How to Draw Gestures and Dynamic Poses for Comic Artists!

1. Introduction: Welcome to how to draw of gestures and dynamic poses for comic artists. I'm Mike Van Orden, the creator of this course, and I'm excited to be your guide on this journey to mastering the art of bringing your comic characters to life. As comic artists were constantly pushing ourselves to create visually exciting and engaging art. And one of the key ways we do that is by using gestures and dynamic poses. In this course, we're going to explore the ins and outs of gesture drawing and how it can help convey emotion and action in your work. Will look at how to use lines and shapes to represent the movement in weight of your characters, as well as how to exaggerate certain features for added impact. We'll also dive into dynamic poses, which are essential for creating visually interesting and believable compositions for your comics, you'll learn how to use balanced tension and foreshortening to create poses. They're both dynamic and believable. Throughout this course, you'll have the opportunity to practice your skills through a series of exercises and assignments, culminating into a final project where you'll create a series of dynamic poses using the characters of your choice. So if you're ready to take your comic art to the next level, Let's get started. 2. Gestures: Definition & Purpose: Gesture drawing. What is it? Why is it important? What's its purpose? And maybe most importantly, how can it help you to grow and improve as an artist? Gesture drawing is a technique that's used in illustration and animation to capture the movement and energy of a subject. Involves quickly sketching out the basic shapes and lines that make up a pose or action, rather than focusing on the details are accurate proportions. The goal of a gesture drawing is to convey the overall feeling or intent of a pose or movement, rather than to focus on the final drawing itself. In comic art, gesture drawing can be an incredibly useful tool for creating dynamic and believable characters. By capturing the essence of a pose or movement, you can more effectively convey the emotion in action in your illustrations. This is particularly important when working with characters in motion, as it allows you to create believable and engaging action sequences. Gesture drawing can also be useful for creating expressive and emotive characters. By focusing on the lines and shapes that make up a pose, you can more effectively communicate the character's emotions and attitudes. This can help to create more engaging and relatable characters and your comics. Gesture drawing can be an essential tool for any comic book artist that's looking to create dynamic and expressive characters. By focusing on the overall feeling in or intent of a pose or movement. You can quickly create illustrations. They're more engaging and more believable. How can gesture drawing help you to improve and grow as an artist? I made a quick list based on my personal experiences of how it's helped me. And I'm going to pass that list onto right now. So first, speed and efficiency, gesture drawing is often done quickly and without worrying about any details or accuracy. This allows artists to quickly capture the overall feeling or intent of a pose or movement without getting bogged down in the details. This can be particularly useful for comic artist who need to create multiple illustrations in a short amount of time. Next, it's going to help you to understand anatomy and movement by focusing on the basic shapes and lines that make up a pose or movement. Gesture drawing can help artists to better understand the anatomy and movement of their characters. This can be really useful for artists who are just starting to learn about human form and how it moves. Next. Improving composition by experimenting with different poses and movements. Gesture drawing can help artists to create more visually interesting and dynamic compositions and their illustrations are just can use gesture drawings to explore different options for their character placement and camera angles, leading to more engaging and dynamic illustrations overall. Next, this is my favorite one, I think maybe the most important one, building a library of references by creating a library of gesture drawing. And so you can have instant access to an on-demand catalog of different poses and movements that you can use for your illustrations. This can be useful for artists who are working with a lot of action sequences, as you can refer to your library at anytime to create believable and engaging action scenes. Lastly, practice and experimentation. Gesture drawing allows for a lot of experimentation. You can play around with different poses, angles, and movements and see how they all work together. This can be a great way for you to practice and improve your skills while at the same time experimenting with different styles and techniques. 3. Body Types & Silhoettes: Okay, welcome back. In this quick lesson, we're just going to go over a couple of different types, our body types. So this is by no means everybody type out there. This is just the general consensus of body types that you'll see in comics. And this is mostly male centric, but we can do one on females as well. I do have a course on drawing females, but I just whip this up pretty quickly. What I did, there's a couple of things I wanted to show you in this. One. I started out with a general character here, a regular human, right? And then I gradually increased the musculature and the size and the stature of the being or figure here. And then even more so developed. Then it jumped over and drew kind of a really thin, like an ecto morphic fuel. So I don't know if you guys are familiar with the Endo, ecto morph and meso morph, right? So the Endo morph and will the ecto morph is the really thin one. I hope I have that accurately. The one that's really hard to put on weight and lose his fat almost instantly. The meso more. And then the endomorphism, I believe the Endo more is the big one, like this guy over here, right? And usually they're just a big, big dude or do that. And they they're just easy to put on weight. They walk around their big-boned or whatever. They are. Considered a believe it's mess up our Endo morph, right? Then a meso morph. And man, I hope I have this correct, I'll have to go back and check myself. So morph is something like these, these two here, right? Someone who's kinda guy, natural, athletic build and burns fat pretty easily, also puts on muscle pretty easily and stuff like that. Now, there are combinations, Endo morphs and meso morphs. And all of them can be combined and you can create your own characters from that. But generally, let me erase all this stuff here. Generally speaking, if you're just thinking about your comic characters and design, you can think of these characters like, for instance, this character here, which would be the kind of almost a regular human, could be enhanced a little bit more and become a Spider-Man or smaller character, right? Then this character here could be like a thor, this could be like a Captain America, or this could be a Batman, right? So this guy here could be a hawk or thing. And then this guy here could be a blob or king pin or whatever. Those are, just all generic kind of stereotypes. But you get the point of what I'm trying to say. And then what I did here above, this is kinda just drew in kind of a simplified anatomy. And I'll give you guys this as a kind of a template or worksheet to use as reference by no means. Don't limit yourself to these. I mean, these are just, you know, you can probably create 100 different types of bodies and then you can get into like aliens and creatures and monsters and stuff like that, which people have been asking me to create a course on nasa. I'll probably do something like that in the near future. But for now, let's keep it simple. These are body types that I typically use when I'm drawing and I really, really simplified them if I were drawing them professionally or for a commission or for any kind of publication, I would not make them as cartoony and clean. I would make them look a bit rough around the edges and just add my particular style to them. But I think this cleaner type of look is easier to convey the lessons and stuff. So yeah, I'll include this in the templates that should be provided to you through the class so you can find them. I'll put a link to everything for you guys. Another thing I wanted to quickly go over and we're going to have more talks about this in the future. But since I'm here, silhouettes, like if I were to remove this here, you have the basic colors and I can even remove the under drawing here. So you have a very clean type of look right from here. If I were doing a class on shading and lights and finding your lights and values and stuff. This would be really fun to do that on. In fact, I might even save this template just for that case in the future course. But then the thing I want to touch on here is the silhouette. And basically, a silhouette is when you blacken. Figure out or any object. It could be a coffee mug, could be a wine glass, could be a clock tower or building or whatever. The purpose of this is to kind of check yourself. It's, it's to be able to know what kind of characters you're trying to portray, eat. And you basically want to be able to identify a character through a silhouette and makes sure that the limbs and the arms and everything are showing the body language that you want. So yeah, in fact, I will just continue this on. And we're going to break this up into two. So I'm going to immediately jump into silhouettes. So here we go. So yeah, so silhouettes are basically, when you take 22 elements, you take your sketch, the shapes, and then you take the element of blacks or darkening and n are shadow so that you can identify your character quickly. It makes sure that things are looking good. So for instance, let's say that. Let's just say for the sake of confusion, that maybe that's not gonna work because as dark blue, if I wasn't showing this gap here between the arms and the waste, we would have what's called a thing. It just jumped right on my head. A tangent. We'd have a tangent. A tangent is when a certain body part or line crosses another one parallel. And then it gives a lot of confusion to the, the audience. So I might touch on that a little bit here in this course, but if not, it will be in later courses. But basically, tangents are big no-nos. So when you're trying to accomplish with a silhouette, is you're trying to accomplish that. You have all the elements that you need in a sketch so that when you get rid of the silhouette, everything looks fine, right? Or in this case, I like to just kinda reduce the opacity and just double-check everything, makes sure it looks fine, which in this case, I think it does. But let me give you another example of silhouettes. So I'm going to jump into my little gallery here and this one. So this here is a silhouette. And I don't know how familiar are you with any of these characters, but if you are familiar with them by any means, you should be able to identify at least one, if not all three, right? So take a little gander here. I'll give you a couple of seconds to figure it out. And then I will do the reveal. Alright, so here we go. So let's reveal its loose. Lower this down or shrink this down a little bit so you can see them all. Okay, And then we're gonna take our silhouette and we're just going to lower the opacity. Are you ready 321. There you go. Was that who you were thinking it was? We'll take a look at it again. Now imagine someone like Mickey Mouse or, or, you know, any character that you're really familiar with. Spiderman crouching down or spending his web, Batman and the moon behind them. You want to be able to use silhouettes. And a big part of that is body language and gestures. So there we go. Now, I'll come back to this in a later lesson to show you these characters and how I came up with them. These are really, really important. There's a lot of body language in these characters, but for the sake of this quick little lessons, lesson on silhouettes, there you have it. I hope that, that gives you a little bit of understanding on the purpose of silhouettes. And one of the ways that you can use them is, let's say that you use, you have a sketch and you want to just double-check it. Well, you can take that sketch ticket photo of it, pop it into a tablet like this, or you can trace over it with another blank page if you don't have a tablet. And then you can just color it all in black. And just color all the shapes in. And just kinda step back and look at and ask yourself, does this show the characters that I'm trying to draw? It can identify them just by looking at this. And if so, then you've done a good job. If it looks muddled and you can't tell what's what, then you might want to recompose your sketch. Okay, so that's it for this quick lesson. And let me know if you have any questions on, on silhouettes. And I'd be happy to answer them for you or if you have anything that you want to show me, send it my way. I'll take a look and give you some feedback. All right guys, I'll see you in the next one. 4. Importance of Body Language in Comics: Okay, welcome back. And continuing on from the last lesson, now we're going to jump in to the importance of body language. And what I'll do is I'll kinda break these characters down. So if you remember in the last message or the last message, last lesson, we talked about a little bit about silhouettes. And one of the reasons that you could tell who these characters were, hopefully, is because of the body language that they're using, right? So why? If, if, if you know who these characters are right, this is a wolverine, why? Or how could you tell? Well, because he's got his claws up. He's, he's looks very stoic and he's ready for battle. How could you tell that this would be dead pool over here, right? Because he's got that kind of look like a stance doesn't look too serious. It looks kinda funny, especially when you remove this. Alright, so let's remove the whole silhouette. You can look and you can tell like that's a body language that he would use. Now, the centerpiece would be Colossus, and he's just a big giant character made of a metal material. He just looks kind of intimidating, only big, he's ready for battle. It looks pretty serious, but it doesn't look angry or aggressive or anything like that. He looks like just someone who's very stoic and just doesn't take any nonsense and has very direct, right? That's, that's kind of how I understand the character. You may understand these characters a little bit differently than I do, but this is what I base them on. With this one here. He looks like he's ready to take some action and he's not going to back down. He's like bringing on all right, hands up. So that's body language for you. Alright? And that's really, really important in comics because you want, just like if you're watching a movie, you want people to be able to identify why I say people. I mean your, your audience, your viewers, your fans, your friends, who, whoever is looking at your art, you're communicating to them. The character that you're drawing. If they've never seen a character before, you want them to be able to pick up what you're putting down relatively fast. Okay, so what I'm gonna do is just get rid of a few things here. And I'm going to trace my steps backwards to kinda show you the gestures of how I started this out. And I don't know if I saved a little gestures. Let's see if I did or not. Okay, let's see gesture. Did the finalists get rid of all these lines? We'll just we'll just have the gestures and K files. Why do I have these? Why do I have this one? Yeah, there we go. Get rid of that. I must have just used a arbitrary layer. Okay, so let me go to all these gestures and try and bring them out so that we can see. This is how I started all this, how I start almost all my sketches. Let's see. During this out, that was very simplified gesture. And then I think I have another one somewhere here, right here. So we know it's Colossus, dead pulled gesture. Okay, so there you go. This was the premise. This was what I started working with, right? When I drew these characters. Now, what I was before, I wanted to dive into any type of details or anatomy or facial expressions or anything like that. I really wanted to make sure that I had their body language put down correctly in such a way that I would be able to tell that these are the characters that I'm trying to portray. The reason I do that is because it gives information back to my brain when I'm drawing. It keeps me in that zone of that character, right? If I were just kinda halfheartedly drawing a character and I wasn't trying to convey their personality or their body language or their attitude. Well, there's a big chance that ending or the final sketch would turn out very botched or lackluster. And I try to avoid that at all costs. Now as artists, we're humbled every day and there's some things that we tried to draw and they just don't work out. And we tend to try and force them. And it just doesn't go our way. And we have to just learn from those lessons and then try again. Just don't ever give up. Then I'm going to go ahead and show you from here. I'm just going to lower the opacity on all these a little bit, keeping them here. But then show you my next step, which was to find the lines for the characters, right? So we'll start with, let's start with Deadpool. So that poll, I just drew these lines in, darken them up a little bit. Fact, we don't need too much of this gesture here. So I drew those lines and just tried to, if this was a very quick sketch just for the sake of this lesson. And then we'll jump over to Colossus. Now with classes I have, let's see, as lions here. And let's go ahead and darken them in. Almost remove their gesture. I'm just trying to keep it there in the background so you can see. I didn't get into any details on crosses his face or anything like that. Same thing with drawing this Wolverine sketch here. So I drew the lines. Let's darken them in. And let's go ahead and lighten up the gesture so we can kind of see through them there. Then that's kind of how everything started. I just went from a gesture. Then I worked from that gesture and just started doing some lines, very, very rough lines. This is just very sketchy. And then from here, let's go back to Deadpool and we'll do the final. The final is it wasn't even really a final per se, but it's just this is where I'm ending up with and I just darken some of the lines that I wanted to keep that if I were to get rid of the under drawings at all, it would have enough information there where it's still know who the character was, right? Then at the end you can draw it. You're going to add some gray tones in. And that's a whole different lesson there. What else did I That's just the leg. Oh, you know, what I did is I I make this mistake all the time. So what I can do is just merge this layer and with the dead pool layer, and I'll do that later. Okay, so then jumping over two clauses here, same thing, just find the one of the habits that I'm still trying to get into is labeling my layers. Because a lot of times I'll just try and remember Layer one through 25 or whatever. And I find that I get really confused or I start drawing on the wrong layer. And I'm not even a digital artists, I'm more of a traditional artists. So maybe you digital artists out there don't have this problem. But for me in particular, men, I've just run into that so many times where it's like you have to get in the habit of just labeling each one of your layers. So you know, it makes, it makes your job a lot easier. But it also just prevents a lot of confusion in the future. And it's also great because you can just focus on one element at a time. So you can have a layer for backgrounds or layer for our car, layer for a weapon, or a layer for the sky. It doesn't matter. And you can just keep them all separate, which is pretty awesome. It's something that I'm still learning myself. Okay, So then there are some details for our colossus. And then over here for Wolverine, it's all the same concept. Just helps me of the lines. And then I'll just lighten this up a little bit. And really we don't even need adjust your shots underneath. I'll just get rid of them. Whoops. So now we have our lines and then later on, just to kinda sell it. And you'll hear me say that a lot. When you're drawing it and when you're sketching and you're trying to sell it, quote unquote. That just means an epic. This up back in the day when I when I used to do sales. And your I don't know, you've probably heard this before. It's an idiom. It says, sell the sizzle, not the steak. Well, that's where when you're adding stuff like this, you're trying to just take it one little step further to sell it as a three-dimensional mass. And you can go deeper and deeper in and add more elements and layers and stuff like that. But really, the whole purpose of this lesson here is to kinda show you that body language and then show you a brief glimpse behind the scenes to see my process. And then going back to that silhouette, this is a really great way to check your work. And I really recommend it to you because it's better to spot the errors and mistakes ahead of time so that you don't have to rework too much. And that's the whole, the whole purpose of this course is to help you to prevent that. So that before you even start diving into your actual sketch, you should have your gestures laid out. You should have everything balanced and, and kinda proportionally composed so that you don't run into the mistake of painting yourself into a corner and then having to come back and rework or even scrapping it altogether. That always success as artists, we put a lot of work into our, our sketches and a lot of effort and to let that go to waste. It's really just a shame. That's it will end this one here. On this. I'll share this in the templates for you all share all the versions. I think I'll do like the line work. Maybe even the gestures all separately. And then I'll even drop in the gray tones and the silhouettes for you. So I'll try and not try it. I will save them all as a template, probably as a PDF. And then I'll give you a link to all this stuff too. So you can have this stuff for reference and you can try your own. Alright, so I hope that this helps. And if you have any questions, as always, feel free to reach out to me. And I'll be happy to assist you and keep doing the good work, keep practicing, keep going. I'll see you soon. 5. Creating Motion & Movement: Alright, well here we go. So in this lesson, we are just going to focus on something called motion. So we're just gonna go over a couple of techniques on how to draw the human figure in motion. And I'm initially, I'm planning to keep it pretty simplified. I wanted to show you the concepts and then we'll go a little bit more into practice. And then in a later lectures, I will dive a little bit deeper into it and then give you a chance to do some practicing on your own. So motion, what is motion? Motion is a movement, right? So motion is energy from, if you want to get from point a to point B. But you have an obstacle between you. You need to go around that obstacle, right? So that's called movement. From it's traveling. It's when you raise a limb like an arm or leg. It's when you bend over to touch your toes. It's when you turn your head. Any type of movement, whether it'd be subtle or whether it'd be subtle or obvious. It doesn't really matter as long It's as long as you can convey that there's some sort of movement, it's really important that you learn the principles of it. So let's just jump in and let me show you a couple of examples. One thing that I learned a lot was okay, Let's just say you have a head. We're drawing a basic stick figure, right? Actually, we're drawing a stick on a, standing on the surface. Right? This stick is about, let's just say 78 heads tall. Now. Height here, feet are here. And what we want to do is we want to show movement to get this, this stick figure, this stick with a head over to about this area. So how would we do that? How would we show movement? Well, let's just take a line from the center of here. And let's do a curve to this x. And I'm going to lower that curve. I think that's a very strong curves, so I'm just actually going to draw it through like that. Okay? A way to do this, and this is just for perception. This is not something that you're going to have to do routinely or anything like that. But this is just to send the message across. And so let's just do a circle like this. And let's do one here. Let's do another one here. Just jump down to this. Okay? So we've achieved our goal. We've, we've brought this head all the way down to our target, right? So then let's just go ahead and connect line to each one of these. So if you've taken my anatomy course, one of the things I mentioned is you have the three major masses. And the further you separate the masses from one another and at three major message just to kind of recap, are your, your head, which is here, right? Your upper body, your torso, upper chest, which is here. Right. Then your lower pelvis, which is here. Okay. The further away from each other they are, the more extended they are, the more you're conveying movement. And so if we were to turn this character sideways and just draw, it doesn't have to be perfect. Just for the sake of showing you some movement. We have a character that's kinda leaning now, right? And he's kind of Alabama. It's because he's looks like he's falling. And we're going to get a little further. Alright. We're going to drop it down a little further. So we're kinda getting the same parallel curve. Then we have another one here, which I extended this one a little bit further than the others. It's just approximate not to worry about anything being exact because I'm just showing you that each one of these conveys some sort of movement. So if we were to add an arm here, and then a hand here, and then legs, right? Same as if we were at an arm here. Let's say that we moved it like this, put another arm back like this. And we moved a leg like this. And then the leg like this. And then I'll even switch to a different color so we don't get too confused. And then another arm like this, I'll pull it back this time. Arm That's going forward. Then a leg. It's going back. Like this, coming forward. Then we're gonna keep this moving. It almost looks kinda like we're animating right. Then this time we're going to bring this leg forward, this leg dark. And then finally, actually, this is a very long necks, so I'm not really comfortable with that. I'm going to go ahead and erase it, bringing up a little bit closer with it, we'll stick with the red. And we'll go back to the blue. And we will take a closer look at this in one moment. I'll show you what I mean by everything. So we have a latest going like this. So now let's jump onto this one. And we're going to pull this arm back, full arm forward. You can see that this one is really, really close to the ground, right? And I'm going to explain something in the moment. And I'm going to take this whole layer. And let's go ahead and use a different color. Let's just say like a green. Dark green preferably to make it stand out. So here we go. Point. Let's just call this point a. Whoops. Point a. And we'll call this point z, right? A to Z. So movement, right? Well, in order to show movement, if we just kept this stick figure upright and just kinda made him, you know, like this the whole way. And then just move an arm, leg. It would show movement. Right? I'm just drawing this for the heck of it. But just to give you a point. But it doesn't show any kind of dynamic or interesting type of movement. That's what we want when we're drawing comic books or storyboards or animation, or any type of commercial art. So we want to show some action. So what I would do at this point, and just to illustrate a little bit further, and I am pretty sure that you grasp what I'm saying. We're gonna go into some actual sketching here in a few minutes. But for now, I'm just showing you the principles of movement. So let's just say that this character here, z, right? That was our ultimate goal. So let's just go ahead and draw a little bit more of a detailed stick figure. And so when I say a little bit more, what I'm thinking is, let's draw in a shoulder and arm. Let's draw on another shoulder over here. Then let's draw, and since this arm that's closest to us is swinging back, then that would mean that there's armed, it's this leg that's closest to us would be going forward and then delay that's further apart or further away from us. We'll be going backwards. And I like, when I'm drawing running characters, instead of clenching your fist, I like to kind of give them kind of pointy hands to make it a little bit more. No pun intended but aerodynamic. Right? So you can kinda see that we've done the framework, right? We have a character in motion, which coincidentally happens to be the title of this lesson. Okay, so how did we do that? Well, we just visualized where we wanted our character to be. We visualize our character standing up over here. We had in mind that we want our character to travel to here. So I hope that that makes a little bit of sense to you. For me, it's the best representation that I learned personally. And I taught myself this just by studying things like animation and movement, just watching movies and things like that. It's just one of those things that you want to have a pretty good grasp on prior to really try to dive into your sketches. Because when you're drawing, you have a few things that you want to keep in mind. You have your anatomy, you have your technique. You have your gestures, you have your, let's say finished details like rendering and adding textures and volume and details and shadows and all that stuff. Which makes all your art look pretty. But all of that stuff is useless. If you don't see useless, that's a harsh word, but all that stuff is not serving you as well as it could if you don't have a pretty firm grasp on movement and gestures and movement played together right there on the same playground. They work together. And that's why when I'm drawing, initially, when I'm doing my layout, I typically draw gestures. Now, if this were a real sketch for me, I would probably go a little crazy and my pencil would be moving like 1 million mi an hour and I'd be shaping things out. And this is a technique that we'll get into, but this is just kind of a sketchy rendering technique that allows me to shape and mold things into the way that I want them. I can lowered his head down if I want to make it look like. And that's another, another thing is if you want to make your character look like they're really coming out, you are really moving aero dynamically. So a concept is keep it lower to the ground, right? So you see how the, his body in general is pretty low to the surface, right? So if you look at racecars or motorcycle races or anything like that, when they're taking their curve, are there turn, you can see that the rider will go really, really, really the lean into it and they'll go really, really close to the ground. The reason for that is really it's just physics because that speed, that momentum. It's, you know, if they were to try and stay upright or they weren't going with that rhythm of the turn, they would just lose control and they would wipe out. But when you lower, lower the body closer to the ground, when you're going faster, it creates this illusion of momentum and speed and movement, right? So just keep that in mind. And I'm trying to give you all the knowledge I have in my head. So bear with me if I jump from topic to topic, it's really because I'm trying to share everything with you. Here's what I would typically do if I were drawing this character I'm ion. I would probably be using traditional paper and pencil, but I would try to get everything as close to the movement and the portrayal as I, as I wanted to like my gesture and I wouldn't be too focused on the anatomy just yet. But I would have things placed where I can tell proportionally. Alright, this works, this could work. And I might even draw some little speed lines just to kinda tell my subconscious mind like, Hey, this guy is moving really fast. You can even throw some flames from the ground and from his foot. And if this were like a character like the flash, there might be some lightning going all over the place. The other thing is that it's information, you're putting that into your head. And then what I would do is I would just lower the opacity or the equivalent of erasing. And let's just go ahead and get rid of those. And then from here, I'm not gonna do it right now, but I would just sharpen my pencil and just start diving into, I would probably zoom in when I'm using this and just kinda find because I hear and I won't go into details still. I would just kind of find out where things fall. And then we come back in later and start working on my musculature or my anatomy and all that stuff. This is just a process and it's just, you know, not every process is going to be your process. You might find a way that works better for you. And that's perfectly fine. You know, there's no cookie cutter approach to arch. It is very subjective. And I'm just trying to show you the foundational stuff, the stuff that you should be keeping in mind while you're drawing, such as movement and weight and mass. And how does this stuff, how does gravity affect certain things, and how's movement work? So I would start with something like this and I did that really quickly. And then if I were really diving into it, I would just keep working and keep grinding it out until it starts shaping up until the standards that I want to hold it to. Then I would just keep cleaning up and drawing it out. I'll create a whole course on that. And that would be like, that would be a really deep diving course because we really go into the details and the rendering and stuff like that. If that's something that you're interested in, by all means, just send me a message and tell me, you know, that's something that you'd like to learn. But for now, that's it. We're going to stop here. So let's just recap real quick before I do, I'm going to erase this guy here and throw these guys back on. And let's bring them out. Hello, welcome back. And recap. Now I want this to be two point where you could tell me what we did yourself. So you can explain this to me. We started from point a, we ended up at point Z. Point a is very stiff, upright, boring, not showing too much movement. And then as you can see from each one of these and we drew five different figures. By the time we get down to z, we saw that there's a lot more movement. I even drop the head down even lower, which I don't need to have this detailed part. Okay. I dropped the head down even lower to kinda just convey more movement, more intensity. And so keep that in mind as we go on further. So there you go. We're going to end here. What you could do is you can replicate this. I really want you to understand this stuff. My goal in all my courses is to teach you well enough that you can explain this to someone else, right? So I want to pass on this information. That's knowledge I wanted to demonstrate for you. I want you to be able to take everything I'm teaching you, and I want you to be able to regurgitate it, but also to apply it. And I want you to have the confidence that you can also teach it yourselves. Okay, I hope that makes sense. And for now, that is it. And thanks for joining and I will see you in the next one. 6. Gestures in Motion: Okay, welcome back. And in the last lesson we went over some techniques, but mostly the principles of capturing Mu movement. And this little quick lesson, we're just going to go into a little bit, a little bit deeper into the techniques and maybe show you a couple of examples of drawing a more movement in the human form and which could be equated or translated as gestures. Let me see here, that was just a side sketch here. We might even get into that in a later chapter. So basically, to carry on from our last lesson, here's what, here's how I would approach it. If I'm trying to create gestures, I would think first I would warm up and I would just draw a curved line, drawn a head, drawing a body in drawn. There's my three major masses. I would always start out something like that. Now you could draw something like this, which is, you know, they call the the pillow or two bean method where you're kinda drawing a rectangular shape which represents the top and bottom and put the head here, and then put an arm up here, and then put an arm back here. Alright. And then put another leg up this way and then drop it down this leg back here. You can't do that. It's okay. But let's go ahead and shrink this down a little bit and move them over. And when it comes to gesture drawing, if you are kind of new at it and it's not something that you really do too often. I really recommend doing this as a regular form of practice. Before you start driving, diving into a sketch that you want to finish, just take some scrap paper and just do some silly things like this. Look, I'll just show you. Draw a upper body, lower body. Draw a line up the middle Joel ahead up here. And I'm kinda looking up at them, right? I see. And then just draw try things. Like I'll draw a leg here, right? And then I'll just draw this leg. And I'll say, normally it would probably go here. I'm just going to kick your way over here right there. And then if that if this leg was coming forward, that would mean that this arm would be coming forward and this arm would be going backwards. So we'd also have to figure out, okay. I want to drop his head down and give them more movement. Remember we talked about keeping your head low. Alright? And then pull this arm back. Then take this arm here. And then kinda gives. And then you can even do this. You can take his, his head and turn it this way. And here we are. Here's what I'll do. I'll show you what I mean. I'll lower the opacity and I'll redraw it using black, right? So we have, instead is head facing downward. I'm going to have his hopes. Drawling different layer kinda makes it pop a little bit more. Then what I was saying is just and I'm not trying to get this perfect because it's a gesture. Right. So his heads facing this way. Right. And then I have a shoulder here. Shoulder here, arm dropping. I'm just keeping it stick figure for now. Arm pulling back, arm coming like this. You can even, you know what? Let's do this. Let's make it a little bit more extreme. Instead of his arm pulling out here. Let's pull his arm back this way. And then let's go ahead. And imagine that his he's kicking. Boom, right? Then this leg is coming down here. And it just shows some movement. And it may be inaccurate, but, you know, you can learn from it. So with that said, let's go ahead and get rid of this. And let's go back to this other layer and bring the opacity back. And I'm just going to go ahead and shrink this down, move it over here somewhere. Take this eraser and get rid of this, and just start doodling a little bit more with the red. Just to show you some examples. Let's say we wanted a character kind of crouching down looking at us. So I would just draw the top head shape. Imagine that the pelvis is pushed back because this is called foreshortening, which we will get into. But he's bending towards us, right? So if we're looking at it from the side. We have the lower pelvis and then we have the upper hand, we have the head, right? So you have to imagine yet to see things as they are, as you would want them to be. And I know that sounds very cryptic and proverbial. Okay, So here we go. So I'm drawing his arm down here. And then I'm gonna go ahead and put this leg here and here, and this one there. And then I'm going to put this leg up here. I mean, there's harm up here. Okay. And so what can I do with this? Well, if I really, right now it doesn't look like too much. But if I really wanted to, I could kinda sculpt it and just kinda workout my limbs in terms of shapes. I can put this arm here, just widen it up a little bit. And we just start kind of developing more of a kind of a human ask form, right? So we're, we're finding the form and we want to keep it moving. And when I say moving, I mean, like changing the limbs around. Don't keep everything stationary. You don't want your art to look stiff. You went to look like these characters are full of life. And you know, you wanna do this. You don't want to get stuck on any of these. You want to keep going. And this is, this is literally how I do it. I take a few of these, I learn and I'll erase this one here. And I move on. And I kinda, it's kinda like downloading information into your memory banks. So then let's say I wanted a character jumping upwards. So let's say, like I would say, okay, well let's try. I put the little action line going up. I put a torso, upper body here, lower one here, head here. And then I'm angling it to kinda show like, okay, we can have one arm going up. Actually, let's shrink them down a little bit. Okay. And I'll even turn him a little bit like that. Okay. And 11 arm up, one arm coming here. Same thing here. So if this, if this, remember, I think it's called contrapposto or contrapposto. Forgive me if I'm wrong. But there's a term where whenever you're moving your arms and your legs, like think of it. When you're walking. Whenever you put your right foot forward, your left arm moves forward as well, right? And when you and your right arm goes backwards, so anything that's on the same side of your body will be opposing each other. So for instance, since this arm is stretched, then that would mean that this leg on this side would be stretched, right? And then the opposing side would be this leg would move forward. This arm would move backwards. So I hope that that makes sense. And I can tell you a few more times. Like even this character here, like I had this silhouette here for a reason. Because I was going to show you there's a chapter that I'm doing on silhouettes. I guess I can explain it. When you're drawing one of the tests that you can do that make sure that your proportions look good or that your character pose looks good, is you can block it and all in. You don't have to. I rarely do it. I only do it when I'm really doing something that's a little iffy or something that I'm really concerned about, but it does help a lot to make things proportional lysed and also it helps with the composition. So with that said, I will just remove that layer. And you can see that when I, when I did this one, see what did I do? Where did I start? Tracing my footsteps backwards here. Okay, so we have this layout here and now this looks like the initial layout. And we can even darker then. I will continue to draw on this layer and kinda recap. So what I did was I drew his head here, pulled one arm back, one arm forward. Alright. And then curved his line of action like this. Pull this leg forward as well, and then pull this leg back. And that was kind of what I was going for just so you can know. Now we're not going to really touch too much on this right now because I do have more lectures that go deeper into this kinda stuff. So let's get out of here. And with cool things about what we just did is hey, I've just created a gesture, right? Just by tracing over light that you can do the same. You can find art in comics or whatever that you like. You can find a photo of, let's say, a football player or soccer player or See fighter or whatever it is. And you can trace over it and just find their action, right. But with comics, what you want to really realize and remember is that you want to focus on exaggeration. So comic books are going to be a lot more exaggerated than real life. Okay, onward and upward. Let's go ahead and keep this going. So I'm just trying to think off the top of my head. What's another good pose? Let's think of like Spiderman. Let's say like, How would Spearman V, I'm just going to draw a head shoulder. Imagine that his arm is bent down like this. It doesn't have to be perfect. I can totally move all this around, right? And pull this arm backwards, imagined that this one is holding on to some webs. And then since this arm is forward, I'm going to bring this leg for oppose it, right? And then since then that would push this leg back, right? But with Spiderman, That's kinda funny. He's very different than most people or most characters because He's got this weird agility and flexibility and almost like a contortionist. So you can really go crazy drawing and someone like Spider-Man or let's say Night Crawler, or any of those characters are very limber. But I can have this imagining that he's swinging over some buildings, right? Maybe a taller building over here. And I don't care about the perspective right now. I'm just just iterating my thought process on all this. Okay? So that's one way to do it, right? And then let's go ahead and keep all this. Why not shrink it down? What did I just do? That was silly of me. Okay. I met two, lasso it and then shrink it down. That works a little bit. It, alright, let's do smart. And you know, for me, this is actually really, really fun because it gives me a chance to do the things I wouldn't normally do. Like take the chances that I wouldn't normally take. Because if you make a mistake, cares. If you don't, if you can't figure it out, It's okay, study it, learn from it. Why would I want to waste valuable sheet of paper and a couple of hours of my time doing something wrong when I could easily just do a couple of practice runs and learn and get into the groove per se and get things right before I go. So yeah, I would just keep carrying on like this. And let's see, what's another pose flying towards you? Let's say, Well, that's foreshortening and I think I'm gonna do a chapter on that later. What's another one? How about, you know that you always see that iconic pose or like Batman or spawn or someone standing over a building, allege kind of gazing down over the city. Well, let's do something like that. How would that look? I'm just imagining that it would be something like actually let me shrink this down. I always start out pretty big like that. I'm so used to drawing on paper. And so imagine something like this. So we have, you can notice that I pretty much always start with the three major masses first. Now you don't have to, but I like to because it kind of keeps everything all the checks and balances in place. So I can imagine that he's overseeing Gotham City or if it's whoever it is can be Spiderman could be Batman, could be spawn. But there are kinda looking down over the city. Or maybe he's watching inspiring man swing, right? Or maybe it was watching whoever. And then what I would do is kinda figure out what's a good pose. So is this arm is going to be closer to us or further away. Now you could switch it up like I'll do a couple of different examples. In fact, I'll do another layer and I'll do it where the arms closest to us. And then that would make that this leg. Where do you go this way? Then this this leg over here will go like that. And I would probably not make the back leg so angled like that. I'd probably make it a little bit more relaxed depending on the energy of the sketch. And then. I would just start playing around with the shapes a little bit and seeing how things fall together. If I see, if I notice a couple of proportions that are out of whack. This is a good time to kind of try and correct them. Now, if his shoulders here and I want him to be looking over our shoulder maybe at the camera instead like I had us can do that too. And then put his hind leg back here. A lot of times what happens is you would draw like an edge of a building or a gargoyles or whatever. And it might cover up that foot. There might be a lot of darkness back here. Because you want to, you want to keep the focus on your character. You don't want it. Your eyes wandering all over the place. Compositionally. You want to keep the audience really engaged with the character that you're drawing. Now I could take this other arm on the other side and draw kind of like some outstretched fingers like that. Okay, so that's one way to do it. And then I could take his cape. And you can determine, do you want this keep going forward like that or flying off into the wind up to you. Then, you know, at this point you start formulating ideas. And you're like, okay, well this kind of works, but what if we didn't do it like that? What if we did a different way? What if we put this arm closest to us back? This one? That, and that would bring this R this leg that's closest to us forward. Another one back. Right? In fact, I think I may have missed up on the last one. Don't worry, we all make mistakes. Okay. So then I could also lowers head. You can you can always move things around to see how they adjust right? Now I'll show you that because All this stuff is so vitally important to your finished work, I can almost guarantee that probably the majority of you probably don't start your arm out like this. You probably just dive right into your sketch and you think you have it figured out, or you think you will figure out, or it will magically turn out the way you want and then, and then it doesn't, And then you're kinda bummed out and you might even cave and give up in the middle of your sketch. And I don't want you to do that anymore. I want you to learn techniques and formulas and methods that help you get past those little sticking points. And so here we go. We have a different angle, right? And we can try so many different things with this. So let's say that we have the little edge right there looking at the profile. If we wanted a cape, again, we can do the same thing where maybe the cape is going to go like this. Maybe it's going to come out a little bit in front of them. Maybe there's gonna be cape over here. You just play around with it. These are your aesthetics, these are your compositions. And I am working on a couple of courses. One is on composition and layouts. And we're gonna get more into multiple characters and perspective and layout design and all that stuff too. So bear with me. These courses take some time, as you can see. Okay? So let's say we took this one, right? And I would just be like, well, let's go ahead and lower the opacity. The opacity on the original. And then let's go ahead and create a new layer and see how can we handle this. I would probably start out again with the basic shapes like this. Now, if I were drawing a real sketch, I probably wouldn't be drawing every single shape the way I'm doing now, but I'm doing this so you guys can see, I'm always leave your self room for error. So I have the basic shapes here. Here's his neck, here's his head. And we get to decide, you know, what does this character doing? Why is he here? What's the purpose? Of his existence on this page. Right? You have to be asking yourself these questions all the time. I know it sounds funny and weird and you're probably not doing that all the time. You're probably just saying, what's a cool sketch? What would other people like? What can I get the most likes on what's, what's popular right now, and that's all fun. But man, imagine how much more fun it would be if he knew all the rules. And you knew how to break the rules, and then you knew how to manipulate the rules to work in a coordinates with your style. Okay, So I'm popping in some basic limbs and I'm not really working too much on the anatomy but enough to kind of get an idea of like, Okay, I could work like this or I could I could erase this and drop his head down a little bit, extend his neck. Now, too worried about having everything proportional yet. Because what I'm doing, this first step is really just your information step. You're just trying to lay down information. You can notice like, Oh, this legs too big, this arms too small, the hands are mismatched or whatever this you can notice that stuff later. Or, you know, hey, I could probably upturn this hand. It would look a little bit more dynamic. All that stuff. It's something that you'll figure out along the way as you're drawing and every sketches different. Alright. So here we go. We're, we're forming a character, a human figure, right? And I'm just, you could see that I'm just drawing over and over and over again and kind of sculpting and molding, not really caring about my exact lines. So if you're, if you're the type of artist and I used to be like this, who just kinda jumps in and tries to get everything perfect the first time. Don't do that. Make these mistakes. Whittle and sculpt, and just keep your pencil moving. Don't have any leave your ego out of this. And just keep everything moving because you're kind of machine right now. You're a machine that's transferring information from your mind onto paper and two-dimensions. And you're trying to do it is relatively accurate as you can, as fast as you can to the best of your ability. But also you're implementing your own style. And style is a whole different topic. And I have a course that I've already started on, finding your style and capitalize on your own style. I have a lot of courses in the works, but for now let's focus on this one. And I would just take this and lower the opacity and probably get rid of the under drawing. And then I would just create another layer. And you can change the LED color if you want, or you can just keep it the same. It doesn't really matter because we're just practicing. But let's say that I wanted to work on the anatomy of this. You can pick any arbitrary point that you want. I could pick this bicep and just say, alright, well this bicep would look pretty cool if it were flexed. And he has this tricep here and hopefully, you know a little bit about anatomy at this stage of your art journey. And if you need some help with anatomy, maybe you've taken my course on simplified, simplified superhero anatomy. If not, it's okay. You still could take it or just study some books. I'm also planning on making a more advanced anatomy course so it won't be simplified, it'd be a little bit more deep diving. But you know, what I'm doing here is I'm just kind of finding some lines that represent the anatomy here. Are the right are they wrong? I don't know. Let's see. Just taking the information that's inside and putting it down on paper. To the best of my ability at this given moment. That's all we can do. To the best of your ability. Don't compare yourself to other artists. Prepare yourself to yourself yesterday or two weeks ago, or five years ago. And keep watching your own progress. And here we go. Now I'm just going to focus on putting his neck in and drawing the head shape. And this comes a little bit easier for me. And I still make mistakes Tuesday. But I've been doing this for years and years and years. And a lot of this stuff becomes second nature. And I want that for you as well. I want you to get to the point where, you know, you just kinda pick up your pencil and you know, where things go. But at the same time, I don't want you to overanalyze anything. I used to be a big culprit of that and it used to really, really slow me down. I would overanalyze my art. And I was stubborn. If I couldn't figure something out, I wouldn't let it go. I would just keep drawing, enforcing. And until I realized like, Man, I'm never going to figure this out. And I've already spent 6 h on it, and it's just gotten worse. Sometimes you just gotta learn when to walk away and start over and learn from it and don't repeat the same mistakes, right? So here we go, just a basic outline, nothing too serious. This arm here might be even too small, really, the one that's further away. So luckily we are using some technology here. Or I can increase the size. And that's one of the advantage of drawing on digital tablets. But yeah, these are the things that you want to catch initially before you start diving into your finished work. If this were Bamiyan, I would just kinda draw some elements. Try and capture them as best as I can. You can even put like the little symbols here. I think that this chest is actually a little too small to be honest. I would probably if I were if I weren't teaching right now, I would probably take some time and change the proportions on this a lot. But right now it's okay because this is just for the sake of teaching. So we're not too worried. Just all I'll say is constantly be mindful of what you're drawing. Okay, just keep, keep yourself aware, keep yourself alert. There's gonna be some moments where you let go and you let your hand takeover and you just start drawing without really thinking about it. But you get to a point where you're starting to wiggle down the details and observe. There is a term called the observing ego, right? Where you're letting go of your egoic nature, which is constantly judging. You're getting into the nature of observing with your ego. And all that does is it gives you the ability to be aware of when things are going well and when they're not in the way that you're aware is you do a check on yourself, you're looking at, you're like, okay, let's check. How does this look? What would I change? And just off the bat, like the couple of things I would change, our output, probably make them a little thicker. And this region give them a little bit more weight. Yeah. I mean, that's just one of the things. And you just got to keep asking yourself, like, how can I make this a little bit better? What can I do to make this look a little bit more alive? And these are the questions of an artist's, right? You're asking yourself because you're creating something that you're eventually more likely going to share with the world. And you wanted to just go in with your best foot forward. So there you have it. Here's a quick way to draw and render a character. Now, I didn't go too deep into it. You can keep repeating. This is kind of a rents wash to repeat cycle. And then you'll get to the point where eventually you'd be able to retrace this again. And I say trace, but when you trace over it with a different lead and start doing your details, if I really wanted to, I can come in here and just start adding some hatching and stuff like that. This course, we're not talking about crosshatching or details. I do have a course where I did talk about a little bit. I did a really cool course with Ed for a chalk. And that was on rendering comics. And I go a little bit into rendering and doing like crosshatching and stuff like that. But eventually I'll, I'll do a whole course on it so that you can take your initial sketch like something like this, and you can take it all the way through to the end. But yeah, we'll stop here. I hope that this was helpful for you and we'd have a lot more to learn. So I don't want to overwhelm you. This was a long lecture, but I will see you in the next one. Okay? So that's it. Take care and I'll see you in the next one. 7. The Stick Figure Simplified Gestures: Okay, so now that we've talked a little bit about the importance of gestures and dynamic figure drawing. Let's kinda jump into a very basic simplistic version of the, a simplified gesture, if you will. And you guys probably started out with this when you're in school as a little kid. And most people will tell you, Hey, I can't draw anything, but I can, I can even draw a stick figure. Well, I'll tell you what. Stick figures are, kinda the beginning of everything. So I'm just going to give you a couple of demos and go over the basics of just a simplified gesture. I'm kinda like this one here. Now. One when we're doing gesture shots like this, where I guess the main objective would be to put everything down on your page as fast as possible, test it out. So if you're doing like a thumbnail sketch for a future drawing, or if you're laying out a comic book, or if you're doing character design and stuff like that, what you wanna do is you want to take your knowledge of your anatomy, the character that you're trying to portray. There. You know, everything about them, their body language, their behavior, their attitude. You're trying to express that through your overall art. But the best way to do that is to start out with gestures. Gestures are very impactful and very powerful. So here we go. For a simplified gesture. Just start out with a head. It could be an oval head, could be a round head, compete head like this. It doesn't matter, right? You can you can simplify it as much as you want. From there. Just draw a straight line down. Now this is just our figure, right? A basic front view. So now measure a gap between the bottom of the chin and rethink the collarbone would be right. And so hopefully you have a little bit of a grasp of anatomy. And if you don't, I do have an anatomy, a very simplified anatomy course available, and I am working on a more complex advanced intermediate course. So stay tuned for that. So if this were the collarbone, you can just draw just a circular shape, a sphere, right? And then underneath that sphere, you can just draw another smaller sphere. And from here, you can just decide where you want to put the legs. So you could put like here, like here. And here you can put the arms, right? This looks like child's play. And many of you are probably more advanced than this and you probably don't even mess with stick figures all that often. However, I still use stick figures when I'm drawing. They really helped me. And I'll, I'll show you how in either this lesson are the ones to follow. But generally, if I want to draw a stick figure really fast, I would just probably start out with the upper body workout, something like this. And if I want to put like a leg here and then maybe pull this leg, the other leg backwards. And then we're gonna get into a whole section on twists. But maybe I twist his body towards us and contort it. Pull this arm back, pull this arm forward. You can see how we can get a little bit more complex with just a little bit of movement of the limbs, right? Don't worry about this because we're getting way deeper into this in future lessons. But I'm just kinda showing you why. I think stick figures are very essential when you're doing gestures. Another way to do it is just draw a curve. This is how I used to start out 99% of my sketches. I would just draw a curve like this, a line like this, kinda follow along with the curve. And put my one leg here, maybe another leg over here, put an arm, drop down here. And then just imagine that this other arm is falling over here. And then you can just, you're seeing the form developed and it doesn't have to be perfect. The whole purpose of drawing stick figures is to find first-year putting information down on the page. And then secondly, you're just trying to find something that works for what you're going for. So if we were working on some sort of complex pose or maybe a multi character pose, It's best to try and try things out first before you commit. Now, I see a lot of artists that just kinda dive in and they don't give it the, the love that you should. And when I say that, what I mean is, before you start committing to your final piece. Or even thinking about that, you need to find your gestures, your body language, your overall blue, blueprint of what you're trying to achieve prior to going into any details or even anatomy. Like I don't even draw anatomy until I start figuring out where my character is going to be. What angle if I'm using a kind of perspective, how many characters are in the scene? Yadda, yadda. So that's really, really important. Let's go ahead and just minimize these guys here. Pulling down and nobody puts baby in the corner, but I do. Okay, So here we go. Another way to look at stick figures is if you are trying to accomplish movement, you know, let's say you have someone running and I think I've given you this example many times and other courses as well. But you know, keep keep your your limbs moving, opposing each other. Put the head down a little bit. Put a leg forward and backward, right? And that's just automatically creating and the illusion of running or moving. You can even bring that forward by. Let's say if we wanted to pull one arm back, put one arm forward here, put one leg forward. And then the other leg back. From here, you'd build on it. So let's say that I really wanted to turn this one here into something. Well, I could just, I won't even lower the opacity. I'll just erase it. I'll pretend like I'm using traditional paper and pencil here. You could do the same thing. And really it doesn't matter if you're drawing on a tablet or if you're using traditional paper and pencil like I typically will use. It's really up to you, but you can do the same thing as on both. So here we go. So if I were to want, Let's say I chose this pose of the character running towards us. Well then what I would do is just build on that a little bit more. And it really, at this point, I'm not even considering, you know, trying to get the anatomy correct. I'm just building a building off of what I put down earlier, which is basic information. And then I would draw through it, keep it sloppy because I'm going to continue to do this whole process of erasing and redrawing, erasing and redrawing. So since we have this, his left arm facing us, Ford and his other arm pull back. What I would do is put this this leg his his right leg coming towards us. Right. And then his other leg. You wouldn't even see? Okay. This one. Now you could if you wanted him to have like a stance or you wanted to bring this leg back here, you could, and you can actually draw a foot back here, but it gets a little wonky when you do stuff like that. I prefer just kinda leaving things to the imagination. But this is what I would do and then I would just go another step and kind of erase this down. Just keep the lines I like and just work off of them. And then when it comes to your finished drawing, less is gonna be more. So now, I would probably sharpen my pencil, which is lowering the size of my point. And then just kind of focus on whatever grabs my attention first. So in this case, I'm just going to focus on the head coming towards us. And no way am I going to finish this sketch because this is a lesson mostly on using how you can use a stick figure and turn it into a finished sketch ultimately. But now at this stage, I would say, okay, well, let's capture our shapes for the anatomy. We don't have to dive into the anatomy yet. But, you know, we know the basics. We know that there's arm. And this is a whole different lesson, but foreshortening anything that's further away from the eye, which is us. The viewer, is going to appear smaller and anything that's closer to us is going to appear larger. And this just kinda helps create the illusion of volume and dimension into Art. So I'm now just trying to find where I think everything would fall. If you make a mistake, it's not a big deal. If you decide later like, Oh, you know, I wanted to change this. I think there's leg would look better here or this arm would look better if I raise it up. It's really up to you. Because he's, one of the points of drawing in general. And learning these types of poses is you're moving things around to find out what works best. So I might decide, Hey, I don't like this arm over here. Alright, I might decide, you know, maybe it looks better if I have no arms showing and draw in his hand here, right? These are the types of things that you're going to have to mess around with and kind of tweak and experiment with on your own. And this is part of the drawing. This is part of crafting your skill. And don't be afraid to try new things. And don't try and copy anyone. You know. Basically, you can copy for the foundational purposes of learning. But don't try and mimic any artists, not even me. I have some favorite artists too. And of course, your favorite artists, their style and techniques are going to kind of overlap with your style and it'll blend in and people might be able to pinpoint it. But really find yourself your own style by just experimenting. So there we go. I didn't want to go too deep on this lesson because it is very general. And really the bottom line is, you know, stick figures are very easy. You can even do like the Hangman version. Or you can add a little bit more. But it all starts with kind of a stick figure. And the cool thing about body language and movement and stuff like that is you can just do a little adjustments like turn his head to the side. Right? You can lift this arm up. So create a radius, right? You don't have to create a radius. You can just kinda guesstimate where you think it will go. But I'm just showing you the hand here. Alright. So there you can erase this one that you drew in. You just change the whole dynamic and language of your, your, your original gesture, right? You could try something different. The same you know, approximately the same posture and everything. You could put his head here, crosses arms in. Remember we're not going into any details. We're just showing the gesture of the sketch. If you wanted to draw someone else, and that's a whole different lesson. But if I wanted to draw someone else around the same height, I can just go around here but put ahead even shorter than him. Turn this character towards him, their way out. I turned the character towards them was I bowed this line out. So instead of having a straight line up and down, I bought it towards them. Do the same thing, put an upper lower a leg here. And then I can even say, Hey, Hey pal, you okay. Why are you crossing your arms? What's, you know, what's going on? And you can, you can do so much with gesture drawings and have so much fun. And sometimes I'll even say almost all the time, when you're doing gesture drawings, you'll have these little epiphanies that wouldn't have sparked if you just jumped into your sketch. I get so many more epiphanies and ideas from my gesture drawings. Then when I tried to just jump into a sketch on a blank page and in trying to just go for it. So I hope that this kind of gives you a brief understanding of stick figures. And from here, we're going to move a little bit forward and a little bit faster paced. And we're going to jump into a little bit more of, I would say, intermediate to advanced techniques eventually. And I'll try not to be too difficult. I want to make it easy enough for you to grasp. And hey, you might even be way beyond this point and you're just using this to tighten up your skills and sharpen the saw, whatever the case may be. I'll try and make this all relatively easy to follow. So that's it. That's going to conclude this one on stick figures. Just remember, one last demo here I'll give to you is a stick figure. You can, you can figure out your best way to do it. It could be as easy as drawling. Enlarge this a little bit, is drawing a one piece like this and then put an arm here and arm here and extend another leg out here. You could just make up your own. You know, it doesn't There's no right or wrong way. As long as it's conveying a a figure like image that you can work with. I didn't particularly like that one, but you know, a lot of times when I'm drawing, let's say, let's say I'm drawing multiple characters in the background. So we had like a, you know, this is the background and we have like a perspective of point here, right? But we want characters back here. A lot of times I'll just draw kind of loops like this. Put it head on loop, loop, loop. And then you can even do more in the background. Depending on where you place your your vanishing point, you can go further and further. So if I know this is a whole different lesson for you, so I'm not gonna go too deep on it. But yeah, I'll get into this in a later chapter, so stay tuned for that. But yeah, there's just so many ways to do it and let me know. Show me what you like to do and show me your style of your stick figures and how you break down in your gestures. Because I think that's really, really important and that's why I've dedicated my time to create this whole course on it, on this subject because I think it's something that people overlook. All right guys, I'll see you in the next one and keep practicing. Okay. 8. Drawing the Twist: You're back. Well guess what? We have a new lesson here, and this one is on the twist. So what is a twist? I get this question so much. You wouldn't even believe it. It's, it's very tricky for a lot of people, artists, aspiring artist, even veteran artists to be able to pull off drawing a twisting motion. So I'm gonna do my best in breaking it down as simply and quickly as I can. I'll show you some demos. I'll show you some I've already done prior to this recording. And then I will possibly attempt to do some live demos to show you and put it into practice. So basically the twist. All it is is imagine you're taking a towel and you are wringing it out. You're twisting one. You have in both hands, one on top of the other. You're twisting one hand and one direction. The other in the other direction. Well, that's kind of how your, your, your body would move, right? At least your sketch. You will have, let's see, you'd have one non right layer here. You'd have one going in this direction. Let's thicken this up a little bit. So yeah, so if we had a straight line, right. This is your feet. This is your head, in your opinion, right? But let's say that you wanted to twist. Alright, so how would you do that? How would you be able to make the body seem as though it's twist, twist it. So let's go ahead and I'll show you a few examples there very quickly done. But they get the point across. So we can move on to this one here. So let me go ahead and change the color. Alright, so for this twist, we have an action line here, right? And then we have pelvis here. Then we have an angle here for the chest. Okay. So this is the upper portion, the upper mass. This is the lower-mass and this is his head. Okay. So how did we show a twist? Well, let's, let's break it down. What's the best way to do this? I'm just going to lower the opacity. Keep it on here. Maybe even lower the opacity on these kinda show you. Okay, so let's go jump up to our new layer. And this will be a really quick demo and then we'll jump into some more. So imagine this is the backside of the character. Alright? So we have one leg moving forward, one leg coming back, alright? But the character is swiping or doing something that's behind them. So they're turning around to look at an object over here. Okay, so one of the ways that you do that is, well, let's go back to our basics. We have our torso, right? Then we have our pelvis. So what I like to do is if you were to imagine this like a box, the cube, almost, right? Okay. Well what I would do is since it has four sides, alright? We'll call it this point, this point. This point, this point. What I would do is I would attach a string from this one to the front one, this one to the back one. Went to the front one. This one to the document. Okay? So what's happening is you're twisting these. So if this string here, we're to move over here, right? That would mean that this side of that box would move over here. And then it would extend over here. And you're just keeping it simple. Then this one would go front. Because when you go back, this one would go to the back. So let's put it into practice. So we're going to draw, okay, so we have one hip going this way, right? We want to draw this point this way. So how do I explain this? I will just try and draw and talk at the same time. But what I would do is I would just create the shape of the upper torso. Imagine it connecting organically, put an arm here. Right. Then I would imagine it has other arm is down here. You're just seeing the fist, his or her doesn't matter. You can you can change this to any one you want. And then I would, to sell it a little bit more. I would draw a head here looking this way, right? So then you can see that this character is twisting in this direction. So now if we were to go a little bit further on this, well, again, you'll be doing this a lot when you're drawing is I will take, see, I will lower the opacity on these. Might even get rid of this layer here. Just so we can see it more. So now that I have my guidelines and my information, if I were to dive into this and go into the details a little bit more, I would basically, you know what, let's do it like this. It's sometimes easier for me to, to invert and change the background to a darker color. Let's say give me like a dark blue. Okay? So then what I can do is I can increase the opacity here. And this helps my eye to focus on the objective. Then what I would do is come here and draw with a lighter color and make sure we're on the right layer. Then we go. So if I were to want to sculpt and flesh this character out, well, what I would do is remember my anatomy, that we have a shoulder here, chest here. Now you're not going to see all that chest because he's turning around this way, right. Then you're going to see just it's also kind of an up-shot. So you're just going to see some of his arm. The lower arm. We can add some fingers. Make it look like he's shooting some sort of powers out or whatever, sweating someone away. Then what I would do is make it look a little bit more dynamic. I would tilt his head. At this point, I'm still sculpting and molding, so I'm not too worried about how clean the lines are. Then making sure that I show this other end, I'll make it a fist. Now you could play around and change the head tilt and straighten it up a little bit. Whatever works best and whatever you end up landing on, stick with it. Don't over-complicate it. And so what's happening here is I'm just kind of maneuvering everything so it looks like it's organically twisting around. Now, in real life, is this a possible position? Maybe, maybe not. It depends on who you're asking. I mean, you might have a contortionist, but we are exaggerating. This is a comic form. We're not drawing, at least to me when I draw comics. For me, it's really basic too much on realism. I base it on fantasy and mythology. Um, but you want to be able to sell enough where it's kinda believable. You want to be able to make it look dynamic and make it look like there's some action taken place. Then what you can do now that we have this sketch is we could just invert this. Alright? And then I can take it back to that other background which was white. Then we can get rid of the under drawing. It would be this one. We don't have to keep it inverted anymore. We have we're back to our original bluish color. Then I can just lower the opacity on this, right? And then I can think, okay, does this work? This is where your problem-solving abilities come in. And you can see like there's a lot of things that could work, but there's a lot of things that look a little bit wonky. So I can do a little bit of checking and balancing here. So checks and balances are really important. So I could reverse it like this and say, okay, well, it's kind of okay, but let's see if we can make it a little bit better. And one of the things I would probably do is mess around with this arm a little bit. So I'm going to shrink it down, see how it looks. One large, I'm going to tilt it up a little. Math, not feeling it. You could do that. It doesn't really matter. That's too small. But I like to do this. A lot of artists like Jim Lee in traditional artists like myself. A lot of times what we'll do is we'll take a little sticky note or a little scrap paper and we'll draw different arms are heads and we'll put over like imagine this is like a sticky paper or a scrap sheet of paper. We would draw another arm and then position it and see what worked. And he just try different things out. But digitally have the advantage of being able to cut and move things around and enlarge them. So it does save you a little bit of time. There are some advantages to working digitally. A lot of artists also draw digitally layouts. They work digitally and then they go ahead and use a light table, the printout that digital sketch. And then they'll use a light table and we'll trace over with their pencils. So that's something that you can keep in mind too. So going back to this, I'm just going to flop it over one more time. And I'm gonna go ahead and change this head a little bit. Let's see. Since hope so I got the white on here, the back. Since we have we're not seeing much of the chest. The chest it's furthest away from us. I'm just going to try and move this arm a little bit closer, pull this in a little bit more, and just play around. I don't like any of this right now. So let's go ahead and reverse. Lot of times you can backtrack. And this is where true problem-solving comes in, right? So you're, you're trying to, you have the problem now you're trying to find the solution. Without overthinking. What I'll do now is I'll come in with like a red color. And I'll try and make some adjustments that I think might help. See. Might start his neck here. It head back a little bit. Then, since his chest is stressing, we're not going to see too much musculature or it's not gonna be flexed. Then we have this shoulder here. What we wanna do is we want to resize things. Now I can see that this arm is just way too long, which I kinda thought so. But you can, a lot of times you won't even see the errors until later. Which can be kind of discouraging because you might spend a lot of time drawing something that you think is working out, only define that in the end. It was wrong. And you have to accept that. Take your, your L, learn from it and pick up the pencil and start all over and look pale. And that's honestly, it's a gift. The more failures and the more times you mess up your art, as long as you're learning from it. It's actually good. Because it doesn't take too much time to fail. And it doesn't take much time to learn from it. And then you apply what you learn and you just keep going. Okay. So I'm still trying to figure out, okay, how does this arm go? I don't like this under drawling too much. It's kinda distracting me. So I'm just going to lower down a little bit more. And let's see what I can do here. If I was drawing a stick figure still, I would probably put his hand re-run here. A generic hand. Overlap it, which gives it a little foreshortened look. Just kinda play around until you have a, you come up with a pose. It kinda works for you. That's one way to do a twist, right? And this was just a very practical example. So all I did here was just shorten, foreshortened the arm a little bit. And foreshortening is when you just move it towards the camera a little bit more. So just to give you a quick lesson so you guys aren't confused. If this was your horizon line, and I hope you know a little bit of the basics of perspective. You have a vanishing point, right? So from this vanishing points and everything is directed towards it. So in this case the vanishing point would be his shoulder. Ok. And so from that vanishing point, you can draw lines going towards that and then some vertical lines. You can actually make a cubical shape, right? Ultimately. Then within that, we can do is you can a fist create a couple of cylinders and work their, work their way back to the arm. Remembering that what's closer to the arm, which is further away from us, is going to be a bit smaller. And what's closer to the camera, which is closer to us, is gonna be, appear to be bigger, right? And then you just do that and you shape it until you get just about where you want it. And then there you go. This is just very, very quick demo, but we're going to get a little bit deeper here. So let's go ahead and get rid of these. And I had some other things on here before I move on. We go. Okay. This was just oh, I think I was just I was playing around with this earlier and thinking, how can I teach this in a way that's easy to understand? What I did is I drew some very generic stick figures or basic gestures of someone just standing straight up. And then what I tried to do is within them, I tried to create, actually let me darken this in a little bit. Try to create a little bit of a twist. Yeah. Okay. So we'll start let me let me just kinda talk through it here. So same thing, same concept. We have a teach on a new layer. So we have a character standing straight up right here in front of us. And then we have a character that's starting to twist. And what I did was I just kinda formed this S-shape. Then we have a stronger twist which would be kinda like we have one movement going this way. The arm going this way, leg going this way. And then you have this upper body is twisting this way. And then this pelvis is twisting this way. When we get rid of all this, we lower the opacity. And then we just add in a couple of drawing details. You can see where you can create from all this, right? And this all just came from imagination. Just meet, practicing and playing around. Just kinda thinking of how can I teach this to my students in a way that's kind of easy to understand. So this is one method that came up with is just take the basics of a character, a basic gesture sketch like this to the left here and this one here. And just kind of practice and twisting and turning. Now remember, if we were to make this three-dimensional, we'd have a couple of strings attaching it. If we were talking about the strings, we'd have one connecting here. Alright? Same thing here. These strings, one would be up front, one be here and there, just twisting and turning, right with the with the with the figure that you're drawing. I'll give you guys this stuff in templates and stuff so you can kinda look at it. But I wouldn't go a little bit deeper on this because this is just scratching the surface. Let's see what else do we get rid of all this. Okay? Don't really need this anymore. Think that it just go back. Okay? So I'm just going to do some live examples of twisting. Okay, This is just the bare minimum. This is the kind of clean, quote unquote lines. So I'll give this to you. If you think it would help. I think it might. Okay. So let's get out of here. Let's go ahead and start a whole new layer. And what I'm gonna do is my typical, what I like to do when I'm practicing is I like to invert and I like to change the background to a darker color, not always black, kind of a dark blue will suffice. So that's black. This is a dark blue. And I like to use a white pencil. And now we have a new clean slate of paper, clean sheet of paper, clean slate, whatever you wanna call it. So our objective is to draw the twist. So let's see. So if I were to imagine a twisting form, I'm just I'm just spit balling here for myself to get the to get warmed up. Okay, so here's what I'm gonna do. I'm going to draw a basic stick figure. Let's see what's a good twisting motion. Let's say girl standing up, Let's say like, okay, we have an upper torso right here. I have a lower. Now. We'd have one leg somewhere here, maybe one leg this way. And then what I'm going to try and do is twist this in a way that's almost too close, resembling the last one I did hold on 1 s. Bear with me. Even veteran artists and people who draw a time. They wanted to use a little rainfall eggs. And let's see, I'm doing this live. Now. I'll probably come back and re-edit or maybe do another version where I have something in front of me. But let's see. Trying to think of, you know, who's really good at twisting and turning was, and is, marks the best tree did a lot of really good twists. Let's see, I'm trying to formulate an image in my mind. Okay. Let's say that we have I'm just bear with me if I get quiet. What I'm going to try and do is have twist going this way, twist going this way. And then we'll have the head going like this, will have the body going like this. And the day in the life of an artist from it. Always trying to figure things out. You don't want to reinvent the wheel, but you want to learn to be able to draw the wheel and many different ways. All I'm trying to do here is imagine a character kinda leaping and emotion where they're either shooting their race or a weapon towards someone behind them. And it also conveys a little bit of action. So what I would do here is I'm just going to erase. For those who are using pencil and paper, you can just, if you're drawing along, you don't have to watch and then practice later. I'm just going to erase this to deployment where I leave just a kinda residue behind. So I can work from it. So small size of this Canvas I'm using is massive. That's the problem. Alright, so here we go. Now we have kind of an outline of a gesture. And now we can just jump in. And at this point, what you wanna do is you want to find your anchors. An anchor is a point that isn't going to move. It's something like, well, we have our head could be an anchor right? Then we know that this is the, there's a twist. This would be the characters right leg, right? And then this other leg would be coming backwards. Then. Now what we're trying to do is convey an arm and just show it like this character is looking behind her. Whoever you wanted to do. I'm drawing a male figure, but you can choose whatever you want. On the other shoulder over here and draw a flying cat for all I care. Doc or a panda bear. It doesn't matter. The concepts and the principles are all the same. Okay, so now I might actually turn this into a female. I don't know. It kind of reminds me of deal, either Tomb Raider or which blade type thing. So I'm just trying to capture the elements that I want to keep. I'm not worried about the final details. This is just a simple. Kind of a layout. And the purpose of this stage is to find out, does this work? Does, is this something that conveys what you're trying to show? And then what I would do now is reduce it a little bit and just keep going. Now I'd probably won't finish this one because obviously, I know your time is valuable, excuse me. And this isn't really a course on doing final sketches. But I do want to get enough to where you can kinda see it coming to life. So here we go. Shoulder here. Now, it's still at this stage. I don't draw too much of the anatomy. I'm just trying to get the shapes down. Then. We know that this is the front of the leg. So we're drawing cylinders. We look kind of like this right ankle. Then this would connect to the socket of the hip. Same thing here. This would be a cylinder going back. This way. There will be a break for the knee in another cylinder. Then the fluids, which would probably be the best way to draw this foot. Almost when I'm drawing a foot that I know that I'm not putting too much effort into yet because I don't know if this is the final. I'll just draw it like an arrow. Then I can shape it out later. Okay, So then we have this twist. So we want to convey. So remember that if we look up right at the character, we know that the stomach is somewhere here, right? So we want that stomach twisting upwards. But then it's going into this ribcage. And it's a really, really tough twist to do. It's almost like I could do this twist, right? But that doesn't mean no one can, and that doesn't mean it can't happen in Congress. Okay. So now we're kind of getting are, we can see the character coming together a little bit. And so what I would probably do at this stage is kinda find the attitude of the character. And now I think I'm just gonna go with a female. So to do that, I'm just drawing in some wispy lines, long wavy lines. I'm not worried about details yet. Then I will draw. The eyes will fall. And when I'm trying to do is just line these eyes up at the top. So up here, I'll draw, draw a couple. I hear no details yet. And since she's moving backwards, you got to think of some that hair is going to be flowing this way, right? Going to be flowing with her movement. And then keeping it all very general. This is how I this is my process and what I say a lot and I've probably mentioned it already in this course a few times. Is always keep your pencil moving because you don't want to stagnate and you'll want to start overthinking. Because once you get into that stage of overthinking, you get into the analysis to paralysis stage where you kind of slip into your logical mind. And you can't see it from that point. It's very hard to problem-solve. So when you're doing this, you're a little bit more creative. You're kind of going with the flow a little bit and you're thinking, Okay, well how can I've finished this up? I'm just going to imagine that she's got like she's pulling. Imagine, boom, boom, boom. I'm just making sound effects in my head. And again, I didn't think about this sketch. I didn't have any reference. And it's just for the sake of drawing on the spot and kinda coming up with a character. Now one way that I can check this is I could lower the opacity a little bit. I'm just going to get rid of the under drawings here. Let's see. You know what? I'm just going to combine them both. Because I can ultimately lower the opacity. And then what I'll do is I'm just going to check my work by inverting and then change back to the white background. And then it gives me a layout. I can look back at. Now at this stage, I would just kinda stand back and take a, take a closer look. I'm just going to try and find this color so I can stick with it. Actually. Trying to find the darkest might be written in this region here. I'll just stick with that works. And so at this stage, I would probably personally took a break and go get a drink of water, do some stretches, do some push ups, whatever, keep myself. And that's another thing. When you're an artist, you don't want to be sedentary for too long. You want to get up and move around. But that's what I would probably do. I would just get up, get some water, give my brain a little rest, and then come back and take another look at this. And then after I came back and looked, I would just lower the opacity or erased it. If I'm doing it on paper, one of the Continue. And then I would just think to myself, okay, what can I do to make this kind of pop? And then I will just start working on some details. I'll just zoom in on the face. And since I have the information where I want, the eyes, just come in and start working on that. Then if I am able to get lucky enough to capture the life of the character, right, then I would probably come back in and put more effort into this. Since this is just a demo. I don't foresee myself doing too much with this. And I'm just trying to find the anchor points. And when I say anchor points, what I mean is if you haven't, I, you can basically tell where the nose is. If you haven't noticed, is if you know where the nose is, you can you can basically tell where the mouth before, right? And so on and so forth. And then from this, I can kinda see where either the ear would fall right on here. The chain would fall somewhere around there. Then her head. If I'm just trying to capture the shapes, will not be this big. Now this head looks a little bit distorted to me. So I would, at this point, I would say that this is not working. Come back in and erase it and try it again. This is just part of being an artist. So if I really wanted to tighten this up, I would just try and get my general shapes, right. I tried to get my head shape in here. And then from there I can put it in the eye socket. Says my battery is low. On my pencil, I guess. I'll have to there's just less than soon. But yeah. If you're still watching this, I'm proud of you because you're trying to learn. You're serious about learning. But also like, I want you to see that even though when you look at any kind of social media platform, everything looks so easy, right? Everything looks like it's so natural for an artist to draw. But you don't get to see all the, all of the struggles and all the glitches and the errors because those are usually omitted or the cameras sped up so fast that you don't see any kind of thought process. You just see the outcome. And so when you run into situations where you're struggling with a piece and you want to give up or whatever, just remind yourself that what you're going through, everyone goes through it. Even the best, the best of the best. So what I'm trying to do now is just give her some solid form. Kinda find all the hips would be like this. This would connect to her leg. Might even shorten this leg a little bit. Then I don't really have to then draw the lower lake overlapping. Now one of the reasons I overlap is the show depth and show that this leg is indeed in front of the other leg. Now from here, basically, just keep doing the same process over and over and over again until I get where I want it to be. And then once I'm happy, I just at that point, I would just dive right into the details. So what I'm trying to do is give her a side view of our hands like this. Then on top, put it in a weapon of whatever choice you want. And then of course, when you're really drawing things like this, it could be trying to keep it real. You would want to use some reference to do that. And then coming up, I think in our next, next lesson or maybe next two lessons, we are going to start drawing from reference. And then we're just going to show you the value of drawing from reference and the importance of it. But right now, I'm just trying to piece this one together. And that's really what it comes down to. You're just constantly piecing things together, trying things out. Now. I'm just going to give her some hair coming forward like this. And so I hope you guys are gaining something from this because this is really just impromptu teaching here. As if you were here in my studio with me. This is something that I would literally be doing when I'm figuring out my r. Okay? So then what I would do at this stage is lower the opacity it one more time. Probably check this out, see how this looks. Ok. Now I can, I can see like, okay, that's decent enough. Of course, I still need to work on this foot here, which comes down to finding different shapes. What else? I have enough where I can generally say, okay, this could work. Even though she's not even close to being finished here. I can, I can kinda conceptualize that there is a way to do this sketch. And what I would do is just popped in this one again, lower the opacity, then create another layer. And it's a process like that. So this is the actual process. Then I would just come in with a dark bled like I have here. And from here on out, I would probably just get a little bit more bold and confident with my lines. And try and find the things that I would give her like a belt loop here. Just try to find the things I want to keep about this. Still kinda keeping it rough, but confidence starts going up when you start seeing it come together. And I'd probably shrink down her arm, the shoulder size a little bit. This is the stage that you want to do that you want to keep before you start diving into your rendering and all that stuff, you want to get your proportions right? Like this shoulder over here is massively big and the arms further away so you don't want it to doesn't have to be much smaller, but you don't want it to look bigger than the arm that's closer to you. Then I would dive in and try and capture a little bit more of her character in the eyes. Getting the eyes down to a point where you can actually put some licenses character. It starts making a difference. Right? Now I have a course that I'm working on teaching. Now this looks a little cross-eyed, but I'll probably, I'll come back and fix it. I have a course that I'm working on. I've three more courses coming up. This is just the first that I think is the most important before you move on getting your gestures down. But yeah, I have a whole course on faces. I have a course on composition and layout, drawing multiple characters and drawing them in perspective. Then what else do I have? I have a lot of courses in the works. I've done a lot of recording to just have to sift through them and edit and all that good stuff. But for now, this one is very, very valuable. I think it took me a long time to realize how important gestures are. And I'm hoping that I can save you a lot of time and help you grow as an artist by showing you this upfront. Showing you the techniques that I use personally. Here's the thing. One day I'm using this technique and then I might discover a new way to do it. And I'll come back and I'll create another video for you on this same course. And you know what, I know what the problem is. I didn't have my given me the whole low battery signal. I just plugged it in, so no worries. Okay. So there we go. There's a little face. So now I can think, okay, She's looks like she's battle ready. She's in motion. Is it perfect? No, not by any means. Is it something that I'm happy with this show you because impromptu and I just came up with it for you. Yeah, I think that's a good thing because you can see the creative process. Now, we're going to stop here because I think this video is running pretty long and I have so much more to share with you. So yeah, Let's just end this here. If you have any questions on this, let me know if I do finish this sketch or ticket further. I'll just post it in a group or something like that or share a template or whatever. But this is just really, I just wanted you guys to see a little bit behind the scenes. So you can see like even for me, someone who draws every single day, for hours, every day. Even I struggle with certain poses and things like that. So I want to humanize this for you. So I hopefully I was able to accomplish that and I will see you in the next one. Okay. Keep it up, keep practicing and hang tight. We'll be in the next video shortly. 9. Step by Step Practice and Application: Okay, welcome back, and here we go. So as you can see by the little handwritten title on the top corner here, this is a drawing, a character step-by-step. So you guys, if you follow my art, you've probably seen this sketch already, but I just wanted to show you the process of it. And it's basically this is how I started out. So I'm just going to go step-by-step and remember earlier in the lesson before saying, Be sure to label your sketches from, instead of having these numbers one through blah, blah, blah, label them individually. Well, hey, I didn't do this and this was a while back, but I've learned since then. But let's just start. Luckily, I started from one layer from the bottom and work my way up. So it kinda works out. No big deal. Okay? So layer one, we have the gesture, right? So first step is draw your gesture. Then secondly, I started to flesh out the gesture, right? And just try and keep. What I was trying to accomplish was a little bit movement of this character walking. Now, looking at this character and this will happen to you a lot as well. I can see a lot of things I would make changes on. But overall, I feel like this works enough to give a solid lesson on this topic of just kind of going step-by-step and developing your character from beginning to the end. So then the next layer, I believe, Let's go ahead. Yeah, I just kind of outlined them a little bit more, but this time dove a little bit deeper into the anatomy. Not too much, but just enough. Then let's see. Okay. I started outlining a little bit with a pencil. So if we were to remove this, we would see that's a little bit cleaner. Right? I'm just going to keep them all on for the sake of showing you. And then I started adding some elements to show the character that was trying to draw. And in this case it's Scorpion, want to Spider-Man, arc enemies or arch enemies. And so then the next one would be, I did kind of a quick gesture of his tail, how I would perceive it. And I wanted to, I wanted to kind of go in front of him. And then I kind of worked a little bit more on that. Said tail added some lines and details and I was just practicing with this and making it look kind of like a thinner type tail, maybe robotic. And then let's see what does this line here, okay, these are the stripes on his costume and maybe we can lose a few of these under drawings here. Keep that. Oh, we got C. I should have labeled these. So here we go. This would be what I would consider a clean sketch where we have all the elements we need and we can kinda zoom in. I have the face that I wanted to draw on him, the tail moving forward and I just wanted to keep some fluidity and some movement into this art on the y that's trying to get rid of the red here. Okay? And then let's move on to the next one. Okay, so now I started trying to find my my shades. So here let me just give you a demo. I was oops, four here. Okay. I was imagining the light source from a peer. And I don't know how familiar you are with light and creating shadows and stuff like that. But I'll give you an overview and then we'll have a whole course on this stuff coming up. But if this were a light bulb, right? And it's shining down above and behind the character. That would mean, is that anything that this light touches won't have shadow on it. Right. So if it touches his top of the shoulder or the back of his head or anything that's close to that light. You're gonna do a couple of things in terms of line weight, which I don t think I demo on this one too Well. Line weight would be very thin when it's touching the light and heavier when it's further away from the light. And there wouldn't be any cast shadow or any kind of shadow where the light is shining. It's like when you take a flashlight and you shine it onto something, you're removing the shadows, right. Top of his tail here. Even here, which, you know, it's, it's really up for grabs. I could have shaded this in. If I wanted to write, it wouldn't have hurt. Okay. But I didn't and that's that's fine. That was on me. I could have even shaded more in on his chest. Right? I did. That was just a decision I made. I wasn't putting too much effort into this butt. You get the point. So let's go ahead and remove that. Then let's go, Let's keep climbing up our ladder here. So then I started adding some details. And that's probably why I didn't add too much shade because I wanted to leave some room for some details. And then I put some basic values and shades here just to kinda contrast the character. And then let's see what's next. Well, this is where I added a little bit color. Now, just to remind you, I am by no means a digital artist or colorist. In fact, whenever I do any kind of a colored work, I'll usually hand it off to another professional and collaborate with them. So I do teach myself occasionally, but it's not my forte. Then. Let's see here. Okay, some elements. I headed some effects where I was just playing around. So I added some kind of venom, maybe leaking out the tip of his tail and some blood coming out of his mouth and stuff like that. But nothing extreme. Just just for me to kind of play around and have fun with. And that is my character, right? That's my character drawling from beginning to end. And I hope, I hope that kinda gives you a little bit of insight and behind the scenes kind of stuff. A couple of things that you could do if you were doing something similar to this, in hindsight is always 2020, right? A couple of things that I would probably do is I would probably add more shadows upfront, right? Even darken this area here. And I probably blacken it out. I'd probably even add some shadows here and darken this in a little bit more. And just kind of make it pop a little bit more. And I might even do something like change the background. If I were, you know, I don't know what color I'd go maybe with a reddish color and pop them out. Green or even yellow. I mean, you'd have to find something that works that complements what you put down. I wouldn't do any type of a green, I'll think because that would just kinda make him blend in. So we do something that was a complimentary color to whatever it was I was trying to pull off, right. Whatever character. And that's a whole different ball game. And that's something that I would even teach at this point because it's something I'm still learning. But when I trust me, when I get to the point where I'm feeling confident enough in color spectrum and teaching how colors work with one another. I will certainly make a course in it, but not until I feel like I have a little bit of a I'm a little bit of authority on that issue or that topic. Okay. So that's, that's that. So I will, if you want, I can give you a template on all this. Let's go ahead and bring that back to white, just make it easier on the eye. And we will remove this layer here. And if you guys want, I can give you a template breakdown on how I sketch this. It would be a lot of different templates. So maybe I can just make one PDF out of it, just going from one through 13 or 14 or whatever it turns out to be. And if that's something if I don't give you enough on this one, let me know if you want all the layers, I'd be happy to share them with you. Okay, so that's it. That's a quick gesture to finish sketch for you. So I hope it helps reach out to me if you have any questions like always, show me your work. If you've done something similar to this or if you have any process sketches that you want me to review, let me know. That's what I'm here for. I'm not just an instructor, I'm also an art coach or mentor. Have lots of students that work under me that I'm always, for the past three plus years, I've been watching them grow and as artists. And I'm just, I'm amazed. I want that for you as well. So keep it up and I will see you on the next one. 10. Fleshing out the Character : Hey, welcome back. And so what we're gonna do now is, like I said in the last, the last video, our last lesson, we are going to just pick random sketches from this, this page of gestures. Then what I'll do is I'll remove or I'll move them to a new page and then we will kind of work. I'll show you how you can start fleshing out a, a character from gesture to a more developed, fleshed out. Whoever your drawling, it could be Spiderman like in this case. I believe that I'm just gonna go with Spiderman. Let's, let's give it a shot. So think I did this right? And then we'll jump here. I'm just going to enlarge it. And what I like to do, as I've mentioned in other lessons, is I like to invert everything. So I'm just going to invert this. And I'm just going to change the background. Let's go with Let's go to the black. Actually, dark blue is fine. Then what I can do now is I can draw right on top of this. So let's just go ahead and instead of reducing the opacity, I will just erase it as if I were drawing with pencil and paper because I don't know if I'm gonna do on this actual course, but most of the time I'm drawing and if you look at my opinion, I'm a pencil or by nature. And I like traditional medium. I like drawing with pencil on paper. But for the sake of teaching and things like that, I really do appreciate the, the abilities that digital sketching has to offer. So let's go ahead and increase this. Maybe I'll make some videos with some pencil sketching just so you can see because it is different, like the principles are the same, but the outcome usually comes out a little bit different, differently. Alright, so we're imagining that this is Spider-Man. So I'll do a couple of things. I will rework this and just kinda find the shapes and cylinders. I probably went through this too much on my own. But since you're watching, I'm just trying to kinda show you my thought process. I'll do it. So I'm imagining that has upper torsos here connecting with his lower torso here. Okay. Then this shoulder this side would have a hole for his shoulder, right? So then what I would do is just draw a cylinder here. I like to leave a little space if I'm stretching out the arm, draw another cylinder as if it were going away from us. And then we can just draw a shape for our hand, which we can, we can alter and change later. Then what I would do is on this other arm here, I would pop the shoulder out like that just to show that there is a shoulder. And then I think I raise this arm up like that. So now with this hand here, I have the option of putting a thumb, which when I draw my hand, you'll see I do it. If I'm doing an open hand, I'll do one circle. And then inside I'll draw another circle representing his thumb, right? And then from here, I'll represent this will be his fingers. And so I could draw something like this and you can just draw a stick figure fingers. You can alter it until it's about where you want. I don't particularly like this. So I will go ahead and actually, let's see. I'll leave it like this and come back and decide if I want him having a fist. What I want him to be doing with this hand. Now, this hand here, I think what I'm going for, and to sell it a little bit more, I might bend his risk down. Like this. It gives it more of an intense. By. Then I can just imagine that that's a web going through, right? And all this stuff is subject to be gone later. Like you don't have to keep it. But just for the sake of conveying and providing information to your own brain, you'll forget. I like to draw all this stuff in there. So I'm not really worried about the anatomy yet. All I'm doing is putting my shapes and I'm projecting his foot here. Since it's his right foot, I'm going to have the curve coming inward then because we're looking up at it. And then I'm just going to draw a cylinder here. Alright, and then it has this little knee area. And then another cylinder here. Same thing here. I'll draw a cylinder popping out for his other leg, his knee, and then another cylinder coming back. And then I'll throw this one in. And then this foot, since it's foreshortened, will appear smaller. And then at this stage, we can start thinking, okay, how are the muscles is going to work? If I want to add a lot of musculature, I can, or if I want to keep it very clean and sleek, can do that too. So now let's see, where would I go? I think I would zoom in and kind of just pencil and where I think his eyes would be something like this. Not to worry if I get it right and then I'm going to raise this shoulder up here and then connect the shoulder down to his lat. And hopefully you know these muscles. You don't have to known by name, but you should know them by nature, like where they go. Then I'm just going to drop this shoulder down here because I think it's way too high. And actually let me just do it here. Let me pop this shoulder, re around here. And I'm just trying to imagine how things would look. Now this is an interesting angle. So we're seeing the bottom of his arm, which would be the tricep, right. And we're seeing this muscle over here. We don't even see the bicep. And the bicep is just the the larger rounder muscle when it's contracted, but stretched out, elongated right now and extended and we're not even seeing it because it's actually facing him, facing the character. Okay, so then now I'm just kind of working out a few of the solutions and details of how I want the overall character to look. Now, I'm going to imagine that he's got that overlapping muscle here and it's going to split up over here. And then he's going to have, now you probably won't even see these muscles when all is said and done because he's wearing a full body costume. But it's good for me to kinda know where things are so I can proportion everything accurately, as accurately as possible. Now, I'm not gonna do much from here down because he stretched out, elongated. We're not going to see too much of his abs because they're gonna be covered, right? So I'm gonna imagine that if I were drawing his costume, it comes down to a point, right? He's got that little belt thing. This is the classic version. Then he would come up here and just kinda follow along his body. Now, I'm still looking at this left hand. I'm just thinking I'm just going to make a fist and I'm not getting into details on it, I'm just kinda shaping it out. As an artist. One of the things I've learned is to see things and shapes rather than details. At least initially. And then you can work from them. And then you can start fine-tuning and adding your details. But initially everything starts with the shapes. So now we have this, I'm going to work on this leg here first. Let's see. Since it's going upwards, I'm gonna imagine his ankles here. Now I'm just going to finally draw a, well, we call it his shin bone. You won't see the other ankle because it's on the other side of the foot, but I will draw on a heel. I'll widen this foot up here a little bit. Then when I'm coming up to his calf muscles, I'll round it out. And then I will bring his knee to right about here and just kind of project it back. Now, since this leg is foreshortened and it's coming towards us, I'm going to just add a little bit of shape, bowing out like this, and then bowing inwards like this. Now I'm going to kind of protect it towards the slot of his. If this were an action figure, like I'm putting the leg inside of that open slot. But then what I'm gonna do is kinda give him a shape here to show his glute muscle behind that you're not going to see much of but just kinda cells at a little bit more. And then I'll drop down to this other leg and I have this thing. And if you've taken my anatomy class and I'll mention that as often. Is that from right. Here where the hip bone connects to the upper ribcage, I usually draw a line towards the knee representing this whole overlap of a muscle. Alright. Like if I were doing it from here, I would just overlap like this. So you wouldn't even see much of his top of muscles, but you would see more of his hamstrings, which are the muscles behind the leg. And then same thing. I'm imagining his leg going into a slot. And then you're seeing a little bit his hips here. Then to sell it to myself, what I'll do is I'll take a line straight down the middle of this leg, which I'll erase later. But it kinda gives me, it's almost like an action line so I can see, okay, this leg is being towards us. We've got this kneecap here. Now you're not going to see much tension in the muscle or you're not gonna see much contraction, I should say, because this leg is stretched out. So you don't have to worry about too much of the details, but coming back in towards his lower leg here has Shin. I'm going to draw this in. I'm gonna put his foot right about here. The heel curve this in. We're not going to see too much of it. Then what I'm gonna do is imagine that this is the top of his boots. And allow this will be hidden by this leg. So you're not going to see much of that lower layer because it's pushed up against his upper lake. Right. And then if you wanted to, on the outside of this up his right leg facing us. You could add a little bit more dimension like that. What I tried to remember is that a lot of times like one muscle will be higher than the other. So the inside of his leg here would be lower than this outside calf, right. And these are just little nuances to remember when you're drawing. Really just, I just advise you to study the heck out of anatomy. And it doesn't have to be perfect. Don't be a stickler for trying to get every single muscle perfect, make it believable, at least, or at least consistent, right? Okay, So then what I'll do here is I'm just going to develop the ribcage a little bit more. I'm going to pop this chest muscle out off the body a little bit to show it like he has some trust muscle, even though It's stretched back, it's not gonna be flexed to kinda like the bicep or anything else where the leg, it's not gonna be bulky or anything. You might not even see too much of a shoulder because of this angle. Right? So I'm imagining his neck is here. And now you can try different angles of his head. You could, and it's perfectly fine. You can turn his head to any way you want. You can even put his head over here if you wanted to write or over here, or you can have them looking this way. But I think for the sake of this one, my initial my initial instinct was to put it here. So I'm just following through with that. Now. I can always change that later. Okay. So I've got the ribcage in. I've got the anatomy and enough to where I can work with it. This is basically how I would just put a sketch together. Then you can come in and zoom in here and just like, alright, I got this spider thing here. You just put the information that you want to get too detailed. Okay, so now at this stage, I could just kind of, um, well, I could just reverse the invert inverted layer here and then go back to the background and change that to white. And then we have kind of a more traditional look. Something that we can work with. I can decide, hey, do I wanted to make this body longer or do I want to make any adjustments? And you can always do that. I probably won't get into a really finished sketch because that's not what this course is about. I'm just trying to show you how you can take your small gestures and turn them into a formidable character. So let's see. What I'll do now is I'll just jump to this layer and I will go ahead and overlap the the under drawing hair with a little bit of line work. This is just for the sake of demonstration. Let's see. So I would just capture some of the muscles that I like. Not too much. A lot of times when I'm drawing, I always remind myself that less is more. I don't want to draw every single muscle. I just want to allude to the fact that there are muscles here, that this is a powerful character. And you leave a lot of room to the imagination that way. And I just think it's more appealing overall, because if you draw every single muscle and I used to do that when I was younger because I was like flexing like, Hey, I know this muscle, I know where this goes and but you're doing yourself a disservice. You're also doing your audience a disservice because you're taking away from that fun of using the imagination and building and putting things together. And it kinda just looks crazy at the end, at least for me it did. I mean, if you have a way to pull off where it looks good, go for it. I'm all for that. It's something that you're just doing because you think you're supposed to do it. I say less is more and just allude to things. Unless you're drawing some like crazed out character that's like, what's his name? Bain from Batman or something where there's reduced the size of this head banging or Batman from Batman, where he's like pumping in those toxins into his blood and he's got, he's all vascular and you might draw a little bit more of the muscles in that case. So there are exceptions. As you've probably heard like, I like I like to know the rules before you break them because if you're breaking them intentionally, then it shows if you're breaking them because you're just, you know, you don't know any better. That also shows okay, I'm not gonna spend too much more time on this. I think you get the gist of what I'm doing here. All I'm trying to do at this point is find the delight, the lines that I would like to keep it if I were to take this sketch further. By no means are these my final lines? I would love to do a course just from, just drawing from beginning to end, from conception to the actual finished piece. But the problem with that is it takes a while. Sometimes even me, I'm a pretty quick sketcher or artist. But even with me, sometimes a really decent sketch could take several hours. Because you're problem-solving, you're doing so much at the same time while you're drawing. Then when you're talking and drawing at the same time, it's pretty tough. What I could probably do is time-lapse. And if someone's interested in that, let me know. I was teaching courses back in 2020, live courses. And I would do live demonstrations there. And that was cool. Okay. I'm just going to pop into this arm here. Again, just trying to find the shapes at work. Not getting too much into these details. And maybe even this, this arm might even be shaded in. For the most part, I might just end up because it's pushed back. That gives the illusion that it's further away from us. That and could also make it smaller. Go up to this arm, this hand up here. So we got his wrist bending. When I'm drawing hands. I like to draw a hexagon here. Or is it a hexagon, or is a no. It's a pentagon, five by five points. And then draw the thumb sticking out. And then if I'm really going to dive into this sketch, I would come back and it's treating all this stuff out. The little spider envelope here. And then you can come back and alter this. Then put his eyes and let's say because I changed the shape of his head, you can even keep his eyes the same size. It doesn't really matter. And I think that's about all I'll do now if I really wanted to go crazy on this. Since this is kind of still an under drawing, I would just start his webbing, just kind of a guideline for it. This and then just work my way around. This is very lightly done because I don't want to get married to anything. Yeah, I don't want to commit to my art just yet until I feel 100%. I want to move forward. I would just kinda keep everything very generic. Meaning that I'm not getting into the webbing details, just kinda placing them where I think they would go. Pop this fruit in here. And then let's say what would happen if I were to drop this under drawing? It looks fine. Now. I would keep going. Honestly. Workout a lot more lines and just start adding in my lights and shadows and textures and values and all that good stuff. But for the sake of showing you, this is just one and I'll do a couple more examples. So stay tuned and show if you've done this and if you follow it along, or if you want to go ahead and try and then show me what you come up with and show me where you're struggling with. This is a really good way to kinda see what you're sticking points are and where you're having problems. And we'll try and get through them, okay? Alright guys. Well, I'll see you in the next one. Thanks for joining and I'll talk to you soon. 11. Gestures in Real Time: Okay, Let's talk about gestures a little bit more. So when you're, when you're thinking in terms of movement, emotion, expression, all those good things. You're thinking in terms of gestures. So the gesture is the it's the underlining or the blueprint of your EarSketch before you even begin fleshing it out. It's something that's really, really important. And if we take a look at a couple of things here, the thing that you're trying to capture when you're, when you're doing gestures, is you're trying to capture the mood, the movement, the emotion, the expression, the stance. And then some cases you can even, you can even identify certain characters by just a simple gesture, right? Like, like this one here. Actually let me go ahead and open up a new layer because I don't want to draw on top of this. Okay? So like this one for instance, let's pick something better. Let's go with a, an ink pen. So this obviously, I would say that that's, I don't want to say too obviously, but it looks like Spiderman to me, right? Let's see if there's anymore. You might spot some before I do. Oh, was that I would say probably Wolverine. This could be Superman. This could be Spider-Man again. This could be sub Mariner or human torch. So you get a lot of this when you're sketching. This was kind of like my quick human. And I really proud of this one to be honest. This could be Spiderman crouching down. But you get the gist of what I'm saying. Here's another one that could be Wolverine got the claws out, those little indication. So when you are sketching gestures, you want to make sure that, you know, you give yourself enough information while you're sketching them so that you create that energy, that momentum that, you know, that kind of drives the rest of the sketch. That's really the basics of a gesture. If you're just taking a glance. This one here could be Spiderman as well, right? Spinning, web, jumping, whatever. But realistically, you can take a gesture of almost anyone in any kind of gesture, or this could be Spiderman as well. You can take any gesture and you can formulate it into almost any character. But certain characters have their own distinct movements and agility and things like that. So I like to keep that in mind when I'm drawing because it's a, it's a good habit. It's good practice to kind of draw things in such a way that they resemble the, the character that you're drawing. Gestures in such a way that they resemble the character that you're trying to portray. This could be the flash, right? I'm just trying to identify a few. Now, when I was drawing this, this could be a flash as well. I wasn't really thinking of any particular character. I was just drawing general iconic poses, ones that you see repeated a lot. Um, you know, get the, someone throwing a punch here. Again, this one could be a superhero landing or even throwing a punch at this guy here, earth is bouncer crossing my arms. This kinda connects to that. Just a side view. Got the foreshortened leap with the bigger fist coming at us. I got this one here where he's kind of a flying Superman punch. You got the body language here of the larger character crouching over the smaller character. And the smaller characters can have bending. They're both kind of bending in the same direction. This character here was kind of knocked on his feet. We don't know if he's taken harassed or if he was knocked out. We don't know. But it's a gesture. This one here, it looks like someone who's kind of leading. Telling you maybe an army with to do this one just, this could be something like Captain America or Batman or something like that. He's got that kind of a build. Another Spider-Man here. So you see, you get the gist of it. Let's see if there's anymore. You can tell. This is the he cliche. Male, female. Portrayal that you see in a lot of the '90s comics. I always liked it. I think it was Jim Lee used to do this one a lot where he would just draw like a very masculine strong character and then have a feminine looking character next to them. And it would be either Jacobi, superman, Wonder Woman. It could be, could be Cyclops with Jean Grey. It didn't matter. But that was kind of like a standard. Let's see, what else do we have? But these are generally like you got this one here where he's kinda ready for action. Another one where it's almost like a Spider-Man ask. You got this one where it's like I got the centerpiece, which is the main character. And you've got the two could be guards next to them. You got to just be creative and imaginative when you're doing your gestures. And I really think that every sketch that you draw Here's just a, could be any female character. But I think that any, any character that you're attempting to draw, don't just dive into the cylinders and the shapes and the anatomy. And, you know, unless you're just like an expert, always start out with a underlining gesture gesture or a scribbling of a pose, which would be a gesture. I do that first, it's just good practice. It's going to get you into the flow. It's going to help you warm up. And yeah, so that's just kind of an overlook on some gestures. Now, we're still going to continue on with this, but in this little lesson here is just a short one, just so you can understand why we draw gestures in the first place. So on the next one, what we'll do is I will go ahead and pick a gesture, or maybe two or three. And I will formulate them into a pose, right? Um, so I'll just randomly pick a couple and then put them on a blank sheet and we'll go from there. So what I would like you to do is just kind of start practicing your gestural sketches. Now, I can show you different approaches on that. And I will in a later lecture, but on this one, just for today, just do the best that you can. Get your sketch pad out or your tablet, whatever you're comfortable drawing on, and go ahead and do a couple. When I say a couple of 1020304000 sketches, if you have time, but really somewhere 10-25 would be great. Just different gestures in different poses. And it can be as simple as let's go ahead and close this out, and let's go ahead and go to this layer here. Just to give you an idea, you can just draw a, let me change my pencil here. You can draw this one. Sorry. Draw a head. A body. Getchar. Gets are three major masses which if you've taken my course on simplified superhero anatomy, you would know like the three major masses are the ones that are connected to each other. So you got the upper chest, torso connects talent to the pelvis, and you've got the head. So those are your three major masses and then your limbs and everything connect to them. But let's just say that you drew something like this right? Now. You have so many different options on what you can do from here. So you could basically imagine, okay, let's have an arm going back this way. So this would be like the center, center point, the center line of the looking downward at the top mass. And this would be one shoulder, this would be one shoulder from here, would connect to the neck, connects to the head. Right. And this could be the back, connects to the pelvis area, right. Then from here, we can have an arm extending out like this and pull fist here. Then from here, you have another arm. And we can decide, you know, what do we wanna do with that? Do we want to hear something interesting? When you're in this stage? You can move things around organically. So if you wanted to raise his arm up and kinda put it up here, you can imagine this is the shoulder because your shoulder does raise up and down, right? So that shoulder does move. And so if you want to push it forward, you can if you want to pull it back, you can. You can try a couple of different methods. So like, let's say we try and arm here. Alright? Or let's say that we decided, well, I wanted to. Normally this well, that one probably doesn't look as good because it looks a little awkward. So I'll go ahead and delete that. But this is a good way to test your work. Your kid. Pull this arm way back. Alright. Don't like that either. I'm just going to stick with the one that I drew the first time. Now, we can decide with this lower body here, what do we wanna do? Like here? Extend another leg back. And then, you know, you just you just mess around like that until you get something. Now you can lower his head and don't worry about getting it perfect. I might sketches are never perfect and they'll never be perfect. But you can always learn something. So then I'll just open another layer after I've reduced the opacity. Then what I'll do here is just all kinda refund it a little bit. I'll say, okay, well here's the energy is flowing like this. We're looking at the top, looking down into character. It's got this leg that's popping out here. And this is where you just kinda practice drawing a little bit further. All right. We're like, okay, well, he's got this shoulder here that pops out. It got this arm that comes here. And then we have this on anyway. I'm just going to bring it back a little further. And then for his head, I'm just going to right around there. And then there you go. You have a gestural sketch. Now, when you shrink it down, Let's say that we shrink it down where this other layer here don't need anymore. Now we have this sketch of a gesture that looks like he's in motion, looks like he's about to throw a punch. You could do a few things. You can say, okay, well, do I want to failure so that way or this way? And you can also lighten this up. Add another layer. Or if you're drawing with pencil and paper, you can erase the lines, keep them kinda light behind and go ahead and start redrawing. So that's the equivalent. And so then what I would do is this layer here. And if I were trying to draw some sort of character, I would, I would think in terms of okay, he's looking this way. Alright. We're looking at them from above. So we want to make sure we capture that. So we know that his shoulder is going to be here and another shoulder is going to be here. They are. There's this way. And again, I'm not trying to get the anatomy perfect yet or ever, but just trying to capture the movement and the emotion. So if you see what I did here, I do kind of an S S curve. And then I imagined that this leg is extended backwards. This would be a calf. Not worry about the feet just yet. Now this leg I would want it to be extended for me it really long. So what I'm gonna do is just shorten it. And then just imagine. Okay, So since you can actually make this foreleg the one, the one that's closest to us. So you can make that one going forward or vice versa. Because both arms are kind of equally facing. Front. Can pull this one back and just do a basic shape. Don't, don't worry about getting everything perfect yet. What we're trying to do is just capture the essence of this character. Would I know what this character is if we can really make them into whoever we want. We're focused on here is the movement, the movement and the action. Now, with that said, you know, as we're getting closer and closer to finding out who we were drawing, we can take it step-by-step and it just gets a little cleaner and cleaner. And then I'll switch legs here. I'll go to the gray. Jumped to this layer. In this layer, what I'll do is I'll go ahead and reduce this opacity where you can almost not see it. And then I'll think to myself, okay, well, how could this be? Well, it could be a number of people, could be Spiderman, could be, could be Night Crawler, hopes. It could be rain. And it could be Batman. So really, when you're drawing a gesture, when I say you can make it into almost anyone, I'm not lying. You could. But it's I think it's always best to have someone in mind while you're drawing, unless you're just doing gestural practice. But like, let's say I wanted to make this, let's go back to our Wolverine. And what I would do is I would just focus on a couple of shapes. Now I'm not going to worry too much about the anatomy or any details. I'm just going to imagine his head shape, size, not even really his shape. I'm going to connect now. I'm going to thicken up his neck. Alright, and I'm going to give them a little bit more mass because Wolverine, at least a comic book version, is more of a stout, shorter character, but wide, right? And so you're just constantly, constantly creating these little shapes and until you get it just about where you want it. So from this shoulder here, I would pull this arm back. And don't worry if you're not getting this. Where we're doing a couple of different things here. We're talking about anatomy, we're talking about poses. We're talking about gestures. It's a lot, right? Don't overwhelm yourself. Just go at the pace that you're comfortable with and do what I always say to just practice, practice, practice, practice. So what I did was I made this leg closest to us, the one that's extended backwards. Now, again, I'm not getting too carried away at the shapes or the details. I'm pulling this other leg for a couple of things that you can do to really sell this is you're adding the boots, these little wings or come off the boots, you have the famous Wolverine. I guess they're called wings. I don't know what you would call them. Give him his claws. And all you're trying to do is you're trying to sell the cell the sketch. You're selling the sizzle, not the steak. I don't know if you've ever heard that expression before. But as you can see, we're not too intricate at this point. We're just really getting into some light details. And it takes a lot of this, it takes a lot of this repetition, drawing, finding shapes, adding different layers. And then you start, Okay? You tell yourself, alright, well let's find the anatomy. So what I'll do for the anatomy is I'll get a little sloppy. Like what I mean by sloppy is I'll move my pencil a little bit fast. Because while I'll do is I'll lighten this up. I'll sketch in my anatomy to the best of my ability at this moment. Keep in mind that I'm going to keep this energy flowing and all this stuff that we're seeing right here, it's subject to change, but what is not going to change as the energy of this sketch? Okay, so what I'm doing is pulling him, putting them together, putting his muscles together, imagining that has dealt would go somewhere around here, shorts, leg. And then really doing this over and over and over again. And the reason for this is because I'm learning, as I'm sketching, I'm learning, you know, what to do and what not to do. Where do I want this face to be? Which direction is it looking? And once we get to a stage similar to this, what I can do is I can lower the opacity. I know one more time. And look, we're getting closer and closer. You see? Now it just comes down to refinement. So now we have all the information there. And we just want to come in and start working on the actual, actual sketching. So at this point what I would do is I would find tune it, come in here and just kinda find a couple of different shapes. And we're doing this really, really fast. But honestly this is my approach to when I'm drawing, I just feel it out like this. I take my knowledge of anatomy and I just put things together. As I'm sketching. Then you start rendering more and more details as you go on. But you're not really focused on the details. Just yet. It really just focused on getting your proportions, your anatomy, your energy flow. Just try and get all that. It starts coming together. Like Okay, well, that looks good. Works for me. And just keep going. You got to decide. Okay. Well, which direction do I want his head tilted? Like Do we want him facing someone over here? Alright, so if that's the case, That's the focal point. You have to imagine that. So let's imagine that he's facing a villain here, right? Let's just say this is some horrendous monster, could be, the hall, could be saber-tooth, whoever is coming at them. So what we have to do is we have to find the angle that we want to use. Taking our knowledge of what we've learned in all of our courses that we've taken, our anatomy. And we had to construct everything together. And if we start finding that were struggling, it's okay, just take a breather. There'll be deal. What you want to really focus on is just doing the work and then, you know, perfecting it later. Don't worry about it. Like I said earlier, you'll never have it. Perfect. But you'll have it. And when I say perfect it, I don't mean literally become perfect. What I mean is you'll have a process. And that process is something that is going to serve you. And the process is what's repeatable. Its form is something that you can formulate. So you want to keep that process very formulaic in very practical. So if you look at his head while I'm trying to do is you're not seeing too much of his eye. You're seeing kinda like this would be his jaw line coming down and this would be the back of his head. So if we were to draw a circle here, this would indicate the sphere behind his head. And then we could take from here add on his wings and then go on the other side, do the same thing. This is really as daunting as it might seem. It's really fun and it's very cathartic. It's something that once you get the swing of it, you're like, oh man, this, you just become a little bit better and better and better to the point where it's not intimidating. It's more like you're excited to try. And you want to learn and you want to get better. You're going to see other artists that are just mind-blowing and you're gonna tell yourself, hey, if they can do it, I can do it too. You got really believed that the only way to build confidence. The only way to build anything is by doing it. So you can read all the books you want, you can watch all the courses you want. And I think that they are very beneficial. But ultimately, you're going to have to come in and you're gonna have to do some work. So there we go. We have a wolverine kind of gesture. Now, this is something that we could move around if we wanted to. We could totally we can totally reposition his arms. We can move his head. You know, there's a lot of things you can do with this. Like I said, the key is non-attachment. You don't want to get attached to anything. This is just sketch. And honestly, I spent more time on this than I would normally because it's just a gesture. And normally what I would do is I would do a really quick gesture. And then I would dive in on my main shapes. And then from the shapes, I would start working on the anatomy and looking for the muscles that are flexed. Some muscles, they're gonna be contracted and some are not going to be contracted. So you want to pay attention to that, then you would start thinking about it. Where's the light source coming from? Where the shadows are going to be? How can I make this look more three-dimensional? So these are all parts of the process. So hang in there. What we'll do on the next one, like I said earlier is we'll come back and we'll go to this original one, will pick one or two or three of these, and we'll take it a little bit further. Okay. So thanks for watching. Go ahead and do the homework that I asked you to do, which is just practice. Look, here's the, here's the deal, is you are only going to get better by practicing. Now. What you practise is what's most important. So when you hear the term practise, practise, practise, it might sound kind of boring or repetitive or not that again, but it's not just practice. It's taking the information, the knowledge, and then applying it. So a practice really equates to combining knowledge with application repeatedly until you have a better understanding. And then even when you start to understand that, repeat it even more so that it becomes ingrained. And then ultimately what you want is it to become second nature. Why do you want that? Because when you start drawing or anything else, you're going to slip into flow and autopilot, just like when you're driving a car or riding a bicycle, or playing a video game, or watching a movie. You're going to zone out consciously. And you're just going to allow things to flow through you. You got to learn to trust that. But first you have to program it. So practice is programming. Okay? So there you go. That's some inside knowledge from me and I hope it really helps and I'll see you in the next one. Okay. Keep it going. Don't skip this. Make sure you practice. Pick out a few different gestures. Challenge yourself, send them to me, show me what you've come up with and if you find that you're struggling with gestures, let me know. Tell me what you're struggling with and send it to me and maybe I can rework it for you and show you how it's done, or at least how I would do it. Alright, hang in there, I'll see you in the next one.