How to Draw Comic Book Style Faces in Sketchbook Pro 8

1. Comic Book Faces in Sketchbook Pro 8 Intro: Hello everyone. My name is Robert Marzullo and I'll be your instructor in this course, Comic Book Faces in Sketchbook Pro 8. Over the years, I've refined my process for drawing characters. One of the things that you have to get right first is drawing the face. Without a good face and a consistent way to draw the face, it's pretty hard to tell a good story. When you're trying to do comics, storyboards for television, 3D animation, all of those things have to rely on strong facial construction. I'm going to show you a variety of techniques that make the facial construction of your characters easier to do and allow you to create things consistently. Once you get that out of the way, you can spend more of your time just creating new and interesting character concepts. The program we'll be using to accomplish is Sketchbook Pro 8. It has some very powerful features that lends itself to feeling very traditional. The process is easy to understand. So you don't spend so much time trying to figure out the architecture of the program. You can spend more time on just being creative and staying in the moment of your drawing. Also keep in mind that a lot of these methods can also be done traditionally. I'm using a tablet and the software, but it doesn't mean that you can't take what I show you here and use a regular pen and paper. There's going to be a lot of neat things that we'll cover. It will be basically from the very start of the facial construction all the way to the coloring process and coming up with a couple unique characters. So I'm very excited to teach you this course. I hope you're excited to learn it. Be sure to let me know what you think. There will be lots more coming in the future so be ready for that. We'll cover everything from composition to scene creation and all the other advanced things that allow you to create a complete comic book illustration. So thanks very much for stopping by to view this course and let's get started. 2. Creating Face Shapes: The first thing to cover is creating face shapes. Obviously everyone's got a very different face shape, so there's a lot of variety that can be placed into your characters here. But just to give it a basic starting point, one nice thing to start with is just a circle. You can sketch a circle. It doesn't have to be perfect. As you can see, minds definitely not. Then from that circle, draw just a basic. I'll even simplify it further. I was going to say just a basic wedge-shaped, but let's do a square, and then a triangle. It doesn't get much more basic than that. I'm pretty sure at this point, anybody could follow along with this. Don't let the simplicity of whatever we draw scare you off and thinking that maybe something's too basic for you. It's okay to start with very basic shapes to work up to your forms. It doesn't mean you're less of an artist. Now to refine this a little bit more, we started with a circle, a square, and a triangle. Now we've got a little bit more of what would almost look like an anime head with the point of chin. We want a little bit more realism. We can just add a flat spot to the bottom of the chin there and get rid of that point. Pretty quickly we have a semi-realistic head shape. We still want to keep it pretty basic for now because we're still laying in what I would call construction lines. Now with that being done, let's take a line directly down the middle, and directly across. We're going to talk more about laying out proportions as we progress. But I just want to show you by laying these in, you can get a better visual for the head shape itself. We're not going to take that much further. First, I want to elaborate into a variety of head shapes, and we'll discuss the proportions later. There's one of our head shapes. Let's go ahead and duplicate this now, and this solver. I want to show you how you can change a head shape like this and come up with a new character. You can obviously just redraw an entire new head shaped or modify the existing one. Softly erase that down. Just like I'm working on paper. Now, I want to show that this person maybe is a bit more heavy set. If you were to use this first initial shape, it would show that they're in relatively good form. Let's go ahead and take this a step further. We use the same basic head shape at the top. We'll add more of a rounded lower jaw line, and even a more rounded chin. We'll picture that it comes into the jaw line shape like this. You can see that we haven't changed much there, but it yields already a different look to the character. Now, when figuring in your head shapes, you can also figure on the ears because obviously the ears create a uniqueness to the character as well. We'll say this person has a little bit smaller ears, like so. We'll get into too much detail yet and go back to the first one, and we'll say that maybe this character has a little bit thinner, but also taller ears. Just to show some variety there. Let's go ahead and shrink this head. Which is always fun to do, and move that up and over. I guess what I'll do is I'll duplicate this layer one more time, and we'll adjust this to be at another head. Again, I'll softly erase that down. Now I want to try to come up with something different from the initial two obviously. Let's go and take this a step further as far as weight, and we'll use the same head shape. But now we're really going to add a bit of weight and edit form to the head. We're going to make the draw line lower, and a bit more sag down. The ears don't matter, but we could probably even make those a bit smaller and comparison, which would add an increase size and feel to the shape of the head. We could also make the top of the head appear smaller by comparison to the lower jaw line, which again will all add to the effect that the character is a bit more weighted. Then lastly, we can even widen out the entire head, like that. Let's bring that up, and yeah, I think that we've given a fair amount of weight to that next head now. Let's take the first one and let's do this again where we copy it, and move it down. Softly erase. I'm going to actually start by stretching it inward, giving it a more elongated field to the head shape. Let's go ahead and give the cheekbones a little bit more definition. Bring the jaw line in a bit, and make the chain line or the very chin shape protrude out more. Basically enhancing the effect that this person has very slim, and maybe even a bit malnourished. The head shape can stay the same. To also give more of this effect will do the ears a little bit different shape, but nice and thin and tall. There's yet another version of the head there. Another thing to keep in mind when creating these various head shapes is that the hairline itself is also going to add another shape to the face. I'm just going to draw in a basic hairline to give you an idea of what also lends to the variety of head shapes that you might create. Any number of hairlines that you create like this will in turn just give you a little bit different feel to the pitera face. For instance, on this character with the cheeks protruding out further to show weight. Maybe the hairline goes back and recedes behind those cheeks. Obviously the way the brown one or x will also add another effect. But by doing that, you can show more slender individual that might have their sideburns showing more. But somebody that has larger cheeks, maybe the cheek line comes in front of that a little bit. It's taking note of little things like that, that helped me define all these different faces. Then obviously they have more of a cut style. Maybe the one side drops down and front, comes down on evenly from side to side. The hairline definitely adds another dynamic to creating these characters. Let's go and duplicate this face one more time. I just want to make sure we have a nice variety of characters to work with. Let's take this character, let's widen them back out. But like that, softer racists down. Now what I want to do is make sure that we get a nice rounded face looking moreover appointed chin. One thing to take note of when drawing the female faces is that they're typically going to be more widened out at the cheekbone areas and then more pointed down to the chin line in a smaller, more petite chin. Sometimes more defined cheekbones, but it really just depends on the character. Smaller ears by comparison to the head shape, also tend to look more feminine. We'll just do a basic hairline. Something like this would be more of a rounded face with a pointed chin. There's oftentimes when creating face shapes like this, people will relate them to the basic shape, square circle, heart-shaped face, things like that. I don't want to get too much into that because I want you to think past that a little bit and think a bit more in terms of what the facial features create more so than just a basic shapes. That's how I would create a variety of face shapes. Next, we'll go ahead and measure and add facial features to our head shapes here. 3. Measuring and Placing Facial Features: Now that we've got our face shapes, we're going to go ahead and measure the facial features. I'll start this character on the bottom left. The way that I normally do it, and I don't know that there's an exact right or wrong way because facial features are so different from person to person. But a line down the middle of the face, and a line approximately halfway to the middle of the head. Then halfway from this line to the chin, approximately again and halfway from there to there again, approximately is the mouth. The reason why I say approximately, is because we all have very different proportions and even the expressions on the face can tend to move these around a bit. These are just general guidelines to get you started. The distance between the eyes is generally the width of one eye, something like that. The distance between the eyes is generally the width of the nose, and the distance from pupil to pupil can generally be said to be where the mouth is placed. Other rules that can apply, that I'll oftentimes find myself doing just naturally, is you can draw different shapes into the positioning like an offset triangle for the nose. You can find these shapes that you use to putting into your form that also helps you measure, to get things in place quicker. A downward shape moon there, a couple moon shapes for the brow with a reverse moon shape there. Although these aren't exactly measuring tools, they still work in that same fashion because it helps you to place some of your facial features. Once you start learning the shapes, that are consistent in the face, your placement and your overall design of your character becomes a lot easier. Other things to keep in mind, the bottom of the ears oftentimes lines up with the bottom of the nose, a little bit past sometimes. Top of the ears can be just above the eyes. The other thing to keep in mind with this, is that if the head rotates back, the ears will appear lower on the form of the head. If the head rotates down, the opposite will occur. You got to remember that the ears, just think of it in terms of this head shape. We're looking at it from the side, you have a wedge off the bottom, and you have the ears here. While as this rotates, the jaw line will come up, the head will recede back into space, and that will give the appearance that the ears are lower. So think of the ears almost as a pivot point. It's also good to keep that in mind because of the way the neck reacts off that area. Little rules like that, if you remember those, it'll go a long ways in helping you figure out your characters. Say that we've got the middle of the head here, halfway down from here to here, halfway down from here to here and those are just our guidelines. Then we start to place in some of the facial features. With that guideline, that base, it becomes a lot easier to just worry about, how do I want these eyes to look? What kind of expression does this character have? As I'm drawing him now, I don't have to think about their placement in the long run, I've done that. I could just think about the design of the facial features. Obviously, if they have a certain smile or a lack of smile that's going to distort and change the positioning of the features as well. Nothing is set in stone, so always be very open to moving your stuff around. As you feel comfortable, erase some of your construction lines. At this stage, I would also say place your lines very carefully, and not even so much carefully but just relaxed. It could be messy. Messy is fine, sometimes messy works really well, but just relaxed and experimental. You don't want to tense up at this stage of your artwork. In fact, I would say that, you don't want to tense up probably at all, but if you're going to tense up at the finished work, do that right at the very end and then tighten up your lines, that thing. But stay loose and fluid with the, design of your character. Another good rule for the eyes, I use to always draw the pupils first, and I would always get these offset funny-looking eyes. Something to keep in mind is that the distance, the eye-part of the eye is basically one-third of the overall eye. I'm sorry, I'm not using the technical term there or the proper terminology, I should say. But if you just consider that it's about one-third of the overall eye like that, you'll generally get a pretty decent look. Then it's a lot easier to just fill in the pupil after you've done that. If you notice too, I've also got my resolution very low. I like doing that for the initial sketch, it allows me to feel more like I'm using a pencil on paper. I just use it to be a little bit more rough, again, in my design stage. So there's the placement of the facial features. I can now take that and clean it up as I soft erase the head down, create a new layer, and draw over top, and really refine. But I've got my base foundation of what I wanted the character to look like. Now to place the facial features on the female character. Put in zoom in here. The first thing I do again, is to place a line down the middle of the face and halfway point from the top of the head to the chin, approximately. That'll be the guideline for our eyes. Halfway from there to the chin, will be the guideline to the nose, and halfway from the nose to the chin approximately, will be the mouth. The distance from the eyes, whatever size we determined generally will be the space of one eye, we'll say something like this. The nose shape. Something to keep in mind when placing the nose is to always draw the nostrils unless the head is at a really steep downward turn angle. It's real easy to get in the habit of drawing a nose like this. It's obviously easier to do but it's not accurate. Even though I did it on the male character over here. But if you start studying faces the more you'll notice is that you almost always see a bit of the nostrils. Again, unless the head is downward tilted pretty far, so from a side angle, I would picture something pretty extreme like so, then obviously you're not going to see the nostrils when head's tilted that far down. Study your reference and I am sure you'll see what I'm explaining there. There's the placement of the nose. A good thing to keep in mind when drawing in the mouth is if the mouth is going to be open, I recommend drawing that first. I'm going to do a slight opening here, but I'm not going to do a screaming pose or a yelling pose. That'll be relatively basic for this particular one. But the thing to keep in mind is that it sometimes becomes easier to draw that open mouth pose first, and then place the other facial features. Now, since we're working digitally, it's not that big of a deal because one of the beauties obviously of digital, is that we can edit and move our work around pretty seamless with the design process. As I had drawn the mouth here, with just a slight opening, it's placing decently enough. We'll get the rest of the face in, and then if I've got to move things around, I'll show you it's pretty easy to do obviously. Now, the other thing is to always make sure that the top lip is just a little bit thinner than the bottom lip. Except of course those supermodels that are either born just with a lot larger top lip or enjoy collagen injections, I'm not sure. But for the most part, most people have a smaller top lip. But that is subjective to maybe your style and what type of characters you'd like to draw. Now, for the eyes, I generally do a basic rounded moon shape for the top and bottom like this. Just to get them into place. Always keep in mind that you don't have to draw this stuff and perfect the first time. Sometimes it's good just to get a placeholder in your work. So I throw in these pretty lazy looking eyes and then I can add to those. Get the eyebrows in there, eyebrows I just do as this half turned moon shape, again, like that, and then now I can modify those. I can take my selection tool here. The thing that looks inaccurate to me is they just seem tilted downward too much, almost as if she's sad, or tired, or something like that. That's a little bit better. Now, I can soft erase that and refine that a bit now. But not a lot, I'm still in the sketch phase of my drawing and I just want to get a few more things accurate about it, but I'm not rendering yet, I'm not doing my detail work yet. It's important to realize, when you're doing work to keep those separated, because a lot of times you can go a little bit too quick with your design process and go right to rendering, and to me all the nice line work in the world, and all the cool fancy crosshatching or whatever you like to do, isn't going to bold well over bad line work or bad foundation. So we've got to spend that time in the design process and that's where you are roughing out your concept like we're doing here. Still trying to figure out maybe what this character looks like, what her features are. Another thing to keep in mind when doing features like this on a woman or any character really, is if you have too much line work, like five-star adding this line, and this line, and this line, you start adding age. We'll talk more about that too as well as we define some other characters. You can see those proportions that we talked about are working pretty well here, we are getting everything in place. Again, the distance of the eye generally the iris portion is one third of the overall eye. I'd like to draw on the bigger rounded shapes, the rounded shape of the iris, and then come back and place the pupil. Sometimes I have a little bit of trouble even doing it that way, but we'll get there, no worries. Obviously, the big heavy eyelashes to help define and shape the eye. Again, we'll always do that, a little bit thicker on the top, then on the bottom, like the same rule with the lips. A little glint off to the one side of the eye like that. Always draw a shadow from the top eye lid. There's our rough of the female face with the placement of our facial features. That'll complete this lesson. In the next lesson we're going to clean up our line work a bit more, render out the characters, and give them some hair, so stay tuned. 4. Rendering the Male Face: Now, for the fun part, we're going to start rendering out our characters and giving them a little bit more style and finish work. I'll take this character here, there's a couple ways you could do it. You could just turn down the layer opacity or you can keep soft erasing. Now, generally, once I've got my character to enough finality, I'll just turn the layer opacity down, add a new layer over top and this just allows me to really just think about cleaning up the line work and placing in my final features. Actually one of the things that I probably should do is roughen the hair. Let's go ahead and do that first. I don't want to give him just this shaved head style or whatever. I'll give him a bit of a neck too. You'll see now that I've actually increased the artwork dramatically to the Canvas, so the line even looks a little bit different. I just want to make mention of that because I get a lot of people that ask me, what resolution do I work at, what size, screen, Canvas, whatever and the thing that I would address that as is just to say that the main thing is to just get good line clarity. If the line is the way that you like the look of and that's the look that you're striving for, then I would say go with that. I'll show you what I'm using, if I didn't already. So 7 by 13 at 300 dpi at a 31 meg file. I mainly go off the fact that my system can handle it and this is the type of line that I get. If I want a smoother line, then I up the resolution and I also play with the settings within my tablet as well. So hairstyle, let's just give him a, I don't know if this is called a faux hawk or what, but we'll do like a feathered back style. Generally what I do with hair is I just rough in the direction. If you notice I'm not drawing every strand, I'm skipping large areas because hair tends to look a lot more realistic when you do it that way. If you try to sit there and sketch every line, every hair, you're going to get a very fake and uninteresting look. Looks like spaghetti noodles or something. So you basically just want to space it out, and I would think of it more like your texturing the hair, not drawing every strand. This is just a rough initial sketch that I used to get placement in the overall shape. Then you'll see a soft erasers down and then start to refine it. So I'll grab our soft eraser here. Size that way up. So that initial sketch with almost everything I do isn't something that I keep. It's just basically a starting point, not a series of rough markers or just basic points of the beginning process of the sketch. The more that I illustrate, the more that I get into doing drawings, I realize that, the rougher the better in the very beginning. You seem to get ideas down a lot nicer if you just really don't focus on clarity at that stage. That might be particular to my own style. You'll have to see what works for you. As I often say, we're all very different creatures in the way that we create. But I noticed with my style that the rougher the better in the beginning. If not, I just tend to tense up too early on in the design portion of my illustration. I just really want to focus on getting the ideas down. Then once I've got enough of the idea down, I can generally start to picture a little bit of larger shapes of shadow. So maybe I want some shadow there on the one side of the face. If you notice again, I'm taking large gaps and moving around. I'm not staying in one area. I'm not doing one shape say like this. Even though mentally, I might be envisioning the shape to be something like this, I'm not going to draw it in as one large shape. I might stop the edge of the shadow in that general area to form that shape mentally but I'm going to skip around and leave open segments and areas where I would picture there being high and low areas to the hair. So just something like that. I'll just go around and spot in some just smaller shadows. Just again, I'm trying to texturize it and make it not look so flat and boring. Keep in mind that you can just keep repeating this process of soft erasing and adding to your work until you get to a level that you're happy with. Sometimes things might take me four or five revisions to get right. Other times I might get them in just a couple. Just start adding some shadows in the face and get that ready for the next stage. So there's a little bit more rendering to our character. Still very rough obviously. Let's go ahead and soft erase this down or actually just turn down the layer opacity like so. You know what? I think I've already shown you, but I'll show you again if I haven't. You can also just hit lock transparency. Grab the brush here. Grab a nice, what I call a non photo blue and we'll just sketch over top of that. So that transparency feature can be very helpful. I like drawing over that type of look. I don't know if it's reminiscent of me drawing in the way that I used to traditionally, but I definitely like the feel. Now we get to have some fun and render with a little bit more confidence, I'll generally tighten up on the the shot and just get in here and start to add a little bit more of my line weight. Generally the way that I do it is I'll do a thin line and then on the bottom of something a bit of a thicker line, almost resembling of a shadow. I just repeat that process. Sometimes I just throw the occasional thick line in there just because I think it looks cool. So it's really a combination of those thought processes or processes. How do you say that properly? Again with the texturing, I want to throw in a block of shadow, couple of lines. I don't know that there's much rhyme or reason to this. I just look for anything that looks improper then I try to redo it, anything that I get right, I try to redo that as well or repeat that effect. Again, varying the line weight, pick the pen as much as possible. I think it just makes for an overall more interesting illustration when your line weight has lots of variation. If everything is just a similar width and stroke pressure or whatever, it just tends to look very boring [inaudible] very flat. I'm still trying to find the shapes in here just a little bit better. I see myself getting too repetitive right there so I try to break away from that as well. So if I have too much of a repetitive thing like I got here, maybe I'll throw in some of these, little I don't know, they look like commas, stretched out commas or something. Just something to break up the monotony because again, the repetition can also be boring in your work. So I just want to show a little bit of variance there to create style. I try to always think about how I would have completed this or done this traditionally. I'm checking my ear level there and it was way off. Glad that I checked that. How would it did something traditionally and then re-emulate those effects? So if you see, I'm giving myself a couple little markers here. Now if I really wanted a cheer, I can just copy that other ear and flip it. Won't do that this time just because I don't want you to think that I can't draw any ear from side to side. That would be embarrassing. So I'm proving to you right now that I can, but I will check my symmetry now. SketchBook also has a really neat symmetry feature which is fun to use and we'll probably tackle that later on another course or another lesson anyways but it's highly powerful and I suggest playing around with it. I suggest doing both, practicing symmetry and utilizing the symmetry features. I think that both are important. Definitely not one or the other. If you had to pick one, I would say just do it on your own but I think it teaches you a lot in the design process to use symmetrical effects. One that I'll do from time to time is draw half of my character then flip them and then make alterations. So it's still kind of a symmetry tool but the neat thing about SketchBook is it allows you to, SketchBook Pro I should say allows you to do that interactively. So it's really fun and yields a really nice result. Okay. So there's more of the texturing. I've got some line weight in there. You should be able to pan back from your illustration and see a definite impact change, more of a vibrancy to your work. So that's primarily what I think the added line weight does for it. It just makes it read from more of a distance and gives it a little bit of clarity and vibrance. So all those things should occur when you're doing your added line weight and clean up, what I commonly refer to as rendering. Sometimes I recommend drawing certain things quickly. Like say for instance, kind of what I did with them out there but it didn't come up quite what I was picturing. I would picture doing certain things in broad sweeping strokes and other things in a more sketched line. So we'll say this neck here. Sometimes it's going to be beneficial to practice a quick fluid line or a quick sweeping line and other times it'll be more beneficial to do a sketch line. So I'm trying to think of things that particularly would work that way. A woman's legs, for instance, I would tend to draw those with the sweeping line every time. I wouldn't sketch a woman's leg. I'm not saying that I can't do it. I just think it doesn't match what you're trying to accomplish. You want something that's got a nice flow and a smooth effect to it, then I would do the quick sweeping pole. You got to practice that. I'm more of a sketch guy where I tend to pull my lines in short intervals like a sketch but I practice both so that I can have a little bit of each bits of those style into my work. I do recommend that you play with those concepts. All right, we'll give him the big bushy eyebrows. Now, to save time, I will show you the effect here of copying and maneuvering. When it comes to a straight-forward shot like this with the eyes, it's just a good time-saver. I can even go as far as to get the iris in there and the pupil but not the glare because the glare will actually be on the opposite side. So I'll get in on the little bit of the information like this. That top pile needs to be thicker. So something like this and then I'll do a quick select Command C, Command V, control if you're on a PC and then edit Mirror Layer. Should sit wherever those side of the screen, will pull that back over and drop it into place. Let's try about right there. So I'm back, yeah, about there. He's got- his eyes are a little too big. I always do that where I tend to give a little bit more of an animated look. Quick way to fix that is just pull those inward just a little bit. Hit enter, do that to the other one now. Select, pull inward, hit enter. Now the other thing is to check the lineup of the nose. The eyes will generally be the width of the nose and see other ones then a little bit closer. I could kind of see that, that's what made me want to check it. So let me go back to this other one and pull them apart. Something like that and I'll hit Command E to merge that back down to the existing cleanup work. Another thing I'll do is I'll look at the layer underneath and I'll see what changes. He's obviously got a different look and it's in the eyes. If you notice my sketch had a more sloping eye, obviously not such pronounced eyebrows, but I don't think it hurts the look overall. I'll just keep going with it. You do got to be careful at times to not shift your character's look unintentionally. For this particular instance, we'll just go ahead and go with it. Okay. So now I'll bring out those eyes a little bit more with the glare on the one side of each eye. The shadow that occurs on the iris from the top eyelid. Usually is going to be a bit of a darker tone, the bottom eye, not much. Then you can get in there and start if you like a lot of the smaller line work. Get in there and just do size your brush down, do a couple little texture lines. Whatever style you like doing. There's lots of ways to obviously detail the eyes. We'll see it's something like that's enough right there. Keeping in mind again that the more smaller lines that we add in the iris like this, the more that we start to define age. I'd like to do a lot a little line breaks too. Okay, so we're starting to get their characters almost rendered out. I didn't use a lot of shadows on this face. Generally I only placed a lot of shadows on a character's face if the scene shows them being in the dark in some way. It's a lot easier to colorize the face and show semi dramatic effects with the shadowing. If you start to overly define shadows in the ink stage, then typically it's going to be something that you're trying to show the characters in a kind of an extreme dark scenario. Okay, so there's that, now I will move over to the female face and render that out. 5. Rendering the Female Face: All right. Let's render out the female face now. I will first start off by giving her some hair. One of the things to keep in mind when doing female hair, is just to keep everything flowing lines. So everything should be a curved line like that, and ribbon effects. Let's say that we've got the hair coming down like this, you want parts where it thins down and then gets thicker, and that's how it rotates and flips around the forums. So I'll throw on some rough lines like that just to get it started. I just would say stray away from trying to draw every strand, and then the other thing is to stay away from trying to draw one big bulky shape. You want a lot of smaller shapes in there. Let's see, I'll get rid of some of the construction lines here, and just picture that those ribbons are flowing around the cranium or skull shape. Down here, we'll see the hair starts to curve. The other thing I recommend is looking at style magazines and hairstyle magazines for women because it shows you a lot of variety, and that all hair-dos are not created equal. That there's lots of variants and that all. Curls can be tricky. I tend to do something like this where I do a curl like this, like a sheet folded on itself. So I do the first loop. I'll draw the back of it, and then I picture the way that it would rotate around and draw the other side. I just repeat that process. For this part, I just draw in some rough sketch lines for that. I can also do a few loose strands if you want. That's nice at the end to give it a touch of more realism. Those are basic roughed in perspective of the hair. I'll go and soft erase it down now. I also soft erased the jaw line. I'm still trying to get that a little bit nicer. Now I can get him here a little bit more confidently with my rough sketch lines and start to figure out exactly how I want the hairstyle to look. Again, showing separation from the lines. I'm not trying to draw too many lines right next to one another, so I don't end up with a very stringy, boring hair fat. Try to also clean up the jaw line. I just feel like the jaw was protruding or maybe pointing down too far. Whenever I don't quite know what's wrong with something, I just make incremental changes, so I can get a feel for what looks better. Sometimes it's a exercise in futility and I just have to keep going back and forth with it. It can be daunting at times, and other times things kind of snap right into place. I don't know if there's a rhyme or reason to that. The only thing that you can do to head that off, is if you really are struggling with something, then that's when you check reference. Also try to overlap the shapes and the top of the head not to end up with a perfect seam line for a part like this. I try to avoid that there. If you notice, I have also drawn a thicker line once I feel like I found the perimeter shape of the hair or whatever I'm drawing really. I've drawn a thicker line and then I may erase some sketch lines around it just to sculpt the shape that I'm seeing there. I realized that the more that I draw this stuff, the more I start to see it as sculpting and not drawing, not sketching. There's so many times when you're just trying to emulate a 3D look to your sketch, that it's almost better to think of it like you're molding and sculpting it. Again, just trying to throw on some curls there, which I always struggle with curls. Curls are always tricky. But I make sure not to stray away from things that I struggle with. I actually make sure to incorporate those into my work as much as possible, so that I can eventually get past that area that I don't feel as comfortable with. It's really easy to get in the habit of just drawing what we're confident at. Now, we'll do the same thing where we take this to a more of a blue line. So I'll lock transparency. It should be able to hold. I'll select the blue over here, and I can work with a larger brush. Oh, that's why. Certain brushes only size up so large. The hard pencil brush size is a bit extremely large as you can see right there. The regular pencil brush doesn't, so just keep that in mind. Now I can add a new layer over top and refine this a bit more. Go back to black, and I can get in here with a lot more clarity and refine this. A lot harder edge to my pencil tool now. Again, I'll try to find my line way as I'm drawing this in. This is another opportunity to show you too what I was talking about with the sweeping passes. Even the jaw line hair can work that way. If you feel like you're struggling to get a nice smooth line, then I think one of the easiest ways to do that as the quick poll. It takes a few re-dos or tries tries at it, but one of the neat things about digital is you can just control Z. So even though it looks maddening what I'm doing here, once you start to get a feel for it, you can generally do a few sweeping passes and get it done. I actually use that affect a lot for car design. Whenever I'm working on an illustration of a car, I do almost an entire car now with these sweeping quick polls. It's really just finding the areas in your art work that you feel are conducive to work this way, but I do recommend incorporating that into your work. There's definitely a need for it, especially if you're somebody that can't sketch as well. I've gotten pretty good at doing my sketch lines because I practice them quite a bit. I can generally sketch around the perimeter of something and still make the line look relatively smooth with very little to no clean up, but probably not going to get it as clean as one sweeping pole like that. As you can tell, I need a practice that more. I'm trying to find the right shape in there. Also go back, and throw some shadows after I get these initial shapes worked out. See which ones work well for the next stage, so something like that. Something I'm avoiding doing a whole lot is rotating, but again, like I mentioned earlier, in this course, it's good to make your artwork as easily to accomplish as you can by using the software. For instance, if you feel that a certain line is hard for you to pull, then don't be against rotating the screen. You hold the Space bar to get to this icon, rotate it around, and then go with what feels the most natural to your mechanics as an artist. If your best pull is a downward pull, that's what mine is, then this might be the way for you to accomplish your line strokes a lot quicker. The other thing is to use the layers to accomplish that as well. You sometimes might tense up working on your piece if you think that you're working in maybe a destructive fashion. If you feel that, then add a new layer, make your adjustments on that layer, then merge them down. There was a certain amount of freedom that you get from that, and you can sometimes manipulate your line work as well. I'm trying to put these what I call beauty lines, I'm going to work a little bit of curl. That can be tricky though. Just basically keep practicing those lines, though men are quick succession. Use the all mighty Control Z to see if they work well, then go back and replace them. Also, remember to make some thick sometime, which I'm not doing really enough of right there, but hopefully you see that. There's our hair shape for the most part. Let's pan back and see if it works. It looks decent. It's not a great hair shape. One of the things that sticks out solely to me, are these areas right here. They just look little bit to like to just point out in this direction, but not flowing back into the form of the hair. I would fix something like that, maybe take a couple of these outta here. Think I actually need to rotate all of them. What I am seeing that I think it should be doing, is it should be flowing back into the other form of the hair. Let me try something like this where a few of them flip up in the front and a few back into the other form. I still don't know if that's right, but still looks a little weird. They looks better now that one side is different than the other. I think that was the other thing is that you shouldn't have hardly any symmetry when it comes to hair. Probably none. There shouldn't be anything symmetrical. Unless of course, someone who just has their hair slipped back but definitely not on a hair do like this. There's that. I'm going to add another layer just because like I said, sometimes it affords us the opportunity to edit our work a little bit better. As long as you're not in the habit of getting to layer crazy, this is a useful tactic. I'll just go ahead and start trying to bring out the line work can lie in wait a bit more with the facial features. The beauty of taking all the steps that we didn't get everything in place, is now we don't have to worry about our placement at all, or almost none at all. We can just worry about line clarity, line weight and refining our artwork, which to me is always the fun part. I feel like all the other stuff is like the work to get to this part which is more laid back and enjoyable for me for sake or whatever reason. Just render whatever lines you think look cool and bring your characters form out the best. Eyelashes can be tricky at times. The main roles are just at the top one is thicker or has more lashes or whatever you want to hover, you'll want to stylize it. Then the bottom one is a bit thinner, and the other thing I think I notice is that it breaks off to being almost nonexistent at apart, whether it be right here in the base of the tear duct, wherever or just at the bottom of the eye, but it seems to do that. Now if I'm doing comic book eyes, I'll draw a larger shapes and then I'll just break them off, do a little bit of weird stylized thing here. That's just one of the particular ways that you can do the eyelashes. There's obviously just a multitude of ways that you can play around with this button, this is how I'll do it at times. The eyebrows ultimately you could do a thicker shape at first. Have it round around the forehead there bit. Again, I like to do a little bit of a stylized look to that as well. Because this is a straight on shot, I will also copy this hold C, Command V, image, mirror layer, figure [inaudible] just went, and put them into place. Quickly erase the part that should be behind the hair. I'll just go ahead and merge that down Command E. Now for the highlights in the eyes, which are always the fun part. I'll just do a large highlight on the one side. I'm also going to block in more of the eye on this one. They're going to looks a little bit cooler at times and it's less you have to shade, so that's nice. But you can show the contrast of the highlight more if you do it this way. We trace around that highlight. You don't want to do it in my opinion so much where you lose the pupil. But it's amazing when you start playing with shadows, that you realize how much you can place and omit details and it still reads. Not really sure where that comes from or what it's called, but it's a pretty neat thing about illustration work, that you can put in some pretty heavy shadows and still get a nice read your work. I'm using that every shadow on the edge to really punch up the vividness of the eyes. I'm going to time-lapse this next portion just to speed it up a bit. Here it can be a little bit time consuming to do. But what I like to do here is lance some larger shapes of shadow, and try to round out the form and figure out the overall shape of the hair. As you see right there, just put in a drop shadow onto those little flips of hair by the cheekbones. What I'm mainly thinking here is laying in the larger shapes of shadow in, leaving some separation for the texturing of the hair. I just feel like if you were to block that all in with a solid shape that it would look flat and a little more boring, so I leave those gaps of the shapes of shadows in almost everything I do, but definitely in hair. Then I start to fill in a little bit more texture lines to show a little bit more of that hair affect or a texturing in the hair. That's really my only thought processes, I'm doing this on a separate layer, which also affords me the opportunity to use some arrays techniques if I need to. Mainly just to draw it in a more non-destructive approach so I can play around with. Here's always been one of the things that I struggle with a little bit more. I feel like I need to give myself that added ability to edit just to save myself if I run it any problems. But I just really recommend if you struggle with hair, texturing it and shading it, just to paint back and forth and you'll see here in a second right here I start to paint with white. Our draw with wider however we want to look at it, but I basically go back and forth in the illustration to really find the shapes. I start to zoom in a little bit tighter and tighter to figure it out. Then once I get it to a level I'm happy with, I go back to the eyes, the mouth. I bounce around to various elements whenever I draw something like this because, I feel like one thing as contrast to the other. Then it helps me to see other areas and I need to improve upon and my sketch. Now we've got some cleaned up blind work on our characters. Next it's time to add some color. Let's head over to the next lesson where I show you how to use some coloring effects inside of Sketchbook Pro 8. 6. Coloring Our Characters In Sketchbook Pro 8: Okay, so now that we've got all our line work ready to go. We can prep everything for color. Now, I'm adding a group here and then placing all the elements from the female face into that group. That's one way to do it. Another way is just merge them all together, like you see here with the male character and add a new layer below it. So I'm opening up the Copic library, which you can get to by going into "Window", Copic" and I really suggest that you play around with this feature in Sketchbook pro because I find it very helpful. Not only does it give you some really nice colors to choose from, it gives you corresponding complimentary colors. Then also a little palette at the bottom that you can drag any color you're working with down too. It helps you save where you're at in your coloring process. So here I'm just flatting in some basic skin tone and then I'll go to another layer and I'll throw in some hair color and the eye color. As long as the colors don't meet up to one another, you can add them on the same layer. For instance, it's how I did the hair and then the eyes on the same layer just condenses down your amount of layers so that you don't get to layer crazy like I mentioned before. It's really easy to do. If the other layer that you're adding the color to bleeds over the other color, since we're working with opaque, hard, edge colors right now, you can just color over like you see me doing with the shirt or the skin tone. So you use the line work as your bordering and you can also use the colors and layers to overlay on top of one another. So I've got the white and the atmost highlight of the eyes obviously in the foreground. Now I can lock transparency on the skin tone and grab the soft air brush and just start to paint on a tone.The beauty of this is that I can't go outside of the skin tone obviously and bleed over into the hair or the canvas or the shirt. So this affords a lot of opportunity to just concentrate on coloring, not worry about other things like that. You're also in a really non-destructive way you can paint back and forth. Say, I don't like this particular tone, I can grab another tone, start painting in. I can sample by holding Alt and sample the existing skin tone and paint in the other direction. So I'll say I've put a hard shadow on the nose there. I can sample these lighter skin tone and paint it back. So it's really a great way to work with the color. If you notice there on the top lip, I actually sample this skin tone painted over lightly and create a new color and then sample that just because I felt that the skin tone of the lip was too dark. Now I'm adding a little bit of rows on the cheeks I actually add another layer and do that. Again, the reasoning for that is if I feel that something's a little bit more experimental, I'm going to add a layer, paint it over, test it, play with the blending modes, then merge it down if I'm satisfied with it and that's exactly what I did there. As at now I'm just grabbing a brighter light source trying to find more form in the character and show some depth there. Another thing I do as I'm painting like this, I actually will add something and then it'll allow me to see something else in one of the corresponding colors. So again, it's a process of adding contrast to your work and then noticing either flaws or things that you can make better. If you notice, I had a little bit of rim lighting to the face there. So now we are working on the hair, again like transparency and now I'm using one of the synthetic paintbrushes. The way those work is that as you apply pressure, you get the color that's selected. As you smudge back and forth, it blends that color and slowly runs off the brush. Obviously selecting some of the lighter tone and painting back in the other direction and just trying to give it a bit more texture. I don't want to get in the habit of using the soft brush for every aspect of my coloring. It's a little bit boring so if you can mix it up with a little bit of paint smudging, hard edge effects and soft brush affect, you'll get an overall better colorization of your piece. I need some more highlights in the eyes and again, just bouncing back and forth trying to see more contrast to the work using the paintbrush again to blend some tones in the shirt there. Then I'll sample the brighter color and do some of the lines in the shirt and the highlights on the edges. So you can see it's a really quick way to add color and depth to your line work. Again, now at this stage, once I've got enough into the colorization, I can actually sample a lot from the existing palette on the screen. Here I'll add another layer and just black and a little bit of background. I mainly do it just because I don't like to see characters just on a white background but again back to the contrasting. If you can notice that it bled over to the skin tone, but then I just dropped it behind the skin tone layer and it fixed the problem. So here's another technique I wanted to show you where I use a layer or you can paint it directly on the skin tone if you feel confident with it, but the layer allows you control of the opacity. But I'm painting this with a hard brush effect and I'm just looking for some shapes of shadow with a little bit darker skin tone. So this is just more of an experimental stage of what I do but I think it adds a a cool cell shading effect to the work. You can control not only the opacity, you can either soft erase or blend your edges. I think this is a really neat way to add another dimension to your character. It's really quick and easier to do and actually pretty fun. You see, I'm just basically blending that edge with one of the smudge brushes provided in sketchbook. Okay, so now onto the female face, I'll just repeat this process. I'll try a little bit different color values just to show some range of what you can do with this. I'll also try a little bit of the glow effects, which are really neat inside of this program as well. The same thing, I separate by layers, I make sure they're underneath the initial line work and I start filling in my flats. Just starting with a reddish brown, a burnt sienna for the hair. You can use whatever brush you want for this stage but I do recommend something with the hard edge because you really want that solid layer so that when you lock transparency, all your effects are contained within there. You're basically creating a selection without the use of selection tools. I'll just try and blend that hair into the skin tone a little bit more I'll use a smudge brush for that. Again, I can place those layers as much as I need them. But if the layers are pretty basic like the eyes or the mouth, I can really draw a lot of that. I don't have to create a layer for every color, but it does offers you the opportunity to edit your work a little bit further. This is the work stage of getting right in the color. You're basically prepping the line work for the coloring process. Here back to the soft brush and I struggle here for a minute trying to figure out what color values I want to use, what their skin tone. I think I started a little bit too pale or light with the skin tone for what I wanted to go for, but it does allow me to show you how you can keep adjusting that without having to really start over. If you notice I do broad strokes over the entire side of the face and then smaller brush strokes around the tighter line work. I want to add a little bit more of a tarnish tone to our skin. I just feel it looks a little too light or peachy. I start to add in a little bit more of an orangish red or light orange just to give the skin tone a little bit more of a tan look, I guess. Go back around and touching up the works since I shifted it. That's another neat thing about the soft air brush. It really does blend so well that you can make adjustments like that on the fly without having to start over. Starting over in this case just means painting all of it with an initial solid color and blending back out. It's really not that length of a process, it's not too big of a deal. Here I've got another layer over top. I'm just trying to round out the forms, add a little bit of bounce light on the cheek. Each time I add those small highlights, I'm just trying to shape the character a bit more. The edge lighting always gives it a cool cartoon feel. Here I'm adding a light source on the hair. If you notice I added a layer on top, blended the light source and then generally I'll merge that down into the hair. Then I'm adding another layer over the top but with a glow effect. These layers are really neat because they were just a short amount of time and a few quick brush strokes, you've got this really neat glow effect, then you can manipulate that glow effect with smudge, layer opacity, soft erase, whatever you need to do to get it right to the level that you want. I really recommend playing around with those. I use that a lot for anything that I need to look a bit specular. Think it even works for the highlights on the face as you'll see later on in the lesson here. I'll just turn to paint some tone and texture on the eyes, just enough to show that they're not just one color. I always recommend painting some tone on the whites of the eyes, a little bits of gray, pink, yellow, whatever you need, anything but just completely stark white and same thing with the teeth. If you add just a little bit it helps your artwork look unfinished. Again, just some soft brush in the shirt. Little highlights repeating that process throughout, and if you notice I'm playing with the opacity of the skin tone, just feel that our skin tone still just a little bit off. I'm actually sampling from the existing tones and blending out. It's another way to just soften up your shadows and using the soft airbrush and sampling what's already there on the Canvas. Then here I want to try a little bit of that hard edge shadowing effect. I'm painting directly on the skin tone layer. I know what I'd like to do with this so I'm just going to brush that in there and then I'm going to blend it out. But again if I didn't feel as confident with that, I could have just created another layer and it would allow me to back away from it or change it more. I'll just draw on that end, and when I do this I think going back to the drawing stage. It's almost like I'm not thinking about coloring, I'm thinking about the shape of the shadow and what I want to see there. I'll get that into place and then I'll grab one of the smudge brushes here and just soften the edge a bit, so it's not too much of a hard edge. It doesn't have to be a completely solid edge for it to be a hard edge shadow. Think it looks a little more natural one, it's blended. I'm just trying to find any flaws in the artwork. A lot of times I'll check it over and over again and see what doesn't sit well with me and just add small changes incrementally like I said, just to refine the work. I'm still on a few more shadows to the phase, try to round it out a bit more. Here I noticed that the shadow on the nose just seems a bit thin and out of place so I correct that. I recommend studying from photos, even though you're going to make maybe a more animated style like we've done here, you're still going to get a lot of information from your photos like where shadows go, how they react to the face, how glare is raked, all that stuff. Here I'm adding another soft glow effect. I actually convert this to a glow effect because the soft glow doesn't allow you to change opacity. Where if you put it to the glow effect and actually allows you to control your opacity in the glow. It gives that nice little specular effect to the skin. That'll wrap up this lesson. I hope you've gained some insight how to better use Sketchbook Pro to create your very own characters from start to finish. I've enjoyed teaching you this course. This is Robert Marzullo saying, good luck with the art and we'll talk to you soon. 7. How to Draw the Female Face Side View: Welcome back everyone. Robert Marzullo here from Ram Studio Comics. I'm going to show you how to draw a head in a profile view. We're going to start off with the circle, and we're going to go ahead and place another circle inside of there leaving about a quarter of the distance on the top and bottom. Not exactly, but somewhere in there. We're also going to divide this through the top middle, horizontal and vertical middle, and basically get around the center point. This doesn't have to be exact, just gives us a place to start from. If we were to even take from this top circle and go over, we could roughly say that's about where the hairline will go. If we were to take from this extreme center right here and go across, we could say it's roughly where the eyes will go or the brow. Then as we work down from here, we can add in another segment, at least the distance of from here to here, and maybe even a little bit taller, and we'll go ahead and put a horizontal line across there. Then as we shape the face, this face is actually going to be pointing to the right of the screen. As we shape the face, we can bring a line straight down and just get it started as far as the shape of the face there. But what we want to start thinking about almost immediately is where the nose will go. If we were to start from here down and go across from that circle again, we could roughly say that the nose is right about in that area. Likewise, we could say the ear is placed right about here. What ends up happening, and I just want to make sure before we get too far into this that you understand, you're going to see lots of different units of measurement when people do this. Mainly because there's so much variations from different people all over the planet obviously. This isn't going to work for every type of character, it's going to get you started and then you have to adjust this as you go for the type of characters that you like to draw. Especially if you start to incorporate or think about animated characters that are even more exaggerated in caricature like. But this will get you started. Just remember some of these rules. Like the top of the ear generally will give you the browline. The eyes are a little bit lower than that, but right about there. The bottom of the ear will generally give you the bottom of the nose right about there. You can also really divide the bottom section in two-thirds. You can use that to place or draw on the profile this character now. Let's say that we bring the nose out this way. I'm just going to rub this in. You could say the top lip will sit on that first line, and that the bottom lip by the time it comes out and rounds back, generally where the chin starts right there. Again, this is going to vary a lot based upon the characters and these are loose units of measurement. I really want to stress that. Whenever I see people teach this and they act like this is the only way to do it, it's really not the case. They all need to stress that to their students that, these are very loose units of measurements based upon all the different characters that you're going to try to illustrate. Now the thing to remember here with the neck, is that it's probably roughly halfway at this area. Again, this is going to depend upon the character and how thin their neck is. But the one consistency here that I can say, is that it's not a straight line that you're going to get really if you're doing this in lines, you're going to get a line that comes across here that's not really aligned in actuality, and then a tapered line that comes out and runs down. Really you're trying to create the transition here of a shadow. Looks like that. You really don't want to envision these as actual lines more or less just illustrating the form, that's really a transition from the neck to the jaw line. Obviously, the jaw line isn't a straight line. It's a rounded form that's in that area. I think it's helpful to think of it that way because, when we do our line drawings we tend to make things look a little too rigid and solid in some areas, and that's a perfect example. The neck will come right up and meet to the ear right there. The sternocleidomastoid or whatever that fun muscle to say it's right there. Collarbones right here. Now as we get back up into here, we'll go and place the eye now. Now generally, I think the eye usual will line up to about the side of the mouse. Let's go and try that. I'll be honest, whenever I do this, I tend to go off comparative notes. As I start to place things, I'm drawing them comparatively to other items in the scene, or in this case in the design of the face. It's never exactly the same, I guess is what I'm getting at again. We've got the eye there now. Funny thing about the eye is it's not really this pie like shape that you see there. It's really going to be a little bit more of where you see the tear duct even from an angle generally, you're almost never going to see a perfect profile of a character. Probably only in drawing really, or if somebody's purposely posing that way in the camera, a person is trying to capture that, but other than that you're probably never going to see it. But it's helpful to draw all these because, they're great for getting the foundation of your character design in place and then working outward from there. As we get this nose drawn in, it dips in right about the top of the eye and sometimes more or less the middle of the eye. Then the brow will come back out and it'll taper back. Generally the forehead will come back at a slight taper and then it will take a more extreme direction as it rounds back around the cranium like this. Let's just get that in. I'm going to thin up this neck even more, because it's looking much too masculine. I'm actually wanting to draw more of a feminine characters. What I need to do there, is be aware of things like the shape of the nose, the thickness of the neck, no definition of an Adam's apple or little to none basically, and pass that, accentuate the eyes with a heavier shape of eyelashes or whatever. I tend to draw them all together as a larger shape for more of a comic impression. Her style, and then a little bit of that top eyelid like that. Then as I get the pupil and the iris in there, I try to remember to draw those as an oval not as circles from an angle like this. Just remember that, that it'll tend to look more oval from this direction. This bottom eyelash like this. I'll leave a little bit of that light hitting the ridge of the eye, it tends to give it a bit more depth and looks a little more interesting. Remember to make the eyebrow pretty close to the front of the face but not connecting. Then solid or pretty thick up here and taper back pretty far as it goes to the back of the eye. Again, I want to soften up the look in the proportions of the nose, just personal preference obviously, so this is just based on whatever type of character you're trying to draw. I also don't want the face. If you notice it looks far too flat right this area. I want to fix that. I also want to soften up the transition of the brow to the nose. I'm going to bring out the nose a little bit more, give it a tiny bit smaller proportion to the ball part of the nose, and bring that top lip out a little more. Generally, the top lip is going to be noticeably thinner than the bottom lip. That's not always the case, but more often than not I think it's generally that way. I'm going to bring out the bottom lip and make it a bit heavier, especially on the part where it tapers back to the side of the mouth. Generally the top lip will get very thin from this angle and the bottom lip will appear to stay wider, longer till it meets that point. Then I'm going to bring this chin back a little bit. Just change that shape a little bit. Notice I'm not really making huge changes there. They're just tiny, minute changes that will make a pretty big difference. A lot of times you don't have to make very dramatic changes when it comes to facial reconstruction, character design in general, but definitely in the face, very small changes will be pretty noticeable. I'll get rid of some of these construction lines so that we can see it a bit better. I still want to adjust the shape of the mouth. Now we're placing the ear. The ear already has this perimeter shape, I'm going to draw on a bit further. The ear will tend to taper down and inwards to the lobe. Then a quick trick for the ear is a C shape and then a Y. So something like that. Actually a little bit off from the shape you'll see, but the other way is to draw a ridge line around the ear. As it comes into here you kind of this point and this bottom part of the lobe like that. Then that Y shape is actually kind of a curved y, and you'll get a little bit of a dip here generally. There's so much variety in the shapes of ears that you really latch on to a way that you'd like to draw them, and stick with that. You'll just slowly maneuver as you study more and more from life and things like that, you'll come up with some different variety in the shapes. I think for the most part, a lot of artists will gravitate towards one or two designs for the ear. Just because there is so much going on in there with the shapes. I'll just try to show a little bit of a separation of those shapes with a few shadows here. So something like that just to get some placement in there. Hopefully you see that bit of a Y. It's a weird slanted Y, but it's a C and a Y. If you remember those shapes and letters, it can help you to get through that part. So now with the hairline. Like I said before, if you bring this line over, you can start the hairline there. Few more hair lines generally will be a little bit less angular, and they'll have these soft transitions. Obviously we don't tend to see them as much because they have a lot more hair and it's usually covered up on quite a bit more. It's a little bit less angular and also not as far forward on the face as a male haircut or hairline. So now once that's in place, we'll go ahead and draw and just a quick hair shape, let's do something relatively basic. So with hair, I'd like to draw in the bulk of the hair. Not so much the strands. The strands, I'll say vary till the very end. I'll just get in a design. I'll throw a few sweeping lines all over the place and figure out the look of the hair because there's just, again, so many different hairstyles you could pick from. I just have to go with something. So I'll play some of the shapes in here, try to get some ideas as I go. Then what I'll tend to do is take it from this stage. We'll go and soft to erase this down and refine it. As I mentioned a lot, I really like to do my work in stages like this where I can see it comparatively. Just always helps me to come up with ideas. I can see where it's been and where it's going. Again, I'm going to draw in some of this hair shape. Next you're going to start with the hair first now and ignore the rest of the details. So I can figure out this hair design a bit more. Something like this. Again, just trying to get those bigger bulk of the shapes of the hair in place. So we say it's good enough, and then now what I'll do is I'll get in here, and I'll finalize the shapes within the face here. So this is my next opportunity to fix any big mistakes that I see here or make any changes that I want to the design of the character. I think it's pretty well in place. I just want to tighten up the line work, add little bit of line weight. Not much, but just a little bit more. Now it just looks a bit funny. I'll just go with that there. So it's probably a tiny bit smaller than a real natural would look, but this is a little bit more of a stylized comic character, which is what I'm shooting for anyways. When you get into realism, obviously, you can get a lot more critical of the way things should look, but in this case, we're doing more stylized, so we can have a little bit more fun with it and do what we want to do versus what might really be totally accurate. So again, with the eyelashes, I tend to do it on pretty heavy and pretty exaggerated. I liked doing it this way because it will trace out the eye and give some really nice contrast, which I'm always a big fan of when doing stylized representations. So I'll just use these thick to thin lines and I'll trace out this work. I'll leave that ridge opening for that bottom eyelid just because it helps to give it a little bit more depth right there. Getting that pupil on with a small oval, making sure that the way that I draw out the eye looks more oval than circular from this angle. The eyebrow starts off thick and tapers back quite a bit and gets a bit thinner or a lot thinner into a few little tiny loose strands of hair, generally on the inside, right there. That's really it. So from this point on, I will just use shadows to show separation in the hair and things like that, but it's really not about drawing the face anymore as I talk about the hair, but essentially, this is really the way that I construct a profile. Now, the other thing to keep in mind, if you're working, traditionally, you're going to use a light table at this stage, but if you're working digitally, you really want to play around with moving the proportions, changing proportions, moving the position of things. Just because the experimentation that you do there, really lends to you figuring out your style, and getting things just the way you might want to see it. So a lot of times I'll take parts of my drawing at this stage, and I'll maybe increase the size. Bigger eyes tend to look more animated, which is a look I like. So I'll just proportions, I'll maybe change the smile and give her a little bit more of a smirk. So it's really easy to make adjustments like these after the brunt of the work has been done here. I think I'll actually do away with the ear because I think I'm liking the look of the hair kind of just covering the ear at this stage, but it is good to do some under drawing, even with things like this, it's definitely really important when you're doing the full characters, so you can see where everything goes and then really only get rid of it if it makes sense. If it helps the illustration then get it out of there, but if it doesn't, don't do it just out of laziness or something, just make sure you're making the right choice there. That's essentially how I would draw through it and construct a female profile. So now what we'll do is work on some different angle shots and some male characters and just bounce back and forth. We'll keep trying to come up with more interesting characters. I'll probably even incorporate some lessons where we do some creature design stuffs, some fun stuff like that and show the differences from doing a regular human type character to a monster or alien type form. So that'll complete this lesson, let's move on to the next.