How to Draw Comic Book Style Females Like A Pro!

1. Intro: Hey, guys. So my name is Mike Van Orden. I'm an art coach and mentor, also a American comic artist. And if you haven't seen my courses before, I'm just going to show you what's ahead in the course that I'm teaching you now. This one is on drawing comic book style females, and this would be considered a kind of a 101 or, you know, beginner intermediate class. So if you're advanced, you could still take this course. It might be a good refresher for you. But really, this is for people who are starting out and drawing females and familiarizing themselves with how you know, the differences of drawing a female compared to a male. And so in this course, we'll be doing I'll be showing, you know, flow and well, we can go through a couple of things here. So I'll be showing a few things like, the structure and anatomy of a female. So we'll be covering that. We'll be going over drawing different heads from different angles, drawing lips and all that good stuff and eyes. We'll go more into detail and draw different heads from different areas. Look how we can find references and learn from them. Also, we will be working on how to draw hair and how to kind of place to shine on the hair and all that good stuff. And what else will we go into? Okay, so we have a bonus course, which will be how to set up a compositional piece with kind of an action piece. We also have well, there's so much. I can't even cover here in this intro course. But again, my name is Mike and Orden. I've been drawing comics for a long time comic style art. And if you're not familiar with my work, you can go ahead and look me up. And you're also going to be getting everything I'm showing you here. You're going to be getting a copy of it. I'm going to create PDFs and send them over to you. So they will be included in this course. So we have all kinds of stuff here. We have this, we have this. There we go. So we have all kinds of training references for your liking and we go over how to draw eyes. So really, this course, I think is a great course for someone who just kind of struggles with drawing females and wants to just become more familiar with how it works, how define flow, how to just get better at drawing females. Now, this course is a prep course for a more advanced course that's going to be coming up in the future. But I really think that you're going to dig this one. I had a lot of fun creating it, and I will probably be adding even more to this. Now, we do go step by step, and I show you my whole process from this to this to this, and finally that. So you'll see everything from A to Z of how I approach my work. And I'm always here to help. I love doing this, and I can't wait to see you inside this course, so I'll see you there. Okay. 2. Shape Figure & Form: All right, welcome. In this lecture, what we're going to do is we're just going to dive into the female form. I've broken down, you know, general poses, so we have a front facing, a three quarter facing and a rear facing view. Now, when I draw females, I typically I draw from, you know, just imagination from knowing where things fall. I don't really do the whole, you know, what you see a lot of artists do. And you can do this as you're learning. A lot of artists will just draw and they will do the head shape. So they'll say, Okay, we have the head falling away around here, right? And then what they'll do is they'll just kind of keep you know, drawing that same distance apart and try to get to the standard whoops. The standard is typically 7.5 to eight eight heads tall, which let's say, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, is like 8.5. But really, you don't have to do that. Here's why. I feel that it's a great way to learn, but I don't want to see my students get too meticulous or too enslaved to these certain measurements because they're always going to change based on camera angle, you know, and people come in all shapes and sizes. So there are general rules that you can follow, and I think that they're good and you'll definitely hear me mention this a lot is it's good to know the rules. In fact, I employ you to know all the rules, but then after that, you can start breaking or expanding or building off the rules. So Let's just go ahead and build up a little bit here. As you can see, layer by layer, I'm starting to create structure going in, let's see. This is basically the process that I would do. Then I add these blue lines in just to show you. Where things go, the shapes of things, and we can probably get rid of a few of these, clean it up a little bit, just so we can show This looks a little better. We want to keep the blue in. That looks good. I guess I don't have blue on the other ones, which is fine. We can add some. We'll just go ahead and instruct on this. Here we go. If you want this, I can actually include it in the lesson and give you a PDF file so you can use this for reference. I can give it to you without the out the blue lines as well. Let's see, like that. There we go. But you can see that the form is pretty easy to follow. If you've watched me draw before, have you seen any other my other courses, you'll know I have a pretty easy process. I always start with a quick gesture under sketch, and then I work my way up and I find proportions in anatomy, and I start locking things in. Building the blueprint. And so I call that my informational stage. And then once I get all that information down, and then I would go ahead and either lower the capacity if I'm drawing digitally, or I would go ahead and erase if I'm drawing traditionally with a pencil and paper and leave just kind of a ghost of the sketch behind, and then redraw, refine and repeat that process. So let's go ahead and study. So what we're going to do is we're going to first see what we notice about the female form. So we're going to focus on the front facing. Okay. Now, a couple of things. And I just created this from imagination, but this is kind of what goes through my mind as I sketch. Now, you have your three major masses, which you've taken my superhero anatomy course, you know that these are your major masses, which are the head, the upper torso, or upper chest, and the lower pelvis. These three are essential. They're non moving, they're in every single sketch. Now, you can twist in turn, which is great, and I highly recommend it. You could technically take this and apply it to this. You can keep her facing front words like this, but then shift and move this over here and have her twisting. That's a cool thing about the human body. It can contort and twist and change shape at our will. With that being said, Let's go ahead and dive into the obvious, which are I'll go ahead and erase all these lines actually. The obvious things that I like to point out with a female is that everything is, more narrow than it would be with a male. For instance, these shoulders are going to be closer together, right? This neck is going to be more narrow. This from the shoulders down to the crotch area, it's going to go inward. Now, we have our leg sockets, and we have our shoulder sockets. When we're drawing our arms, I like to draw inward, because it creates a flow. Same with the legs. I like to draw them inward. And keep everything close together. There you go. Now the head, I would probably enlarge the size a little bit on this sketch proportionally. Now, the major things I want to bestow upon you are these shapes. The things that I want you to keep in mind as you're drawing your females. Number one, the shoulders are closer together than they would be for a male. Number two, the upper chest will connect down to the lower torso. But in between that space, these are two masses. There's going to be a longer distance, or at least it appears longer because it's leaner. A lot of times females will have the illusion of having a longer torso. Now, with the legs, female strength is in the lower body. I like to draw more powerful legs, thicker and very lean and petite feminine arms. Now, do you have to do that on every single sketch? Absolutely not. You can draw a very masculine, strong heroic female. There's nothing wrong with that. However, I really want you to learn the basics, the rules first before you start breaking them and creating very strong heroic looking women. In fact, maybe we can draw a If not, in this lesson, maybe in the future one here, we can draw in more of a stronger stout woman. Okay. Now, jumping over to the three quarter view. Same thing. You can see that there's kind of a gracefulness to these sketches. I keep everything close together. Her hands spread apart. We always want these elbows, are these arms kind going inwards. We like these curves here. This is a flow. And same with the back. So we like these shoulders close. Almost looks like she's pulling them together. She's almost trying to connect her shoulders from behind. Then we want the lower half her bottom to push out and we want her tummy to tuck in. That's how they would stand, typically in regular female gesture pose. We don't have to limit ourselves to it, but it's great to know. Then I'm keeping the legs close together. You can see put a diamond shape here to represent where the knee would fall. And then, she might be wearing high heels. A lot of times when you're drawing females, they will look like they're standing on their tippy toes. It just looks more feminine, right? Thank to Disney, thank to Tinkerbell, thank to any type of Disney character or any female character in a comic book. And that's what we're doing. We're focusing on a comic book animated style. So don't get to you know, don't start crying for realism when we're drawing cartoons, right? So this is more of an exaggerated embellishment of the female form. Doesn't have to be perfect. And you're going to have your own style, ultimately. So let's go ahead and what else can we touch upon with this lesson? Go ahead and erase. I will definitely now thinking about, I think I will include this in the lesson and give this to you for a reference model sheet Because I think it serves a really good purpose as a reminder. What I'm going to do is just re emphasize this one more time. I want you to be able to repeat this. What are the most important things on any character? Well, the three masses, three major masses, which are the head, The upper chest and the pelvis. Why are they the most important? Everything connects to them. The head is the head, whatever direction the head is or wherever the head is in relation to your sketch is where the balance is. So everything is based on balancing the head. Your whole body is trained to keep your head balanced. It's a safety mechanism. It's a way to keep our brain intact and protected. So we are, you know, from the moment we learn to crawl or walk, we are always keeping our heads in balance, right? So this is the most important mass. Now, our second mass here would be the chest. Now, the chest doesn't really change form. It can expand when you're breathing, but you're not going to notice that too much when you're drawing. But the chest is going to have a certain distance from the pelvis, right? So if you're looking from the side, let's say that you have the chest and then the pelvis, right? Now, If you're drawing straight up the chest here, chest here. Now, this spine, which would be connecting the chest to the pelvis can move. It's movable. Like a windshield wiper. I can do a whole loop. You want to think in terms of movement when you're drawing. On top of this pelvis I'm sorry, chest, you connect your head. If we're looking down at a character, we see. Now, When you are let's say that you want to draw a twist. So let's say that I'm going to zoom in a little bit here. So we have a head, and then we have our flow line. We have our upper chest, then we want to turn our body this way. We have one going in this direction and one going this direction. How do we do that? Well, you're not going to do this too often because it could look weird and contorted. But just to show you, I'll draw this upper chest facing us, connect it down, and At a leg here. Put an arm here. Put our other arm here. Maybe a fist. I'll lower this head. So we're creating a pose now where she almost looks like she's punching. She's twisting, right? And then this leg would go backwards. And it would still keep the balance because remember, the balance is the most important thing. We're trying to keep this head protected and balanced at all times. So this is just a quick little demo on movement. We're not going to get too much into movement in this course, but I am going to be having a whole course on movement and action and just showing you how the subtleties of just changing small things can lead to great progress. So you can see that by lifting her arm, throwing a punch, pulling this arm back, pulling this leg forward and this one back, we've created a dynamic gesture, right? And so that's the cool thing about keeping twists in mind because our body is designed to twist maneuver in ways. And it also prevents a stiffness in your art. So we don't want our art to look stiff ever. Another thing you can do is, let's say, I think I have an example. Let me just go to it. Did I include it in this one? Yeah. We're going to go over this one in one of our lessons. I'll show you exactly how I created this post. So, hang in there. Now, let's try another quick pot just to show you an example of why the three masses are so important. Um Let's say that we're drawing from the side view. So we have our line of action. You've seen this in animation at the head the upper chest, and you got the pelvis. You got the three major masses. Now, each one of these has sockets. The head has a socket for the neck. This one has a couple of sockets, one for each limb, the arms, and then the legs, but also has a connector from the spine down. This spine connects all the way from the back of the head all the way down through here to the tail bone. Now, if we are drawing limbs, let's say that she's crouching down. Maybe one leg would be like this. Now we're just creating gestures, and maybe the other leg would be over here. Then maybe one arm would be pulled back, and maybe her other arm would be going forward. We've just created another gesture using our three masses. Now, the important thing to recognize is one, two, three, is that there's a distance between these masses. If you put them too close together, it's not going to look good. In fact, the further you can keep your upper chest from your pelvis area, the more action and more dynamic your sketch is going to look, right? And try it. Do a couple of practice exercises on your own. You can do this endlessly. In fact, if you're not already drawing gestures all the time, I really encourage you to do so. This is how I've learned, is how I teach. You want to always draw gestures. Because gestures give you that fluid and they give you that quick loose feel where you have the energy and you capture the energy. You're not too worried about the end results. Because from this gesture, you can go ahead and you can create almost anything. Yeah. I don't want to get into this, but I thought it was a good bonus to just jumped into my mind as I was trying to explain the female body and why things are important. I like to show by example. There you go. You have a quick gesture of a female character crouching down. You can also turn this into a Spider Man or whoever. But it's a lot of fun. Is there anything else that I want to touch upon? No, I generally, everything is pretty simplified here, and, you know, the main thing I want you to pay attention to are the shapes. I want you to know that there is a distance between here and here that we have our legs close together and all of these. We have our shoulders close together. I know it sounds repetitive. But if you really want to differentiate the difference between a male and a female, these are the tail tail signs. If we were drawing a male and I think I've done this in another lesson, we would have a head. We would have wider shoulders, shoulders would be out. We'd have a bigger barrel chest in most cases, unless it's a very lean agile character. We'd have a lower mass here, right? And then from here, the legs would be more sprawled out because it's more of a masculine gesture, right? Now, he might have his arms bowed out a little bit more. But we can already see that you would assume that this is more of a masculine character, just by this alone, right? Now, you can also and I think I will include, we might draw someone like Shehak or something like that where we're drawing a very feminine character. But we're going to keep her very strong and masculine. Okay Let's say that we have a female posing like this. Maybe we'll add some muscles broader shoulders, and just make her give her some bigger lots here, you can do this because female body building is a thing. It's really there. You can actually find a lot of reference for a very strong athletic women. I like sprinters, to be honest. I think they're good reference. If you're trying to draw a very dynamic, strong female character, just draw a sprinter. I'm just showing you what's on my mind right now. That's the way my lessons are. They're free for all. They're here to teach you on the fly. I don't like my lessons to become boring and stagnant, just like my art. I like to keep things alive and full of energy. I think it's a really good way to teach. But here you go. I've just sculpted out a stronger, more defined female. You can see. I hope that helps. All right. So that will conclude this quick lesson, and I will see you in the next one. Keep going. I hope you're digging this. Please give me some feedback. Let me know and if there's anything that I can add to this course. I will. I'll do that to all my courses. I say that my courses are on demand, and I want you to get the most benefit and value from them as possible. I'm your art coach and I'm your art instructor and I'm here, and hopefully, you're gaining a lot of knowledge and inspiration from these courses. I'll see you in the next one. Hang in there. 3. Further Studies of the Female Form: Okay, welcome back, and we're just going to go further into studying the female form. So, I have a photograph here, and basically, it shows the essence of a general female stance, like a gesture, right? So if we were to want to break this down, we have our three masses. We have the head, we have the upper chest torso area, and then we have the lower pelvis, okay? And that's This is going to be the same for all of your art. You're always going to have these three masses, and you're always going to want to keep them spaced apart, and that space is going to create the movement, the dynamic of the character. So, you know, I don't know if you've taken my other course on superhero anatomy. It's just a basic simplistic way of looking at, anatomy and just keeping the shapes and proportions in simulation or in a compiled, what's the best way to describe it? Yeah, basically, I'm just trying to simplify anatomy so that you don't have to overthink because what I see a lot of artists do is they overthink proportions, size. Now, you'll see me. I rarely ever measure eight a half heads tall or any of those types of proportions. You don't have to. You can, and there's a lot of videos, and there's a lot of instructional books on that out there. And I think you probably consumed enough by now where you kind of have it ingrained in your head. What I really want to focus on and emphasize on is getting all this information and putting it into practice. Okay. So with that said, I kind of broke down this same sketch over here. And you can see that, you know, let me go to blue. You can see that her shoulders are here, They go inwards, right, if we were to find points. But then we have our hips that also go inward. And then her arms. They also go inward, right? So this is kind of a common theme with the female form is it's more it's more The curves are more facing toward the body where a male is more outward. He well, let's just show you. So we have this kind of a male here. His arms are more bowed outward, you'll be able to tell that this is a man just by looking at the silhouette. The same with his legs, they're bowed out. As opposed to the female, which everything goes inwards. You want to keep it like that. As I mentioned in a lot of my lessons, you have to master the rules before you can break them and expand on them. I think it's a really good idea to just get in a habit of memorizing and repeating to yourself the female form, how it works, so that it becomes second nature because a lot of people will start trying to get very creative a little too soon without knowing the rules. And then the art turns out a little bit wonky. I mean, it's good effort, and it's ambitious, and I really respect that, but save that until you really know the rules. Okay, so I think you understand it, you know, from a theoretical point and where you are going to put all this into practice. Let's see. So I have a few faces here, too. Maybe I can go in on this here and see what we can work with. Okay. So female faces. One thing that I'll mention a lot when I'm drawing females is You want to less lines is typically going to be better. With females, I like to draw the eyes bigger. So actually, let me go ahead and reduce the pace of this. Okay. Less lines is going to be better. Bigger eyes. Typically When I'm drawing females, I like them to be very alert, or you can make them sultry and then we can show you the difference. Here we go. She's bright eyed and bushy tailed, as I would say, put in her eyebrows. Now, the nose, I like to keep the nose ybtle too much information there. And then draw in her lips. Now, as you see, when I draw lips, if I'm just drawing basic lips, I'll draw them like this, a little triangle and the center line there, and then follow lines will follow that and then boom. You have your lips. You see how easy that is. Then from the chin, I think that this chin might be a little too long. What I'll do is I'll shorten it to b here. You can alter and crop this as you're drawing. And, you know, don't get too married to your first sketch. What I mean by that is keep yourself open for change and for alteration. A lot of times artists, especially beginner artists, they will try to everything perfect on the first go. I will never do that. Even after drawing for so many years and so many hours, I will always leave room to make adjustments because, um There's a lot of things that we don't see in the first go round. What I mean is we have the concept in our mind, and we try our hardest to lock it down, and sometimes we paint ourselves into a corner. What I would rather see you do is draw very quick, keep the gestures very light and loose and free and then come back and reshape and redefine your art. Don't be too serious with it in the beginning. Be very loose and have fun. Keep it fluid and leave room for adjustments and just always keep that in mind. Especially when you're drawing humans or any type of beings because when you're drawing buildings, you might want to get a little bit more technical and you might want to measure things and you're getting your perspective grids out and everything like that. But when you're drawing humans or whatever kind of creatures or whatnot, you can be a little bit more free form and have a lot more fun with it. No. So you could see that I quickly drew just a basic face. And if we want to change this to more of a sultry look, what you can do is you can go midway through the eye, cut it there. Same thing here. And then you would just start adding some eyelashes. And it just changes the personality. You can also raise this up a little bit on their lip and give her more of a smirk. There's just little micro adjustments that you can make that make a big difference on your art. I really implore you to experiment with these. It's a lot of fun and you'll find your voice when you're doing stuff like this. So I've been teaching art for quite a while now and what I know is with a lot of my students, is they get a little too rigid with the rules, and they're so focused on making everything perfect and almost emulating what they see to the exact same lines. What I really recommend is if you keep things very loose, you can still pay attention to the rules and what you're learning. But be willing to keep it fun, experiment a little bit. If you ultimately think it didn't work out the way I wanted to, well, that's why you're drawing with pencil or on a tablet where you can go ahead and make adjustments and erase and so forth. So, yeah, ultimately, this is something that you want to do for fun, right? So you have to keep it fun, even while you're learning. Because if you start doing this as a profession, it will become monotonous. It will be you don't want your passion, your love to become kind of a curse, right? You don't want to become something that, you start dreading instead of waking up excited to do. And to avoid that, you just have to leave yourself open for just having fun. Okay. So that's a quick face, and I know we're getting a little all over the place here, but I'm just showing you demos because this whole course is specifically to kind of imprint into your minds the difference between drawing males and females, and I want you to grasp this information as much as possible, put into practice and just understand the difference. Okay. Same thing here when we're drawing a three quarter view, which I have a few different lessons where we do this. Let's see. Okay. When we clean it up, it looks a little like this. But let's see if there's anything else. Where is the one that we altered? This one? Yeah. Go ahead and lower this capacity. Same thing here. Okay. I'm not sure where my other. Okay. Got it. Okay. Okay. I think that's it. I have a lot of layers on this one. I was teaching a lot of lessons on this particular topic. Okay. All right. This is good, actually. Let's go with this. All right. Go to instruct. Okay. So we have a very light layout, and I think that you can do this easily, right? You can just. You can draw a basic head shape like this. Draw your line, draw your center line. Then what I like to do when I'm drawing three quarter is draw a oval over here to give it that depth. You're trying to make your R appear three dimensional as much as possible. Now, with our eyes, you can keep them as I put them here or you can make adjustments. It's really up to you. One of the things I like to do when I'm I'll go into center here and I'll do like this. I'm imagining kind of like a mask. This kind of keeps things in alignment for me. Then we have this eye line. Then we can just go ahead and pop in an oval shape here, another one over here. Go here to the nose, drop down to the lips, and you'll see what I'm going to do here in a moment. Then we can add in her ear. Put in her neck. And then we have basically all the information we need at this point. Okay. Then what we can do is we can take this exact same layer and we can lower the capacity. We can go down here. Let's see which one was it. We can keep it like this now. We'll create another. Now we'll come back in and we'll start finding where we want to put our actual lines. So one thing we can do is we can start with her that's further away. Now remember, with three quarter views, one of the rules is things that are further away from you are going to appear smaller, you're going to see less of it. Was the that's further away from us might appear smaller than this that's closer to us. And then the nose, the bridge of the nose might obstruct some of this eye, right? Depending on how much her head is tilted away from us. And then keep your curves of her face, you know, however you like to draw them. Study people. Everyone has different shapes. And then now what I'm doing is I'm just trying to find the size of her face that I like. I'm going to add in her ear here. I'm keeping everything very loose, very sketchy, very fun. Now I'll put this eyebrow a little lower like this. Now, eyebrows convey expressions. So um If you raise the eyebrow, it's going to look more innocent, more surprised. If you lower them, they're going to look a little bit more serious, more sultry. Keep those things in mind and practice. Same with the eyes, if you close the eyelid halfway, you're going to make them look a little bit more relaxed, sultry. If you open them up, they're going to be a lot more alert and maybe more youthful. Just keep these things in your mind as you're drawing your characters and experiment. Always experiment. Then our nose, we're going to go ahead and keep it very simplistic. Now, underneath her nose, we're going to draw this little indention, which would connect to her lip. Then I'll give her that little triangle, connect. Now we're going to see more of the lip facing us then further away. This is going to curve around. Same thing with the bottom part. You can see how things just kind of come together when you do this. And then if we're establishing kind of a hair line, everyone has different hair lines, but you can just make up your own. Don't give her too much of a forehead. You can, you know, make sure it works. And then now as we are making progress, we can see that you know, the form of the face is coming together. This isn't an actual, you know, I'm not doing this as a serious sketch. I'm just doing this as an example to show you how to approach. But if we were, you know, I would probably I would erase this even more and refine it and redraw it as I got my lines to where I want them to be. So when you're drawing, it's always going to be about refinement. It's going to be about cleaning up redrawing, adding your rendering your shades, establishing your light source, all that stuff. And don't worry. I will keep talking about this stuff. If you're a little bit lost when it comes to terminology, stick with me. I'll be helping you. I'm making a lot of courses. They'll be coming out over the next few months. Some of them will be on establishing light sources and shades and rendering. Some of them will be on character placement and perspective and all that good stuff. So actually, I think my next course will be on composition and layout. Which I think you'll have a lot of fun with it because you'll be able to take everything you've learned about figure drawing, and then you'll be able to put it into practice and create your own pin up sketches and things like that. All right. So there we go. Now, the next step, obviously would be to draw her hair, which we will have a segment on hair. But, you know, if I'm drawing hair, when you're initially drawing hair on a female character or any character, you want to just pay attention to the clumps of shapes. So you know, maybe you establish kind of like, alright, well, maybe our hair parts over here. And so anything on this side is going to go in this direction and anything on this side. Is going to go in this direction. If we were then you can have as many clumps as you want. She could have very wild hair. But let's just keep it very basic. One thing I'd like to do is if I'm parting it down the side like this, I'll give a v here, almost like Remember when you're a kid and you're drawing these little birds flying. I'll give it that shape, and then I'll just continue over. Then same thing here, I And then I'm just establishing and then I'll just close this up like this. And then you can just depending if she's going to have long hair or short hair, you can just what you're doing is you're establishing the parameters of where her hair is going to be. And then same thing here, you can flow out here. Of course, you're going to erase all this later and you're going to refine it, but at least you're establishing where things go. It all comes together as you're moving your pencils and you're placing lines. You can start at some point, you're going to be able to see, this is working or this isn't working and you'll make adjustments accordingly. But don't be afraid to experiment. I'll say that all the time. Don't just look at someone else's hair and try to draw every strand perfectly onto your sketch. Be willing to make mistakes because you'll learn from them. You know, perfectionists usually do what's called a paralysis of analysis. I forget the actual quote now. But basically, they analyze it so much that they become very, you know, almost like a deer in headlights. They don't know where to go. They've over thought it, and they just kind of get stuck, and you don't want that to happen to you. Okay. All right. So here we go. Then, you know, at this stage, what I would probably do if, you know, this was me drawing like a real sketch, I would just lower the opacity again. And then I would probably switch to a different lead, maybe pencil lead. And then add another layer. And Okay. Wait. Okay. And then I would just start refining this sketch. So I probably established a few lines here. Start drawing and working in our hair. Depending on how much detail I wanted to put into it. And this is fun. I mean, honestly, when it comes together, you're so happy, and the reward is, you know, the finished the finished sketch is the reward. And so we have our shapes, and we're still establishing her hair where it's going to be. And then we can start adding in her eyes again so you can go close in. Now, when you're drawing the eyes this time, you can go in a little bit more into the details. You can really refine things at this point. Because you have your blueprint. You have the information that you need and Now you have something to work from. You're not just seeing what sticks when you throw it down. You have the information. You know that the proportions are where you want them. Now you can just really start to dive in with the style, which reminds me, I have a course that I'm working on on finding your style, which a lot of my students ask me, how do you find your own style. It's a lot easier than you think. I'll be introducing that course in the near future too. Okay. Okay. So now we're just basically refining. This is this to me, this becomes very cathartic and just very relaxing because, you know, now you're just putting things together, you're almost on autopilot and you're really just allowing things to flow. You're allowing your pencil to flow Yeah, there's nothing like it to me. And I think once you get to this point and you've probably experienced it before. But once you really know that your art is going in the right direction and you can just let go, you can really just enjoy it. So you can see, as we're cleaning it up, looks a little bit better. And this is by any means, this is not a great sketch. This is just really for the purpose of instruction. Okay, so we'll leave it here in conclusion. So we've drawn a little bit more on the fasis. And if you want, I can give you this as a PDF, so you can have it as a guide. But yeah, so we have our you know, three masses. We've come over here and we've kind of just kind of drawn those three masses. So we have our our upper torso and then our pelvis. Everything else is going to be limbs and everything else is going to be able to move. Now, your head doesn't change shape. Neither does your upper torso or your hips. They can twist and turn. But generally, they're going to be the same size and shape in every sketch. There's going to be more of a distance or more of a twist. And we'll get into that, you know twisting the character. A lot of times when you're drawing a female character, you're going to want to twist her in different directions to make her look more dynamic. So, alright, we'll stop here. I hope you've enjoyed this one. And if you have any questions, you know, reach out to me directly, and I'll be happy to help. I'll see you in the next one. 4. Form, Shapes & Flow: Okay, welcome to this lesson here. And this one, we are going to focus on form and shapes and flow. So when you're drawing females, you want to keep it very simple, but you also want to keep the flow very consistent with a female form. So, in general, females are going to have I'll just illustrate here. So So we have her head. Now, this is just a quick rough sketch. But a couple of things you want to notice are if I were to be if I were to start drawing a quick gesture of a female, what I would probably do is look for this kind of a flow. And then if she's facing head on like this, I would just remember that her shoulders are closer together than a male character. So we have a shorter distance between her shoulders. Her neck might appear thinner, and then her trap muscles are going to appear generally smaller. A lot of things are going to curve up. You're going to see this curve here from shoulder to shoulder. Then another thing that you want to keep in mind is right before the shoulder starts, you're going to close in on the upper torso here. Then depending on how tall the female character is, you're going to connect the upper chest, the upper torso down to the lower hips. One rule of thumb, and I'll probably mention this in a lot of our lectures is that generally, when you're drawing a female, you'll one hip a little higher than the other. Typically, you'll draw one shoulder higher than the other, as well, right? Because this creates a more of a female feminine stance. To put this into action, I'll just connect this. You see that the distance between the bottom of her rib cage to the top of her hip is going to be shorter then this distance here, right? And then this hip might pop out a little bit depending on her body type. And then you would just proceed to add limbs, legs and so forth. But we're not focusing too much on the anatomy. What we're focusing on here is the flow. This is the thought process that you want behind your sketch. Then another important thing to remember is when drawing a female, typically, what will happen is, let's say you have your elbows right around the mid torso region. Let's say her elbows here and then her other elbows here. You want to bend this arm curved inward. It's a more feminine gesture, right? Whereas a male would be bowed outwards, right? Shoulder, and then you put the bicep here, trip. If you take in my course on male anatomy, you'll see that. And then this goes into the shoulder forearm. So that's how you're putting together the structure of a male arm. Now, you could do this with females too. There are characters like wonder woman or she hawk or whatnot, that would have more of a masculine physique on top of a feminine frame. So there are a lot of variables that you can play around with. But I would say keep things inflow. Now, another important thing that you want to remember is you know balance. So from this hip down, this is going to be her leg that she's balanced on. And then this leg here is going to be like a kickstand. It's going outwards. It's going to hold her from falling over. But most of her weight is going to be on this leg, right? Um, Now, going over to this one here, let's see. We'll do something similar. So this is kind of a side pose. Keep it feminine. Also, hold on, before I jump over here, her hair, typically, you know, I like to keep the hair flowing. And you could do that. These are just kind of subtleties that will stand out with your art because you got to remember when you're drawing a stationary, stagnant piece of art, you want to convey as much movement within that shot as possible. So these are things that you want to keep in mind because ultimately, you don't want your art to look stiff, especially when you're drawing the female form because, you know, females are curvaceous, you know, they're very subtle and less is more. But you want to create some sort of a movement, some sort of a pose that shows that even if you were to create a silhouette, you would know that it's a female form. Okay. So jumping back over to this one here. All right. So we have her head, and then we're connecting the neck, right? Okay. So what I would do is, again, keep these shoulders close together. Now, if I'm keeping them in alignment and I'm not raising one, that's fine. Now, from the back of her head, I would imagine that her spine is going like that. And then I would pop a rib cage in here. And then just connect this. Now, a way to make your art look more three dimensional is you're imagining that this is a hollow a barrel, then dropping down to this region, you'd be looking down. It's almost like your horizon line is right around here. Anything above it, you're going to see underneath and anything below it, you're going to see on top. Then you would just put in her shapes Okay. And same thing, I'll keep the weight on this leg here. Now, of course, this is very rough and it's not a finished sketch. It's just showing you the thought process, and we'll be doing this a lot. I think I have something underneath here. Let's go to. I did this in an earlier lesson when I was talking to a private student. Here we go. I did with blue and I can do that again. You can see the gestures. You have this go ahead and create a new layer. You can see that I came inward and outward, right? Inward and outward. Kept these shoulders close together, curved here, kept this hip up, balanced on here. This This leg is going out to keep the balance. The neck is very thin and petite. These are the types of things that you want to keep in your mind. This will be a really short lesson. Really, this is just mindset. This is just flow and form, and I'll be mentioning this a lot throughout the course. So hopefully you grasp the concept that I'm putting down here because I guess another good way to describe it is, let's just empty this out real quick. Let's go to another red, and when you're drawing a male versus a female, a male is going to be very rigid, this is front facing. You have the torso, then you have the pelvis region. And then this neck goes up, you have the head, and then his shoulders are going to be wider and then his arms are going to bow out, and then, you know, curve in curve in. Then you're going to connect same thing. And then his legs are going to have a wider stance. And then the traps are going to go higher. And so you're just building and building and building and you're keeping it. Now you can draw a lean character. But basically, you're just compiling more and more musculature to your character to make him what's a good word? Just heroic, powerful, Okay. And then from the inside of the rib cage, I like to go down here, connect. So I'll raise things. So you can make adjustments to your proportions as you're drawing. You don't have to get everything perfect the right time the first time. And then I like to draw from the inside of this area. I like to draw a line straight down. And then, you know, we have the basics of a male. You know, gesture. And obviously, you can build more of a hawkish character where the head would be lower, the traps would be bigger. You can add your anatomy in here, but this is the basics. Then when you move over here and we draw a female start with the head this time. Even if we're drawing her straight head on, we still want her to look as feminine as possible. I'll do a curve up like that. As you can see, this one's curved down. This one I'll curve up, keep her chest smaller, the cavity. Bring this down. Probably create a little longer distance between the torso and the chest and then put her shoulders close together, neck, and then curve curve in curve out. Depending on her hips, now you can draw you know, the legs close together as opposed to the male, which he's got a, you know, his legs spread apart to present masculinity and females are more closed in to represent femininity. So and I know that this is going to vary it's not going to it's not universal, it's general. So you can draw females, you know, with their legs sprawled and very heroic as well. So don't limit yourself. This is just a general rule of thumb. Okay. And remember, once you know the rules, that's when you break them. So once you understand how things work, you can go ahead and start, you know, testing out different variations of your sketch and maybe you want to let's say maybe you want to give her more of a wider stance. So let's see how this is just experimenting. So you can draw kind of a hip here and then connect her legs outwards. And then you would just make your adjustments, knee might fall here. Okay. Just work around it. And it's not going to destroy your art if you make her pose a little bit more masculine. But I do want you to learn the rules of keeping your female gestures as feminine as possible initially, and then you work your way into altering and breaking and expanding on the rules. So that's it for this lesson. We'll keep this one here, and I hope that this helps. If you have any questions on it, you just send it directly to me. If you want to show me your art, I think you can send it here or you can find me on Instagram or any other social media, and just let me know that you're my student. Okay. I'll be happy to help you. Okay. So hopefully, this helps and I will see you in the next one. Okay. 5. Drawing Methods and Process : Hey, guys, this is just a quick explanation on my teaching methods. And the process that I would like you to utilize as well when you're sketching. So as an artist, I do just a few steps that I always repeat. If you can create a formula. Anything can be repeated and replicated. So my formula is I always start out with a quick gesture sketch, something like this. I'll refine it into something like this, and then I'll go further and it'll end up something like this. Actually, sorry. Something like, look like this. Um, So I guess the phases would be one would be my quick gesture. Two, would be just refining that gesture and shaping it and molding it to get the pose that I'm looking for. And then three would be to add some details so you can see that when we thin out this layer here, We can see things shining through. And then on my last layer, I would just add some details, and you can see that we just dive in, add some shades, some shadows, some rendering, and that's really it. If I were to explain this in layman's terms from the beginning, let's start from the top. First step would be to a quick sketch. Let's say we have a box, a cube. So I'm getting my shapes in, right? My next step would be to refine that we'll erase that a little bit, and then start finding my lines that I want to keep. So we'd go here, keep it a little bit darker. Find the lines that we want ultimately. And then my next stage would be to add some details. So maybe at this point, I would start, you know, Just going into details. Maybe I would X these out because I know that I'm going to shade this black. Maybe I would put some lines going here, lines here, go across. Now I'm just doing my drawing. A part of the sketch, you can go ahead and erase so you can do this and then sharpen your pencil if you're drawing traditionally or just start a new layer if you're doing it digitally. Then at this point, you can say, well, now, this is where your final lines come in. You put down your foundational sketch lines and then you drew your hard lines that you want to keep that they identify the proportions and all that good stuff. Then your final lines are going to be your rendering. You just set this up for rendering and we know that underneath here is going to be shaded and you know, I'm just creating some abstract. You know, we don't even know what this is, but it's my process. And if you're doing the same thing with a human, it would be same thing. We would just start with a shape of a head body, maybe one leg here, one leg going up. Maybe maybe we drop the head down and we have a arm going out this way and we have an arm going out this way, this is just establishing the figure, and we know that none of this is that important. We're just trying to find out how much space it's going to take up on our canvas, right? Then once we have this in, and we've shaped it and molded it to our liking, then we can come in and and we can lighten this up. And then our next phase would be to start refining, but don't get caught up in this one yet either. Just now here's where you'll find your definite shapes that you want to keep and you'll start working your anatomy, right? You don't have to do costum details or anything at this stage. But let's say, you're working your anatomy in. Same thing here. And then obviously, I'm doing this really fast because the point of this is not to show you how well I can draw. The point of this is to show you the process of which I draw in. And so now we have enough information where I know where everything goes. At this stage, I can say, well, let's come in and we'll start adding some costum effects. We can even get rid of this under drawing here. We can lighten this up. This is the stage of drawing. You have to be very patient. A lot of times people try to draw and they try to get everything perfect on the first go, and that's not how you would do it. You want to have all your shapes, all your information in, and then you want to come back and do your refining. If you're adding cost elements, you can do that at this stage, where let's say that he has these S. Let's say he has a X go across his chest, right? And I'm just making this up as we go. Let's say that he has some blades coming out of his arm here. This one, let's see. His boots just go like this and you get the idea. I'm not doing anything with the face yet. But this is Okay. This is how I really want you to approach your art. It's the professional way. It's the way that you're going to draw and you're going to be able to keep everything in proportions so that when you get to the end of your sketch, you're not having to rework and erase and you're not painting yourself into a corner, so to speak. These are my steps. Then after this stage, what I would do is probably if I'm using pencil. It's see how this looks lower the capacity. I would just come in and use a different color. Let's say pencil color, and then Okay. Then at this stage, you can just come in and start doing your details. Okay. Sharpen the pencil or lower the size of your pencil. And if you have a character in mind, let's say that I want to draw Wolverine, right? I would just kind of put my eyes here. Okay. And this is the process. And you're always going to be refining, so don't try and rush your art. A lot of times it takes a while. Accept that, enjoy the process. I'm sure you've heard that little quip here and there, you know, of enjoying the process. Well, it's actually really true. Now, sometimes when you're working professionally and you have editor screaming at you or if you have a client that really wants his art, sometimes you have to draw a little faster. But don't lose the quality in the process, you know, don't try to rush. Don't try to get things perfect. Don't try and show off. Don't let your ego takeover is what I'm trying to say, you know, enjoy it. And take your time and make sure that everything is where you want it to be. And once you do something like that, and you have this formula, well, you can't go wrong honestly. It's almost foolproof because you'll have all your proportions down, you have your anatomy, I'll figure it out. And as I always say, if you haven't taken my anatomy course, go ahead and take it, it's called simplified superhero anatomy, and I really just dive into how to quickly identify muscles and how they work and how they contract. How to place them. And it's a fun course. It was my first stand alone course. I'm really proud of it. Okay, so there you go. I think that this is enough. Now, this is just a process. And when you see me teaching on this course, I know that, you know, you're expecting, Hey, we're supposed to be drawing females. I'm just showing an example of how I approach this course. So in our next following, you know, lectures, you're going to see all females from here on out. So get ready. Here we go. Thanks for joining, and I'll see you in the next one. 6. Breaking Down a Female Sketch: Hey, welcome back. And in this one, we're going to just kind of examine a sketch that I did. This was an Aspen sketch I did for Aspen comics several years ago. And basically, what we'll try and do is break this down real quick. Now, I can see that, you know, this art was something I created back in 2018, so several years ago. I know that I've improved since, and I can already see things that I would alter and change. The rules still apply. So we have our character. Let's zoom in a little bit. And it's really just a It's a female form covered in sort of barnacles and coral and things like that. So she's got sort of an organic armor on her. Now, the way that I approached this sketch was I'll show you. So we lower the opacity. I did create the gesture here. You can see that with this, the the flow. Actually, let me go blue. Our flow is balance here, right? Okay. And then coming up curving in. But this arm is balanced with this leg, head is facing forward. These are the types of things that you're keeping in mind as you're laying out your sketch. And then one of the things I would have done is I would have had this, this right arm or right. I would have had bowed in a bit more curved in and then coming out. That just for me and my particular style, the way I drew it before in 2018, I kind of made it going out, it's not a bad thing, but I just think it would have been better if I would have curved this elbow in more and it would have flowed a lot better with the curves. So let's go ahead and close this one out and we'll do another one. Okay. So here we go. So when you're starting a sketch like this, what you're trying to do is you know, You're trying to establish a few things. Number one, it's a semi upshot, meaning that we're looking up to the character because we have our get into this. We have our horizon line, which is the water line, right? So anything above this line, we're going to be looking up at. That's just how perspective works. So anything below, we're going to be looking down at. That's why we see these curves facing downwards like this, right? But anything we look up at, we're going to be seeing underneath. Now, if you're laying out a sketch and you can do this. The first thing I would do is I would just really quickly, actually, let me lower this capacity even more so we're not distracted by it. So I would really just quickly draw in kind of a head shape. I don't want it to be perfect because I'm trying to capture the information as fast as I can. And then go over here, and my pencil is just constantly moving. And this is how I want you to kind train yourself. Just keep your pencil moving and keep the gestures full of energy. Now, instead of having this arm bow outwards like this, I'm going to bring it in. So we have our or mid section of our arm going towards the middle of her torso. And then I would have it coming around like that, right? And same with this one. So we know that her shoulder is here. So I would imagine if I'm drawing through her arms coming in, then I think I would drop her hand a little bit more. Okay. And then her other hand is going to be here, following along. Okay. And then I would just draw the undercarriage of her upper torso, drop it down. Now, she's curved backwards a little bit. So she has his angle. So you're going to see this is very common when you're drawing females, you're going to see under the cavity and then inside the cavity. And that's just part of drawing the female form. Okay. Then what I would do is establish the balance on this leg. Come over here. Of course, this is me drawing years later, so I can see things a little differently than when I was drawing this. And you know hindsight is always 2020. We can always catch things years later. And a lot of times you can look back at your art and you can be wow, you can be like, Wow, I actually had a better understanding of this than I thought. And you know, sometimes we forget. Sometimes we get off on the wrong track and we start doing things the wrong way for a while, and then we look back at our older art, and we're like, Oh, well, you know, I didn't need to change. I should have just kept going the way I was going. Um, so here we go. We have the gesture, right? And then from the gesture, what you would do is you would loosen it up, so you take your pencil if you're drawing traditionally, you know, erase it so you have your lines barely there, and then you just come in and start refining. And I'm not going to get too into details, but you know this is how I approach all of my art. And if you're not approaching your art in this kind of manner, and you're finding yourself getting frustrated because You're running into these sticking points where you can't find a solution to a certain angle or you can't get your pose the way you want it. It's probably because you're diving into the art a little too soon and you're trying to get the finish lines before you have the foundation, the blueprint. So I'm going to turn this point over here a little bit. Then I'm going to follow through. I'd like to keep these curves flowing. Then I'm going to draw her rib cage in. Her arm socket here. Now, this shoulder is going to pop out a little bit on this side, and this one is going to be raised up a little bit. Then I'm not drawing her arm or anything at this point. I'm just drawing her anatomy, the way I want. And then flowing this hand around keeping it very rough and loose You can establish where you want to put her breast. Basically, when I'm I'm placing breast, what I'll do is I'll try and find the center point of the rib cage or the upper torso, and then I'll draw a line through horizontally, and then I'll divide it. I'll just go here and here. Now I'm creating a grid for myself. Now, I know that the breast would go from under the armpit, then it would depending on the size, you would just be able to work them in. Now, they don't have to be perfect at this point. Essentially what you're doing is you're just putting the information down. Now you can change the size, the shape, everything. But you do want to a lot of times what will happen is people will start artist beginners. A lot of times we'll start the breast way up here. You don't want to do that. You want to make you want to keep them a certain distance between the collar bone here, the clavicle, and then you want to have a little distance in between. Okay. And then what you're doing is now, I made this torso extra long because I was modeling my sketch after the late Michael Turner, which I emulated his art a lot. He's a huge influence on me. He tended to draw very long torsos, which was very stylistic and, in my opinion, I thought it was really cool. So I went with it. But you can always alter and change your style as you progress in your art journey. Okay. So here we go. Now, I'm just kind of fine tuning the anatomy. Now, I'm going to put her hands here. This is how I would approach it now in 2000 this year, as opposed to 2018. All right. And you can see that things start to come together and you have your eye line here so you can just go ahead and when I'm placing eyes, I'll just try and keep them spaced apart where I can fit another eye in the middle. I'll drop down the nose. Since this is an upshot, the nose is going to appear at then her lips, I would that indention between the bottom of your nose and the top of your lip. I would keep that in mind. Then I would just keep a shape here. Now, you'll come back here and alter this, obviously. This is not going to be perfect on the first go round. I would draw on her ears a little lower around here. Now, I'm imagining that from the bottom of your ear, if I was drawing through, I would just draw a line like this for her neck. And then I will create a eyebrow, with her, I want her to look a little bit innocent in this one. So I'm raising the eyebrows up. Okay. And now we have our we have the measurements that we need, and at this point, you would just start to establish dive into the anatomy a little bit more if you want to draw let's say that I wanted to draw her armor. So I might even start a different layer in different color. And then just imagine that her armor was here. I'm going to place shapes and then you can go in and start altering things. And then you'll add the details and you'll come back. Once you get everything placed like all your information, at this point, what you'll do is you'll come back, you'll erase the lines or you'll lower the capacity and you'll start actually drawing the details. You can even do this with her hair. Maybe I want her hair to flow this way. Okay. I mean, I put some mountains in the background. And you'll come back and do all these details. Okay. Same thing here with her bikini line. You can put some more armor here. Maybe something here up to you as the artist. Aspen necklace on a chain here. Okay. And this is, you know, this is it. This is the essentials of laying out your sketch. And once you have everything laid out, then the time spent will be the refinement. It will be the rendering, the actual drawing, the shades, the light sources, and all that stuff. Okay. Now, I do have a collaboration course with Ed FoCuck on rendering, where I have a segment or two, but I don't really get to dive into it the way I want to. So I'll be making a course on rendering, doing cross hatching and details and all the line work as well. So hang tight. I have a lot of courses in the works. Okay. We're going to lower the capacity on these. And so you can see just from this, we have enough information to work on work with. So Now, I've erased everything, including the actual original sketch, and at this point, you know, you can just dive in and just start really drawing because we have the blueprint. We know where everything is. We know all the proportions are where we want them. And so now it's just drawing. It's like, Okay, well, let's see. I want her eye here. Let's Okay. I e here. I want to give her kind of surprised innocent look. So I'm raising the eyebrows. And then you would just come in and, you know, put an not here, put an not here, lip Drawing her ear. And this is the exact process that I do when I'm drawing. And it's not hard. It's just repetition, and it's practice. I know that you've heard that a lot. A lot of artists when you ask them, how do you get better? Practice practice practice is the general response, and I used to get really annoyed with that when I was younger. But it turns out it's true. The more you practice, the more it's just going to become ingrained you're going to it'll become second nature and you'll catch your own mistakes, you know, and that's where you want to be. And instead of a lot of times with budding artists, they'll focus on when they're looking at other people's art, you see these a lot in groups and things like that where people post art and you get a lot of critiques. What I'll notice is a lot of budding artists who are just learning. They think that there's only one way to do things. They'll critique other people's work and they'll be focused on the negatives. You've done that wrong. The arm looks wrong, blah, but really what I want you to focus on is what you're doing right. Because you're going to strengthen that. The more you focus on the things that you're doing right, the more you're going to strengthen your ability to keep repeating that. And then you're also going to increase your art confidence. And, you know, that in itself is extremely important because the only way you get build confidence is by doing and by believing in what you're doing. Without seeking the approval or, you know, you don't want to have perfect criticism is what I'm trying to say is you want people to criticize your work. You want to welcome it. You don't need constant validation, is what I mean? If you're always seeking validation and then you get discouraged when someone critiques you. Well, you're not going to progress. You're going to become stagnant or maybe you might even just lose interest or just feel super discouraged. We don't want that. You have to be brave in this journey and you have to welcome what you get. You can welcome validation, but you can equally welcome criticism. So don't seek praise is what I'm trying to say. Praise is a great feeling. But ultimately, if you really want to learn and grow, you have to be willing to accept the errors and your ways and learn to strengthen them and correct them. But anyway, I'm rambling and I digress, and I'm trying to draw and give you a little coaching at the same time. That's the art coach in me. Okay, so here we go. We've gotten our sketch to where we want it. Now, I'm going to actually stop here because I think I've given you enough information to work with. I want to see you get into this process as well. It's a three step process really. It's laying out your gestures, and then then it's finding your you know, anatomy and your proportions, and then it's erasing, four steps, and then it's refinement, you're repeating. The last step on refining, you're going to be erasing, refining, erasing, refining. But once you get your information down, your proportions, your blueprint, it becomes much, much easier. Hang in there. Keep going. We'll stop here, and I will see you in the next one. Actually, if you want to see the way that this turned out when it was colored, let's see if I can show you that real quick. Go into my gallery. This is it. This is how it turned out when it was colored. It was pretty fun. Yeah, I have a few of these and What I want you to do is just maybe find a couple of sketches that you like. You can find them online, you can find maybe you can look through your old art and just try to draw them in your own style and replicate them, but keep it loose and start from scratch. So do exactly what I did, find the gestures, find the proportions, and then start refining. And it looks terrible at the end, it's okay. You did it. You put the practice in, you applied it, and you learned from it. So keep doing that over and over again. That's exactly how I learned. You know, I'm self taught. And the only way you can get better. Even though I'm instructing you and I'm helping you, and I'm your coach and instructor. The only way you're really going to learn is by implementing what the information I'm giving you and repeating it, and that's it. Okay. So I'll see you in the next one. I hope that this lesson benefited you, and hang in there. Keep going. I'm really proud of you. You've made it this far. I'll see you in the next one. 7. Female Studies: Face, Lips, Eyes, etc: Hey, welcome to this section, which will be So this one will be a study and observation of the female head, face, lips, eyes, all that good stuff. So let's just dive right in. All right. So we'll start over here with the eyes. So a couple of things that I keep in mind, and I want you to keep in mind when you're drawing eyes is basically an eye is a circular spherical shape, right? And you know, you can Put your eyeball here. You can put it here. You can put it down here, you can put it up here. But you want to keep it in your mind. You want to make sure that you realize that your eye is more spherical. And so when you're drawing your eye from different angles, you want to keep that in mind that even though it appears as a circle, as you're going away from the camera, which is us, things are going to start turning into ovals, right? And you're not going to see the whole thing. So what do I mean by this, and let's go ahead and give you a demo. Actually, I think I have a one here. Let's see. Okay. So drawing an head on looks kind of like this, right? So I just drew a subtle kind of a sultry, and then I went over it with the black. And so we have kind of an shape. Now, the way I went about doing this is I just, you know, created a shape, something along these lines. Really loose and really quick. Put the eyeball, the iris here, and then the pupil here, keep it really rough. Then depending on your style, a lot of people like to draw heavy eyelashes, which seems to be a trend, so I'm not opposed to it, and then you can put your eye brow over. This is a really quick way to draw an eye. If we wanted to you know tighten this up a little bit, what we could do is lower the capacity, add another layer, choose a different color, then we can just dive right in. Now this is where the actual drawing comes in. We have our information as you know, if you've been watching my courses, I'm always an advocate of applying information first, then you work and build off that information. Now that we have our information, we know essentially where everything goes, and so it's up to us to add our own style, finesse it into the way that we like it. Okay. And do the actual drawing. So when you're drawing your eyeballs in, you can remember that there's going to be a glare, so you can add a circle here, circle here. You can even add some circles inside if you want. This just creates the element of glare. You can shade this in. Then what I like to do is since this eyelash is full and it's actually casting shadow. I'll show you. Let me go ahead and color this in. And, keep in mind, we're doing this very, very quickly just for the sake of illustration and instruction. But when you're drawing your eyes, what you can do is you can remember that there's going to be shade here because the eyelashes are heavy and they're conveying and casting shadow down below. Then what you can do is you can just start drawing some lines in fading them. And this is kind of a rendering technique. Okay. And then with the eyebrows, you can keep everything uniform. Study the heck out of eyebrows, look at magazines, look at models, look at your friends, look at your family. Understand how eyebrows and eyelashes work. This is just a quick method of drawing an eye. Let's see what else we have in this one. I'll get rid of this and I'll get rid of that. We will add Well, first, let's go to this female over here to the left. What we've done what I've done is I've captured the essence of her profile. We'll do it again. But this is how she would look if you were drawing her in a comic book style. Now, generally, I don't really trace, but this one for showing you how things work, I thought it was a good idea. I'll create another layer, and let's just do again. We'll get rid of the one that I have from before. And so when you're drawing the female form, one of the things that you want to do is this. You want to capture your shapes. So you can see that, Okay. Am I on the right layer? Let's go to instruct. Okay. You can see that she has a long neck, right? Her collar bone goes inward. Here's her clavicle in the middle. And from that clavicle, we have this neck muscle that goes up behind the ear. The ear is lower. If you're doing a eye line, The ear starts right about here, and just draw in your ear. And then when I'm drawing, typically, what I'll do is I'll create a line like this on a profile shot, and you'll see when I do my profile lesson. This kind gives me an indication of where I want her eyes to be. And then I'll draw a V shape here. And then remember her head is a spherical shape. So we're curving this eye the eyebrows around. And then we're putting in her nose. And then underneath her nose, there's going to be a curve for her lip. Now, from her tip of her nose down to the bottom of her chin is a good way to measure your lips. So you can make sure that they're all flowing with that and then connect to her chin. And maybe I'll give you kind of a cheat sheet where you can see what I mean by the certain angles. Because when you start locking these measurements, you can almost start doing this stuff blindfolded. You know where things go, and it's a great feeling because your confidence level goes up. And you make a lot less mistakes. You can also pinpoint when things don't look right. Here we go. We have our profile shot. Now let's erase this or let's go ahead and get rid of that. Let's go ahead to our next one up here and I'll show you. Again, we have this How do we do that? Well, a couple of things. We want to establish her eye. From this side, the eye is going to look like this. Now, she's got heavy eyelashes. And then her eye brow goes up and like this. Then bridge of our nose starts here a little bubble. Now, when I'm drawing, I like to draw a circle there. It's kind of a comic book thing. Pop this out. You can see that everything just comes together. Now, Okay. There's going to be in, out, and out. And what I mean by that is you see this is going out in is going to curve out in out out. Pay attention to this. It seems tedious, but once you master how things work, it becomes very, very easy later. I know that underneath her bottom lip, it's going to curve in. Then it's going to curve out for her chin. Then this chin is going to go up into her jaw. Then this is going to go up. Then we're going to go ahead and draw, you know, where her ear would fall. And then depending on how you want to draw her eyes, you can draw like that. You can shade in these eyelashes. You can add her ear details. You can even put in earrings. You can do just kind of a loop. You can change anything you want. This is your world. She's just living in it. Okay. So Okay. Now, a couple of things I notice with her, the highlights of the lighting. You can see that she has this curve here. I think that's really good to really nose things like that because then you realize, this is where her eye socket is, if she were a skeleton, it would look something like that. Her nose would probably stop right around here. And then she'd have this cheek bones that would connect. Then she'd have this jaw bone. And you're just breaking it down. When you study anatomy enough and you know where things go, it becomes really fun to identify this stuff. I'm going to go ahead and backtrack a little bit. I'll even take this one off. We have the basics here. And really, at this point, if this was your art, and I don't really recommend tracing too much, but if you're just learning, it's okay. You know, a lot of artists, if you're familiar with Neil Adams, he will tell you, trace from magazines until you understand it. And so it's not a horrible thing to do. And with today's technology, you can trace like this. But I don't want you to hinder your ability to actually learn how to draw and to draw things on your own. So if you can do this and you can learn and you can memorize things, that's fine, but don't let this become a crutch. Because it can. It can become very tempting for you to just stick with this method. But for me, for the sake of teaching, I thought this would be really good. We have our human form. We have the female profile shot here. I think this is a really good example. I really liked the reason I use this one is because in general, the model that I found, she has a comic book que face. It really worked. Let's jump over to a few more things on this lesson. Without making it last too long. Let's see. A couple of other things I did was, I used some references from J Scott Campbell, which is who is one of my top influences growing up, he's got a really cool style of art that I really love he keeps his art very consistent. And so let's go ahead and break down a few things that he does. I'm going to switch over to blue as you can see, Everything looks very repeatable, very formulated when you look at the style here. So we have the y line, right? Ey line. Now, I drew in these lines myself because it's a good way to encapsulate where things flow. You have the center line here, and then you have these lines going this way. You have the center line here, and then you have the center line going up, so it's a good way. And then from the ear lobe or the center of the ear going down to the lip, I like to use this measurement as a way to place things. Then from the outside of the lip, drop straight down, and then we have our chin. Then from our chin, if we draw the lip line straight across like this, this is where our draw line usually ends up. It's really cool to use these measurements, and then you can take them with you on any other sketch that you do in the future. You can see the center of the ear, go down to the lip. You can even draw a line from the going down to the outside of mouth like this. Same thing over here. Then we have our chin. We have our jaw line, goes up at an angle, put in our ears. This is generally speaking, this is how you're going to formulate all of your female heads or even male head shots for that matter. Same thing. This is one that I created, find your center line. Find the bottom of your eyes. Go out like this, find a center. Go from the center of the ear to the mouth, drop this straight down. And I would even close. I wouldn't even make that chin or that cheek out that much. I would actually tighten it up here. And I would actually lower this ear, I think. If I were redrawing this. These are the things that you want to catch while you're drawing, just a quick study. As you know, as you can see, we're putting all this stuff into practice. With lips, let's go ahead and find my p 1 second. Here we go. Lowpacity of these lips. In general, when you're drawing lips, let's go ahead and go back to red. A couple of things to keep in mind. Keep it really, really simple initially. Draw a happy face. Draw a line straight across. On each side, draw a little indention from the center like this, right? Go ahead and draw a triangle like that. Then imagine the thickness of your lips. Now, those are going to vary. There's no right or wrong way to do this. Now, from the end of the curve of the lip, draw a line connecting down on each side, right? Now, you can just draw a bottom lip so you can measure down how far you want to be, and you can connect it here, or another thing you can do. Is you can draw a diamond, right? So you can change and alter the shape. And same thing on the side. So we have our lips that are going in this angle. So our center of the mouth is here, just like here. But now we're going since it's a profile, We have our triangle steel, so our triangle will go like that. If we wanted to do a diamond, we could like that. See how the shape changes though, since it's turning and twisting to the other direction away from us. Boom, chin, curve, Curve. I like to keep things as simple as possible. Another one here. This one is a curve like this. Same thing. Now, since this one is further away from us, we're not going to see the end of the lip, but we can go ahead to the center, put in a triangle. We can put in our top indention, connect this over here. Curve it, keep it shorter since it's further away from us. And there we go. Now you can also draw this. And then if you draw your lips, kind of, you know, the diamond, you can go inside and imagine that these are teeth here. But that's, you know, It's a very high risk to take because you don't want your female sketch or any sketch to look to toothy. Yeah, so this is the basics of the lips. I say, practice as much as you can. But just to kind of re emulate what I was doing and show you the conclusion of this is really easy. So if you're drawing a smile, go to the center of that smile, Now, you can keep the lips a little tighter, like this. You can add in a triangle here just to show slightly open. And boom. You have it. You can also, you know, alter this and changes as much as you want. Let's see if I have some more room here. Okay. Let's say we just want a cocked up mouth like this. So we have, you know, she's giving kind of a smug kind of just kind of a smirk, right? So here's one end. Here's the other. Go down the center. There you go. And just get used to practicing these and moving these around as much as you can. And if you want to show kind of a toothy smile or a big smile or a grin, one of the ways I learned to do that was just to draw That's your smile. You have your teeth inside, and we're just breaking it down. Don't worry. We won't never draw teeth like this. Then we're drawing the bottom lip, connecting it. Draw the top lip, connecting it. Then what you would do from this point is you would just start refining and shaping things until they look good. I'll go ahead and erase this a little bit. Hops. Now we have our blueprint, as I always say, our information. Then I can come in and say, Oh, well, let's refine this. Let's make it look a little bit better. So I can go to the center Okay. And now I'm just doing the actual drawing part, right? Then a lot of times when you're drawing a mouth and you're showing teeth, it's good to create shadow on the sides. And then just show in the just a hint of where the teeth would be. So you're not drawing in the actual teeth. And then you can come in a curve. Okay. Anything over here, you can add a little shade and pop in the bottom lip, there you go. You're creating a smile. Now there's all kinds of ways to do this. There's no exact way. What I always recommend is just keep studying what you see. Study people smiles, study everything. If we want to change this here to a smile, he and Just alter things a little bit. Smile, maybe put a little mole here. And there you go. So like I say, micro adjustments can lead to macro improvements, and it doesn't take much. Just a slight move. I hope that this lesson is helping you to understand a little bit more. For me, it's really fun, and this is how I've taught myself. This is how I learned. Studying other artists, studying real people, and just applying everything I've learned. So if you want to copy of this as a PDF or something just for reference, let me know, and I can make that happen. All right, well, I hope you've enjoyed this one. It's been kind a long lesson. But hey, it's worth it. All right. I'll see you in the next one. 8. Headshots Front Facing View : Okay, let's go ahead and approach a couple of faces, and we'll first start with a head on face, and I'll show you how I approach my rendering. So as you can see, we have a really basic and quick outline of a front facing female. And basically, all I was trying to do is just capture the parameters of our face the information I needed so that I can proceed further. So Let's just go ahead and dive in. We'll start with our eyes. When we're drawing eyes, what we want to do is we're constantly trying to keep things as symmetrical as we can. They don't have to be perfectly symmetrical, just close enough. I'll do a division line here, and then I'll just start on her right eye facing us or our left eye. What I'll do is I'll just go ahead and work up a shape. Now, keep in mind this This rendering that we're doing now, this is basically just another step in the process where we're going to go ahead and erase it or lower the opacity and redraw it, if that's what we would be doing if we're finalizing the artwork. Then what I'm going to do is once I have these eyes shaped in. Now, since we are using digital, you can go ahead and capture this and flip it over and move it, not quite like that, and you can move it over here. That is something that people tend to do. More of an old school free style traditional artist. So even though I'm using technology, I like to draw in a traditional way. I will use tricks and stuff like that, occasionally, but it's not really necessary for me. If you want to do that, by all means, go for it. It's okay. It's really just preference. I have the two eyes in. Now I will establish where I want her eyeballs to be. You can have her looking over here or you can have her looking down. It's really up to you to decide what you want. I'm just going to have her looking ahead on. You know what I might do is I might go ahead and just give her an eye lid here. Okay. And how much of an eyelid is really at your discretion. The things I'm doing are very subjective. There's no right or wrong way. There's just foundational rules that you can follow and you can break. As long as you know them, you can do whatever you want with them. Then what I'll do here is I'll go ahead and start working in an eyeball, just shaping it in. I'm going to have it looking directly towards us. You can see that on either side of the eyeball, we have about an equal distance to the edge of the eye. And then what you can do is you can just determine how big you want the pupil to be. Then you can go ahead and work your way down. I can either jump to the eyebrow or I can jump down to the nose. I think what I'll do is I'll just jump down to the nose real quick. I'd like to do a little kind of a what is it eclipse or like an oval shape for the top of the nose and then I'll come down. I'll find the bottom of the nose. I'll just do a shape like this, and then I will imagine her nostrils being somewhere around here. And then I'll go I'll just indicate the edge of her nose. And then underneath, I'll give her that kind of indention that falls under the nose above the lip. And then I'll go when I'm drawing, I'm always jumping back and forth between objects just to keep everything in somewhat of a balance. Then I'll jump down to the lips. I know that the mouth line is somewhere around here. This line here. I'll go ahead and erase that. What I'll do to show you just a very basic go to style and way of drawing lips is I'll just go to the center and I'll draw a triangle. Then I can even do a triangle facing down like this. And then underneath this, I can do I can measure out how big I want her lips. Now, there's no rule to this because everyone has different sized lips. I'm not a big proportional rule guy because you can be in some instances, but don't enslave yourself to those types of rules. Now I'll go up and draw her upper lip. And then on the outside, I'll draw a little indention. And then I will measure down, even if you want to go inside here and do a fine line going straight across. It can indicate here and you can do a Okay. So almost shows that she's got, you know, you can see her teeth inside the lips here. It doesn't hurt your drawing. It's okay. Or we can just leave it blank. And then from here, what I'll do is I'll just jump down to how where I think I want her chin to be. Now, obviously, I don't want it too far down here. So I will just go to where I drew this bottom of this oval here. I'll just do a soft chin and leave it right about here. Then I'll go to her ear line and I'll go to the outside of her head and I'm just going to I'll draw this line and I'll raise it to show you. I'm imagining that her cheek bones go like this, on either side. You can erase these lines. Just imagine that. Then I'm going to draw her ear right around here. Same thing over here. Then I'll just do the shape of the ear. Not to intricate at this point, we're just placing things. Then down below, I'll just draw her face going down and then we can curve it towards the chin. Okay. And then I will go ahead and add an eyebrow, let's say, up here. Just shape it in. Nothing too detailed at this point. These eyebrows can be large or small. It's really up to you. I give you free rein to create the character that you desire because we all have our specific attractions to certain styles and faces. Whatever you're being prompted to draw, go ahead and follow that. You can just use the direction I'm giving you to create whatever you want to create. Then what I'll do is I'll just go ahead and find her neck. I'll just establish her neck inwards like this. Okay. Now I imagine that she has her collarbone going like that. And from the center of the collarbone, I'll imagine her neck, the muscle that goes up alongside the neck. Now, you don't have to draw this in dark. Just draw it in there for your own view. And then We'll go up to her top of her head. Now, we're going to imagine that she's looking pretty good at this point. We're just going to round off her head. Now we can add hair, we can do whatever we want. It's up to us. We can also go ahead and start working on some details I just shade in these eyebrows. We can go ah fill in. Okay. Balls. I like to do a little reflection on the bottom too. Now you can change this, you can put this wherever you want. Don't get too tied into just doing a one way experiment. There's so many variables, there's so many ways to do this. I don't want you to get locked into one method because that's what happens when you're learning you'll see one way to do something, and then you'll think that that's the only way. Really, part of art is creativity and creativity is just taking what you've learned and coming up with different combinations and creating different combinations to serve different purposes. And it also ultimately expresses your own personal style. Now, you can show you can show an indication of the nose if you want, like maybe here. I don't like to draw too much on females because I think less is more. I like to keep it kind of elusive and leave a lot of it to our imaginations. Now I'm just hollowing out her ears, just placing things. There's no right or wrong way to draw an ear, just make it look, look for the shape of an ear and study your own ears, study other people's ears. It's one of those things where a lot of people don't pay attention to ears too much, don't overthink it. Then you could add some shadow underneath her face here. You can imagine that this here would be filled with some shadow. A Bing. There we go. And we can even go further and do other details like you can you can add some reflections on her lips, you know, up to you. You can shade this in. Okay. You can put some shadow underneath her nose. These are all up to you to decide if you want to establish a light source, whatnot, it's up to you. You can even give her an indication of cheekbone. It will age a little bit, but if you wanted to, you could, you can keep it soft. And what I mean by keep it soft is don't draw a angular line, keep it smooth and curved, just to give her an elegant look. And there you have it. Okay. So there's a head on facing and you can come back and make adjustments you can see, well, maybe this head isn't perfectly symmetrical. It's okay because generally, you're going to add hair. That's why I didn't emphasize too much on the top portion of our head. Then what we'll do is we'll stop here. Let's take a look at this one more time. And let's just go ahead and point out the things that we just covered. We covered the eyes, the nose, the mouth, the ears, the eyebrows, and the placement. First thing we did was we established a horizontal line. Now, it doesn't have to be completely straight. I can't curve like you're wrapping it around the head like this. Then once we did that, we had our center line here. We try to keep within those guidelines. Now, after that, we tried to draw our eyes as close to the same size as possible and with the space almost of one eye in between. From here to here should be pretty close to this distance here. Then let's go ahead and backtrack this a little bit. What else can I say about this? I think this is enough for you to chew on and practice with. What we'll do next is we'll jump over to the three quarter view. So practice, keep doing this a few more times. Then once you feel like you have the hang of it, do it a few more times. And you get creative, draw thinner eyebrows. If you look at what I had before, let's erase this, and I think I had this before. Looks nothing like it. Just so you can really go the extra mile, you can create anything you want. For instance, if you want to I'll just do this one more time, really quickly. But let's say we wanted to give her more of a smaller eye appeal. You can do that. Okay. You can give her a indication of a nose here. You can give her a smile. When you're drawing smiles, let's say, I don't know if a smile would fit this I guess we can try. Smile, just take this line here, curve it up just like you're drawing a happy face. But then at the top of that, draw a line almost straight across. And then start working in your details, throw an upper lip here. Bottom lip. And then imagine that she has these teeth showing. So don't make her look toothy. Don't try to draw too much on the teeth. Just indicate where they would be. I always love saying that less is more because I really truly believe that. You don't want to add too much when it comes to drawing female characters. It really takes away from them if you do. Now, there could be some instances where maybe the mood is set in a dark place and you might have to draw a lot of shadows. That's okay. You can add a little bit more details. But generally speaking, don't draw too many lines. Every time you do you age, your your sketch, you make her look older or, you have more room for error, the more you do. There you go. You can even give her like this a curved eyebrow here and then raise this one up. You can see that just by moving eyebrows around and adding a little bit of smile, you're creating more expressions. Okay. Okay, I think you get the gist of what I'm trying to say. All right. So on the next one, we will come back and we'll work on the three quarter view, and then we will work on the profile view. Okay? I'll see you in the next lesson. Keep up the good work, and if you have any questions, just send them directly to me. I'll see you in the next one. 9. 3/4 Female Headshot: I Welcome back. This one, what we're going to do is work on the three quarter, that's three quarter three quarters view. And what we can do is we're just going to keep on the same layer. Let's establish a couple of things here. When we're drawing three quarters, it's similar to drawing head on. The only thing is you're turning the head away from you. What that means is things that are closer to you are going to appear a little bit slightly larger you're going to see a little bit more of them and things are further away are going to appear a little bit smaller and you're going to see slightly less. It's a perspective slash four shortening done but without having to do a grid. For instance, if we did do a grid, let's just go to another layer. Let's say that she's in a box and nobody likes to be put in a box, but for the sake of demonstration, let's do it. It's not the best box, but let's just say that she's got this She's in this box. Actually, this is not the best way to draw the box for this one. Let's start over. The better way to draw this box would be to imagine let's do a van point here. You don't have to draw like this, but I'm just showing you what's happening here. Okay. So we have this vanishing point and then what we want to do is we want to draw the box like this. And you know what we can do is make this kind of a two point perspective. So from this point here, Okay. Now, I'll do a whole class on perspective so that you're not so confused. But you can see these lines intersecting and you can see how things are coming together. What we can do at this point is we can establish a couple of things, so we can find her let's do it in blue, so it stands out. The front of her face could be like this, draw like this. Then then we go work back this way. And it's just in this cube. If we want to continue this. But anyway, now that we have this cube, what we would do is we would go ahead and center it center here and establish where things go. Without getting too confused, I'm going to go ahead and jump back to the other layer we're working on. And we're going to go ah and That was the thought process. Now the actual drawing process. The difference between a thought process and the implementation process is when you're thinking, you're always trying to think in perspective, in shapes, angles, moods, you're keeping all that at the forefront of your mind while you're drawing. Let's go ahead and fast track this and we'll do the same thing. We'll go back to this layer. Okay. We'll go ahead and that horizon line wrapping around our head. We'll find that center line. Then we want to space the eyes apart. Let's go ahead and draw these eyes in a little bit more. That doesn't have to be perfect. Okay. When we're drawing the eyes, since this eyeball on the outside of our face is going away from us, we're not going to see too much of the outside, so it's going to come in, come out. Depending on our head shape. Then one thing you can do is you can draw something like this just to keep everything in alignment. This keeps everything cohesive. Then we'll draw on her nose. Now, remember I did that little oval ellipsis type thing. We'll do the same thing on the nose here. We'll indicate her nostril. Now this nostril we're going to see more of, but the one that's further away, we probably wouldn't see much. Now, since things are protruding further away from us now, they're going towards this angle. We're going to pop the mouth out this way. Let's say, That will put the center of the lips here. Remember we drew this line and then I drew a triangle going up, so it'd go like that now. I'd be more to the side. Then we can draw in a bottom lip. Make sure this lip wraps around. It's following all these lines, and then the upper lip, Okay. Now, we don't have to keep this triangle the same size. We can open it or close it. We can we can make her smile, we can keep it completely closed. I'll show you different variations on lips in another lesson. Okay. Now, let's go ahead and find some curves. Drop down. Give her a chin. Pull this back to her, pop the jaw. Now, up here, what I'm going to do is just indicate her head size. Then I'm going to pop in your ear now in my earlier drawing, it looks like I put the ear a little too close, so I'm going to pop it back a little and I'm going to lower at. I'm going to put the ear right around here. We're just finding our shapes. I'm going to throw in the neck here. I can see a few things that I've gotten off a little bit where I come back and rework them. But this is just really information we're throwing down here. The ear, I'd pop in the shape. Okay. And then what I would do is just place your eyebrows right around here. Same thing. Now the other eyebrow that's further away from us, we're not going to see that much of it. Another thing, just like we did here in that first demonstration is we can show a little bit of eye lid. Let's go ahead and divide a little bit here, same thing. Sorry, I'm getting silent. I'm just when I draw, I tend to get lost time stops, and I'm just getting in the zone a little bit. Sometimes I slip in there. I hope you do too. There we go. I feel like I have this down to a point where I can work with this. If we wanted to, we can go ahead and lighten it up. We can probably get rid of the under drawing here or at least reduce opacity. Then we have enough to work with. Then I can draw another layer. Okay. And at this point, you can just decide where do you want her eyes to be looking? Do you want her to be looking at the camera? Do you want her to be looking away? These are little personal decisions that you'll make as the artist. For the sake of this lesson, let's just keep her looking at us. I will just place her eyeball a little bit further towards us. So you're going to see a little bit more room on the inside of her eye as opposed to the. Then on the opposite eye, you're going to see more room on the outside of the eye as opposed to the inside. So something like that. Let's go ahead and indicate where her eyelids would be like that. Then we can draw in a little bit more of her eyebrows. Put some eyelashes. Curve out the nose. As you're drawing, you're just thinking, what would make this sketch a little bit more appealing to me, and you're just personalizing it to your own preferences. I really and I'll probably say this a lot throughout our lessons. I can't overemphasize it enough. Study real people, study, actors, study your friends, study just study life and study the people that you see out and about. Look at their facial structures, look at the things that stand out to you the most. Everyone looks a little bit different We all have the same foundations and the same kind of archetype and concerns of, you know, we have two eyes, two ears, and, you know, all that. But everyone's shaped slightly different. And some people look a little bit more exotic. Some people look, you know, a cartoony and you have to determine and decide what you like, and what fits your preference, and then find that certain style and just go with it and carry it with you. Because your art becomes somewhat like handwriting. The more you draw in a certain way, the more it's establishing your style, and then what will happen is people will start recognizing your art just by the style. I'm sure you can recognize some of your favorite artists just by the art without even seeing their signature or their credits. It's the same thing with you. You might not notice it because it's so subjective and the nuances are so small to pick up. By guarantee you that if you look at your old artwork, you'll know that it's yours just right away, just by the style, and other people might know it's yours too. By the way you're presenting it, and these are things that you want to keep in mind as you're drawing. You not just trying to sketch a female face, you're also trying to implement your own finesse, your own personal style to it. With that said, now we have a three quarter view. Just a demonstration. Now, if we want, we can go ahead and give her a little tipple here. We can give her can fill in the pupils a little bit more, give her a reflection over here. And like I said earlier, I'd like to give one at the bottom sometimes. You can give her really thick eyelashes. One of my favorite artists Resting piece, Michael Turner. He was really well known for just drawing really, really thick eyelashes. And he pulled it off. It's amazing. He kept his women looking very feminine and sultry. I really like that about his style. It was really a fantasy slash comic book style combined. Okay. Fantasy art, I should say. Okay. There we go. We have a three quarter view. And just to recap, all we did was turn the head away from us, right? And then we kept everything on the same plane. Things that are further away from us here might appear less or we will see less of them because they're turned away from us. For instance, like the lip, if you can see the portion of the lip we're seeing more of. This eye we're seeing more of. This ear, obviously we're seeing, we're not seeing her other ear. Basically, this whole side of the face, we don't see on the other side. Those are things to keep in mind when you're drawing three quarters. A lot of people struggle with three quarters. I find them the easiest, but I think what happens is people get a little lost in the placement of eyes. But if you're keeping everything along these guidelines that we initially started out with, and that's the reason I did these little lines in the background, what is it called the drawing guides. I did that just so you guys can see that everything kind of falls in the same place. And if you're drawing digitally, I would recommend that you draw using these guidelines at least initially. Now, typically when I'm drawing, I draw on traditional paper and with pencil. And so I don't have guidelines. Occasionally, I'll draw you grid lines or perspective lines prior to a sketch. But after a while, you can just eyeball it and you can You can finagle where things will go. I know I see that very freely and you might just be learning right now, but trust me, it does get easier because repetition just creates more muscle memory and you will be able to just recall where things go a lot faster as you keep practicing. Now, what we'll do on the next lesson is I'll show you how to draw a profile sketch, which profile just meets side view, in my opinion, it's the easiest, but also there's something about the profile that I like the most. It's very subtle. You can make your characters look very unique. And even though they're not typically looking at you, a lot of times they're looking straight ahead, you can add a lot of character and flavor to them. So that's it. We'll leave us right here. And if you have any questions on this lesson, Go ahead and message to me directly. I'm happy to answer your questions, or if there's anything that you would like me to explain further, I certainly will. And keep practicing, don't stop, and I'll see you in the next one. 10. Female Profile Headshot: All right. So welcome back and in this lesson, we are going to do the female head shot in a profile view. And basically, profile just meets side view. So a quick way to look at this is, let's say, A right where are we? Let's go to Yeah, we can use the same layer. Okay. So I'll give you the breakdown really quick. I'd like to start with the thought process. Now, thought process doesn't necessarily mean the drawing process. It just means what's happening in my mind prior to drawing and while I'm drawing. These are the things I'm keeping in my mind. When it comes to drawing a perspective, or I'm sorry, a profile sketch, what you're trying to do is just keep everything in one direction. The last one that we did here was a two point perspective. This is just one point, and basically what you're doing is imagine a square right here. We got this square, we find our center, find our center, yada yada. We want to keep everything inside here. We would draw this oval here, draw this here, divide in half and there you go. Then we have our eye line. These are the thoughts. Now, you don't have to draw this. This is just what's going through my mind. When I'm placing the when I'm kind of placing the proportions in my thoughts prior to going on paper. This is what I'm thinking. So let's go ahead and get rid of this and we'll dive in and kind of I'll show you in real time, how I approach a profile shot. Let's go ahead and lower the capacity on this. Jump to this layer, we'll go back to the red pencil. And, so a couple of things that stand out to me the most on these is when I'm starting, I like to draw a egg, like this. Now you can draw a circle if you want, but when I'm drawing sideways, I like to draw an oval egg. Now I'll divide that egg almost in half and then I'll draw a line like this as a center line where I want her eyes to be placed. Then from the edge this corner here, the edge of the egg, I'll just draw a line straight down. And then I'll draw a chin, then that chin will go to the jaw. The jaw will angle back a little bit. Now, I could tell that her ear is a little highly placed, so I'll drop it down. So I'm just placing everything. Then I will draw in her neck from behind. I'll just imagine her muscles here. Now, if you want to know where all these muscles are, even though it's a male perspective or a male anatomy course, I did put out a course called simplified superhero anatomy, and it shows and you can use the same principles when drawing the head or drawing the body too, although the female body is going to differ as you can see in these lessons, but the rules are still the same. So once we have this established, what we want to do is draw on her eyes. What I like to do is I like to step back a little bit around this distance, and I like to establish her eyes there. When I'm drawing from the side, what I like to do is I like to go from an angle. So imagining an angle like that. Then I'll draw almost like a v and then I'll draw a circle there indicating her eye. Now, pull back, and then we have our ear here. Then going forward, we can right down the center where the eye would fall. I will do this where her nose meets her forehead. Pop in and then remember the lips or oval. I would just do the same thing. Just put an oval here. Draw on the nose, draw on the nostril. Now, when you're drawing from the side, what you're trying to realize is that the lips are protruding away from the face, so it's not flat. You put these lips out. What I'll do is I'll just go out to about Not quite as far as the nose, but let's imagine that this is the edge of her lip. What I'll do is from this outside corner, I'll just draw a line to where her chin is. I'll try and keep things in congruits with this as a measuring device. Okay. And then underneath this lip, I'll make a chin protruding out. And we still get the triangle. Remember in the lips, we would draw a we had a line, we draw a triangle in the middle. You can draw one down below if you want. You don't have to upper lip, lower lip. Well, now we're drawing the triangle from the side, so it would look more like this. Triangle you just have to learn how to change the shapes and wrap them around. You're thinking of this character in three dimensions. Even though we're drawing on a two dimensional surface, we wanted to appear three dimensional. We'll lower the opacity and we'll redraw this a little bit. Then I'll go to the middle over the shapes over ear. Doesn't have to be too intricate. Now her eyebrows. Now one thing is the front of her eyes. Remember, when we're looking at the eyebrows, they're wrapping around the head, they're following the shape of the head. We want to keep that in mind when we're drawing a profile shot too. We know that if your eyebrows start here, they're wrapping around. Keep that in mind. Then maybe they're going to end right around here, but they're wrapping around. Now, if she has really thick eyelashes, let's say that we divide again, but some eyelashes. We might see the eyelashes popping out on the other side too. Jump over to the outside of her nose, the bridge of her nose, and then just draw in where the lashes would be. And this is a really quick and easy way to draw a profile view of a head. Once I learned this, I loved it. I was like, I got this a moment, and I realize it's not that hard. It's a lot of fun and you can just make it look stylistic. You can do whatever you want. Now that we have this, the same general rules apply as every other sketch. We can go ahead and say we lose this we delete the under sketch and she looks good. Let's go ahead and lower the opacity. And then we'll go ahead and re drawer. While I'm redrawing, I'll just recap. This will be our recap. When you're redrawing. The thing that I was really focused on was keeping her this eye at an angle. I like it that way because this looks a little boring when you draw a head on. With men, you can draw a head on. I don't know, but there's something about drawing with females. It just makes them look a little bit more exotic and interesting. That's just my take. Again, I always encourage draw anyway you want to earn the foundations, learn the rules, and then break them. Now I'm adding some eyelashes. I'm wrapping her eyebrows around. I'm going to go ahead and draw the curve of her nose. I'm going to pop the nose out a little bit, give her a nostril here. Now, we're not going to see the other nostril. Indicate the top of her nose, and you can still do that little oval. Now, depending on how big you want her lips or how small you want them, that's up to you. We all have specific tastes. I'll draw the triangle facing away. I will draw the top part of the lip connecting down to where this mouth line goes. And then I'll do the same here. Then underneath, I'll slant it inwards, just to show that the lips are protruding away from the face. So you have the slant on the top and the slant on the bottom, and then I'll immediately bounce back out and give her a chin. Okay. And once we get to the edge of her jaw, I'll just start sliding that upwards. Now I'll go up at an angle rather than going straight up. Then I'll draw in her ear. Again, ears are another one of those things that you can draw in all shapes or sizes. And then I will draw on the under portion of her neck, chin connecting to her neck. Hoops we almost lost it here. And then I will draw the back portion of her neck. And I'll just give a slight indication of this neck muscle. And then I'll just finish the top of her head. Okay. And then on the side further away from us, which would be the opposite side of her face, I'll just draw an indication of eyelashes. And then we have it. Now, if we want to draw on her eyeball. Maybe I'll draw on a few shadows here under her ears. Then we just decide where we want her looking. Do we want her looking at us? Do we want her looking away from us? That's really up to us as the artist, right? So we can try a couple of different variations. One variation would be towards us, so we can just draw circle, draw on another circle for her people, and then inside that. I can even draw another circle up here, just indicating a little bit of glare. And if we don't like that, we can have it facing forward. Now, if we're facing forward, we don't want to draw a circle. We want to draw a captain America shield or let's just say oval shape like this. It's an ellipse. Then here, we just put in her eyeball, Okay. You wn't see it too much. But it's really up to us. We can always mess around, try a few things that's about drawing with pencils or even digitally, we can erase things, we can try new things really at our own discretion. So there we have it. We have our profile view. If we were drawing hair, what I might do is just imagine a hair line. Now, everyone has different hair lines. I'd probably bounce it a curve towards her flowing with this shape and then bounce it back and then just flow like that. Now, there's no right or wrong way. Everyone has different hair lines. And we will have a section here on hair. I'll show you how to place how I would approach placing hair. Whether we do it on these exact sketches or we have new ones, that's to be determined. There we go. Now we have our profile shop, recap it was really easy. Maybe I make it look easy. But I'm telling you that if you practice, you'll get it and it'll come easier and easier. Every time you try, it will become second nature. I did for me. It does for my other students, I believe it will for you, if you have any questions or anything, always feel free to reach out to me. I'm pretty easy to talk to and I try to get back to you as quick as I can. I am a really busy guy. I'm always creating classes or doing commissions or published work. But I will always check my messages here or you can DM me on social media. It's really up to you. You can find me anywhere. Explain who you are and what you're looking for, and I'll try and help you. Okay. Okay. With that said, we'll go ahead and move on to the next lesson for now, study these heads, try and get them mastered to where you have a really good grasp and understanding of how things work, and show me what you come up with. Once you've done a few and you feel confident. Um, go ahead and post a couple or send them to me, whatever you want to do. Let's see what you're working with. And, you know, let's find your strengths and your weaknesses I you' having a sticking point or whatever. We want to get you on track to becoming a better version of your current artist self, right? We're trying to level up. And this is something that's always going to be a constant, even me. I'm always learning. So don't be discouraged. Keep going, and I'll see you in the next one. 11. A Quick Study Guide : Hey, guys. This is just a quick recap of drawing a head from the side. I made this kind of graph. And really, I'm going to keep this one really short and sweet because I'm sending this over to you. Just the rules of thumb to keep in mind, let's just go ahead and create this line here represents actually, you know, let me create another layer. All right. This line here is our our main it's the line that I want you to keep in mind when you're drawing your lips to your nose, your lips, and your chin. From this point of your nose, all the way down, these are almost going to be in perfect alignment. It's a really good way to measure your face. Now, from this part of the lip, I like to drop it straight down from the eye like this, so I know where the mouth is ending, right? And then from here, I like to just kind of draw a line. This is the under drawing for me so I can shape things going to the center of the ear, and then we have our eye line, and then remember our eyebrows that kind curve in like this. Because you're imagining that they're curving around because our face is a spherical shape, right? It's got volume and dimensions. So yeah. That's what I want you to keep in mind. Other than that, I think we have a whole lesson on this and when it comes ahead, so I draw the front facing the three quarter, and the side view profile like this. So I'll go more into detail with that, but I wanted you to have this as kind of a cheat sheet to keep as your reference. And I hope it helps and that's it. That concludes this one. It was a real quick one. I'll try and do a few more like these supplemental videos to kind of guide you along. And if you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me. I'll see you in the next one. 12. Let's Draw Eyes!: All right. So welcome to we'll call this a draw along segment. And this one, we will focus on the eyes. So what we'll do is I'll show you a couple methods for drawing eyes, and then I want you to kind of follow along. Now, if you feel more comfortable watching this full lecture and then coming back to it, you totally can. Whatever you're most comfortable with. But I'll just show you a couple methods that I would recommend for learning how to draw certain things, like eyes, lips, nose, all that good stuff. So we'll we'll work on it with each little lecture here, and I'll try and keep these really short and sweet. So here we go. What I would first say to do is let's just draw with a single or start with a single. So draw a rectangle. Okay. And we're just doing this to kind of encompass what we're trying to draw. So within this rectangle, what I'm going to do is I'm going to draw a line just a light line from one corner to the next, and then vice versa. It's not good. And then what this does is this helps me to establish the center of the rectangle, right? So that x marks the spot. We know that that is the center point. Now, we don't need to have our exactly placed right in the center. What we can do is we can angle our up. Since we are focusing on females in this this lesson. I like to draw kind of an upward slant of the eyes. It makes it look a little bit more animated and a little bit more wide eyed and bushy tailed. So let's see. We'll start with. I'll just draw kind of a Let's see how would I approach this? You know, I'm just going to draw another box within the box. All right. And then what I'm going to do is I'm going to just from this area here, I'm going to draw an almond shape. Okay. And then I'm going to where this center point is, I'm going to go ahead and try to encompass that within an eyeball, right? It doesn't have to be exactly center. And then I'm going to go and draw a circle within a circle. Keep in mind, this is our under drawing, so we don't have to make this perfect or anything like that. We can make it look messy and come back and clean it up, so don't worry about it. And then what I'm going to do is at this point, I've already established my information. So I'll just go ahead and lower the capacity. Create a new layer. If you're just working with pencil and paper, it's fine. Erase this and just keep a light just trace of your lines so you can see just a faint hint of what you've sketched so far. Now I'll just come back in and I'll use a darker tone. Now I'll start drawing. What I'll do is I'll shape in the eye. And do the same thing over here. And then I'm going to imagine that she has eyelashes. So what I'm doing at this point, is just drawing the shapes. I'm not trying to get anything perfect. At the end here on the corner, I'm just going to have them lifting upward. Okay. And then on the bottom here, I'll have some more eyelashes exposed. I've just drawn in the shapes of the eyelashes. We can also go ahead and draw an eyebrow. What I would do is let's say bring this line out a little bit, come up. Now you're imagining this is where the nose goes, and then I would just shape upwards. Like this. Now, eyebrows can be all shapes and forms, so don't get stuck on one way to do this. Then what I would do is go ahead and darken this eyeball in. Okay. And I would or that was the pupil rather. And then I would come around here, and I would just establish a few lines. Just representing the outer sides of the eyeball. And then inside here where these eyelashes are drawn. I would just fill them in, if that's possible. No. I'll just do it the old fashioned way. Okay. And then underneath these eye lashes, I would draw something like this. Now this is for effect. And then underneath the people, I would do something similar like this and maybe draw a couple lines out. And then with the eyebrow, I would just shade it in, fill it in a little bit. Okay. And let's get rid of this first layer, see how it looks. Okay. And then let's go ahead and clean up a little. Okay. Okay. So we've drawn an eyeball. Would you agree it looks similar to an eyeball. But let's take it further. Let's go back. Let's go back to this original layer and I'm going to go ahead and you know what? I'll start a new layer and I'll start in red again. This time, what I'll do is let's focus on two eyes. So I'll draw another rectangle. This time, I'm going to make it longer. Okay. Okay. And we can still establish the center point. It's not necessary, but I like to do it just for measurements and keeping things symmetrical and the distance away from each other that I would like. Then what you can do here is within these triangles here. Go ahead, here, one more thing that we can do. Let's go from the center and just go straight across. And then we'll do the same thing going upward. Now we've divided everything. If we wanted to take it further. Now this is getting a little bit geometrical here. But we can take these lines here and divide these two squares, I should say, rectangles, rather. We can do the same thing. We can divide them. Now we're getting a little complex. But this establishes everything for us. Then we go to the center of this cross line here, which would be right about here, and same thing over here. So now we've really established a really decent measurement to shows where things are, and then what I would do is just fade this in, start a new layer or fade out, I should say. Then within these squares or rectangles, let's go ahead and draw. So let's say that we wanted to make two eyes. Now, what a lot of people have problems with is drawing two eyes on the same front facing sketch. Well, this is a good way to do it. You have your measurements. You know where everything goes, and it's really close enough. Now, we can imagine that our eyebrows would go somewhere around here to the t of our nose. The nose would drop down, and then we would have the ball of the nose. And then underneath would be where the lips are. Then we can put our eyebrows in at any height that we want depending on the mood that we're looking for. Then what we can do is go ahead and put our eyeballs in Remember, just keep things centered. Pull it back a little bit, just double check, looks okay. And this is just our underdrawing. So it's just our information, our blueprint, I should say. Okay. So I'm just drawing and drawing and I'm adding more lines, and at this point, I've got all the information I need, so I'm just going to go ahead and lower the epacity once more. Then at this point, I'll start a new layer. I'll jump over to the darker one again, and then I'll work. What I would do in this case is my first thought process is what's the emotion I'm going for? Well, I already have her giving us a glass glossy stare, and I'm going to go ahead and stick with that. But now it's just going to be stylized. How do we stylize our eye? Well in this particular eye, I'm just going to start at the corners like this. And then work my way up. Again, I would still consider this information gathering, meaning that once we draw in these darker lines, we can go ahead and again one more time, lower the capacity or erase the lines because drawing when you're completing a sketch, it's a process. You're always refining. It's you're imagining a two dimensional sculpture. That's how it would be. Then I'm just going to go ahead and place this pupil here, and then I'm going to place her eye underneath. Same thing, Pupil underneath. And then I'm just going to jump up to her eyebrow, keep it like this. Same thing here. And we have enough lines established. There we go. We have information again. At this stage, what would I do? Well, I would go ahead and we're not going to draw in the nose or the lips or anything like that. We totally could. But for this, we're just focusing on the eyes, and then maybe what we'll do is from there, we can drop down to the nose, and then we can drop down to the lips and I can just show you how we can continue the sketch. So let's go ahead and lower the capacity on this one. And then we'll keep it black, and then we will add another layer. This will be our working layer. Now this is where the drawing is going to be. I'll just go ahead and turn my paper this way. When I'm drawing with the traditional paper, I'll do a lot too. I'll just turn it to the side so I can have a better angle with my pencil. Okay. And if you want to just draw straight ahead horizontally, you totally can. So you don't have to do what I'm doing. This is just what I've become accustomed to. Okay. So I've established the main lines of her eyes on the top or her eye lids or eyelashes form. Then what I'm going to do is go ahead and place in her pupils. Okay. Can I have just plop this in? Yeah. Well, I guess not. I'll just color it in. Then what I would do is just show where the eyeballs are, the iris. And then at this stage, I could start adding some details so I could start thinking up the eye lashes on both sides. Hopefully you can follow along here. Then again, I'm going to add some shadow here, so this will be all dark. Just for effect. It pops the eye out a little bit more, makes it look a little bit more realistic. Of course, we're drawing cartoons, comics, but there is a little bit of realism in all art. Okay. Now I've got some eyebrows established. I've got the eyes where I want them, and now it's just a matter of details. Again, I will go ahead and zoom in. I'll start adding some hair on the eyebrows. Just imagine them being in this kind of formation. Then I can switch the direction going this way. Then same thing with the eye lashes, I'll just fill this in. And underneath her eyelashes here, the shadowy part. I'll fill that in. Of course, we're doing this really fast for the sake of this lesson. But once you practice this over and over, it will become a little easier for you. You'll surprise yourself. This is how I taught myself. You can also observe other artists, see how they do it. You can find your own style just by practicing and just trial and error really. Now I've established everything. Let me go ahead and fill this part in and then we'll jump down and do a little bit more of the details. Where are we with time? We are looking at 16 minutes. Further than I wanted to. It's okay. Okay. All right. There we go. So now we have established her eyes, and now I'm going to roll these eyelashes upwards here. Okay. Okay. Then let's go and remove these other layers. There we go. We have our eyes. Easy enough. Keep this as reference. I can send this to you if you'd like. Let's go ahead and do a little bit more if we wanted to take it further, one thing you can do is you can add I love rendering. You can add some lines like this. Same thing over here. If you wanted to add a little bit more a glare, you can just add another circle underneath. Pop in this circle. Okay. Now, if we really want some more glare, we can darken in these pupils, darken in this under shadow under the eye. Okay. Do the same thing on both sides. Then what we can do is you can use your eraser on your pencil or you can use your eraser on your tablet of choice and just erase a little bit here. You know what? We're working on different layers. Let me go ahead and pop this layer down. Merge down. So now. Same thing here. You can even draw a line across. There we go. We just add a little bit of life to this. It's fun. You'll try out these little techniques. You can even add a couple more dots. You don't want to get to carried away, but you can. There you go. We'll leave it here. This is how I would approach drawing yes. Now, if you want to freestyle, how much time are we we're at 19 minutes? If I wanted to freestyle draw, which I love the term freestyle, I love drawing freestyle, what I mean by freestyle is just by no reference, no measurements, draw. I would just approach something like this. I would just go, we're going to draw. Keep the movement of my pencil pretty fast. Let's say it's a sultry eye, the lids are half shut. Put in her eyeball underneath, put in a pupil, come up here, draw her eyebrow. A booming. We have this in. So there's our information, right? So remember, you want to put your information down for every sketch. I don't care if you're drawing an eyeball or if you're drawing a figure or a whole scene. You want your under drawing to have all your blueprints so that you can work off of that. That keeps your proportions, right, that keeps everything balanced. And when we get into composition and stuff like that. Now, I do have a whole course coming on composition and layouts. So stay tuned for that. But this is how it goes. You're just laying out and sketching things where you want them. Go ahead and erase it, or lower the capacity, and then just fine tune things. Same method, come here. Boom. Draw in her eye. Put in her eye her pupil here. Draw in the is around it. Work in the eyebrows. I'm sorry, eyelashes. Give her an eye lid. Also, study eyes, you see eyes every day. You look in people's eyes when you talk to them, you see them on TV. Just study eyes as much as you can replicate them. But when you're drawing comics and cartoons and things like that, you're really stylizing things. There we go. A lot of people change different shapes for eyes. You can draw circular eyes like, let's say we have a circle like this, put and then you can go ahead and shape it the way you want it. You can sculpt this circle. So if you want the eyes to be more facing towards us instead of angled, can do this, or Okay. You can do kind of if you remember Michael Turner, a lot of times he would start with a eyeball in upwards. My pencil is dying. That's not good. Okay. And then he would have a straight line at the front, pop it over an angle, draw in a very big eyeball with a pupil. And then he would just draw in these giant eyelashes, right? If you don't know who Michael Turner is, I suggest looking him up, he has passed. He's a legendary artist. He's a huge influence on a lot of professionals. And yeah, he had his own style that I really liked and still do. You can see a lot of his influence in my work if you have been following me. Okay. Here we go. This is a quick free style, just thinking of how an eyeball would look in a Michael Turner style. There we go. I think that's enough. Now, let's go ahead and quit here. Go ahead and practice this as much as you can, get some eyes and really focus on keeping them symmetrical as close as you can. It doesn't have to be perfect. And then remember your distance apart too. So do that. Practice, show me what you've got, and that's your assignment. I really just want you to get really comfortable with drawing both eyes. And now you know shapes of eyes and you can come up with your own, but there you go. Okay, next lesson I'll be another draw along. So stay tuned and I'll see you there. 13. How to Draw Hair: Hello, and welcome. So this is a segment on hair. And I think hair is one of one of those enigmas that a lot of aspiring and budding artists just can't figure out. And I just want to show you a few easy steps to kind of give you a better grasp on how to handle the subject. So when we're looking at this sketch here, what do you see? Well, you don't see every individual strand of hair, right? And that's why a lot of people a lot of even me when I first started out, I thought, Oh, I have to draw every single hair, and it looks kind of like like a broom. You know, you're just drawing everything. Well, it turns out, you don't have to do it that way. Um, One of the best ways to draw here is to basically as I always say to my students, think in forms and shapes. So what you'll do is you'll figure out the kind of style that your character has, and then you will from there, go ahead and start shaping it out. You don't worry about the details or the sheen or the clumps or anything like that at this stage. So for instance, We have a three quarter view head here. The way that I would approach it is, let's say that I'll draw the head in blue and just to give us an idea of how things are going here. Don't worry about in fact, I'll probably get rid of these details of the face. I don't want them to be too distracting. I coming in. We know that her head is going to be shaped something like this, her ears are going to fall somewhere around here, going to have her neck. Okay Okay. Lip and eyebrows. As I always say, we have our information down. Once you have your information down, you can work directly from it. It's a lot easier. A lot of artists and you'll hear me repeating this from Lesson to Lesson, hopefully it sinks in. But even me when I started drawing, I used to try and here. I'll show you. Let's say that I wanted to draw something like this. Well, what I would do is I would just start drawing in an eye here. And then I put the eye like this. Then I didn't even look decent when I first started. Then I would say, well, here's this eye. Then I would go almost like this. Imagine this is even there. Then I'm going, well, maybe the other eye falls over here and this eyebrow goes here and everything starts getting walky the nose here and then the lips here, and then hair goes like this. Does this sound like someone you know? Maybe even you? Well, that's okay. It happens to the best of us. Let's get rid of this and forget about it. Okay. Back to what I was saying is we have this head shape, right? And you can go even further. A lot of times while I'm drawing a head, I'll volumize the shape of the skull, just to make it three dimensional for me because I know that all this is just a blueprint, just an under drawing that's subject to be erased and changed and alter to my liking. So we don't get married to this part of the art. We don't get to attach to it. We basically use it as a guide. It's our blueprint. It's our plans. If you've ever seen construction workers or architects, they always start out with a blueprint first, and then they work from that. Now, they can alter and make changes as they go along, which is perfectly fine, but at least they have that foundational blueprint to work from. And that's us as well. Now that we have this blueprint, let's go ahead and lower the opacity, lighten it up a little bit. We'll do the same thing under drawing. Just enough to see. Then I'll switch to a different color for the hair, so we'll do a red. Let's see how we would approach this. One of the first things you can do is you can go from your ear, then you can say, well, how is this hair line going to go? You can Kind of create your own hairline? Okay. Like so it doesn't have to be perfect because a lot of this is going to be hidden. Then from here, what you can do is you can start putting in placing your shapes. The shape that I would start with on this particular one and I remember drawing this one, not too long ago, is I would find my part. The hair parts right here. Now all hair is going to part, but in this case, this character did have parting hair. Then what I would do is I would know that anything going this direction of the part is going to flow Okay. And this movement. Let's erase that then anything going the opposite direction is going to flow this way. Keeping those little things in mind, it will help you as you're clumping and shaping and adding volume and all that stuff to your hair. What I could do at this point is say, well, let's go ahead and take this piece here and put a shape. Then the thing that we're looking at here is, hey, we want her to have a longer hair. Let's see, that's going to be like this and we just create some shapes like so. Doesn't have to be perfect. Then what we can do is go up here, volumize a little bit, and what I mean by volumize is just add to it. Here behind the ear, we can say, well, maybe something goes like this. Then we can follow these shapes. And just be creative. Now, if you want to a strand going across the face like this, you can. Then the word that I like to use that comes to mind when I'm drawing hair is Wisp. It's like wisping wisping shapes, it's wisp then what you can do is once you have these hair foundations here, get rid of this image for a second. Let's go ahead and lower the opacity of this one. Let's go ahead and even lighten up this under sketch here. We don't want to be too distracted. Then at this point, what we can do is we can just start drawing in, we can target our hair strands now. Now, what I mean by strands is I don't mean each individual strand, but what I would say is, well, we know that one is going across her face. It's going across her face and it's wisping over here. And we know underneath is probably going to be an ocean wave, all moving in that same direction. Now, also, we know that our hair part, we know where it falls, why not just start subtly shaping in some hair here. Then when we get to this v point here where it splits. One thing I do sometimes is I put another clump and I just in fan it away. Now, I'll give you this as reference because we won't have time to draw all the hair in one segment because hair does take a while. This is one oh one class. It's a beginner intermediate course. If you're an advanced artist, it's a refresher. I take refreshing courses or I look at my old art and learn from it all the time. There's no harm in that. I have a more advanced course in development. For drawing females, but I would prefer that this be a prerequisite. I want you to learn these basics, get comfortable with them because when we go into the next course, we're going to really be diving into this stuff and it's going to be a little bit more complex and you'll have these aha moments when you're doing it because you'll be like, Oh, I remember we touched on this and the first prep course is what I would call this one. Okay. I just want you to get the most of value for your time and just kind of learn as much as you can. Here we go. We've orchestrated our hair and we know where it's falling. And so the process from here on out would be the same. We would just refine, erase, redraw, refine redraw. We would start finding shadows and stuff like that if we were really getting into it. But again, I'm saving that rendering and shadows and light and stuff for the next course because it just too much to chew on For learning one subject. Drawing females, one thing I'll say about drawing females is a comparative drawing males is less is more, right? So when you're drawing a man or a male figure, you can be rugged. You can draw as many lines as you want, and sometimes the lines actually make your character look cooler, more cutting edge. But when you draw to me lines on a female character, could age. Every line could age. If I just put a line here, here, it automatically just takes away from our beauty. It's a weird thing the way that that works, but something to keep in mind is less is more when it comes to drawing females. This is a basic approach. Now, let's go ahead and get ready of these and bring back our images We'll darken it in. I'll give this to you as a PDF, let's see. Okay. Did I draw directly on there? No, I did not. Okay. Perfect. Okay. So then we have this under drawing. So we'll darken that in. Now, this one is the one I was going for. Then let's go ahead and open up a few more layers. There's a few things I prepped for this class and I want to go over all of them with you. I'll give you this as a study guide, don't worry. Everything that you see here, you're going to have. But let's just cover the basics, and I will go to a new layer. In case I draw on this, I don't mess it up for you. The way I draw here, and this is all three quarter based, and I have two here. I don't like that. Let me fix this. Which one could it be? Oh there. We have two. Let's go ahead and capture this one. Capture Okay. What happens if we move this down here. Okay. It's just a same hit. It was just duplicated somehow. No big deal. We can actually move this over here, keep it, we'll shrink it down a little bit. There you go. Anyway, back to the top and we have this perfect. And what I wanted to do is just go over all this stuff real quick. So we are running at 13 minutes now. You can follow this is step by step. I started with the shape here, this one here. Okay. Then I worked over here, started drawing in some facial details, start tightening it up a little bit, and then here's your final face. Then from here, I took this same hairstyle that you see over here, and I just re rendered it so that it could be placed on to these characters. For instance, let's say that we have, we'll start with this one. Okay. Well, let's move this to here. Like what I did over here on the bottom right. So you can see that that's how I set it up. And you know the point of this is I want you to see how hair breaks down. Just like we just drew the sketch over here on this one, you can see, I started with the shapes here, one, and then over here, I can tighten up two. Then three, I am showing some rendering just to show some light, and we're not going to get deeply into the theories and all that of what's going on here. But think it is important for you to learn a little bit about adding a little sheen and glare. I left this reference for you. You can carry it over into our next course that we get. Now, The bottom line here when you're drawing hair is keep it simple, T in shapes, think in forms and don't try and draw your hair all at once. Do it in sections. Remember to erase, redraw, refine and repeat. There's a lot of s here. Let's say that we have this one here on the bottom. I'm going to zoom in. Let's just say we're giving her a whole different look. We'll do pencil and let's just say that we're giving her a mohawk. Remember that storm had that mohawk. You can do that. There's a shape, very easy shape you can practice with. Then if you want to try a new one. Let's do some bangs. Draw some bangs really quickly. Then back here, put a pony tail. All this is is shapes again. Okay. All right. And then you can do I'm just showing you some quick examples. So don't get to attach to these. You can do these on your own. Let's say, another one. You can have hair swooping over, right? You can still keep it short. Okay. And what you can really do is just study a bunch of hairstyles. Look at haircut magazines or look at online, go to your barber website, and just look at hairstyles here, look at your favorite actors and actresses. Look at yourself, look at a mirror. That's one thing that a lot of people overlook is that you have reference in front of you all the time, if you just have a mirror. If you have family members, you might have a brother or sister or whomever, depending on what you're drawing, a dog, a cat, a mouse, there's reference everywhere. Then let's try another one. Let's say we want to go this way. Now I'm just keeping the shapes very simple simple is the name of the game. My first first solo course here is called simplified superhero anatomy. And what I like about keeping things simple is that you're not putting too much effort into the thinking, you're not overthinking. You're throwing things down onto paper really quick and you come back and refine them. Now, in terms of the Amy course that I did. I am coming up with another one for that, too, and a 2.0 more advanced where we dive more into the figure drawing and it won't be as simplified as the first course. But, I digress. Let's keep going here. What's another hairstyle? Maybe straight down. Okay. And just practice this kind of stuff. Don't be intimidated. Your confidence comes with repetition and practice. That's where confidence comes from. Making mistakes. Mistakes are the best thing that can happen to you because you'll learn from them and you'll say, you'll catch yourself next time, you'll say, no, I'm not going to do this. I remember last time how it ended up. Just don't do the same thing over and over and over again. Make sure that you try new things. We will leave it here, because I'm going to move on to the next lesson. But I think this is enough for you to work with on hair. Keep it really simple. Do a couple of practice tries. Send them to me, show me what you got. I'd be happy to take a look at them. And from there, if you decide to move on and go to my more advanced course and a few months, maybe a little bit less just depending on how fast I can get out there, then you'll be able to prove to yourself and and observe yourself just your progress. You'll be able to look at from where you started, and then look at yourself weeks or months later as you progress from course to course. My courses are only guides. They're here to help you. They're here to kind of point you in the right direction. But your real improvement is going to come from repetition and practice. Just always remember that. There's no magic bullet, there's no magic formula. The magic is within you. All I'm doing is kind of showing you the map, ok? So that's it. Just remember that, keep going, and I'll see you in the next lesson. 14. Dynamic Pose Process: Okay, welcome back. And in this quick lesson, we're just going to do a quick walk through of my process and how I approach a sketch, whether it be a male or a female or an environment or whatever. I always have the same approach. And basically, what that approach is is let's say that you're drawing a human form like a female, like the one that we see on the screen here. Well, the first thing I would do is establish oppose, and I would also look for the flow of the character and think to myself, what type of mood do I want this to be in? All that good stuff as I'm, you know, quickly sketching the gesture. So let's kind of walk through it so you understand a little bit more. Okay. The first thing I would do is start out with something like this. As you can see, when the character is bent towards you, it's very hard to measure the 87.5 to eight heads in height. This is why I rarely use those types of proportions. If you've taken my anatomy or my simplified anatomy course, you'll know that I rarely ever use any type of measurements. It's more eyeballs and just eyeballing it and figuring out the proportions, which is really easy to do with just practice. You can compare your sketch to a actual figure or you can look at someone else's art and you can figure out proportions on your own, just by trial and error. When you're drawing comic books, there's no written rule because a lot of, I think one of the big factors about drawing comics or cartoons or game design or anything like that, it's really exaggeration and embellishment. All right. First step is I would approach with a quick sketch like this. Then after that, we would fine tune it. I would take this. Let's say that this is the pencil sketch, the gesture. After I would do this, I would erase it. If we're using traditional paper and pencil, I would erase it and leave about this much behind. You can barely see it, but it's enough where I can grab those lines that I want to keep and I can work off of them. Then the second thing that I would do is I would just work my lines that I wanted to keep. Here we go. Now I'm tightening up a little bit adding proportions, adding a little bit of shape for the anatomy, the muscles, putting the hands in there, putting the face the structure to the face, maybe the attitude. Still not too much detail, but a, it's starting to shape and mold into the direction that I want to go in. Then from here, I would just fine tune it, which could look something like this. Ultimately, again, we could take this sketch, and we have both of them combined, and then we can lower the epacy or erase, it's going to look something like this, very light. Then when you have it looking light, let me zoom in a little bit. You see. Then what we could do is go ahead and add our finished lines. This is the the final part of the process prior to rendering, So what I'm doing here is I'm adding her anatomy, her muscles, a little bit costume details, and I was making this costume up as I went along, adding her eyes and her lips, and I didn't get too much into details here. It was just a quick sketch. But yeah, you get the point. Then after this stage, so we can erase that. We take out this layer here and it's really clean now. Then if we wanted to add our details, there we go. With the details, I just added a few lines on the hair, some reflections on the gauntlets or bracelets around her arm, some gloves, costume details, just tightened up the lines a little bit. There you go. That's basically my process. When you're drawing and creating and sketching characters, I want you to think of it in these terms. I want you to be able to go backwards and you start from here. We'll darken it in. Just keep it really rough. Don't worry about don't worry about how detailed this is. Don't try to get everything perfect. This is your information stage where you're just trying to throw down and capture as much information as you can as fast as you can. You're trying to keep the energy, the gesture, the pose, all that good stuff, you're trying to get it all locked down here. Then you'd go into phase two and then Phase three. As you're going from phase to phase, you'll be erasing and redrawing and just tightening things up. This is just a clean professional way. Then at the very end, when you want to add your details, you would go ahead and do that. You can see my details look something like this. It's fun. When you have a formula that you can stick with, it becomes very I guess repeatable. It's very easy to keep doing the same process over and over again. You know what you're working with and you can see the finished sketch almost before it's drawn. Yeah, so keep this in mind. I don't know what your approach is now, but this has worked for me, if you have any questions on it, let me know. But yeah, we'll keep this lesson short and sweet. As we're moving forward in other lessons and I'm drawing or if I have assignments for you, this is how I would want you to approach it. I'd want you to start one more time. Go with your gesture, quick sketch. Tie up that quick sketch with the line work. Don't worry about details yet. Just try to get the anatomy is how you like it, then start working with details and facial expressions and costume elements and all that good stuff, and then finally work on your rendering. That's it. Very simple. If you keep this formula, even when you're doing buildings, same thing, you draw your perspective lines, your grids, you would draw in the shapes of the buildings without worrying about any details or windows. Just put a bunch of boxes and rectangles and cubes and things like that everywhere. And then when you then you would erase it lightly, keep it, you know, keep everything kind of a ghost of the sketch that you started out with, and then you'd follow up and start, you know, tightening up the lines, adding shapes and proportions on the buildings or trees or whatever the environment was. And then you would continue to add more elements like windows or doors or, you know, whatever, balconies or, you know, rails or stairs, whatever. And at the end, you would start rendering, adding some shades and values and cross hatching and all that good stuff. So I hope that this helps just a really quick lesson, and I'll see you in the next one, keep going. 15. Drawing from Reference : Hi, and welcome to this segment. And on this segment, we're going to be doing what I would just call drawing from reference. And all we're doing here is we're first going to take this statue of CT Woman' to just identify a few areas. That kind of correlate with what we were talking about with all the lessons prior to this. So I did a little simulation to decide, and it's not exact by any means, but it's close enough, and we can do another one together. I'll try and keep this lesson pretty short and sweet. But let's go ahead and reduce the capacity on Catwoman here, let's identify a few things. Number one, let me open up a new layers. We'll just start with this one. Number one, what's the first thing that you notice about this, Well, I'll give you a hint. It's a three quarter view, right? And what do we mean by that? So three quarter is it's tilted away from the camera. So we're only seeing if we were to draw a straight line here, Okay. And let's say that we had a curve going around, do one here, and we'll do one here. So she's spinning towards her right facing us in this area, in this direction. So it's three quarter, it's a twist. And so just remember that terminology. I'm sure you probably know it already, but it's good to keep refreshing you. If we were to hop on here and o in a little bit, a couple of things that I would, you know, I would identify just right off the back, are, you know, the attitude of the stance. So we have the hip is raised, right? And we've talked about this. This other shoulder is raised. We've talked about that. And basically, it's kind of a intersecting angle, then we have the weight on this thigh going straight down to this foot. Most of the weight is on here. She's got her other foot here for balance on her tippy toes. Her upper chest and torso is going to pop out like this and then is going to connect to her pelvis, Then she's going to have her shoulder here, her shoulder raised. She's going to have her breasts placed. So you can see that as I had mentioned before, there's a distance between this area here, going down to the breast. And we have her arm, which just a simple shape like that pop into her hand. She's holding her whip. This other arm drops down, Okay. And she's holding the end of the whip. And we can see that this whip wraps around. And, you know, it's going to come through here. Okay. So she's wrapped around, and then we have our legs. So when we're drawing the legs, and I don't know if you've taken my anatomy course on superhero anatomy. But you always want to focus on the shapes first, and then you'll go in and you'll start defining the musculature, you know, any kind of details. You can come back and define later. So we'll dive into that in 1 second. Now, what I like about it, is it has a slight tilt. So we see our eye lines going like that. So we'll just draw her head. Her neck, and voila. We have the basics. We have what we call the information down. We have proportions information. We know where everything goes. From this point, we can virtually just draw this ourselves without as much effort as starting from scratch. We have our lines here. They have a nose here, mouth here. Her ears would go somewhere around here. And these are the types of things I want you to get used to. So if we were to remove this, what would it look like? All right. Fair enough. We can add in a foot to make it look a little bit more legit. We have to sell it to ourselves here. So essentially, what I'm going to do is just move this over here. And that's basically, you know, we're looking at everything that is the foundational blueprint of this statue because you have to remember this statue is three dimensional. It's been shaped and molded. But they used a two dimensional reference. So they used a sketch from probably different angles because if you ever look at how a lot of these statues are designed, they'll have the artist that's modeled after do a couple replicas of the same pose just from different angles. And so that's what the sculpture artist would use, and then they would create this three dimensional sculpture. So let's go ahead and lower the capacity here. Now, as I mentioned before, I'm a big fan of tracing. I do it for you know, teaching purposes only. But generally, you won't catch me tracing too much. Unless it's something that I'll use my light table for if I'm transferring the same exact you know, sketch over to another section, maybe on sequential art, or if I'm transferring a building or if I'm moving something, then it comes in. But generally, I won't trace much. But when it comes to teaching and learning, I think it's a good idea. So I think you can trace. Just don't become too much of a slave to tracing. Now, I'm going to go ahead and create my own little version of Catwoman here. So it's just going to be off the cuff, and I'm just going to use the information I have. Now, this is a cool fun exercise because what you can really do essentially is you can do the same thing in your style. So I'm not even looking at reference anymore, right? I'm just taking the information that we put down earlier, and I'm basically building off of it in my own way. So you can do the same. I'll imagine her ears here. I'll give her some glasses here. Glasses here, and then I'll give her mask. Now, I don't know exactly how our mask goes, but I'm making it up myself, who cares? Just having fun. We know that neck goes like this. If you really want to challenge yourself and you want to get better and you want to implement your own style, this is a good way to do it. If you are going to trace, do something like this, it'll be more challenging and you can actually learn from it. Whereas when you're tracing, you're not really You're not really exercising your creative abilities. It's almost like reading or repeating what you hear, right? So when you're a kid and you're learning how to read and write and learn the alphabet, you're repeating it over and over and over until it becomes second nature. Same rule applies for this kind of stuff, but in essence, I like to really just implement as much creativity as I can. And that's because, you know, as you advance as an artist, you will want some more challenges. You will want something that really just kind of becomes difficult to do. You want something that's more challenging, more rewarding when you pull it off. If you don't pull it off, then it's going to be a big teacher for you. It's going to teach a lot of lessons and you'll ask yourself, what happened? Where did that go wrong? These are the types of things that you want to do when you're drawing. When you're an artist, you want to be willing to make certain mistakes. I'm just dropping this down and I'm going to implement more lines here, and keeping it very simple. Okay. And I'm just really doing what I would call a quick sketch. And just trying to capture the energy of Catwoman. Without using the reference. Now, if I use the reference, what's going to happen is I'm going to try to get everything exactly right. When you do that, it can have the tendency to become very stiff and boring. If you ever look at your work or another artist's work, you start seeing like, hey, this particular sketch looks very lifeless. It's probably because they spent too much time trying to get it perfect. That happens even to the best of us. Okay. All right. So here we go. Just quickly. And we had this whip here, I think, and we'll just add it here and then it wrapped around her neck, came out I think right over here, like this. And then we'll just have it going around like that. Just get creative, have fun. Okay. And then you can go in and you can start doing some details like if you wanted to do some leather like rendering, you could Obviously, you can see them doing this very fast. If this were a commission piece or if I were hired to do this, I would take my time. I'd render it in such a way where I had all the information down as I usually do. But then I would go ahead and erase everything and really just dive in and try to be as meticulous as possible and everything to my liking to something that's satisfying for me. Yeah, here you go. I think it's pretty good. Okay. And maybe you could do the same. So I guess as I'm thinking here and I'm teaching you this lesson, I'm thinking I can probably just send you maybe just go blank like this and just send you either this and we'll get rid of mine. There, yeah. And I can just send this to you and you can try your own. How would you like that? And you know what I encourage you to do is try it multiple times, get it to where you feel like you're becoming more confident and more comfortable with it. And then show me, show me your results. Show me what you've come up with. And maybe if I have some time, I will go ahead and give you a little bit of feedback. And if I have extra time, maybe I'll do kind of a live video somewhere, and I'll pull them up and just go over everything. So if I get enough submissions, I would definitely do that. So, here we go. This lesson is concluded, and basically, it's just drawing from reference, and you can do this with anything. You can search on Google, you can go on Instagram, you can go to Pinterest, find any kind of statuette that you like, whatever angle you like, and then you can choose it, and then you know, you can do a little tracing to get the measurements, or if you really want to test your skills, you can try and draw on your own, you know, and basically, if I were I'll do this really fast, so I don't keep your time. But if I were drawing this on my own, what I would probably do is I would just put some lines in and I would first study. Now, I wouldn't try to draw exactly the same size because that's too tedious, and we know that with a tablet, like, you know, iPad or whatever, you can always reduce the size when you're done. So what I would do is I would just try to capture the flow, the energy, the shapes. And when I see this, what's the main shape that I see? I see this shape here. So if I were to come over here, right? And then this kind of goes down like this. So here we go. I would just put her shoulder is up, this shoulder is down, come like this. Then I can always come back and change, fix alter things as I like. I don't even have to stick to this pose. I can actually change the pose if I wanted to. But then I would say, here's our hand somewhere around here. Okay. And all we're doing putting down the information as we see it. And you can see that well, you can't see my pencil. Maybe I should start recording an additional camera where you can see my pencil moving, but trust me, my pencil is always moving really fast at this stage because I'm trying to capture the information without losing the energy. There we go. Then We And then you would just work off this. And you would just do the steps I've taught you, the process, you know, we have the information, throw into shapes, start finding your proportions, and then you would just refine add anatomy, erase, refine sketch. And then when you finally get to your liking, then at the very end, you would add your rendering. So That's it. So you could approach it like that. So if you're feeling really, really confident, feel free to just jump in and tackle it on your own without even tracing or anything. If you want to trace it a few times, go for it. If you don't have a tablet or anything, get some tracing paper or a light table, and just do it that way. Either way, it's a really good lesson. I think it's really going to help you to evolve and grow as an artist, and you'll carry this stuff with you. You're imprinting it into your memory banks so that when you do draw without having these references, you'll remember. You'll come to you. Trust me. If you do this enough times, it will come to you like, second nature, and it will come easier the more you do it. So, keep going. I'm really happy with your progress. If you have anything you want to show me, please do, and I'll get back to you and stay tuned for the next lesson. I'll see you there. 16. Form & Flow with Gestures : Okay, welcome to this lesson. And in this one, we are going to do what's called freestyle form. It's just drawing freestyle from imagination, so you're moving your pencil around the lot. And really, the purpose of this exercise is just to get your hand into kind of a flow. You know, you want to coordinate your hand. You want to what should I say calibrate your hand eye coordination. When you're drawing females, you know, the main line in a female is kind of an it's an S curve, right? And you just want to get used to Moving your arms around. Now, don't draw with your wrists, draw with your whole arm from shoulder to hand. When you get down to your details, you can start with your wrists. You can work with your wrists. But I might have to do a whole class on just drawing in general. I think a lot of people approach it in a way that's working against them, but that's another day and another time. But for right now, let's just focus on form and flow. If I were drawing a female, the first thing I would do is imagine the flow. If I was drawing her at kind of a an angle like this. Now, my pencil is moving really fast, and don't be intimidated by this. This is just me using the computer mind and just placing things where I think they belong, right? And then you come back and you make all the corrections necessary because this is kind of your information stage, as I always say, Okay. And so I know that the shoulders go here, the arms go there, and we just build off of all this stuff. And, you know, if we wanted to cross her arms like this, we could or we can have, you know, her arm extending out this way. And we can have this arm going down here, grabbing onto her hip. Okay. These are just what we call gestures. That's all I would recommend that you do is start with free form gestures and just get your habits into creating a lot of motion with your pencils. You got to remember, you have to look at yourself as a sculptor. Think of all the great artists that you know and what inspired you, what made you want to draw is more likely you saw another artist that you liked or several artists and you found it very fascinating and you wanted to learn the magic and really the magic is just practice and doing this kind of stuff over and over again. And so you can see that I've got a feminine gesture. And one of the things I want you to notice are balance. So we have a balanced line from the shoulder down. You know, you're always trying to keep her head balanced. And then we have a hip that's raised, and then a lowered one. We have this arm that's coming up. Now, this one is lower as well, but this should come up like this. There we go. It gives it a little bit more attitude. Then what we can do is we can lower the opacity, start a new one and work in how we approach this sketch? I'm just drawing a head shape, an egg, neck underneath, pop in her neck, another shoulder over here, draw a central line down the middle. Underneath her rib cage like this, come back here, draw her hips, and connect the rib cage down to the hips. Imagine that her hand is over here, fingers. Pop the wrist out. Here's the arm, connect this arm to the shoulder, place where you want her breasts and We can come back and resize and reshape these. We're just putting in the information. We're not trying to get anything perfect at this point. This is just practice. This is really what I want you to emphasize on. Now, keep in mind, this is just volume one of drawing females. This is the one oh one version and I will create other versions that are more advanced. Now, here, we have her arm popping out, drawing her forearm. Now I've extended it way too far, but that's okay. We can pop in a hand Shapes. You can see that I haven't tried to perfect anything here. But we're catching the gestures, and let's do another one. Go back here. Actually, we'll stay here. Another one could be. Let's say we just want a forward facing female. Start with her head. Draw a straight line down. Is this shoulder, lower this one. Raise this hip, lower this one. And I'm just creating lines that hey, I don't know what it's going to be ultimately, but let's see what we can come up with. And this is what you know this is my whole process is a lot of times I'll draw things and I'll wait for something to come to mind if I'm just practicing. Now, if you're drawing an actual sketch, let's say that you have paid work from a publisher or you're doing some work for a client like a commission. Then at that point, you want to have more of an established idea of what you're going to be rendering. But right now, I'm just goofing around and practicing and loosening up. Now loosening up. That's what you want to do. You want to have fun, you want to loosen up and make your mistakes in this process, and learn from them, and then take what you learn and bring it with you to your next sketch. Then you can go here, lower the opacity, and then just start drawing something else. Here we go. We'll just so ahead and draw any shape of a head. Divide it. Give her, you know, I'm just quickly shaping in things here where her eyes would go mouth. S neck. Curving this way and then coming back that way, shoulder here, shoulder there upper rib cage. Go down lower pelvis add stretched leg here, and then this leg propped up. This is called foreshortening. I don't know how familiar you are with foreshortening. I know there's a lot of courses on it. If you'd like me to explain further, I certainly can. Foreshortening is generally just when you are bringing your tilting and object closer towards the camera, and it appears shorter since it's becoming it's larger, but it's also appearing shorter. So it's foreshortening and I'll show you how that works. So put this here and draw on this arm. We don't want to make it too long. Go ahead and pop in a hand. Go ahead and divide the chest up into sections so you can know where to place her breasts, and then Imagine she might have hair going this way, this is just we're shaping things in. We're just trying to capture information. You'll hear me say that a lot. It's really a constant thing in art. You're always just trying to capture things. Almost any type of art, whether it be music or sculpting or drawing like this, the artist, the creator is always just trying to capture some motion and get into a rhythm and then bring out the final details and fine tune it, and then you present it to the world. That's how you create art. It's a very general synopsis, but that's basically how it works. Now we have this. We'll go ahead and lower the capacity. Let's see what it looks like when we get rid of this one. There we go. Now we can come in. We'll just switch over to gray. I'm going really fast because I don't want you to spend too much time thinking. I want this to be a segment where you're moving your pencils. I want you to get in the habit of moving your pencils. I don't think too much. When you're drawing hair, remember, it's just wisps You're wisp shapes and keep it flowing. Imagine a cape. It's almost a fabric. Hair has its own character, just like clothing and environments. Everything that you're drawing has its own character, and it has its own movement and its own ability to influence the eyes of your audience. Okay. Okay. Now, obviously, I'm not spending too much time on this, but I really just want you to get the idea of, hey, when you're doing your little doodles, make the most of them, learn from them and carry the positive reinforcement that you've gained to your next piece of art. Let's just say she's got something here. She's holding a staff, and maybe here she's holding a sword Okay. These are just ideas. Now, if you watch any other artists like if you go to a convention, and you see them drawing. A lot of times they're going off the cuff. They're just creating as they feel the flow. To get into flow state is really a very valuable thing to learn. Flow state is when you're able to let go of all perceived time and reality, time space and reality, and just get lost in the creative process. You're not even thinking, you're letting go. It sounds very we but it's a real thing. I get into the flow state or the zone or whatever you want to call it. So often, it's just normal for me now, and I love it. In fact, when you're in a flow state, you never try to force anything. You just like you've heard the saying, go at the flow, and that's really where it comes from is you're letting go of your need to control and force things, you're allowing things to flow naturally. It's almost as if your subconscious mind is taking all the information that you've gathered by studying and practicing and just putting it all down for you. Okay. Okay. There you go. That's a qucult gesture, nothing serious. A couple of them here. I'm going to keep this one short. But go ahead and practice some gestures like this. Focus on flow. Go back to red here. So you can see that this leg is stretched out, this one is popping up. Same thing here. Just focus on flow, balance form, and just practice as much as you can, don't be discouraged if your arts not looking the way you want it to. You just repeat this over and over again, you keep studying and keep watching these videos because I have more videos that are coming up after this one. They're going to go a little bit deeper and I'm really confident that they are going to help you to progress on your journey. So keep This is a very short one in my opinion, but I'll see you in the next one, okay? 17. Sketchbook Exercises to Practice : Okay, welcome back. And this is another draw along free form. And in this one, I'm just going to focus on just certain shapes that you would see in a female. So for instance, let's just focus if I were to say, Hey, draw her up or torso. Well, how would you do that? Well, follow along. There's one angle like this. If we're looking head on, might look something like this. Okay. If we're looking above, we have the neck line, shoulders down. And then you can imagine that she has shoulders attached. And you can also do something like this. You can take a very similar approach going this way, and then draw a line down. Okay. These are another way more of an advanced way of drawing gestures. So let's say we want to draw her head facing to this side like this. Draw a neck down. Then we don't want this head to look too masculine so you've got to be very careful not to make it too boxy. In fact, I think I made that mistake, so I'll just go ahead and draw another one. We have a head facing to her left. Try and draw as gracefully as you can. Then remember when you're drawing from the side, you're going like this. Imagine this is your spine and then it's circulates going like an S shape and then you're going to follow that shape over here, and then it's going to connect down to lower part of her body. We know that her shoulders are going to be around here. Then we can connect this and then we can put her legs in and then you can start working in some more details. And when we're drawing like this, we're just drawing to find our groove, find our rhythm so that we can take it with us to our actual sketch. Now, I don't know how well you are drawing females, you might already have a pretty good grasp of it and this might be a refresher type course. If that's the case, great, show me what you've got because I might actually use your work in my next course because on the next course, it's going to be a little bit further. It's going to be a little bit more advanced. I would consider this more of a 101 type course. So if you feel like you're confident in drawing females already, show me. Show me what you got I find that's suitable for a course material and if you give me your permission, I will include it in our lessons. Let's see here. These are shapes we want. Now, when we're drawing hands, keep it simple, draw your main part of your hand like this, draw this would be your fingers. Then draw your top part of your hand, connect to the wrist, and then remember there's a thumb. That's a quick hand gesture. If you're drawing a fist, there you go. One, two, three, there you go. If we're drawing from the side, get used to finding shapes of things. Now, I have a whole course on anatomy, so if you really want to dive into hands and things like that, I do include some PDFs and things of that nature. Showing hands. I do at least one or two lectures on hands, and if you want more, maybe I will do more down the line. If you want to sprawl out the fingers, open up the hand like this, put one, two, three, four thumb here. And just shape things in. So really, you know, what happens and what happened to me when I was learning to draw is I would always look at the finished artwork of, let's say, one of my favorite famous artists, right? And I would be so intimidated because I would think that they just drew it magically, they just knew exactly where everything was and they went on the first go and they had it. But that's not the case most of the time. Most artists are doing exactly what we're doing here. They're shaping things in. And then they are, you know, Constantly molding and shaping and refining until they get to how they like it. If you're drawing remember profile, if you watch the head segment. This is more of a free for all. Here we go. Then you can take your eraser, you can lower the capacity, erase it down, have our information. I'm a very firm believer in putting your information down first, and then knowing at that point, you know where things fall. So it's really hard to make a mistake once you have your checks and balances in order. You know where everything goes, and you know that everything fits. So it's almost it's if you make a mistake at that point, it just means that you have to improve on that certain area of art. So maybe you have to study that area of anatomy more or maybe you have to study a couple of styles that you like more. But once you have your information down, it should be very easy. It should start coming naturally for you to know where things are placed, right? Um and you can make things up on the fly. There we go. Our emphasis on this course is obviously female, so I'm just trying to keep everything in that nature. Quick, I challenge you right now, if you're drawing along, draw an really quick. Here I'm going to do it with you. Boom. And then draw eyeball, draw a pupil. Draw an eyebrow. I really want you to get used to drawing fast like this and not focusing on the final outcome. Focus on the process, enjoy it. I know it sounds corny and we hear all these cliches all the time. But focusing on the process and enjoying the process is really where it's at. This is where you have the most fun. This is where you learn. You can take your era go ahead and lighten this up. Okay. Come back in, refine. Okay. And one of the biggest things about comic book art, in my opinion, is style. Everyone has their own style. Style is developed through practice and it comes based on your efforts. It's the same thing as handwriting. You can probably look at something that you've written, even if it was from five or six years ago or ten years ago, and you would probably be able to say that, hey, that's my handwriting. A lot of teachers can recognize handwriting because they see all their students. So they know who wrote what and when, you know, it's the same thing with art. A lot of times when you look at your favorite artist, you can tell even before you see the credits on a comic or whatever or a poster, you can already tell that it was your favorite artist that drew it and you have that same ability. You can go in and you can have your own style, and a lot of times you won't even know that you have your own style. It will just shine through. But there are some ways to influence your style and I'll talk about that one of my later courses, but really for now, I really want you to focus on just keeping your pencil moving, having fun capturing shapes and flow, and really just boosting your confidence. That's what my courses are all about. They're about creating a confidence within the artist because that's one of the things I've noticed that a lot of people lack a lot of new artists. They lack the confidence because there's this whole mystery, this whole stigma behind art that they're expecting everything to be so difficult. And really, it's not that difficult, it's just practice. And once you learn the basics, you'll find that everything becomes a lot easier after that because you're not putting your efforts into trying to understand, you're putting your efforts into applying what you understand. There's a big difference there because a lot of times people just seek knowledge, the whole how too. You can know a lot in life, but if you're not applying it, then you're not going to see the big difference. This is the way that I think, and this is the way that I've taught myself, and this is the way I teach my students and I always have. Okay. Okay. So I'm just putting limbs here. You know, I'm just kind of going with the flow, as I say, and you can too. She could be carrying a we're drawing through the character here. But another sword. This could be a shield. She can have some armor like a helmet on. We're just applying information, put some kind of neck armor on shoulder pads here. Okay. This is more character design. But hey, there's a time and place for everything. Then what we can do is come here, erase. What is this stage? It's the information stage. Don't forget that. Information or you can even call it the blueprint. Blueprint is what has all your information before you start building, and that's what we do when we're drawing. We put down our foundation, we put down our information on proportions and where we want things to go. We capture our ideas and we capture the energy, and then we go from there. Then we just start building up from it. Then when we come closer to her face here, we can say, well, I want her eye to be somewhere around here. Put her bridge of her nose here. Put a helmet on. And shower here, put some hair on the top. Again, just creating this as I go. Put neck armor here, shoulder pads here, another shoulder pad here. Ponytail hair coming out. And this is fun, right? I mean, you're creating you're seeing how things are going to finalize your catching mistakes as you draw. And you can step back and you can look at your art and you say, well, I could have done I could have added this or I could have moved your arm this way. And then let's say that there's a bird here in the middle. And There we go. Some arm bands here. We're just going with it. That's the process. I don't want to get too caught up in this because this whole class is not about finalizing art, it's about learning how to draw a style, a comic book style. Now, I do want you to take all this information and start working on improving your female drawings and I want you to show them to me. Share them with me, you can share them here or you can share them on Instagram. Tag me or message me anyway that you want, and I'll do my best to give you feedback. I am by most of the times, but I am pretty good at getting back to people in a timely fashion. There we go. We're going to conclude this part of the lesson and move on to the next, but I think that we have enough for you to work with. Now, keep going, keep practicing. Tell me what you think so far and keep it up. I'll see you in the next one. 18. Thank You!: Hey, guys. Welcome back. And this quick tutorial, it's kind of a I would almost consider a bonus or kind of a look into the future of the courses that are coming away from me. So One of my next courses is going to be on composition and layout and how to design a scene. It will also be setting up poses and just drawing multiple characters. So it's a really important subject that I don't see enough of out there. So composition and layout It's it's basically Without composition and layout, you really it's a shot in the dark that your art is going to turn out any good. You're just guessing. So anyway, let's just jump into this. And what I've done is I've created a scene here. I've got a female character in our foreground, before I even moved to that, what I want you to see is in the center, you'll see the center line here. This is a horizon line. Let me make sure I'm drawing on a good Okay, so we'll keep drawing on this one. So we have a center line going through here, and this center line represents the horizon. From this horizon, we have a center point, which we would call the horizon or vanishing point, right? Now, there can be multiple vanishing points, but that's a topic for another day. So from this vanishing point, we have all these lines, which are these are action lines or these are lines that are just kind of guiding the eye to the distance, it's creating depth, and if you're drawing a scene, you can draw a whole grid and you can go up and down, and there's just so much you can do. Let's go ahead and clear this out. Then from this point, once you have your character in a foreground, which the shapes that we're paying attention to are we have the arm that's closest to us. This everything that is closest to the camera is going to appear a little bit bigger and we're going to see a little bit more of it. Then we have the hand wrapping around this weapon. We're not going to draw the weapon yet. Then we have the upper torso, bending, and then we have the lower pelvis area. Then from there, we're going to spring out a leg. Then we're going to have this leg pulled back, and then we're going to have the neck going up like this, attached to the neck would be the head. It's like a mannequin at this stage, and we're just building our characters. We're just building our anatomy and From here, we can say, well, this character is holding a sword. We can make up that sword, we can come back and fix it later. It can be any size you want, any shape you want. It's really up to you, you're the creator. Put an ear here, y line, hair. This is really all on you. The second stage would be to create a scene of whatever you're fighting. If we got rid of this, Let's see. Actually, let me get rid of this here too. You can see that I drew the character a little bit darker here. Hold on. Let me just check something. Okay. Yeah. I did a light penciling of this character. Let me go to my working layer. With this, now, I don't want you to get too caught up in this stuff because it's taking you away from learning about drawing females. But one of the things I think you're going to have a lot of fun with is drawing scenes when you're drawing scenes, you want to compose them. If you haven't taken a class on composition, I really recommend that you take mine. It's going to be coming out pretty soon. I've been working on it for quite a while. And I'll be announcing the release of it shortly after this course. So anyway, we have a couple characters running at us. Let's go ahead and lighten this up and I'll explain the process. This is the fun part for me because I get to explain the mindset. As we established earlier, we have this vanishing point. Now, remember that that's a vanishing point, right? And every line that you see is going towards that vanishing point. That vanishing point is the point of the direction that I want your eyes to look at, right? So we have a composition, which a composition just basically means placement of the masses that you want the eye to be drawn to. So it could be buildings, it could be figures, it could be, you know, spaceships, could be anything that you're drawing the audiences to. Now, when it comes to these characters running at us, I tried to create some sort of a giant. So I drew this giant shape of a monster, almost kind of a hawkish figure. And basically, all I did was put the basics in, and you can see, I like to demo how I draw things. And we have his arm here, we have his hand, and then this one here is coming up towards us. And maybe, you know, this guy is holding a giant club, right? Like with spikes on it. Okay. And from there, we just put in our anatomy, and hopefully by now you've taken my simplified anatomy course and you know what I'm doing here. Then we have this leg coming at us. This is called foreshortening, when it is coming towards us or going away. It's just creating depth. Then we have this other leg that's going away so you're not going to see too much of it. We have the information for this character. Now, then behind this character, I've drawn some other ones that you're not seeing too much of, but I want to keep them all in a movement. You have this action. We have this one jumping up here. Okay. Now, another rule of thumb, and I don't remember if I explained this in this course, I know I explained it in my last one. But anything above the horizon line, you're going to see underneath it because you're looking up anything below the horizon line, you're going to see the top of it. So if you look below the horizon line, you're looking at the top of his feet, right? And then as we go up, you know, we see these characters, we're looking up at them. And then we have this other flying creature here. Boom. This was my thought process and I have his hands spread out, put these little dragon wings on him, you can get as creative as you want. This all came from imagination, and it's a lot of fun to do. Now we have that character, and then we can put it in the one that we drew here. Or even this one, doesn't matter. I can darken this up. There we go. Now we have a contrast. Then you could if you're spending a lot of time on this, you can lower the opacity here, you can go and create another layer or if you're drawing with pencil and paper, you can just erase it sharpen your pencils, and then just start coming in here and drawing. So let's say I wanted to create a monster create here, here, create kind of a grimace of a mouth here. This is just, you know, for me, it's the fun part because you get to let go and be creative and just have a blast. You can put in the teeth, however you want them. If you want them to be sharp, you can. You can draw, horns on his head. You can draw hair going backwards and wrapping around here. You can create, you can see that I'm just making it up as I go along. Then what you would do is as you're drawing, you would be calculating, you'd be observing in your own mind how things are coming along, and then you can come back and refine era and just tighten things up. Let's say that I wanted a band wrapping around this arm with some spikes. You know, it can do that. Let's say that, you know, I want him to have kind of a something wrapping around and then maybe some kind of case in the back can do that. You can just add. This is really character design. I love doing this kind of stuff if you need any help with it or if you want me to do a class on this, let me know. I'd be happy to oblige. I'm just trying to create as many courses that I really feel are going to benefit you as an artist, and I've been thinking and racking my brain on what would I have wanted to learn back in the day when I first started drawing and we didn't have this kind of technology. We just had to draw and guess we didn't have anyone coaching us. So I want to give you the most value possible. And we live in such a cool time now where not only do you get to improve your art and learn, I get to kind of learn even more myself because you learn as you teach. It's a really cool it's a win win for everyone. So, you know, at this stage, I'm still just kind of drawing in and adding some details. And if I were, you know, my preferred method of drawing is, I like to draw with pencil and paper. Um I'm not I wouldn't consider myself much of a digital artist per se. I can do it, but my preferred method is always the old school, traditional pencil and paper. I'm going to give them some big old feet with claws and even give them a claw back here on this foot and just design my own anatomy here. This is what I would call creative anatomy. Then you get the point. So I've gotten all these in here and I've created a scene. And then what you would do at this stage is you just keep refining and racing and keep doing this. Now, I don't want to go too deeply into this because I will be doing a whole course on setting up scenes and doing composition and layouts and stuff like that. You'll have a project of setting up your own scene and your final project would be to show me what you've come up with. But this is a good practice run for you. It's kind of a thank you for joining my course, and I really want you to get the most from this. Please let me know what you think, get my course a good rating if you've got some value from it. And tell your friends, family, anyone else who draws, anyone that you think would benefit from this course, let them know. And also, you can find me, you know, on all kinds of social media platforms. Mainly, I post a lot of my art on Instagram. I have a Facebook page as well, but mostly Instagram. You can just google my name out there and you'll find all kinds of stuff on me. But that's it for now. Thank you for joining this course. I look forward to seeing you in my next one and stay in touch. And remember, all my courses are on demand, meaning that I'm always going to be updating and adding more content. So stay aware, and I'll send out an e mail to everyone once I do that. So you'll always be informed when I update a course. But that's it. Thanks again. I'll see you in the next course.