chunkier shapes if I need to by just pressing down a little bit more. And then this is the chalky carver, which also is the same thing as the solid carver shape wise, but it's a little bit softer. It has a little bit more texture to it as you place it down. And lastly, a lot of people like using the Lasso tool to create shapes. And Clpsiopain has the lasso fill, which allows you to just make a selection, and it fills it in automatically. So this is a very quick way to create shapes and start designing characters. I'm bringing these up to add more tools to your tool belt as you work through things. You might find that you prefer all sorts of different types of brushes as you work through them. And for me, I don't want to fight the tool. I want to enjoy the process. So finding the right tool for me is very important. And I found that the Lasso fill and the solid carver are some of my favorite tools to shape, carve with and create shapes with. Another method that I like is similar, but if you're someone like me who likes drawing and actually sketching, then you might resonate more with this. What we do instead is just focus on the silhouette again. But I'm going to turn this down to about 25%. I'm going to use a bit of a softer brush. And now, it just feels like I'm using almost like a wet marker to gesture out this character. And it feels a lot less committed because I'm not getting those dark values on the page immediately. It feels like I'm still in sketch mode. I'm still exploring what this character could be like. I'm not worried too much about anatomy right now. Mostly focusing on just capturing a humanoid looking character that I can start ideating off of that will give me a strong silhouette. Actually, maybe I make his legs small, you know, maybe he's short and his arm is as long as his body. And so from here, what you would do is create a new layer, and now you can go in and you can sketch on top of this as sort of a structural lattice that you can place things off of a scaffolding of sorts. So you're not just totally intimidated by the white page, but instead, you have this some shape to work off of. And I actually like working this way for hard surface design. So you're going to see me use this when it comes to designing the vehicle. We'll cover anatomy in a little bit, at least briefly, because it is an important, crucial part of character design. But right now, you know, I still want to be focused on what is the story of this character. I have no idea what this character looks like, you know? I'm trying to find out. I'm exploring what they could potentially look like. So that's another method. And the third and final way is just regular sketching. The default round brrush is just the thing I keep going back to because it just leaves so much room for moving shapes around and lines around. And I'm just exploring this character working fast and loose. To get some idea on the page. And this is not, for me, a finished drawing. This is not what I would use as presentation. This is simply an idea. Kind of like this shape that was going on here, you know? What if I continue that? Just I got this oval shape language going on. What if I just kept using that. And so the first thing we want to do is capture ideas. And these three methods I find the most helpful to toggle between when it comes to communicating ideas. They're just things in my toolbg I have in my artist's tool belt that I can use and whip out at any time to just help me generate ideas. Sometimes it's drawing, sometimes it's shape carving, sometimes it's just silhouette and pencil. You just never know what you can create and what you can find by exploring with these different methods. So now we're going to get into the actual meat and potatoes of Scarper and how exactly he came about. Want to spend the most time on the design portion. This is the most important part. Don't rush through this. Earn to enjoy the process of designing things. And the easiest way to start with that is just the general shape. What is the overall shape you want the character to have? What is the silhouette of the character? Let's spend some time exploring potentially how this character could look. And so, before we move on to the details and their clothing and the materials and all those bits and bobs that the character is going to have attached them, what is the first read of the character? So let's spend some time creating silhouette thumbnail. And something that's always helpful for designing characters is putting together a mood board. Put together a couple pieces on a moodboard. However you want to collect a moodboard, I like using pure ref, grab a couple pieces of clothing, some detailed images and maybe material close ups to help you make costume decisions. Just things that generally give you inspiration. What does the sense you're trying to capture? You can use other artists work, but I think the best ideas come from existing things that you can manipulate and exaggerate. Moodboards are also helpful for pulling shapes from for your shape language. If you're stuck on something or if you're stuck on a part of the character or you don't know what a part of the character should look like, having a mood board with enough references on it allows you to take shape language from existing real world objects and implement them into your character design, giving it a grounded sense of realism and believability. We use a character's story and who they are, their personality to inform the shape language. So if there's no established story, then you won't have something to say about the character, and the character doesn't speak to anything. And I knew from the get go, I wanted this character, Scarper to have sharp features that were triangular, aggressive in shape language, and have a very long and thin sniper barrel. I just had that image in my head. And so, ultimately, it was just a matter of exploring the potential outcomes of this character, tall, thin, long sniper. I knew that's how I wanted his silhouette to read. Now is also the appropriate time to explore various hairstyles, because hair is an important part of your silhouette. It should also feed into the story of the character as well as derive shape language from the character. So in Scarper's case, I gave him long thin, pointy hair. So you'll see me draw basically a silhouette of his head that's very straight and narrow because I'm applying his hair in that silhouette. Don't worry about strict anatomy at this point. We're going to refine anatomy in the next step, and I'm going to give you some tips and tricks that I use to put all my anatomy knowledge into practice as I create characters. And I'm going to be honest, I currently struggle with creating a wide range and variety in character silhouettes. And this is mostly for my own personal stories because I can see the characters and the moments so clearly when I think of them, that it's just a matter of putting pencil to paper or stylus to tablet and working out the details. So Scarper was never going to be a wide character. He was never going to be a short character. Again, because of the story and kind of that archetype I had of him in my head, I didn't want to veer too far from that, but I didn't know exactly how that was all going to play out in the big, medium and small. However, it's totally worth exploring a variety of shapes and sizes for your characters just in case, especially if you're uncertain what they could look like. Many times what's in your head has a better solution once you start exploring. In Scarp' case, though, he looks almost exactly like I imagined him. As I'm working on these series of silhuettes, I'm thinking of overall shape, the big shape, the pose of the character, and the type of attitude they're communicating when you just see them from afar. We want to arrange all these elements in a visually pleasing way. And you can tell just by watching me work through this process that I had a pretty strong idea of who Scarper was as a person, like the attire that he's wearing. I wanted it to be late 1800s, not Victorian era, but more cowboy. And it turns out that a synonym for Marauder is Brigand. So brigands were real life historical figures that lived a life of robbery and plunder. They were effectively land pirates in the late 1800s. They were gang members and thugs. And so this fit perfectly with the type of crew that Scarper ran and I already had this really sharp image of my head of Scarper having a really tall hat or some type of cowboy hat that really just set him apart. And seeing the hat on a brigand from paintings during that era really solidified this image of this character, what he was about. I started with the idea of a cowboy, some sort of gunslinger, mercenary professional. And then when I was putting together my mood board, I was given this opportunity to think through some more costume decisions simply by exploring real world historical characters and events and people who lived. Pulling from real world reference and historical reference is really going to help the believability of your character. So your assignment is to generate six to ten silhouettes using the shape carving method or whatever your preferred method is, pay attention to big, medium, small shapes and overall shape read. We want a variety of silhouettes to explore in the next step, and also create a mood board that's going to help you really refine during the costuming phase. 8. 2-2 Posing: In the design principles section, I said all principles could be reduced to either contrast or gesture. Gesture, like shape language, is about capturing the essence of a thing, but in this case, we're capturing the essence of motion. In figure drawing, gesture is about capturing the motion of the human body. We again have ICS lines to help us describe the human figure. The spine is one of the primary driving forces behind gesture drawing. It determines a lot of the movement of a person. This is typically called the line of action. The line of action is a summary of a pose's inertia. It's movement with a single line. This line typically follows the arc of the spine. The gesture of oppose is what brings life to a drawing and directly impacts storytelling. Nailing the line of action directly impacts the storytelling of a pose. If a person is standing still, however, the gesture will come from the curves of their body, the curvature of the muscles, and the underlying curves of the bones. Gesture drawings are exaggerated. They're attempting to capture the essence of a pose quickly, not outline it perfectly. You can better understand gesture by practicing it yourself using free online tools like line of action. I like doing 20 62nd poses as a warm up. We're going to use gesture to work through poses for our character. And when it comes to poses for our character, remember storytelling is king. The pose should speak directly about the character. Are they confident, timid, aggressive? Coy. A viewer should be able to tell from how they stand, hold themselves where they place their feet in their balance, what type of character this is. And remember that it's okay to steal. There's so much existing character concept art to use as reference for yourself or stock photos. Don't be afraid to use these. I am not saying to steal someone else's designs, although I think it's perfectly fine to take inspiration from existing character artist designs. I think the best designs come from existing real world reference and your own spin and creativity put on top of it. However, I don't believe there's anything proprietary about a pose. So if there's a pose that inspires you and you think would fit with your character, I think it's totally fair game. Ask yourself some questions about the pose you'd like to reference. What about it speaks to your character? Is this the most dynamic option? Does this allow for legibility of the design? We want to create a piece of art you can both show in your portfolio, but also reference for yourself or potential fans to create further artworks from, or a potential three D artist to work off of. Your assignment is to do ten 62nd gesture drawings using an online tool like line of action, and next, explore at least six to 12 different thumbnail poses for your character, focusing on personality and showcasing the design clearly. 9. 2-3 Anatomy: Knowing anatomy and knowing gesture go hand in hand. So focus on both of them. A full anatomy lesson is outside the scope of this course. However, I want to provide you with some helpful ways to simplify and utilize existing anatomy knowledge to quickly create characters without overcomplicating the muscle groups. Core anatomy knowledge comes first. But if you're having trouble applying it to your characters, this is going to be helpful for you. First and foremost, we want to focus on proportion. This is why understanding the skeleton is so vital. If you can understand proportion correctly, you can mess with the stylized scaling of characters in believable ways. This means understanding the fundamental human skeleton and marquee bone landmarks. Next, we can use a basic skeletal structure to place geometric forms on top of. I personally find this simplification more complicated than sticking with important shapes like the rib cage and pelvis area. So my ideal mannequin looks closer to this third stage. And from this third stage with more anatomy knowledge, I can add complexity to create more realistic forms. So the basic steps for easily creating mannequins is to create the fundamental gesture of the skeleton. Think of the skeleton as a wire you can then thread these basic forms onto. From there, we can complicate the form by further implying muscle groups in the correct placement. Feel free to study these images is helpful ways of simplifying the forms and understanding proportion. But nothing is going to replace a true understanding of human anatomy. The point is to get to a place where you can simplify the bones and anatomy and structure behind the human being in a way that's comfortable for you. So, for example, a lot of people like drawing the pelvis as a box, but I prefer drawing it as basically just underwear. This shape helps me visualize the tilt of the pelvis and the curvature of that bone a lot better than a box wood. But I think it's worth exploring all different types of ways to symbolize the body so you can find what works for you. These mannequins are of an average male. The average female figure has smaller shoulders, breasts, and wider hips, and we're generally going to use softer forms and softer lines to indicate the female figure versus the male figure. But a male figure is a great place to start because from there, you can adjust it and make changes to quickly create female mannequins. The three most important parts for any character design are the head, the abdomen, waist region, and the hands. And the reason that I'm bringing this up here is because you need to nail those three areas not only with the design and rendering, but also your anatomy. People will recognize instantly if a face looks off or the waist area looks off and the hands look off. In Andrew Lemas'Fgure drawing for all it's worth, he provides numerous illustrations and poses for studying and understanding proportion. Some of the most common mistakes are improper sizing of the human head or the arms being too short or too long. By adjusting the size of the human head, you can quickly scale a character's appearance. As you can see, children's heads are much larger in comparison to the rest of their body. As they get older, the head apparently seems to shrink. These diagrams can be found on the Internet and are worth studying and understanding. In this diagram, we can see ums make work of tra posto, which is when the tilt of the shoulders and tilt of pelvis are not parallel, providing a contrast between the legs and arms, resulting in a more believable, relaxed looking figure. There are a lot of flowing and contrasting rhythms to explore in the human figure, but offsetting these two main structures instantly creates more realistic looking figures. I highly recommend studying figure drawing with daily gesture drawings of 30 to 60 seconds, as well as more detailed study breakdowns of the human form using books like Michael Hampton's figure drawing, design and invention or Tom Fox's Anatomy for artists, drawing form and pose. I really like morpho Anatomy for artists and morpho simplified forms. Unfortunately, there is no true shorthand for learning anatomy. It's going to take a long time. It's very complex, but it's really rewarding. However, I don't want you to be discouraged from creating your own characters. You can have a basic understanding of anatomy and use simplified forms instead to create fun, believable, appealing characters. 10. 2-4 Costuming: Postuming is the stage where we get to use the backstory of our character to inform their wardrobe and decide whether or not they have a sense of fashion. Since I didn't actually show the process of the pose creation in the last section, I'm going to go over that now. And like I showed in the last couple of sections, I use gestural sketches to lay the foundations of the pose. I explore a few options, even a different perspective, but land on a classic leaning forward pose, knowing I want this character to appear confident, animated, and a bit more forward. I also have to consider the size of his gun and how someone would naturally stand with such a large weapon. This is where collecting reference comes in handy. I'm going to continue to use reference throughout pose creation in particular to verify hands. Always use reference for hands. Coupling strong core knowledge with good photo reference makes your art appear more confident and successful. I make small notes to myself that I used a mirror to double check the naturalness of the pose, making sure it wasn't stiff and felt more human. Get up and check your pose. Notice the curvature of your hips and the contra posto between your shoulders and your hips. What direction are your shoulders going versus your hips? They're usually at odds with one another, and that creates a more natural feeling pose. Also, pay attention to where your arms actually hang. A lot of the time, artists overcompensate or underestimate where arms belong. And that just comes back to basic anatomy knowledge and understanding of the proportions. Body language is a huge component to how humans interact and how we perceive one another. So think about how the body language or the character you're designing and the pose that you put them in is speaking to this character's story and personality. Scarper's confidence, his cockiness comes through in just lifting his neck up a little bit. So think about ways that you can denote a character's personality through their posture, a less confident character would have their head down and their shoulders slumped. You can do a lot through a character's storytelling just through the expression on their face and the tilt of their head. Now that we have some potential poses and a bit of anatomy knowledge, let's move forward with choosing a pose and fleshing it out. I also note I wanted the pose to feel relaxed. He's not tense or ready for action. He's just a bad guy who wants a stiff drink and could help old ladies cross the street. He's a chill guy. Once the pose is solidified, I do two more sketching passes on it, one to really tie down the gesture and forms and a quick line art pass. I'm going to give you some line art techniques in the third chapter of this course, but this was merely to help place his features and make sure the anatomy red like I envisioned underneath the clothes that we're going to place on him. I'm not worried about the design of the gun at the moment. That's going to be its own separate section and its own distinct challenge. We can build our character in pieces, especially with critical unknowns, like the weapon he wield. That's a core part of the overall design, and I wanted to give it its own dedicated focus section. Even with so much existing anatomy knowledge and drawing hundreds of hands over the years, it's still really important to capture the exact weight and feel using reference. So I just went into the bathroom and took some photos of myself to help get those hands looking correct in the right angle, the right relaxation, the right gesture. And the reason I'm wearing a towel is because eventually, I'm going to put a cloak over his shoulders, and I use that for how the drapery holds. The pose is set up with a basic line art pass, we can duplicate our character and treat this foundational pose anatomy base like a mannequin, we can try different clothes on. And here are a couple of different techniques to experiment with trying clothes on characters. Sort of like I covered in the shape language portion, you can use these, mix and match, but they're just tools in your tool belt to move the project forward and help you get ideas out. So the first one is like shape carving. But what we're going to do is create a new layer, and then Eclpsioaint or photoshop, you're going to apply this border effect here. We're going to set the edge color to black, and I'm going to go back to one of my carving brushes that I like. It's Ellipse one, for example, and just start placing shapes down. I can even erase from this, and it will give me secondary lines. So it gives me little detail lines. Or I can change this to a different color. And start mixing and matching shapes. You shouldn't do this in just two values. You can use as many values as you want to separate the clothing. I also highly recommend using as many layers as you need to get the layers of clothing correct. The pitfall of doing this all in one layer is you'll notice when colors mix, they don't have strokes overlapping. So to get a stroke in here, I'd have to erase, which defeats the point. So if you want new shapes, simply duplicate the layer. I have a hot key set to Alt D, so duplicate the layer and then just clear it with delete. And I can add complexity as needed. So that's the first method that I use here. The second method is much simpler. Just going to duplicate this. Again, holding Alt and Shift. Just going to drag a second character over. Going to use a white fill set to about 70%. And let me drag this below so that way he's not affected. This other one's not affected and create a new layer on top of that. So I have two additional layers now, and I'm just going to take my default round brrush and I'm going to start treating this like a red line as if I'm just exploring shapes, drawing. Look at that. I kind of like that. Maybe I'm going to change design now. Pretty fun. Almost Robin hoodesque. So you can just draw right on top, just in case this shape carving method isn't your style or your speed, and I can use the anatomy base that I have to dictate where things fall on his body and where they're placed. So these are just a couple of techniques that I use to create costumes in this next phase. As I mentioned previously, my vision for this character was pretty strong from the get go. Now I'm figuring out the details. How thick is the bell he's wearing? Does he wear a vest or just a biillowy button down like a pirate? Does he have tall boots or short boots? A lot of these questions can be answered by reducing these shapes into big, medium and small. I also want to explore different hats. I had the idea for him to have a wide flat brim hat, similar to characters like in the Western classic tombstone, but I thought it would be worthwhile to explore different looks. Some of the hats I explored in the thumbnail phase felt too witchy or wizardy. I wanted something that clearly defined him as a cowboy. I knew Scarper was going to have a cape, so designing what he wore underneath felt more important because what if I want to take the cape off at some point in the story? I need to know what he's wearing underneath. And don't let randomness guide your design process, but rather think about the story, shapes and function. What shapes support this character's story? What would this character carry on them? What would their sense of fashion be? How does that fashion operate in the real world? A lot of small detail shapes come from understanding how objects actually fit together. This is functional design. Again, reference is super helpful for these types of things. You don't have to figure out everything. You don't have to start from the ground up. You don't have to redesign the wheel. There are plenty of wheels that are already designed. Pull from those and use them as reference, so to speak. I remember as a younger designer, I used to think, Where are people coming up with these shapes? How do they just think of this stuff? And over time, I've just realized it just comes from studying photos, just doing a lot of photo reference studies to build your own visual library to pull from as you design characters. If you don't have a visual library yet, start by pulling from your reference board and make conscious shape decisions as you design your character. Building a visual library is really important. And it just comes from repeatedly seeing the same things over and over again and then practice drawing them yourself. The shape of boots, the type of gloves, belts, buttons, whatever the world this character occupies in, whether it's sci fi or fantasy, you should be practicing the shape language and specific elements from those types of worlds that are common. Know what cloaks and trench coats look like. But this one in particular is different because it has a shape that defines him as a character. It's aggressive. It's flowing. It covers his feet. It looks more like a cowboy trench coat than it does anything boring. And that adds character to him because it pulls from believability, and it makes it scarpers. It's scarpers cloak, not just any cloak. Same thing with his hat. I needed the hat to also follow this triangular shape language. And I began to think, like, what if he had double buckles everywhere? And that became kind of a secondary motif throughout his design of these double buckles that were rectangular. Just added a little bit of contrast and functionality to everything that he had. And the shape of the buckles themselves being rectangular versus triangular comes from the fact that he lives in the draglin and the draglins are a particular family that are known for their metal work and their functional machinery. So it speaks directly to where he gets his clothes from, but also there's still a lot of his own character and shape language that's in there, like those more archway type triangles throughout his clothes. And, again, I didn't explore too many hairstyles because I knew I wanted him to have long hair. That was already a done deal. So, again, a lot of this wasn't just firing in the dark. I had a pretty strong idea of what I wanted this character to be. It was just a matter of figuring out the details. And I'm sure you yourself, have your own characters that you have running around in your head, and you just need to get them out on paper, and it starts by exploring them. In this second version, I was really pushing the triangular shapes, trying to go for, like, a big, spiky looking jacket. I felt like that was a bit too over the top, and I wanted something a bit more clean look. It looked a little too villainous, almost like Zerg or, you know, something a bit too cartoony. I wasn't married to what his boots looked like or his gloves looked like or even his vest or his trousers or anything. It was really more like figuring this all out in the process. And again, concept art is all about what if. So as we design things, we have to play with the idea of what if this character had a belt loop that had binoculars on it because he's a sniper. So he needs to be able to see far away. I didn't want to give him binocular vision. I thought that was a little too much for my world, but instead, I give him a very functional practical device that gets its own call out later that I get to design. And it serves as a piece of story and functional luggage on the character that he carries around with him. Same thing with his belt loop. Where does he carry his bullets? How many bullets does he have? I started thinking about these things, and then I get to design, an ammo purse for him, effectively, that he carries with him. And he only has six bullets that he carries with him because he doesn't ever need more than that. And if the worst comes to worst, he has his hands to shoot people with. This is all story related stuff that I'm thinking about. And then I ended up doing three versions of the character, but the third version that I did is I went back to the shape carving method and just added a bit more complexity in detail, and it's sort of taking what I did from the second stage and applying it with a method from the first stage. So as you move through ideation, start combining ideas. Don't just leave it at one or two ideas, but start combining them. Create a few variations and then mix and match those ideas to get even more variation out of your ideas. So I wanted to give him something a bit more grounded and real. So I go back to this more subtle look to Scarper, and I'm thinking about what kind of colors and color palette he's going to have, so I can tie those to values that I use to then create shapes for the clothes. If I know the color of the cape is going to be a dark gray or bluish gray, then I'm going to make it black here so I can get a good read of how this character reads from afar. And also, for this third look, I begin to include those binoculars. You know, I'm answering that question of what are these gonna look like? Where is he going to carry getting more into that filigree, you know, those third shape reads, those tertiary reads of really small detail shapes that just add to the character. And third shapes are really important, not to overdo them, but to keep them there. They need to be present for character to really feel believable. This is the filigree on clothing and the sort of accents everywhere that really just help things read and pop. And there's no magic happening here. You know, there's no I'm not hiding anything from you. This is literally just a matter of putting pencil to paper, stylus to tablet. And getting in there, getting my hands dirty with this concept, with this character, and figuring out what is going on. And if I ever get lost, you know, I use my reference sheet. I go exploring on the Internet for functional inspiration, other real world costumes and articles of clothing from this era that I'm trying to copy and replicate. In this next section, I'm going to teach you how to self art direct. Your assignment is to choose a standing pose, flesh it out, and begin to wardrobe clothes on your character, like they're trying out clothes at a retail store. Reference your initial fumail sketches and move board for direction and inspiration. You should be thinking about the functional design. Think about how pieces of clothes are knit together. Again, this is where helpful reference comes in. Think about what your character needs to be successful, not just in terms of their own mission, but the overall mission of selling this as a believable, appealing character. 11. 2-5 How to Self Art Direct: To step back and examine our hard work. We want to simulate if we were in a studio environment and send our work up the pipeline for notes and feedback to an art director. But it's just us. So it's time to bring out our artistically critical eye and make some notes on our ideas. We're here to assess the tot visual strengths and weaknesses of our designs, as well as any missing storytelling elements. For starters, I'm going to add a new white layer with a reduced opacity, then add another layer on top. At my favorite digital pen for writing. In this case, I'm using my gel pen for my brush pack and a nice red or blue and start writing down my thoughts. And this whole setup is something I actually created for my clipsuopaint, Auto actions which puts me right into art director mode. And I'm just going to begin stream of consciousness writing. The first steps are just to assess my existing shapes. And I push some of these triangles more. Are there parts of the clothing that haven't been solved? Write down whatever comes to mind. Just like the mindmap. What do you like about your existing ideas? What don't you like? What's working? What needs to change? Here, for example, I like the way the boots in Concept two are looking, but feeling like the design isn't quite there. So I'm going to pull ideas from various sources and point to what I like and what I don't like so I can eventually combine it into one idea. I spent about an hour critically thinking and assessing my design. How's your story telling? Does the character have everything they need to succeed in this story? Are there accoutrements or gadgets they need to have that you've overlooked? Now is a good time to just write down any notes that you think of, point to what you like and what you don't like, and just make a stream of consciousness markup. So I'm just making very conscious notes, being mindful of the things that I like and that I don't like, and just writing them down. You know, in the first concept, I just think his cape isn't aggressive enough. It's not a good enough shape versus the second idea has a nice shape. The first hat is a little too maj like. It's getting to be a little too wizardy. I'm seeing that the clothes don't fit the form of the character well enough that he's losing some of that strong silhouette and the clothes are hiding the character that I want people to see. I'm making notes about shifting of the belts and pointing out that there's not enough detail that I haven't actually solved a lot of this functional design. Some of the clothes just seem random and haphazard versus well put together and well thought out. I then go on to use three different layers with three different colors at lower opacities to identify my existing big medium, small shapes and figure out if I'm running into shapes that are too similar in size. And as I move into this breakdown of my shapes, I'm seeing that the pants and the boots are too similar in size. So I'm going to make a choice on breaking that shape up. One of them has to give the shirt, the boots, the pants. They all have too similar in size. Spend some time really being conscious of the things that you enjoy and that you don't enjoy and how they're stacking up to speaking to this character, doing the shape breakdown is kind of fun. It allows you to see your character in a very graphic read. Kind of like what you did in the thumbnailing stage, but now we're just assessing it as you move through the costuming, and now we're just doing a shape breakdown over all the linework that you've put into these shapes. How are they stacking up compared to your thumbnails? Remember, tall, thin pointy was sort of the three main descriptions I had of Scarper in my head, and so I want to make sure that his clothes are trim and that they fit him really well. Again, coming back to those story related questions, does he have bullets on his belt? Where does he keep his bullets? Does he need bullets? Does he just have one bullet? I'm also wondering about the design of the binoculars. Where do they go? I actually decided that he's going to keep his binoculars sort of tied to his vest, like a vintage pocket watch. When you get feedback from a director, it's going to have a list of things for you to do. And so you want to do the same thing for yourself. You want to give yourself a list of things to address. Again, what's working and what isn't? How about those design principles we covered? Is the design balanced? Does it have proper contrast? Does the costume have a focal point of rest or noise or are there too many competing distracting elements? This is a good time to evaluate the overall harmony and address it properly. Sometimes less is more. In my case, I need to complicate the design a bit further, but you might find yourself taking away elements and trimming it down. The 80 20 rule, shape language, all the design principles we covered. Keep these in mind as you're assessing your work. I'm taking in all the feedback I just wrote for myself, and I'm doing a final refinement pass on this design with just a red line, blue line overdraw. As I go through this final design, I'm thinking about how I can push shapes. I'm thinking about those details because I realized his design was a little too plain looking, so I wanted to add more small shapes to him, more detail, more filigree, give him a little bit more presentation, a little bit more panache. Then I begin to think, What if he did have a coat like the Guys in Tombstone? You know, this large over cloak that just hangs on your shoulders and goes down almost to your waist. But ultimately, I decided to take this off, and you're going to see this in the next section. I'm going to take it off because it just hid too much of his design. But it's important to explore these ideas, you know, again, the what ifs. And if it doesn't work, we get rid of it. We just toss it out. Give yourself a list of things to do, explore shapes, answer story questions, and really just make conscious critical notes. And then at the end here, I'm just taking that fourth iteration, and I'm placing it back on top of my original sized mannequin, and I'm blowing it up and putting it over him so I can do a final line art pass. Your assignment is to red line and mark up your current wardrobe ideas and thumbnails with notes. What's working? What isn't working? What creative problems need to be solved? What world building questions need to be answered. Take notes on your own work. Next, using these notes, do a refinement pass on your character, clarifying shapes, solving problems, answering questions with your new sketch. 12. 2-6 Callouts and Backview: Helpful technique for drawing a back view just to give yourself a base is to take your existing standing pose, duplicate it, and flip it horizontally. You can go to Edit, Transform and flip horizontal to do this. Now we can just erase, fix anatomy. Remember to use reference if you need to, and fix the planes of the feet. They should sit in the same perspective as the forward facing pose. One of the main goals of a character sheet is to provide yourself a potential audience or a three D artist down the pipeline with enough information to see the character completely. A three quarter front view is how we've tackled the front facing portion of the design. Now we have to solve what the character looks like from the back. We have to be able to see this character and three D in our heads as well and solve the costume from all angles. The footage you're seeing now is obviously further along in the process because to the left you can see Scarper is basically almost totally lined out at this point, and the gun is designed. So this is later in the design process, but it's actually good to get all these elements arranged prior and just have these solutions. But I had to figure out what he looked like from the front before I figured out what he looked like from the back because the front is half the design. So all I need to do is solve the remaining half. In fact, it's more than half. You can almost see the entire design from the front, but the back view just offers a little bit more clarity. After getting a good sketch in place, I do another refinement pass on him to clarify anything and figure out what's going on behind him. That piece of his vest that hangs over the shoulders like a cloak is actually separate from the cape. And so what I can do instead, if I wanted to help with presentation is draw the cape over the design with just a light line. So that way, we're not overshadowing and hiding all the details from the back view. We want to spend some time getting to know our character, and that's what expression sheets are great for. You can do as many of these as you want. I find them really enjoyable. I like drawing faces and expressions. But for presentation purposes, I only did three. We only need to see a range of the character's emotions. And since Scarper doesn't have a huge range of emotions, I didn't feel the need to showcase that many. I think actually the limited subtle emotions that I gave him speaks loudly to the type of person and character he is. This is also a good time to figure out what the character actually looks like, what their face looks like. And spending a little bit of time deliberately tackling and designing the face is going to help you solidify the overall appeal of the character. Just think of the most common expressions this character would have, not necessarily that all humans have this character in particular, in Scarper's case, he's not easily miffed. So I want to showcase some subtle emotions rather than really extreme bold emotions. So I do one face where he's sort of surprised or shocked or kind of disgusted, almost, and then another where he's disappointed, unamused and then another one where he's just smiling. He has this recognizable villainous smile, so I want to capture that in one of the callouts. While we're doing these expression call outs, we can mess with the geometry of the character's face. How much can they move? How expressive really are they? I discovered while doing these that I really like the idea of the hat not being on model all the time. There's almost an expressive quality to the hat. So it sort of slumps. When he slumps and his ears slump, you know, everything is sort of animated together because the hat is a part of him, and that adds just an expressive quality to the character. And so the fact that the hat wasn't 100% on model is fine, especially for comic books. In animation, I would have to solve this in a different way and probably change the hat a little bit. But for the purposes of two D illustrations, we can get a lot more expressive. This is all about getting to know our character in and out and for other people to get to know our character as well. Notice how I'm zooming in and out of my work a lot. It's sort of disorienting from the viewer's point. But while I work, I like to zoom out and see how everything is looking overall. I don't like to stay zoomed in too much before I get to the details. I spent a lot of time on this back pose, probably more than I needed to. But there's kind of a question you have to answer for yourself is, does this character retain the same pose as their forward facing view, or do they have a new pose? In Scarper's case, I wanted him to hold the binoculars in this back facing pose so we could see the design of the binoculars a bit more, and he wasn't gonna be holding his gun. So I had to solve what his hands were actually going to be doing. The legs also were a tough thing to solve because it proportions have to match his forward facing view, but now they're in a new perspective. So these are just things to be conscious of as you make a back view. The forward view and the back view need to match, both proportionally and in terms of design. They need to line up, maybe not one to one because the back view is going to be a bit more in perspective, but they need to be proportional. As for call outs, these are sort of like Zoom and enhanced drawings that help describe and make sense of various gadgets or tools a character might have on them. They should clarify the design and function of these things. Maybe your character has a weapon that needs a dedicated call out like a sword. In this instance, simply do a front view of the weapon's design using a symmetrical ruler. In my case, the gun will be a separate page rather than a call out, since it's more like its own character rather than just an accompanying instrument for Scarper. So for the binoculars, I do two drawings to show the animation of how it opens up. Thinking of how these open up directly led me to thinking about its functional design. I originally thought these could be open empowered by magic, but a more practical mechanical design instantly describes how they open up by just seeing them for the first time. It also connects to other design language I've used in other drawings with designs from this same locale. I also finally begin to solve what this bullet pack he has looks like. And then I find a place to put it on him. Oh, carry it on his right side. It also adds to his silhouette. It adds a little bit of balance and some contrast to his overall design that he has these sort of two opposing elements, his binoculars on the right, sitting in a little pouch. And then the left side of him has this bullet case, where he carries these large magic bullets. Design these sheets like schematics for future artists and your future self. Leave no stone or detail unturned, both for the sake of storytelling and believability. Your assignment is to create a backview of the mannequin, as well as begin sketching any call outs. Think about functionality and any animated portions that need to be shown. The sheet should speak for itself. If you have to verbally walk someone through your thought process, there's probably a better way to solve your functionality or showcase your design. 13. 3-1 Line Art: The first thing to understand about line art is it truly is an art. There is a skill to this. Here's some helpful tips you can practice and be conscious of as you make line art for this character. It's important to know how to control the tool we're using. So here's a quick exercise you can do to practice controlling your stylus on either your tablet or your screen display. I'm using a ZencabsPen Display 24. The first line we want to make is going from thin to thick at the very end. Next, we want to practice going thick to thin in the middle to thick again. Next, let's do thick at the beginning and slowly taper our stroke off. And lastly, let's do a stroke where it's thin on either side and thick in the middle. This should give you a good idea of how to control your stylus pressure sensitivity. If you need a little bit more control over your lines, don't be ashamed to use the brush, smoothing and stabilization features available in Photoshop EnclpsioPaint. EnclpsioPaint, you can find the stabilization bar in the tool property panel. Utilize stabilization and brush smoothing to create nice ICS gestural lines as you create your line art. Thin lines denote something that's not that important. Ticker lines draw more attention. Thickness of lines also denote an object's placement in space. Ticker lines denote an object is closer to us, whereas a thin line denotes an object is further away. So objects in the foreground get thicker lines, objects in the background get thinner lines. So the first is that a thick line near the bottom of an object can denote a shadow. In the second example, you can see that thick lines were used to denote the dynamic corners of this object. So you can use thick lines to draw someone's attention to a particular shape. The corners of the box are what's being emphasized here. So again, thick lines denote emphasis. If you do not want something emphasized, do not put thick lines around it. And the last example is what I'm going to be using for my character, which is that big medium, small. So on the outside, we have this thicker line then the secondary shape, which would be the corner that separates the two sides of the box has a medium line, and I added tiny little details that are kind of difficult to see, but they're there. And that would be small, my third read. So I have big medium, small lines, and each of them serves a purpose. So you can structure your character in a way that denotes the largest to the smallest, each gets its own line weight. And this just helps you keep your line weight organized. I just get my character to a really basic setup before I start line drawing, which is lowering the opacity of all of my existing work, basically throwing, again, another white fill background layer on top. With a reduced opacity, so that way, it kind of just makes everything beneath it a little bit more opaque. We don't want this to be just a tracing exercise. We want to create a new drawing on top of the existing sketch. I believe throughout this process, I used a seven pixel size brush for all of the large lines, a five for the medium, and then I did a really light five for any of the third lines. Even in this final line art phase, I'm still looking at my reference sheet. I'm still looking at my mood board. I'm still taking photos. I'm still referencing constantly, especially for the hands. To finalize the hands, I took reference photos that I showed previously in this course that I'm using now, again, in the line art phase to finalize everything. See me make design changes throughout. I'm still solving problems. That's probably not a good thing to be solving this many problems in the line art stage, but it is what it is. As you move through the character, you'll begin to see more and more gaps in your design or things that you would like to add. That's fine. The line art stage is for that. You can do that now. And you can see that when it comes to the boots. When I get to the boots, I'm sort of at a loss. And what I ended up doing was just collecting more reference photos of what boots typically look like and taking more of a pirate boot approach. And that's just one example of how I'm moving through my line art process and designing as I make the lines. And every now and then, I'll step back from my work, do a self art direct, make changes, and then fix the line. Notice how the pose is moving and animated. Not just his stance being forward, but his hair and his cape moving at the bottom, we want to be able to imply this character is alive and standing in this location. Look for some ways to imply movement in your character to bring life to them. We don't want these animated elements to hide the design or obscure important details, which is why I took the cape off his shoulder, but we do want these elements to bring life to the character, and we want them to feel solidified in the environment they're in, like they're being impacted by the environment they're standing in. Now, I'm just going to let the time lapse play as I move through this work because it was hours of work. And so slowly over time, it's just going to get more more quick. At the beginning here, this is all in real time, and it's going to slowly move to about 3,000 times as quick as I worked. Take your time with this. This is not a race. You're making a piece of art. It's okay that things take time. Be patient. If this version is a little too disorienting for you, the next subchapter has the clip sido paint time lapse, which is going to be just a flat version of this, meaning there's not going to be any zooming in and out. There won't be any rotating of the canvas. It will just be a front facing flat view of the entire line art process. So, if that interests you more and you just want to see this from start to finish, the next video will be preferable. However, what you're viewing now is more true to form of how the whole process loads. So I leave you with your assignment. Line art, the front, the back, and your call outs. I'll see you in the next chapter. 14. 3-2 Color Flats: This process is called flats or flatting. These are effectively just the colors without any light attached to them, whether that's a high light or a shadow. Colors that are unaffected by light are called local colors. In three D, this would be like the texture of the object. We need to take a couple steps before getting into coloring. Because I've been working eclipsioPaint, there are some tools here that make coloring and flatting much more efficient. The first is to designate our ine art layer as a reference layer by using this lighthouse icon. Next, select the one tool by pressing W and make sure it's set to reference layer and give a slight increase to the pixels added to the selection. Two or three is usually good for me. Remember all that time we spent on silhouetting the character, altering shapes, making sure the character read well. But we don't want to lose that. So before we start just filling in everything with color, let's create a base silhouette all the colors can sit on top of. So create a new layer and place it below your lines. Make a selection around your character, including the negative shapes between the hair, the arms, everything that is not explicitly inside the character silhouette, then invert the selection and fill it with a mid tone gray. I have this in my auto action pack. It's called the silhouette fill, and it defaults to pure white. Now spend a little bit of time cleaning up the silhouette in areas that you think were missed using a hard round brush. Now we'll create a new layer on top of the silhouette base, clip basket using this icon and use this layer to fill in our colors. We're going to bring in that palette that we designed from earlier and place it on our canvas for easy access. Select the fill bucket tool. Make sure this is also set to reference layer, add a slight area scaling to one pixel is usually good enough so it gets right up next to your lines. And I like to exclude the current layer, which means any existing colors will not be taken into account, and the fill bucket will rely solely on the line art. This is helpful when you need to recolor certain areas. While you have the fill bucket handy, use Alt to color pick from the canvas. The color picket uses is directly linked to the color pick settings that you currently have. So if they need to be adjusted, go into the color picker itself and adjust those settings. Sometimes color picking directly from the same layer is more important than color picking from the canvas, especially while doing your flats. When the fill bucket isn't cutting it for laying down colors, a solid, hard round brush with no opacity or brush density changes will work just fine. Now, I'm just going to show you the process of how I colored this character. Although I have a palette, I have no idea what this character looks like just yet. So when I start filling in colors, I place each color on a separate layer. We'll combine them all down the road. But for now, as I figure out how I want Scarpa to look, to find the right balance between all these colors, I keep them separate. Again, like I said, I now have to figure out where these colors go and where they belong, and I have to find the right balance between all these different colors. That's why the big medium small setup is so powerful is because it automatically decides for you what the ratios of the colors should be. Because magic powers my world and the magic that powers it is a blue crystal, blue is a very prominent color I have to consistently deal with and how to balance all that out. And usually, with all my character design so far, I lean into just warm and cool colors a lot. Back to the idea of him being a cowboy, I knew I wanted him to be in a dark suit with a dark cloak. And I thought, What if the charcoal was a little bit more blue, a little bit cooler of a color. And so to balance that out, to create some nice contrast, I thought of the smaller secondary and tertiary colors being warm. So we get this nice leather color that comes in as this warm brown and then sort of a beige to compliment his under and one of the decisions I made during the line art phase that you're seeing now is I decided to take off the glove in his left hand. I wanted to tell the story of him being blue hand. You know, he's one of the few mags and assassins who can actually utilize magic properly. And one of the ways he does that is by taking off his gloves and shooting with his hands. Most other mags aren't trained to be combat majes. They might have a peripheral knowledge of magic. So I wanted to show that he has a unique skill in the underworld of being able to utilize magic properly. And so taking off that glove and giving him a glove harness, it ended up telling a better story and creating a more compelling character design as a result. Plus, I just love the contrast of the bright blue sitting against the rest of this character. We want the character to be pleasant to look at. Particularly when it comes to colors, you really do not want to lean into noise very much. We want areas of rest and things to look coherent and cohesive. So think about how you can push and pull on that warm versus cool and pull on different ratios of colors. The nice thing about your color choices, though, is once you've made those decisions, you can just flood away and fill on every other drawing, right? Once we get the first front portion of the character's color palette down, then we can just go and apply it to everything else. So it's really about solving that first read, your first front view of the character that all the colors come together and that really help you speed up this process. It doesn't take very long once you've made all the decisions. Also, notice for his magic hand, I'm using a soft brush to create a gradient and actually some layer effects to get that nice glow on his hand. So you don't need to be tied down into just creating hard lines for your colors. Think of gradations. For example, in creature design, it might be more beneficial to use a soft brush to delineate the changes between a creature's skin color and its underbelly rather than a hard line with just a simple change of the edge going from hard to soft we create a more realistic look to the character. In Scarper's case, using a soft brush on his hand just allows you to show that magic pulsing from his fingertip all the way down his arm in a way that doesn't feel blocky and stilted. So don't be limited to a hard brush for your character. Think of ways you can use a soft brush to delineate gradations in clothing or their skin color or even their hair that create some interest and a nice transition look. If you bring in too many colors, the character just looks disjointed, discombobulated. It ends up looking very amateurish, not only just for the character's story, but also you as the storyteller, it looks like you couldn't make decisions on what the emphasis of the character needed to be. And so, again, because Scarper is clean, he's professional, he gets a very professional, clean outfit with a palette to boot. But color choice is a design process. We need to be thinking about contrast. We need to be thinking about big medium, small, and we need to think about how this character is balancing and harmonious, not just with his shapes, but also the colors as well. Don't want to go 50, 50, and this is why I think the big medium small rule applies to coloring, as well. If we can get a big primary color, which in this case, is his charcoal, dark bluish gray outfit, then we can get those medium colors in there, which in his case is more of that silver, right? The silver filigree, the metal pieces, his hair. And then we can move into those warmer tertiary colors where things like his skin, his beige undershirt and all the leathery pieces, they sort of just shine and sparkle. As I go through, I have to make decisions about all these different call outs and all these little accoutrements and gadgets he has on him. And as I update these and any color changes I make, I also have to make color changes to the other call outs. So that way, there's consistency across the entire design sheet. And so even these gadgets, all these gadgets are pulling from this limited color palette that I have. So again, the functional pieces of his armor and leatherwre whatever the functional pieces are, they get specific shapes with specific colors. So the rectangular pieces get a nice bluish metal, and the leather pieces get a nice warm brown. It's not random how I've selected these colors. I knew he needed some warm to contrast it with, and it played off very nicely in his gadgets and his accoutrements. I think, overall, this came out very nicely. All the right things read, and we can use color to draw emphasis and to make things pop. I really like the bluish silver color that I chose for his hair and all the filigree. I just kept it the same color. And I like this because it draws attention to certain parts of his design that otherwise would be missed. Like, for example, I like the tapering on his boots and the end of his shoe. If I hadn't used that bluish silver, you wouldn't really be able to see those things, but they kind of create a nice contrasting outline to his whole look. Because the expression call outs are sort of loose, goosey with some lines here and there, I outline and manually draw in a silhouette. That way, I can just paint on top of them and drop colors in just like I did with the previous method. But here, because I don't have as many lines to work with, I have to do a lot more manual selections, manual cleanup, but they just need to read straightforward. There doesn't need to be a lot of detail and render done here, and we're not going to be shading and lighting these very complexly. So it's totally fine that your expression call outs look a little bit more simple. The lines are a little bit thinner, the colors are a little bit more flat. It's fine. It gets the expression across, and that's what we want. Assignment is to lay down the flats of your character, their callouts, their expressions. Anything you've drawn so far, put all the flats down, which means it's time to make a decision on the color palette of this character. 15. 3-2b Changes: There's going to come a point in your process where the layers stack up and stack up and stack up, and you're going to want to make changes. And to make changes, you're now going to have to edit the line art layer, the silhouette of your character, the flats, the colors, maybe even getting to the point of having to reshade things, relight things. So I'm going to teach you a very destructive method to make changes, but I think it liberates you from being totally dependent on layers and layers structure. Now, this is not for professional workflows. If you were doing this in a professional setting, you would want to edit all your layers. So if that's the route you'd like to take, that's fine. But the way I'm going to show you is effectively just treating this as a flat image that you paint directly on top of. And so we have these colors. We have the lines, and then we have this layer group here called paint overver. This was done throughout the process as I wanted to tell more story about the character. And all I do is paint directly on top of my existing art. So what you would want to do is above your line art, create a new group, grab the same brush that you're using for your linework. We're going to change the settings of our eyedropper tool, our color pick tool to pick up from the obtained display color. Now, what this means is that it's now referencing the entire canvas. So this allows you to paint directly on top of anything. But if I want to make changes, I can do that by painting directly on top of, and I have to add lines manually now. It's saving me so much headache. Instead, I can just paint directly on top of and clean things up. I'm going to speed through the process of how I took a step back, did another self art direct and realized the character was not telling the full story yet either. I figured out so much stuff about this character, but he just felt a little too clean. So one thing in particular that I did is I thought he needed a scar. And I gave him a scar that was kind of a jokerish scar, you know, right on the corner of his mouth. And the story goes is that he was in a close fight with someone else, and a bullet from a magic gun, or a magic bullet whizzed past his cheek and through his ear. And so, because the magic is blue and blood is red, the scar healed as purple, and the bullet hole in his ear also shares that curved triangle look as the rest of him. And I think this just really tells a better story. I always think villains need scars, you know, they've been in battles, they've lived through a life. And so for him to be the best assassin sniper in town, he needs to have had at least one close call where someone almost bested him, but he won. I think that's an important characteristic of Scarper that I added during this paintover phase. At any moment, you can take a step back from your work, self evaluate using the self art direct method, and just ask yourself what needs to change? How can I improve the story? And what about this character really needs to be further refined to complete the image in the audience's head and in your own head of what this character should be on paper. Also gave him a bandana because he's a mage, so he can use a fint which is a speeder bike that mags can use. When he's traveling through the wasteland, he needs something to cover his eyes with. You know, maybe the binoculars can go over his eyes or he just pulls his hat down, but he needed a bandana to really cover his mouth while he's on that speeder bike. So that just made practical sense. He needed something to be able to breathe through his I'm also adding some dirt and splatter to different parts of him. For example, at the bottom of his boots, the bottom of his cape, I'm dirtying up his gun a little bit by just using a texture brush and just sort of smearing some colors around. Even though his suit is clean, his boots aren't know, the bottom of his cape isn't still has to get dirty for work. For a villain, they need to look like they get their hands dirty a little bit. And so for him to just walk around in totally clean clothes and everything is shiny, sparkly, it just didn't feel appropriate. Again, I'm just affecting the local color. There are no shadows applied yet. I'm just applying the color of dirt, what the dirt would be in the wasteland, which is orange. It's an orange color. This dirt is picked up on his gun, the dust is picked up on the gun. The character is being affected by the environment that they inhabit, and that's a really important storytelling point is that this character needs to look like they move around in the environments that they inhabit. With these painto changes, we're going to get into the lighting and shading portion of the course. 16. 3-3 Shading and Lighting: Show you a really basic setup for getting into shading right away. But first, I want to explain local colors to you. In the color portion, I explained that a local color is effectively the color without any light or shadow applied to it. So there's no lighting information. This is like a flat two D texture of the object that we're trying to describe. And a lot of objects in the real world have color variation to them. So this is the color of the leather that I'm going to be using for Scarper. So if you go down to the Subtool detail menu here, which is this little wrench here, click on that and go down to the color Jitter option. You can randomize the colors per stroke. Changing the brush tip color and making this jitter going to add a nice little bit of vibration to your color. But to get a little bit more realistic local color variation, I'm going to use the randomized per stroke. My hue is set to five and saturation to five. This way, I'm not messing with the luminosity, which is going to adjust the value of the color. Instead, I'm just going to mess with the hue and saturation portion to get nice variation in the local color. This is before we apply any light or shadow. I actually did this on Scarper to every piece of his clothing, except for the metal, I believe. So in his leather, what I did is I just took the same color, right? I just color pick with holding down Alt, the same color. And then I just did some brushstrokes here to get some variation. And what I'm doing is I'm describing natural color variation in the leather before any lighting information goes down. It's very subtle, but it adds a nice little bit of interest and warble to your colors. And I'm going to show you how I use this in scarper. So this is Scarper without any lighting information. This is just his local colors. And you'll see here, I have his dirt applied to his coat and his shoes. And then I also have on his, like, black leather boots this little warble, this nice little hue saturation variation going on. Even his pants get this really extreme texture going on. And this just adds to me, interest in helping to explain the materials. His gun also has dirt on it. His hat. Anything that I want to look leathery and sort of have a different look to it. You can see here, the leather here adds a little bit of believability. And the great thing is we can take all this information directly into shading. And just as a side note, if you're wondering how I got that texture on his pants, I use the brush tip color change rather than just the randomized per stroke. So I'll show you what that looks like here. And the color jitter here, we're going to turn on luminosity and just mess with this a little bit, mess with the luminosity, so we can see more colors and values show up. Something like that. It's basically how I got the looks of the pants. So the great thing about the setup is it utilizes all the existing color information we've already applied to our character. So what you're going to do is just this as an example. Here's the silhouette layer here at the bottom. Here's our local colors. We're going to duplicate these and then merge them together. So if you have them in a group like I do here, what you can do is take your colors, duplicate them, right click on it, and hit merge selected layers. And now it gives us a flat of these local colors. See how there's no lighting information on here. It's just the local colors. So we're going to do that here. Now we're going to set this to multiply. We're going to press Control U to bring up our huge saturation luminosity adjustments. We're going to crank up the saturation, bring down the luminosity. Now we have our shadows ready to be carved out. But what we're going to do now is we're going to create a layer mask, pressing this mask button here. We can either carve out the light by having our colors set to transparency. We can carve out the light that's happening. Or if we fill this with transparency, we can carve in the shadows. So there are kind of two different approaches to it. If you're going for a more shadow centric heavy piece, something a little bit more dramatic, I think carving out light makes much more sense. However, if you're going for something subtle, like a cel shaded look, I think carving in the shadows makes more sense. And I'm just using a hard round brush to get this done and my trusty Lassofl. So if we take a look at Scarper, you can see here, I have his set to 40% multiply. If we were to really crank this up, you'll see how saturated these are. I like that dark saturated look. I wanted my colors to pop, and I wanted his hair to be silvery blue. So I really cranked up the saturation on those, and I cranked it down to about 40%. So it's just subtle. And what we want to start doing is carving out the shape, so that way, it defines the forms, but it's not a render job. We're actually here to just complement the character in the design. And even in your pinovers, you can use this exact method, which is what I did here when I added the bandana, made it blue, made it really dark and saturated. And you can check this out in the file that I've provided for you. Now, you could do the same thing with highlights if I were to make another copy of the local colors, I could almost just set this to normal. I don't even know if I need an overlay or some other layer type for this. It might be a little too bright. And you want to make sure you're painting all of your changes within the mask. If you accidentally select the layer, you're going to start carving out the local color here. We want to make sure the mask is always the one selected. This allows us to make changes non destructively. I just want to caution you against overusing highlights. Not everything needs to be three tone. I saved the majority of Scarper's highlights, the specular, which would be the hottest point on an object, where the light shines the most. I saved the specular for basically the metallic pieces because what we want to do is, again, present our ideas in a pleasing way. If the design starts to get mumbled by the painting job, then we need to pull back on the painting to make sure the design is front and center the hero of everything. And all of Scarper specular, I painted on a separate layer on top of the lines. So you can see the specular goes over the line art layer. That way it breaks some of those black lines. If I were to put it beneath, the specular would just get lost. But this way, it allows it to shine a lot more. And this was just using a hard round brush with white, and I started painting in little bits and pieces of the specularity. So keep the presentation simple. We're going to use a el shaded look, which means just basically a single shadow tone. We're not going to account for ambient occlusion or ambient lighting. We're keeping things really simple by just copying and pasting our local colors, saturating them, darkening them, and applying it to multiply, and toning it down just a little bit. So it's not as extreme. All we need is the lighting information to describe the forms a little bit more clearly, where things round off, where there's a hard edge, how things turn in the light is basically all we're doing. Keep things simple, and now I'm going to show you the full process for this shading and lighting portion. I use a round brush and the Lasso fill tool primarily to get all of my shapes done. Remember, I'm still keeping in mind big, medium, small, ICS, all these things as I design shadow shapes. Now that we're here at this final step of shading the character, just enjoy the process. For me, shading is very relaxing. It's very calming, grabbing my Lasso tool and the hard round brush tool. I just calmly, gently go through this combing over shapes, trying to describe the forms, and pushing and pulling on shadows. The first step to shading an object is to pick a lighting direction. I like a top right lighting scenario. Because we're not doing a render job, I'm not going to include ambient lighting or rim light or any other type of lighting properties. I'm just going to do a basic shadow pass. Some people call this a shadow map, which is effectively a two tone version of the entire form. We also want to focus on shadows that help denote the design and describe the forms which are the three D shapes of the design. Common mistakes are to have the shadows too dark or hiding information or being distracting. The lighting should complement the design. Remember that story is king. If the colors or shadows get in the way of sharing that story, we need to modify them. Use specular on metals and the eyes. Too much specular homogenizes the materials and confuses the viewer. Use a colored specular on leathers and other more reflective materials. Matt materials do not need reflectivity depicted. Think about basic forms. You know, an arm is a cylinder, shade the underside. Sometimes multiply doesn't saturate your white or lighter colors properly. You might want to get in there and manually color the local color copy to get those darker more saturated whites. Like, for example, his hair was sort of a silvery color, but to really get that bluish hue out of it, I had to go in and manually change the color. Again, I just save my specular pass for all of the metal materials and the metallic materials because it just helps them pop a little bit more and quickly describes them. When it comes to the expressions, I do include shadows on the face, but mostly I just keep it shadow free. I like the shadows in a couple of the expressions because I think it helped with the drama of the face that he was making. But you can leave your expressions simple. We don't need to overcomplicate the shading, just a basic lighting pass on his face to describe the forms and geometry of his chiseled look. Didn't end up shading his hat because the hat was a very dark color, so I didn't want to add any highlights or specular to it. It felt at the right value. I think this took me about an hour. So just sit back, relax, enjoy the process of shading and don't worry about it. This is a very non destructive process. If you ever need to bring color back in or change anything, you have that mask there to really help you out to push and pull on your shadow shapes. Your assignment is to apply shadows to your character. Make sure the shadows are defining the three D forms of what you're describing and that your lighting information does not get in the way of depicting the design. 17. 3-4 Final: This final section is presentation. We want to assemble and arrange all of our hard work for the public, whether that's for a portfolio or social media. This is basically a graphic design challenge. We're going to arrange all of our callouts, our expressions, the front and back portion of the character in a visually pleasing way. All your design principles, especially the core design principles, all come into play here. Now is also a great opportunity to give your character a shadow underneath them, as well. It doesn't need to be true to the light, but it also should not fight the lighting scenario, either. So I put a very soft shadow underneath the front and back views of Scarper. Also spent some time coming up with a proper name for Scarper and I landed on his nickname Blue hand, and I throw that in the bottom left with a small little lightning graphic. We want to create something thematic. What sorts of visual interests should you include that ties the final composition to the character and their story? If you designed a character of Arthurian legend, perhaps you would show the pages of the art being torn or furled. If it's more of a sci fi character, think of hard surface graphic shapes you can include. The presentation should speak to the character and the world they're a part of. In my case, I've already done a few pieces of portfolio work for Magic punk, so I kept it in line with that style. Bits of dirt flying around, a nice gradient that emphasizes the character and the ground plane they're standing on. And even now, I'm still designing things. Shame on me. I should have already solved all this, but I had this idea to give him a fingerless glove where there's a hole in the glove for his index finger, allowing him to shoot properly. So then I have to make these changes to the front and the back portions, and then I choose to do a call out of the gloves so they can be seen clearly. Ultimately, I redesigned the call out for the glove to be front facing and back facing. So the view of the glove is very clean and very distinct. EclipsioPaint captured that, as you can see here. And that is Scarper Bluehan the Voltsinger. If you'd like, there's a couple extra videos that I included. One video for the entire process of the gun and one video for the entire process of the vehicle, and then a third video for the whole thing altogether. I highly recommend you take a look at those. Your assignment is to finish your character, arrange them in a visually pleasing way. Think about contrast, balance, harmony, create a graphically pleasing presentation of all the work that you've done. 18. 4-1 Gun: For the designs of the gun and the vehicle, I set up a basic perspective grid inside eclipseoPaint that allows me to get nice straight lines. Simply go to your ruler, go to your perspective ruler in the upper left of your canvas or somewhere off screen, hold shift to snap the angle of the vanishing point. And down. This sets up a single vanishing point going in this direction. The reason that I set it up in the corner is so when I'm drawing straight lines back and forth, don't accidentally go towards the horizon line. It allows me to quickly make straight horizontal and vertical lines. Now, if I ever need to disable this to get organic lines, I go up here to my toolbar and turn off Snap to special rulers. And now I can draw like this. I also have this set to a hot key, Control Alt two, so I can turn it off and on. One more thing I want to show you is that rulers can be applied to entire groups. All you have to do with your left mouse button or stylus, click and hold, and you can drag the ruler onto an entire folder to effect the whole folder where you draw things. Now, right click on the ruler. Make sure show and same folder is enabled. Now, any layers that are created in here are affected by this. To disable a ruler, hold down Shift, and click on it, and you'll see the X goes over it. To duplicate a ruler, hold down Alt click and drag, and you can apply it to different layers. Now, with that quick overview of a perspective ruler out of the way, enjoy the rest of the process. The bonus content is just more things for me to show you. In this video, we're going to be looking at the design of the gun from start to finish. This is basically a condensed version of the entire process that I've walked you through up to this point. Scarper's gun was a critical component to the character. He's a sniper. He's an assassin. It's what he uses to get his jobs done. I wanted to give it this exaggerated barrel, something that looked kind of ridiculous, like, almost too long to be true. So the starting sketches were in Procreate, where I'm designing the gun in the vehicle next to each other because I had this cool idea that the gun could sit inside of the vehicle. Like, basically, the gun would be placed in the middle of the vehicle and Scarper could ride around. Eventually, I showed this to a relative of mine, and he said, Oh, that's cool. So he uses the gun handle to, like, navigate the car with as, like, you know, to basically control the vehicle. And I said, No, he doesn't. But that is sick. So after that conversation, I decided, that's a really great idea. Scarper should use his gun, not just as a weapon, but also as a key component to control the vehicle. So there's two call outs that I do for the gun, and the first one is for his finger that there is a second barrel. In case he runs out of magic bullets, he can use his finger to fire the gun. Because remember, he's known as Blue hand. So effectively, the gun would just service as a giant scope for him to aim, and his finger would serve as the bullet. Magic takes a toll on the user, so it's not ideal to be using all the time, especially if you're not that great at it. And because Scarper left the Mags guild quite early on in his life, he didn't receive proper training completely. He knows how to use magic and weave it through his body, which is why he's highly sought after, but he doesn't know how to use it non destructively, which just takes mastery of the magic. So instead, he uses it sparingly. It's a backup option for him. And before I get into designing any of these things, I don't know what a sniper rifle looks like. I don't know what looks realistic or practical. So I pull references of real sniper rifles that have the look and feel that I want, and I start pulling shape language from them. And it ends up that the gun looks a little bit more practical than I would want, but that's okay. I actually think this practicality, this more bulky look ends up working really well with Scarper as a character. One of the main reasons, I think that is is it just adds a level of stability to him. It makes his weapon look solid. I think going for a more organic or wispy weapon, I think it would just make the character look a little bit more unbelievable. And while this is a stylized fantasy world, there's also an aesthetic that I want to go for when it comes to how machinery and mechanics look. And a lot of that is driven by the shape language for, again, the location that he's from, which is called the draglins and they're in charge of machinery and Blacksmith thing. So they have more of a solid, squarish, octagonal shape language. Think like heavy construction equipment and Mad Max vehicles. They're way more interested in creating functional, large, chunky things rather than slim down organic looking metal works. This is a great opportunity for you to show your design thinking, how the gun works, how it functions. I get to design this little bottom side of the barrel here that opens up in a flap and sort of comes down so he can put his finger in. I have to show this. So that way, the next artist who receives it down the pipeline understands what I'm trying to communicate, or the public understands what I'm trying to communicate. And so while this is tedious, you use shortcuts. It's okay to duplicate things. It's okay to speed up your workflow a little bit. We're trying to visually explain how things function and how they work. I also thought this would be a cool idea to show the bullets and give a proper design solution for the bullets and really figure out what they look like. And those long repeating rectangles down the center is a motif that I have in my world that indicates it's charged by magic. It effectively means like this is a magic battery that's what that motif means. So I put it on cylinders, I put it on homes, I put it on other objects in the world to basically indicate if there are blue repeating rectangles around a cylinder, it indicates there's magic inside of it that's working. The process here is no different than the process I've shown you all throughout the course. I just have to do it now for the gun separately. I'm starting off with silhouettes. I start off with silhouettes, and to get those nice straight lines, that is not a technical demonstration on my end. I am using a ruler in Clip Studio paint to get those nice straight lines, which I highly recommend doing. It works very well for profile views of hard surface things to get a nice solid straight line, simply hold down shift and put a ruler down, a perspective ruler and hold down shift going left and hold down shift going down, and then you will up and down in straight lines because in Photoshop, you're able to hold down Shift and get straight lines instantly for concept art. Enclps you paint, you have to set up a perspective ruler. And so I do this for both the gun and the vehicle to get those nice straight lines. And I'm using the same coloring process that I've already taught you. We're going with a silhouette, local colors, duplicate the local colors, a darkened saturated version, and then just reveal it slowly. Again, we want the shadows and the lighting to simply indicate form. We're not here to do a complex render job. Your designs will be the most successful if they simply communicate what the form and the function of these things are. We're here to problem solve. And so as I lay out the final work here, I already talked about this in the presentation section, but I'm doing it again here. I'm just copying and pasting the same presentation, doing these fun little almost like verbal call outs for the function of these things, where the bullets go, how the hand works, you know, the second chamber, how that works, and then also how the handle works, that the handle can twist and serve as a control mechanism for the vehicle, which I'm going to show in the vehicle portion how that all comes together. This final little part was not recorded. I ended up doing this off camera. What I did is I blocked out some three D shapes and blender of the side view of the gun, so that way, I could get a proper front view of the gun. And then I exported that model, traced over it, and made a front view of the gun because I realized that a three D modeler would not be able to create this gun from scratch without me providing a front view. So a side view in front view is proper for a schematic of this approach. And so, instead, the whole process was just captured through the clip studio paint time lapse feature, and you're seeing that now. In the next video, I'm going to show you the same process that I did for the vehicle. 19. 4-2 Vehicle: The gun and the vehicle were designed alongside each other because they went together. So I needed to get the proportions right of how the gun fit into the vehicle. And these beginning sketches were just done in Procreate in my spare time. And eventually I brought them over to KipsioPaint where I could sit down and really think through and problem solve through a lot of the functionality. And now I'm bringing it into EclipseoPaint, and to explore these vehicles a little bit better. I wanted a three quarter view to really figure out how this vehicle would look as it was traveling through the wasteland. And so I'm using all the tools at my disposal. I'm using the liquefy tool. I'm using the Lasso tool and transforming things, the warp tool, whatever it takes to get the right shapes. And you'll see me mess with these shapes quite a bit, because that's what we're here to do. We're here to figure out the shape of the vehicle. You can almost post hoc, explain the functionality of a if the shape looks as if it's designed to do that. I didn't need to know how the gun fit perfectly inside the vehicle. All I need to figure out was, what does this vehicle look like, and does it look like it could fit a gun? So as I'm drawing these, you can see me account for the gun sitting between the two wings of the ship. And again, these are called fints. They are little speeder bikes that only mags can power. And the reason is their handles are locked to mags who can channel magic through their hands. If you cannot channel magic through your hands in some capacity, cannot write these. So again, I'm just taking you through my process of thinking about these things. I'm taking all my own advice. I'm doing an art direct pass. I'm explaining things to myself. I'm walking myself through what works and what doesn't do I like about these ships? What do I not like? And then trying more ideas. As soon as I figure out something I do and don't like, I try new ideas. And I'm starting off here with a lot of these sort of fin like rectangular shapes. And this was the direction I was going. But one, it's a little bit too close to the hero's vehicle, Machi's vehicle, which looks a lot like this. And two, it's missing that scarper shape language. So you can see with this attempt here. I'm really trying to bring in more curve triangles in that shape language that Scarpers known for at this. Even though the gun was built functionally, a fint the speeder bikes that Mags ride is so personal to them that it should reflect them as characters and their interests and their color palettes. And so it makes sense that if Scarper walks around in this suit in this cowboy outfit and he goes to the bike maker in the dreglins, he says, Hey, I want a bike that looks like me. It better look like Blue hand is riding this thing around town. Says, a gun is a little bit more utilitarian. It's not as personal because anyone could use this gun, kind of, except for the second chamber. But most people could use the gun. No one else could ride this bike except another mage. Remember, tall, thin, pointy. He needs a bike to match that personality. He needs something that looks tall, thin and pointy. His gun is just tall and thin, but his bike is also pointy. And it looks like it could jab you as it's driving, and that was important. The silhouette read of the vehicle was very important to me, and I decided that the silhouette was actually what I was going to render. So instead of doing a three quarter view of the vehicle, I end up just doing a profile view and a front view, and that would have been enough information for a three D artist to make a model out of effectively. With this final red line, this art direct pass, I'm really getting close to how I want this vehicle to look. And this took quite a while to solve. And I thought that the fins should be more those curved triangles rather than the rectangular fins that I was going for previously. Once the shapes are in place, my secondary shapes come into question. You know, where's the seat of the vehicle? What is the filagree of the vehicle? What are the details of the vehicle? Where's the engine go? There's a lot of functional problem solving to figure out now. And the cool thing is if you do a little bit of research and a little bit of reference board building, you can quickly figure out the core components to anything you want to make. And so for this line art pass, I use the Bezier Curve tool eclipsioPaint, which is effectively the Pen tool, and I do that on a vector layer to create the lines for this final render pass on this thing, because I wanted it to look like a blueprint and a schematic for the vehicle. And so here I'm bringing in that schematic that idea of the handle that turns the vehicle. Right now, we're just doing a lot of perspective math, just trying to figure out how this should read in space. And basically, what I want to do is create a two frame animation of this function. What does it look like standing up and how does it rotate? You grab the handle at the back, and then you rotate it over. And as I designed that function, I had to go and change the front portion of the character because I decided the back of the gun was actually going to be a handle. So I had to go back and do a paintover that in the front view, which I showed earlier. And so the cool part is, now that I have actually figured out the gun, I can bring in a render of the gun in sort of a grayscale version and place it as a diagram and schematic in this vehicle because they both go hand in hand together to complete the full picture of Scarper. And I think that's one of the main reasons that I wanted to include the process for the gun in the vehicle is these were also characters that were secondary to Scarper, particularly the gun was obviously secondary, and his fint is tertiary. We got that big medium small. The character is the most important piece, but his weapon is just as important. And again, had it been a knife, had it been something smaller, a little bit more ceremonial or just utilitarian, like a generic long sword or a generic bow, I probably would have put that on the main characters page next to them, but I thought the gun in the vehicle had such distinct characteristics and cool world building ideas about them that I wanted to include them on their own pages. And I wanted you to see that process, as well. Like I did with a gun and scarper himself, I'm dirting up the vehicle quite a bit. I decide I'm going to add a little bit more render polish to this piece. And the way that I do that is by adding a glow dodge layer, which is unique to eclipsiopin. I think the equivalent in Photoshop is called linear Dodge, or it might just be the regular color dodge layer, grabbing a nice warm, very, very warm white, and then just sort of airbrushing over the metal parts to give it a nice metallic sheen that really describes the overall texture and feel of the vehicle. Render treatments like this should be used sparingly. So that way, the focus is on the design and not our render skills. But I thought it appropriate for the vehicle to have plenty of dirt on it and also a little bit of machen. The final front view of the vehicle was done off camera, but eclipsioPaint captured it in its time lapse feature, you're seeing that here. And this allowed me to actually solve for how the gun would sit I made it really simple. The gun just sits on some bars that basically hold it up, and it probably has a locking mechanism towards the back where the handle is, so that way, it can rotate in place. No need to overcomplicate it. I just put a vent there to explain that the vehicle at some point has an exhaust intake and then some metal bars to uphold the sniper rifle as Scarpa travels through the wasteland. So in the next video, we're going to look at the final time lapse altogether of this whole process. 20. Outro: Congratulations. By now, you should have your very own fully fleshed out comic book character brought to life by you. We looked at core design principles, demystified shape language, color theory, anatomy, gesture, posing, and numerous workflows you can use moving forward to achieve believable, appealing characters. We went through how to create line art that bolsters your design, colors that tell a story and rendering processes that you can use in future designs that will just speed up your workflow. I look forward to seeing what you've made. If this course is helpful, tell a friend. If you want to follow my work further, consider supporting me on Patroon where you'll find a sketched out blog detailing my design process in written form as I make my way through my very own graphic novel called Magic Punk. If you're interested in Magic Punk and reading through the first few pages that I have, you can do that through Gum Road as well. Subscribe to my YouTube channel if you haven't already for more art related content. And as always, go and make Good art.