How to Draw (Simplified) Superhero Anatomy For Comic Book Artists and more!

1. Introduction: Welcome to my new course, how to draw simplified superhero anatomy. My name is Mike Van Orden, American comic artist, dedicated art mentor and coach. And I will be personally in guiding you through this course. I designed this course for anyone seeking to improve their ability to draw superhero anatomy in an easy to grasp, simplistic kind of way. I'll be teaching you with a method I learned throughout my career as an artist to refer to as simplified layouts. This method focuses more on simple shapes and the nuances that lead to a great finished sketch yields great results and fast. Not only will we be covering the details and application of this technique, also be practicing it alongside with you. That's right. This isn't just a point in talks type of course. I'll personally be in the trenches showing you in real-time how I do it while explaining the process at the same time. Together, I'll walk you through the entire process step-by-step. The ideal student for this course is someone who has a sincere passion for art and really wants to improve and grow their skillset and confidence. Has an artist feel free to look through the course description and I look forward to seeing you inside. Lastly, here's a message from one of my mentors, image co-founder, Deadpool crater and chemical gardeners, extraordinary. Rob life held with Mike Ben Gordon is where you should be. He is a crazy talented dude. He is a **** of an arc coach. And I would bet my last Jimmy Tonga, that you will feel the same. Checkout comic art mastery with Mike Van Orden. He's your guy. He's my guy. Rob light bulb signing off. 2. Tools of the Trade : Okay, Welcome. So in this section, all we're gonna do is discuss the tools that I use it mainly for making this course. And I'll go over a few of them right now. So first, we'll go over the paper. Generally I'll use Bristol board, which is, I think this one is by Canson. It's just a nine by 12 Bristol or a fee for I think they call it out here. I'm traveling right now. Then for pencil I use generally just this. This is called a lead holder and it's a really durable pencil. I've had this one for years. This one's made by a Prismacolor. You can find these on Amazon. They might be a little pricey, but they last forever. And lead that I use is it's a two millimeter lead and I think this is F led. The way that you sharpen these guys is you actually use a sharpener like this and you just have this in here and spin around. It takes a little finessing, it takes flow practice, and then once you get it, it's great. Your pencil lead will come out super sharp. Now if you don't like that type of sharpener, you can use something like this. I think you'd want to use this over a garbage can because your leg is going to fall out. Your graphite as you sharpen is going to fall all over the place. But yeah, this is my general pencil and I use this all the time, as you'll see in the lessons I had. Secondary pencil I use is just a standard to h. This one is by Staedtler. There's so many brands out there, it really doesn't matter. Same thing, general pencil sharpener. I think I paid $0.50 to a dollar for this one, had it for years. These pencils, I buy them by the dozen, so I always have them on hand. Very easy to use. That's it for the Pennsylvania. Now for the erasing, we've got three main erasers I use. This one is a vinyl vinyl eraser. It's really good for cleaning big surfaces. So if you really mess up and you really have to dig in because it is going to leave a residue behind. Generally when I'm erasing, I'll do my first phase of sketching my layouts, my under sketch, and then I'll come through and then use this. This is a gum eraser or a kneaded eraser. You can see everything's clean, there's no residue behind, but I like to leave it so that you can see the lines. So when I come back, I know where the lines are and I can just follow those and just kind of tighten things up. Then this is a just a standard like a pencil eraser. This is more for getting into details and maybe I wanted to just do some eraser tricks or getting to find smaller crevices and things like that. So this one really comes in handy. Typically when I'm drawing, I'll have one in one hand and the pencil on the other, or even one in my mouth. And as I'm drawing all swap in swap, in swap, and just keep, keep going. Now, paper that I use, like I said, is generally Bristol board for I use this professional grade paper for my commissions are pro work. This is 11 by 17 Bristol board. I think this is two or three ply really heavy-duty. The company I got this from is called Eon art productions or eon productions. I know the owner over there. So if you need any help getting sound, maybe I can get you a discount, just let me know. But yeah, this is the paper I generally use. In terms of ruler. I've been using this type of a ruler forever and I think I got this one on Amazon. Very cheap, very affordable. I like to have a ruler on hand. A lot of times I'll have my ruler underneath my left-hand wall I'm drawing just to prevent smudges. And then I have this glove here to prevent smudges from my drawing hand, right? And this glove actually comes in handy for using digital art. For my digital art and instructing this course. I basically use a iPad Pro and an Apple pencil. I use Procreate as my app, so that's my app of choice. Now there are several apps out there. I just, I prefer this one. Now, one thing I want to mention about this is when I first started drawing on a glass surface, I didn't like it. It felt really awkward to me. I bought this this surface protector. It's kind of a screen protector. And the name of it was called paper. Like the reason I got is because I read really good reviews and it gives a toothy matte finish. So when you draw, it doesn't feel here to tinkering of the glass. That was something that was really bothering me. Now when I draw, I can get in there and I can see the details and all that good stuff. I really, really love this paper lake screen protector. And then in terms of my pencils, I can use the sketching there, come with Procreate. I generally, I created my own little pencils here. So I have a tech pencil, an ink pen, and things like that. Maybe I'll put them up on my camera road in the future. But yes, I generally just use a pencil setting for most of my stuff. And yeah, that's it. So that's really the tools I use. I hope that this helped you. If you have any questions, let me know, but I will see you in the next lesson. Let's go. 3. 3 Masses Intro: Well, hello and welcome. This is a quick intro into, well, I think essentially one of the most important things to know about anatomy in that is that there are three major masses in case you don't know this yet. It's really basic stuff and rudimentary, but at the same time, it's extraordinarily important because with these three masses, you can virtually create any character, character, shape, pose, energy, movement, and balance. The three major masses are the head, the I would say upper torso, or you can call it chest. I'll just call it upper torso, and then the pelvis. So why are these considered the three main masses? Well, you can call them x, y, z. Because these are the parts of the body that don't change. Your skull, doesn't change shape. Now, you have a jaw that moves. When you talk. Same with your torso. Your chest doesn't change shape so your ribs, they may expand when you breathe or collapse, but they don't change shape. It same with your pelvis. Your pelvis is stationary. And all of these Our essentially they rely on one another for balanced. Your pelvis has two sockets for your legs and it has one more socket going upward for your spine. Your pelvis is designed to twist and turn. But as a pelvis itself, it doesn't change. Torso has a couple has your spine that connects to it, which gives you movement and twist ability. But it also has your sockets for your shoulders, which leads to your arms and so on and so forth. Then obviously your head, your head is attached to your neck, which therefore is part of the spine. And so let's just dive right into this. Okay. So I'm gonna move and shift this over. And we'll go ahead and move into some demos. Now we know what the three major masses are. Let's go ahead and start identifying them with our sketches. 4. 3 Masses Practice 1: Okay, welcome back. So now we just quick recap. We identified the three major masses, which are the head, upper torso, and the pelvis. So we know if we wanted to draw a head, let's just keep everything. Everything is simplified and pretty basic. Head is basically, let's just say that we have a circle or an oval. Right? There you go. There's a head, a head. Now you can go ahead and draw a chin on this head and that's fine. We have, these are just your basic simple shapes. This is a head facing towards us. Basically. If we wanted to turn this head, all we would have to do is create a circle. Let's say we want to do three-quarters. Well, then we will go ahead and do something like this. If we wanted to do a profile of the head, we would draw carbon novel. Drop this down, come up. Here we go. Now. We have simplified the head. Right? Now, we're going to have a whole, a whole lecture, actually a whole section on drawing heads and faces. So don't worry too much about this right now. Then let's go down to the torso, upper chest. So that is a shape that's let's say you have a clavicle bone, a what they call this, the clavicle or collar bone whatnot. We drop a line down the middle and this is just for facing. Chest. Consist of a shape like this. This is very rudimentary. This is where your shoulders would go and this is where your spine is and this is where your neck is, it connects to your head. But what we want to really focus on is this shape here. Now, that shape can vary depending on your style. And if you're drawing males or females are superheroes, are big guys are small guys. The shape and the size can, it can vary from character to character. But ultimately it's going to be very identifiable because it's just a basic shape and let's just get used to this shape. I'm just going to simplify it like this. Head on. And then let's go from this side. What I'm doing is I'm putting a circle here indicating a socket. We'll do a couple more real quick. Let's say we want to look up at a character. So let's say we're looking inside. So connect down to the pelvis. We're going to get all into perspective to buy. Just really want you to really focus on this shape. So you can start with a line down like this. You can really simplify it. And if you want to make it look three-dimensional, you can. We're going to be doing this over and over and over again. Now, if you wanted to really just understand the shape, you can do a box, let's say just a rectangle. And then make kind of a curve here. And you can go ahead and erase this line. Then you can go ahead and continue this curve on top. You can erase the corners. There you go. And then you can come in and you can hollow it out. I just following this and you can imagine that this was shaded in. There you go. Then you can also do kind of a V, like a triangle on each side, which would almost indicate where your shoulders would be. You can put a socket here, a socket here. And we're gonna get really into this. I promise, but I don't want to. Well, let's avoid over complicating things. Let's also go ahead and take all these, shrink them down, move over to the side. Let's go to the pelvis, will stay in the same layer. Soil pelvis is look, the rudimentary shape of a pelvis is going to be like this. This is the basic flat two-dimensional right? Now you can also do a oval. And then you can come in, put it over here, over here, come up. And the reason is that the pelvis is so important. Because I've seen this with my students previously on one-on-one and group settings. A lot of times people have artists have the tendency of running into the issue of how do I connect the pelvis to the ribs, to the upper torso? That's something that we're going to work on because I think it's vitally important to the outcome of your sketches that you really have a firm grasp on all of this. Back into the shape of pelvises. If we were looking, let's say three-quarter view. Basically a socket here. A socket here are our legs. Looking down at her pelvis could go like this. You're going to want to draw your pelvis at every angle, because your characters are going to be drawn every angle. You don't want all of your characters just facing forward. Because that would just create stiff, non-moving, lifeless and drawings that would just Garner no audience and no excitement from you either as the artist. Let's go ahead. Now that we know the basic shapes, Let's go ahead and put it into practice. So go ahead and take a break, study this. And I'll see you in the next one. And we're going to just jump right in and put this into practice. All right, I'll see you there. 5. 3 Masses Balance & Movement: All right, well welcome back. And this segment in lecture, what I'm gonna do here is just show you a little bit about balanced because before we call these XYZ, we have the upper that we have the head, the upper torso, chest, and then we have the pelvis. Let's say that we wanted to keep things in balance. Well, if we have a head here, let's thicken this up a little bit. Let's just say we have a head here and chest here, and then a pelvis over here. Well, that's going to look kind of weird, right? So unless this is like plastic man or Reed Richards or something, if someone who can stretch that can go like that hat, well, It's going to look kind of weird. So what we can do is we can learn how to balance our masses and put it into practice. So let's say we have a line here, line here, line here. I'm just going to create an x. This is just signifying hate. This is balanced. We have head here, we have a torso here. We have the pelvis here. Now, let's say that we wanted to move this over this way. Then we can move the pelvis or the chest here. Pelvis here, neck here. Let's say we wanted to bend them over this way. So we have the head, we have the upper chest, and then we have his pelvis. Now let's go in and balance this out. Let's show how this works. And what I'm trying to convey here. We're going to shrink this down, we would over. Then we're going to create a character moving in a direction. So let's say that we pick a direction. So we have a upper chest, pelvis and the head. What we're trying to do is we're trying to create separation between the three. And the reason that we do this is because the further they are from each other, the more movement that we're seeing. Let's say that we were drawing a character running. Well, I'm gonna go ahead and shrink this down so I have enough room. But let's just say that we wanted to create some sort of movement here. What we can do is I'm going to go ahead and use red and create character. That's running. We're creating movement. One of the things to keep in mind is if his leg that's closest to us is forward and the leg that's further away from us is backwards. That would mean that the leg, the arm that's closest to us would be pulled back. The arm that's further away from us would go forward. Now you can move this head. You can lower down. And one thing I've learned is dropped his head down. It gives him the illusion that he's running faster. Let's say that we wanted to get rid of that. And just kinda, There you go. So you can see that this character looks like he's moving more intense page just by dropping the head. You see what happened there. This is the kind of thing that you want to keep in mind. And I believe that this is called contrapposto, which is just counter posing. And it's just a way of saying that when one side is moved forward, the other side is moved back. And you want to keep that, that creates balance in your art. And it creates movement. If we had both of these arm, if I had this arm moved forward along with this leg on this side, it would look really weird. It would just wouldn't work. You can try it if you want to, or you can just take my word for it. These types of poses are fun to do because it creates action and it creates a more dynamic form. Another thing you can do is let's just go ahead and shrink this one down. Let's try and squeeze one more little example here because and don't worry, we're going to keep talking about this stuff. It's going to be very repetitive. I'm going to get this stuff ingrained into your mindset becomes second nature. I'm going to keep repeating that statement until it becomes true. So another thing that we can do is we can create a line of action like this. This time, we'll put a upper chest here. We'll put the pelvis right around here, and we'll put the head somewhere around here. Now, what I've done is I created movement kind of going backwards. We're seeing just a little bit of his head, but we're seeing the underneath of his chest and then we're seeing his pelvis. Now you can move and twist his pelvis so we can have it facing straight like that. Or if we wanted to make it more interesting, we can twist it. So let's say we twist the pelvis. This we have this area actually I'm going to twist the chest this way. Then this we have one going this way and one going this way. So we're twisting. Then what we can do is let's go ahead and jump to the blue so we can show things. I can create a leg that's going up like this. We know that since his left leg facing us is going forward, that means his other leg would have to go backward or at least pull back. And you can decide which way you want them to go. And we'll get into feet and hands later. Then what we can do is we can create an arm. And then we'll draw another hand here. We're going to pull this arm back. Now you're going gonna see it. So what I'm doing, and then I'm going to add neck here. Just imagine that this character is jumping and moving. And then we have, I don't know, a sort or a baseball bat wherever you want. But he's moving, he's twisting. You can see that he's swinging and you can pull this further and further back. You can twist things to the extreme. But you can see how this stuff works. And I really want you to practice this and just get into the habit of trying things out. Don't be afraid to mess up. Don't be afraid to try something out. And if it doesn't work, hey, you just learned a way not to do it. No big deal. And you'll remember that. But anyway, I think this is enough to kinda show you an example of how these masses can work together and play against each other. You can create balance, you can create movement, you can create dynamics. You just have so many different options and it's really endless and it's exciting too, because this means that there's just no limit to what you can draw or what, what kind of think of Spiderman, for example. Someone like Spiderman is very agile and almost like a contortionist. And the way that experiment, just to give you an example, another one, and I like examples. But let's go ahead and give you a quick example before we close this part of the lesson. So let's say that we were drawing someone like Spiderman. And we wanted to make it dynamic. So you can do kind of a line of action. Imagine that this is his chest and imagine this is his torso. And then he put his head down here, and then put one arm up one arm here. And then I'm going to put another arm back here. Then I'm gonna put one leg. Let's see, Since I'm going to twist him a little bit, I'm going to twist one layout here. It's going to go back. Here's his foot and then another leg here. And let's see. Well, I'm just going to have to draw it to make this work. Then we're gonna go ahead and we're going to erase this. Whoops, not too much. I'm not going to draw a full Spider-Man, but I'm just gonna give you an idea for a pose. You have the head here. Oops. My pencil. Just not. Okay. So we have a head shape here. We have harm here, back like this. Here. Our shoulder, I should say. Twisting and arm here. Hand's gonna be here. We have another arm here. We can just decide if we want him to be web spinning. What we're trying to do is we're trying to twist put this pelvis further away from his upper chest. So I'm going to drop this leg down a little bit and drop the foot and then this leg. Let's see what this leg I'm not too happy with this. Let's say. I'm trying to see the bottom of his foot. There we go. Then we can just put in his little spiky eyes. Basically what we've done here is we created mankind of just flying through the air. Just to recap. Let's go ahead and blend this up. Just recap how things worked. Okay, So we have his head here, which is our first mass. We have as upper chest here, which is a second mass in the spine connects to his pelvis, which is his third mass. Actually tilt it like that. And then he has one lay pop out here, one leg coming out this way. Then he has this shoulder here. We have arm connecting to the elbow, connecting here, and hand. Same thing here. Now this is where we get into foreshortening and making things look smaller as they go away. And that's for a whole different lessons. So again, let's pay attention to the fundamentals, not to the details. Here we go. Now we know if we really wanted to, we could go ahead and you could actually stretch this head. You can move the head over here. Let's say you want even further away. You can have them looking up. Let's say that we wanted him looking. This way. I have I hear I hear. That means his next twisting. That's a kind of a weird one. So you can do that. Let's go ahead and draw it closer to the original. You can explore with all these and see which one's going to work best for you. But I'm gonna go ahead and put it in a head right here. I'm going to create a little bit more distance than I had on the last one between the upper chest and his head here. Then I'm going to go ahead and throw in an eye for an eye. I know it looks very scribbly. But when you're when you're really training your eye, you'll be able to catch these lines and you'll know which lines belong and which ones don't belong. You'll just get used to this kind of stuff. Anyway. I think that this kind of concludes what I was trying to convey here. You're seeing how things work together. And I know a lot of times when you take these classes or you read books, you're just seeing shapes. But really what I want you to do is I don't want you to, just to train yourself to see shapes, which is very important. I do want you to, I really want you to see things in shapes By want you to really think about how those shapes move, how they create action and movement and add life to your art. Because if you only pay attention to the shapes, you're probably going to end up with a very stiff artwork that's not gonna be exciting, it's not gonna be interesting. And in the end, you might even just feel deflated and lackluster, which can carry on to your next sketch. Now if you start creating momentum and you start drawing really cool stuff and you're really excited about it and you're learning these little tricks and tips, you're gonna create this positive momentum, which is gonna make you very anxious to keep drawing and you're gonna jump to your next sketch. You're going to learn from each one. You're just going to keep advancing and growing and evolving as an artist. And that's part of the journey. And this is the most important part, is just keeping that positive attitude about your art, keeping, keeping track of your results, being honest with yourself and asking yourself, don't try to hide things, don't try to guess things, and don't try to take too many shortcuts. Now once you have a very firm understanding of all the rules, at that point, you can take some shortcuts. But in the meantime, you should really be focused on the fundamentals and just keeping everything looking very alive and keeping everything looking very fluid. I would say instead of stiff, I'm just trying to think of an antonym for stiff. I think fluid and just keeping things moving and just kind of lively is what you want to do as an artist. So there we have it. I've gone a little bit longer than I wanted to on this lesson, but it's okay. The reason I say I've gone a little too long is because we're gonna be really reiterating and recapping all this stuff over and over again in later segments. So there you go. You have these notes and if you guys want these copy of this kind of stuff for a recollection in kind of a, to, to kind of remind you of this lesson. Let me know. I can create little PDFs, all this stuff and handed over t. That's it. This concludes this lesson. And what I want you to do is just practice all this stuff. Put it into your mind, put it into practice. Draw. I hope you have a sketchbook. Just draw this kind of stuff repeatedly, try and understand it, and then that's it. I'll see you in the next one. You're doing great, keep it up and I'll talk to you soon. 6. The Head & Face : Hey, welcome back. And I know a lot of you are anticipating this one. This is what we're, we're kind of drawing the head and will also put some bases on these heads. But I just wanted to show you some of the basic shapes of the head. So what I'll do is I will get rid of this one, lighten this up, and then I'll go to this layer here. What I've done is I've drawn the basic skull. And actually you know what, I think it might be best to draw with blue. Okay, so we have this skull, which is kind of a three-quarter view airline here, circle here. They're very, very commonly used angle in comics. Then we have our eye sockets and we have where our nose would be placed, we have our cheekbones and then our teeth. But I guess the question a lot of people would have is how do we put a face on that? I'll be giving you these templates and there'll be darkened so you can use them in. You can lower the opacity or you can trace over them, or you can just use them as reference. But basically to put a face on them, you want them to kind of turn out like, let's get rid of this real quick. I think the goal for a lot people is to create basis. I've gone ahead and I've drawn phases directly onto these under sketches. And faces are pretty easy. They're pretty fun to draw. Maybe if I can squeeze a couple in here without going too long on time, I will show you some live real time sketches here. Actually, let's do that right now. Quickly. We'll just go over what I've done. So you can see that we have the eye socket here and we have one here. All I've done is drawn an eye shape, eye shape. I drew where the nose would be and put them out here and so on and so forth. It's pretty, once you get the hang of this becomes very simple. Another way to do it though, is if I were to use a green to show you, there's a shape I'm always using. And if I'm not using it, I'm thinking in it. It's a shape that looks like this. I do that for everything. It simplifies everything for me. You can see it on every sketch that I do. Because what's happening is I'm imagining that my face is going to be drawn inside this little window here. So if we were to erase, and I'll do one here too. If we were to erase everything. I'll just divide it. If we didn't have any faces showing it all, we would have this leftover. And this is, this is the shape that I'm looking for in all my sketches. But it's kind of hard to teach from that, going from that point to getting to the end point. So what I'll do is I'll go ahead and let's go ahead and erase these. I'm gonna get rid of these faces. And we will work directly on the layouts I have. Let's go ahead and quickly do a couple of sketches here. You can follow along or you can watch the first time and then re-watch the video later. Whatever, whatever you feel is best for you. On this one here, a couple of things that you'll notice is I have a line going. This is how I create the geometry of my sketches. So I put a line here. You know, I know that my, my, I is going to pop in right around there. Then there's gonna be this cheekbone. How do I know that? Because I studied this skull. I know where everything goes. Then we have our nose is going to be if we were drawing the skull, it'd be more like this. But since we're adding flesh and muscle on top of it, we're going to extend this nose depending on the phase where the characters from. We're gonna have the jaw. Then. Let's just go up a little bit more close and personal here. So I will go ahead and add another layer. I'll lighten this up and I'll use blue. So what I would do is I would, just, since I have this construction, I will just start with the eye. Then I would probably put depends on his mood. I probably put an eyebrow here, at least a hint of one just to show where things fall. Then out here, I would start shaping in his face. Now keep in mind, you can change the size of his nose. It doesn't have to be like this. Here's his under lip. Now, I could pull this in and make him smiling right. This is creating an expression which creates emotion, which draws your eye in. Now you can see, hey, why is this character happy? What's going on? Pop in his ear. Now I'm not going to pay too much attention to the details of the ear because I'm really focused on drawing the face. Then I can put in his neck, throwing some muscle here. We really have a face already. We can, then we can go in and start fine-tuning. But this course isn't on rendering or fine-tuning. This is really just about finding our anatomy, the shapes, and about the anatomy and simplifying them, that we can start focusing on rendering and creating characters. At this point, we have enough information to know like, Alright, well we have a character. What do we want to do with this character? What we can really turn them into whoever we want to. We can turn them into a Captain America. We can we can thicken them up and turn until Wolverine we can, we can even turn them into Spearman if we really wanted to, we can erase everything and just start from scratch. But the bottom line is you want to train your eye to start looking for things. And if you're creating a character, you want to create different facial features. You can, you don't have to. You can just use this under drawing is kind of a guideline like a map, like a blueprint. What you could do is you can give him smaller eyes. You can give them a eyebrows. It go like this. You can give them a bigger nose. You can give them under bite. You even though no neck at all hardly. You can just play around these features as much as you want. There's no right or wrong. You can give them, drop his ears down. You can give them here. You can play around. And that's the fun part about drawing, is you will find your style and you'll find what you like to draw the most. Then what you have to do is you have to train yourself to break those habits. Because a lot of times you'll start drawing the same face over and over again. You'll prohibit yourself. You'll, you'll kind of block yourself from learning. Let's go to another angle of a face. Let's go to, I guess this one can be fine. Same concepts. We already have the blueprint here. We know that his eyes are gonna fall in here. We can decide, okay, What's the mood of the character? Is he happy? Is he sad, angry. We know that his nose is going to fall here and you can just lightly sketch things at this point. You don't have to get everything perfectly intricate. This can be stuff that you can come back and erase and clean up. You can make them looking at us and give them an eyebrow. Wrap the eyebrow around. If you want to give them an angular face like this, you can, or you can round it off. There's just so many different combinations in variables that you can use to create faces. What you're trying to do is you're trying to put character. You're trying to develop a certain character that you can repeat over and over on the same head structure. You want to pick up certain traits like Wolverine has his sideburns. So you know, as soon as you draw those in, he starts looking like will rain. That's, these are the types of things you want to teach yourself. How can I make this character repeatable? How can I duplicate or replicate this formula? Another thing you could do is if you want to work on creating emotion, Let's say that he has a furrowed brow like ESA, just an angry he's in an angry mood. So what do you do? What you know that this is, since we've drawn this as the top part of his head, the slope, we can lower this down. Same thing here. We can lower that down because there's a muscle and skin that lies over that. Then we can squint his eyes. Then we can create these little lines here that indicate strain or stress. Give them thicker eyebrows. Snarl up his nose a little bit. Then if you want them showing teeth or whatever whatever the case may be, it's drawn a mouth shape. Drawn the bottom lip and you're just finding your shapes. Chin here. Then you just keep, keep drawing and then if you make a mistake, you erase. It's not a big deal. This is, this is the day in a life of an artist. You're gonna make constant mistakes. You're going to be constant corrections and adjustments. It's just part of the game. Now, I can pick it up his neck like this. And I'm just creating character as I go along. You can do these. There's an infinite amount of faces that you can practice with. Just by using these, these underlying blueprints. You can spread the eyes off further. You can make the face more square, you can make it more long. It's really up to you. Just use the same principles. Then when you get rid of this, you have this kind of a face here. You can have them looking straight ahead. Just have fun. That's the name of the game. Let's do another one. Let's do one facing forward. So what's our time running out here? Okay, 12 minutes. We don't want to keep you too long, But here we go. So imagine that we wanted to create. Well, let's just put in where our eyes would be. We know our eyes are gonna fall in-between these lines. We can narrow it down depending on the shape of the eyes we want to use. We just throw them in there. I just picked an arbitrary shape, like an almond shape. Then we can put his nose somewhere around here. And then a lot of times when I'm drawing a nose, I'll just make it triangular just to fit things in. I know that the bridge of his nose starts here. I'll come down. I'll put like a U here representing that little upper lip, the little indention above the upper lip. And then I'll put in the mouth line, then an under under lip, and then work as chin. And then I will put in some cheekbones. And this is how I'm just shaping out my face all the time. Is this. I've done this so many times, I can practically do it blindfolded. Then I'll put in an ear and then just finish up the shape of the head. Now, you're at this stage, what you're trying to do is you're trying to find elements that create the character that you're trying to draw. If I wanted to make him look older, I would add more lines. If I make them look younger, it's going to be less lines. If I wanted to make him, since the common theme has been Wolverine or Batman or whomever. Anyone who's got a mass Captain America. There's so many characters out there. What we can do is just start drawing the mask. Then I would probably thicken up his neck now because it will rain if you're drawing wolverine is a thick neck and then I would make his eyes look a little bit more intense. Then of course, we'd get rid of that. I'd go underneath and probably get rid of the ears. I have the ears here so we can just erase. And then let's see how that looks. Then. Yeah, so now we can work without the tight rope. We know where things go. Without the safety net, I should say. Then we'll rings got this double. Just identify the features that can bring out that character so that he's recognizable almost instantly. Obviously with a character like this, it's gonna be his mask, the shape of his mask. And you can do this with just about anyone. Anyone is recognizable. Most, most characters that you know are iconic. Now you might be creating your own characters, which is really cool. But even then, you're going to want the same goal of making your characters look very iconic and recognizable. You don't want them blending in too much with everyone else. You want them to have some sort of standout feature that allows the viewer to instantly recognize who they are. That's just one of the little secret tips of being an artist. So we have these, Let's get rid of this. Let's go back to this and this. So we have all these phases here that I've drawn in and I'll give all these to you so you can use them as reference by really want you to come up with your own phases. That if I was to give you any type of homework, it would be to take this template. And draw some faces over it. Actually, let me get rid of this green. We don't want to send that to you and draw some faces over it and come up with your own and maybe even make your own template if you wanted to, because this is my style. You might have your whole, whole different style than mine. And look at all your favorite artists. They all have their own, their own unique styles. What we're learning is the rules and then you're just going to start breaking them. And the best way to break the rules is to know them first and then you own them. You can do whatever you want. I want you to keep that in mind. But with that said, we have a lot of segments are lectures on the head. So I just wanted to give you this to kind of break it down. If I were to explain it in layman's terms and something very easy to understand. I would say, let's go to another layer here. Keep it very simple. We have we have our basic Actually let me thicken this up. Okay? So we have our basic shapes. When you're doing a side profile shot, it's more like an egg. We dropped from that egg down. We drop straight down like this. Come up and about midway through the egg we're going to drop down and that's usually where the chin falls and then right around the middle of that egg, actually a little too low. I like to curve my eyes like this. It gives it more of a dynamic viewpoint. And then I'll add the ears there. I know that the nose is going to come out here. Now from the tip of the nose, I'll draw a shape like this which connects to the chin. The reason I draw that shape is not because I'm going to keep it. It's just a guideline. Let me know that. Okay. That nose is going to be somewhere around here. I don't want I don't want anything protruding past his nose. His under lip might start here and these are his top lip might start there and his bottom lip here, there's ten is going to pop out. And then same thing here. I'll find these little guide points. I call them underneath the eye, coming down to the midpoint of this chin. Connect this for the cheekbone. And then this shape here identifies the cranium like the three-dimensional point of view. Can just start. We have a character. We have enough information, whereas we were to come in here and lighten it up. We can almost even get rid of this. We have enough to work with. And so with that being the case, we can come in and switch over to a pencil, sharpen it up a little, and then just start working with what we have. And this is how I do all my sketches. Every single time, is I start with the big shapes first and then I start chiseling and sculpting. Find the emotion or mood, capture it as fast as I can. And voila, That's how I draw and I think that's how you can draw two, you just got to keep practicing and you're gonna get the hang of this stuff. Now, like I said in all my videos, if you're still struggling with faces or whatever part of the anatomy, let me know. You can send me a direct message and if I get enough requests, I will certainly make more videos and more templates for you. So this is an on-demand course. This is my first, very first solo course for you guys. So I really wanted to be kind of help you as much as I possibly can because I want to consider this one a prerequisite for any other courses that I make in the future. I really want you to have the anatomy down. And I feel like this course is going to help you to do that. With that said, I hope that this has been helpful. I look forward to seeing the next segments and if you have any questions, send them my way. Keep going. You're doing great. And I'll see you soon. 7. The Head: 3:4 View in Real Time : All right, welcome back. And now we're going to quickly touch upon the drawing. The head from side view, front view and maybe rear view, three-quarter view, all those good views. I wanted to just touch base on all of them. So when you are drawing your character, I want you to be able to have a good grasp on how to draw. I had a call. With that said, let's move forward. And I'm going to start with a three-quarter view. Three-quarter views. Relatively easy. It sphere. Now instead of going directly down the middle, lean towards whichever side you want to do. If you want to face towards the left or the right up to you. You're dividing it. And then you're gonna take this part here where the circle starts to curve inward. You want to draw that down and cut across. You're imagining that this is a chin and then a jaw line from where the jaw would stop and meet the ear. You'll kind of curve in the create shape of a skull. This will all come together. Now, there's a lot of methods to do this. Again, this is a simplified version. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to draw the eye line here. I'm a protruded out a little bit. Then I'm going to draw kind of a cheekbone. Draw from the center. I'm going to imagine that this would be where the nose would be. Since we're our noses over, pointing over towards the characters right, our left. I'm going to draw an L shape here. Maybe make it a triangle. Underneath that knows, I'm going to draw a line down the middle. Just to maybe just a naive and a half of the nose, just a little bit. I'm going to draw a line indicating the mouth. And then you don't want that mouth to go too far out. Actually. One good thing, one good rule to explain to you now is anything that's further away from you when you're doing a three-quarter view, the line is going to be shorter. So you see how this line is divided in the middle. This mouth line is going to appear shorter. This one. Then we have a bottom lip. Then here we're going to have the eyes. Now again, this eye, he's going to appear slightly smaller and closer to the nose. This one's going to be further away from the nose and a little bit bigger. The ear is going to fall somewhere around. Now when you're drawing the ear, if you went to know where to place it. Imagine that the character is wearing glasses or sunglasses and then connect them to like, bring them back towards the back of the skull. This is your frame. And then you know that that frame lies above the ear. You can kind of place where your ear is there. Some people draw their ears too low or too high or too close or too far. This is a good way, a good method to measure and double-check yourself. Okay, there we go. Now from the back of the head where it's coming in, just like this side where we drew the line straight down from the back of this circle here. I'm going to draw back of the neck. Now. This neck is going to be a cylinder shape and it's going to go right about here. You can see not quite to the center of the head, right before. Then we have a muscle that you guys probably have all seen goes from here to the back of the head. There we go. We have our general shape of a, a three-quarter face. Now with that said, let's erase this and let's go over and fine tune it a little bit and I'll go over some of the rules and the placements as I'm, as I'm sketching. Alright, so we're just going to lightly erase and leave a ghost of the sketch behind. Now I'm just gonna go in. And this is not a particular character, we're just making up this character as we go along. But you can turn this character to just about anyone. But I'm just going to start with the eyes. I like to start with the eyes because the eyes helped me to kind of capture. The essence, the motion, the attitude of the character. Iss, bring the life to the character. I think it's a good place to start. Then from here, now, we're going to have a course on emotions and faces. Just, and that's all we're going to do. But for this one, I'm just going to do a standard face not to emotional, just placing things where they would they would fall. So we have the eyebrow here. You can decide if you want this to be a thick eyebrow or within eyebrow. So my rule when I'm drawing eyebrows, just depending on the character. So you have to remember there's a lot of variations. Let's see what happens if I close in on this. There we go. Eyebrows are part of communication. They create emotion, they create language. If you raise the eyebrow up, it's going to create surprise. If you lower down, it's going to create more of an intense look. Maybe even anger. Depends on how wide the eyes are open. There's just a lot of variables when you're drawing that any slight change can really alter the whole attitude of whatever it is that you're drawing. So from there I know that the eyes are here and I like to make the character looking at me. To do that. This eye here, you will favor the eye. The eyeball would kind of come slightly further over this way towards you. And then you can put the pupil here. And then this one again would come towards you. And because it's being cut off by the bridge of the nose. Remember this nose is offset. It's off-center because It's a three-quarter view and we'll get more into this, don't worry, I'll repeat these over and over and through examples. I think you'll, you'll pick up what I'm putting down here. Then I'm just going to draw on kind of a no shape. Then I'm going to underneath the nose has this kind of indention right above the top lip. And then remember that mouth that we were drawing. The lips were a little shorter or going this way and then a little bit longer towards us because it's a three-quarter. So anything that's just like perspective. And of course we'll be doing a course on perspective as well. It perspective teaches you that anything that's closer is going to appear longer and bigger and anything that's further away is going to appear shorter and smaller. There we go. And then we have a kind of an under lip. And then here we're gonna give him strong jaw. When you're drawing comic books. And you want to make your characters appear strong. Books are all about exaggeration and just having fun or not. You're not trying to draw anyone in particular. You're not favoring anyone. You're just drawing what you think looks heroic. Here we go. We have a face. Now from here. I'm not drawing any hair at this point. I'm just drawing in the shapes. Remember his ear is going to pop out. Yours can be all shapes and sizes as well. I like to just keep it relatively easy on the eye. And then you can shade in a few different areas that make the ear kind of pop out. Then remember we have this line back here which was indicating the back of his neck. And then this line here. And then I like to break lines up. I don't like to draw this muscle here. I don't like to draw just straight lines connecting. I like to break it up. And I also like to add a couple intermediate lines here. And then on this side of where the Adam's apple would be. I like to add another line going down like that indicating the same same muscle wrapping around the other side. There we go. There we have a typical Heroic looking figure. Will pull back a little bit. If you wanted to draw hair, you can. If you wanted to shade it in, you can. So if we do our standard above lighting, we can know that underneath his jaw is going to be shaded underneath this ear. Really anything that's furthest away from the light, it's going to be shaded. Now if we want to add a few more details, Let's see if I can just zoom in a little bit. We want to add in some details. I like to add the last double am drawing characters, especially someone like Wolverine, even Batman and I liked him to look a little bit rough and rugged. Just kind of adds character and communicates to the viewer that this character isn't so clean, shaved, my head a rough day, it's ready for battle. You can go up here. You can imagine where the cheekbone would be, just based on our lines here. So I know that the cheekbone go somewhere around here. Underneath the jaw here there's another muscle that kind of goes upward. I like to draw like this. Shaded in. This is how I would approach a standard face. Underneath this nose, we can cast some shadow. Even this lip here, and even this side of his face if we wanted to. Just depends on how intricate we get. This is not a tutorial on how to draw faces, but I figured I'd throw this in here for you just to keep in mind because I'm going to have a whole course on how to do this. If you guys are watching this and you're thinking of any other courses that can contribute and help you with, you know, send me a message and let me know because I went to give you as much value as possible. I want to help you. We live in a day and age where you have more resources than you can ever imagine. I did not have this when I was first starting out. You should be very grateful that you have so many resources out there. I know I am. Here's a typical face. In our next course that we teach on faces and expressions and stuff like that, I will get a little bit more intricate. I'll draw hair. If you wanted to draw hair. Basically what I would do is just establish a hairline. So from where the ear is, wood, Draw a line inward out somewhere towards the middle and then curve it in like that. That would establish a hairline. Hair lines can come in all shapes and sizes depending on the age of the character and maybe even a sinister look. Maybe a more evil character might have a higher receding hairline or maybe no hair at all. Some characters are going to have more scruffy hair. Some are going to have more well combed and styled hair. Some may have, may not even be human, maybe alien, and may have all kinds of weird just shapes and forms popping out of their head. Who knows? It's really up to you. That's the beauty of being an artist. You can create whatever you want. If it doesn't work. You have any eraser. You can try something new. There's a standard head. Now. I'm going to go ahead and draw a front-facing. Actually, let's do a side facing view and then we're gonna do a different character. Let's see here, my microphone over. I'm going to create a character from this side, and I'll do that in the next segment. So this one will be labeled three-quarter view. The next one will be a side view, and then the last one will be a front view. We're going to end on this note, and I'll see you in the next lesson. 8. The Head: Profile in Real Time : Welcome back. Now we're going to continue with drawing the head and face. And this time we're going to draw a side profile view. Again, this whole course is designed on simplifying things and drawing them fast so you can learn fast and then you can come in and do the details later. Okay, So with that said, let's jump in and remember, the first thing that we want to do is we went to train ourselves to think and see and shapes. With that said, the first shape I'm going to do instead of a circle, I'm going to draw an oval almost like an egg. Sideways, horizontally. Then I'm going to, from this front side of the egg, I'm going to drop this down. I'm going to come back here. Now from the center of the egg. I'm going to divide. Now. That doesn't mean that your jaw line stops at the center. I've just where I'm drawing. I'm just dividing the egg and a half from the back part of the egg. Just like the back part here on this previous head that we did, the three-quarter. This one will be a side profile. Their head will be connected to this neck. And then again, we have to remember that these muscles, this one here is the same as this one here. And it connects to the back of the skull. And it's responsible for twisting the head In left, and it can help move it up and down. Now, what we're going to do is we're gonna find our eyeline. And usually the eyeline, if it's just a head-on. Horizontal shot from the side, island is going to come right down here in the middle. Then what I like to do is from where you're dropping a line straight down. I like to step back just a little bit here. I don't know how the measure I usually just eyeball it. No pun intended because we're adding an I here. I would draw a line right here, kind of a dividing. And then what we're doing that for is because this is the eyeline. I went to put like a shape like this here. This is indicating the eye from the side. Now you can do that in many different shapes. But for this one, I'm just going to do it like this and we're going to put it in a rough eyebrow. Now I'm going to erase all this and redraw in a moment, but right now we're just establishing where things go. This part here I'm going to create for his nose. Then underneath his nose. I'm going to drop down. Remember we did this drop-down here. We did the same. Put his mouth maybe you're right about here. Then bottom lip and the chin will pop out. Then we have the jaw. The jaw goes up. Remember the glasses here? Connect behind the ear. You can shape this head to. Remember. Heads come in all shapes and sizes. When we're drawing more characters, I'm going to show you how. For instance, like the Hulk, we'd have more of a square, small shape, or Spider-Man would have an oval egg shape. Batman or superman or someone like that would have more of a chiseled, almost like this here, which is a chisel, strong granite, strong jaw line. Here we have essential shapes in our placements of everything. One of the things I like to do is right underneath the eye here. I like to draw an imaginary line. No, it's not imaginary now because I'm showing you, I like to draw a right to about where I think that this jaw line picks up this muscle here. Sorry, like to connect it and it gives me a good measurement where things are. Another way you can look at it and I'll show you in a moment, is what we're at it let me just write here. Let's imagine that we have our three-quarter base. Again. A good way to think of faces is imagine that every head shape was like this. But you can slap any face on top of this. So a face would be something like this shape. We have nose, mouth that would slap right onto here. You see what I'm saying? If we were to move this over a dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, we would put this part here. Draw this here, then this down to the chin. Same thing on the chin. Line. Hi, nose, mouth. Of course it gets a little bit more detailed than this. But this is kind of how I see the face just coming right off. Back to this. I like to draw a very strong looking characters, stoic characters. When I'm drawing. Especially when I'm teaching. When you're sketching for yourself or if you're working on something professional or commission or something like that, you can vary your styles and you can draw whatever you want. But I like to teach with what I'm most comfortable with. My go-to characters when I draw are typically someone like Batman or Wolverine, Superman or mask character. I loved drawing like Deadpool and Spiderman. When it comes to females, it's more like a Wonder Woman or fathom from Aspen comics. Catwoman, kind of sinister look. But anyway, this is a basic side view. And so what we'll do is we'll do what we did before. And we'll take our kneaded eraser, erase everything, but leave a ghost of the sketch behind. And then I'll zoom in. Just like this one. I'll start with the eyes first. So I'll with the eye, I'll kind of curve it out a little bit. Then I will. When you're drawing highlight that you're imagining a whole circle. For an eye. You're imagining something like. But that's why I simplify that. I only drew this part. We skip this. We don't need this. Once you learn the shapes and where to put them, you can bypass a lot and it's gonna save you a lot of time. Again, we bow this out, put the I in here. We are drawing a eyebrow and I'll shade it in. I'll draw a couple of lines here indicating he's kind of snarling. Serious. Then we'll pop the nose out. We have the upper part of that lip, lower lip, and the chin goes out. Then I like to draw a straight line. Connects to this m is Apple area. Then connect. Remember I don't like to really keep my lines too. I like to break them up. Just adds a little bit more character I find under here we have this kind of a muscle on the jaw. Then here I'm going to draw the indication and see this little piece here. We're going to draw here too, and then maybe even another one. Underneath this, I am just going to draw kind of a slight. And then here is where the cheekbone would be. Then we're going to draw in here. I see that this ear was placed in the wrong spot, so I'm just going to move it a little bit, not much. Then I like to shade in some areas of the ear which indicate shapes and form. Then underneath I'm just going to calcium shadow. Again, the hairline. There we go. Now if you wanted to add an eyeball, you're going to have them looking straight ahead or come back Up to you. Then we can start shading similar to last one. Upper lip, some stubble, first-gen. When you get the hang of this, you realize how repetitive it is, but in a really nice way, it's not a monotonous, boring, repetitive thing that you're doing. You're just, it becomes repetitive because it's it becomes habit. If you're repeating the same thing over and over again, you're only going to get better at it. So don't stray and they'll try and reinvent the, invent the wheel every time you sketch. It's always good, of course, and I always advise that you break the mold and you create your own voice when you're drawing. But for awhile while you're drawing, just keep it basic. Keep it simple, keep it fun. That's what it's all about. Remember, allow us started drawing or had the desire to draw since we were little kids. And why was that? Because it means it's happy. It was something that we liked, we'd like to share with our friends. It's a story-telling device. It's a way to communicate, it's a way to express ourselves. Keep it fun, keep it, and just get good, Get, become the best that you can possibly be. The only way you're going to do that is by constant practice. Reevaluating yourself. Being a harsh critic on yourself, don't be afraid of criticism from others. Actually criticize yourself worse than anyone else could, but not in a negative way. Just keep yourself in check and keep making yourself progress. There we go. We have a side view here. You can see zoom in a little bit. And then we'll zoom out. So we have the side and we have the profile and the three-fourths. Next thing we can do on the next segment, we will do a front-facing face. It's the same principles as these. I hope that you are having fun, I hope you're learning and I can't wait till we put all this stuff together and you can create your own characters. I'll see you in the next lesson again, if you want to reach out to me, you can contact me directly here. Or you can find me on Instagram at Van Orden art, which is the little at sign and then a VAE NORDIET ART. Find me there. You can message me there. I think there's a believe that there's a way that you can email me as well. Anyway, I'm here to help. I'm a Art mentor and coach. I love what I'm doing and I love to help others. So don't be shy. I'll talk to you soon, see you in the next lesson. 9. Headshots in Real Time : All right, Welcome back. In this segment we're going to draw a front-facing head face, all that good stuff. The reason we're covering this, and I'm including it in the simplified anatomy. Superhero anatomy is because I think that no matter how good your anatomy is, no matter how well drawn and how intricate and understood you are in the anatomy terms and all that good stuff without a good head and face and to show expression and emotion. Your, your whole sketch can flop. You want to make sure that you're able to grasp everything in a lot of people tend to shy away from drawing faces. They find them complex. They find difficult, little overwhelmed. But you don't have to be. I think that everything can be simplified. And I'm gonna show you, I'm going to keep showing you. As we move on from less than a lesson. You're going to learn to put all this stuff together. I'm just sharpening up my trusty little number two pencil here. Now in general, I don't Draw with number two. I usually draw with my handy lead holder, which I think is a to H lead. But number two is a great one because it's a software layer. It's dark, easy on the eye, you can depend. The camera picks it up really well. And it's really good for lessons. I think the softness of the LED is a lot of fun to play with because you can get some good details and shades and values and all that good stuff with it as well. Anyway, let's draw the front-facing head. Remember, just like the three-quarter and this side profile view, the front-facing is going to start with a circular shape. I'm gonna divide it down the middle. Stretches line out a little bit longer on the sides. I'm going to continue to draw down and then I'm going to cut them. I'm imagining that this is kind of a jaw line protruding down to the chin. Then underneath we'll have an extension of where the neck would be right? Now another thing you could do is you can actually add to this circle here, make it a little bit bigger. Gives you a little bit more of a shape. And then figure out if your character is. Now, again, I keep repeating this, but I really want you to know. I'm going to have a whole course on drawing heads and faces and changing the angles so we can have angle facing down or facing up side left behind whatever view possible. We're gonna go over it all. But for this one, we're keeping everything simple. So I'm just gonna keep the island pretty much center like this. Then. We're going to quickly draw in our characteristic facial features. So what I like to do is I like to kind of indicate where the nose would be. So draw like a circle or a square here. From here, I will draw shape like this, almost like a triangle. From there. I will create similar where my eyes are going to fall. Now you want to keep your eyes not too far apart, too close together. There's a sweet spot right in the middle. We'll find out here soon. Then after that, I'm going to put in my mouth would fall. So I'm gonna say right around here. And then the under lip, chin in from the mouth. I like to draw a imaginary line book which I'm making visible to you for the sake of teaching. Going out to the cheekbones, carbon back in like this. And then out again. Crossing over. The reason I do this is because I'm trying to find all my shapes. I'm trying to make sure everything is proportionally accurate, at least for my sketch, my preferences. I'm going to zoom in a little bit here. And then re about, remember, the whole glass is if your character, we're wearing glasses, we know that the ear at the top of the ear would fall somewhere around here. I'll just draw, I would say is the shape of the top ear and then I would pull it out. Now you can change all these proportions and sizes. I can make this face longer, more square. You'll play around with all this stuff as you're moving along and you're getting better. I now know what your skill level is at drawing now, but I know that with practice it's going to get better and all these nuances are gonna become subconscious. You'll pick up on them. You won't even need to think twice. I'm telling you from experience, you won't think twice about it. You will easily draw this stuff like second nature. And that's what I want you to be thinking about. Don't be too hard, don't be overthinking. Just dive in and draw. Now with that said, I'm gonna go ahead and draw in a, i, i just a shape. I'm not going to do anything with details yet. So now that I have all this, I think I have enough to work with front-facing and everything that I was looking for in this lesson. I'm going to take this again, our trusty kneaded eraser. I'm just going to go ahead and erase. Now, leaving a ghost of this sketch behind. We're going to start with the eyes. As I typically do. We're drawing fast, so I'm not getting too intricate and not getting too detailed. Just enough to kind of convey how all this stuff works so that you can take this lesson and run with it. Then I will take eyebrow here. I brought here. I'm drawing eyebrows. They're gonna, again, they're going to vary in shape and size depending on who you're drawing and also your style. But for here I'm gonna keep it small and the back. And then as it gets to the front, it's going to get a little thicker. Then. I like to draw these little lines here indicating a serious intense look. Then from here, I can see my cheekbones, so I'm going to go ahead and just drop in the cheekbones a little bit. I'm going to drop this nose. I know that the nose I want is going to fall somewhere around here. Then underneath is gonna be the upper lip area and then the mouth. I like to break up the lines of the mouth. Put it under the bottom lip here. Late to add line outside like this. Then I imagine, when I'm drawing, I imagine a nice strong Square chin. And then this jawline going over here. Let me keep the character bald at this point. We're focused on their face. I'm going to draw in years. I already conveyed where they fall. So I'll just fill in some shapes. I like to, like I always mentioned, shade in a few things that make the ears pop out a little bit more. Remember this little muscle underneath here underneath the jaw? Just kind of allude to it being there. Draw another line out here. I'm going to give them that little dimple inside the chin and then outside I'm going to draw neck. And this trap muscle where his hairline is going to be going like this. Back out. Carbon. And then there we go and have a hairline. And then let's imagine, where is it, whereas imagined him looking directly at us. We want to center the eyes, the eyebrows. And of course, when you're when you're working on your actual sketch and you want to get a little bit more intricate. You can. Is all for the sake of teaching. I don't want to draw here right now because I don't want to distract you from the face. But you can see the hair would fall in this region. Then if you wanted to draw, remember we were drawing stubble. If you want to keep that trend going, you can just quickly, fun to do. It's just a little details. I'm not going to do too much because I know we have time constraints and you guys are focused on learning. Um, I know it's fun to watch. Sometimes. I loved watching other artists draw. I really want you to pick this stuff up and I want you to put the practice. Then I would just do the same trend of casting a shadow from the light source above. There we go. Now you can turn this character into it. Anyone you can turn into Wolverine login. You can. Maybe I'll do that real quick. I imagine that you wanted to draw someone rugged. Here we go. Really quick version. I'm finding the shapes and we're going to add in some sideburns. Just, just for the sake of simplifying, I'm just going to shade this in to keep my pencil moving really fast. You just put everything together. Some more shades here. This is fun. I enjoy it. I think you do too. And you just get to experiment and try new things out and learn from it. And go with the flow. There you go. Like that. Let's do one more face over here. This time. Maybe we won't get into details as much. But let's see, we're running in 14 minutes. I only exhaust you. But let's just draw, draw a circle. Line down the middle. We're going to keep the lesson I've drawn front paste. This time I'm just going to draw an oval. I'm not going to draw an E squared chiseled shapes. We have almost an egg shape. Draw a line for the eyes. Circle to indicate the nose where it starts. Triangle. Mouth. This time, I'm going to show you one little trick to add some emotion. Not going to talk as much during this one because I'm kind of thinking of this as I go along, but I'll explain what I'm doing as I do it. So right now I'm just finding shapes and finding measurements. Letting myself know where everything's going to fall. Do come in and draw my details. I'll know. What character would I like to draw? Maybe. Let's just figure it out. I'm just going to go ahead and erase this lightly. Whatever character pops to mind first. Even if it's not unknown character, even if I'm makeup the character right now, it's fine. I have everything I need here. I have all the measurements. They're essential for creating a face where everything goes. I have all my information laid out. So now it's up to me. Now if you want to get silly, you wanted to draw more of a cartoony face. Like, let's say that we drew. Big eyes, eyeball going in here. And then let's say we raised his eyebrow up. Let's say we have a bigger knows that mouth now a little bit further than we normally would. Some bigger ears. Just changing everything up there. I've done this whole time and just trying something new. Had no idea that was going to draw this. I know who this is. It just shows you that you can create characters anytime you want. Just change shapes and all the fundamental principles and foundations are always here. You can see like I just quickly did this and then what I'll do is one more time. While I erase. Oops, I just got my eraser or the pencil sharpener. Have a little bit more intricate here. What I'll do is I'll give them a tired I this just goes to show you that nothing is ever cut in stone. You can always change your style. You can change your method. You can create things on the cuff. Don't want everything that your rules nill you down. You can the rules once you know them and you can do whatever you want. Really soft chin. Of course, I'm making all this up. I've never drawn this character ever. Once you know the principles and the basics, the rules, you can really just create whoever you want. It's actually fun. Power to possess. There we have it. Another face. Have you wanted to grab our put more details in you can sounds like there's a helicopter in the background. Then what I would do here is just following the same guidelines that was doing on the previous characters. You see Walla. We've just created a character face. Just exactly the same rules that we've used for this one here. We just exaggerate and embellished and change some of the features. And this is what it came out to be. With that said, I really hope that this lesson served you well and I look forward to seeing you in the next lesson. Hang in there, keep practicing. Don't give up. If you have any questions, please message me directly. You can message me here or you can find me on Instagram at Van Orden R, which is the at sign VA NORDIET. Ie ART, sorry, van Orden art. You can find me there on Instagram or you can message me here. And there might even be a button that you can click for email either way, if you have any questions or if you have any suggestions, please let me know. If there's something else that you'd like me to teach in the next course, let me know because I'm planning on doing maybe a course each month, maybe more. We'll see. Just depends on how much time I have on my hands. Okay guys, thanks for joining me on this lesson. I hope you enjoyed it. And I will see you again on the next segment. Talk to you soon. 10. The Torso and Upper Chest : All right guys, welcome back. And now we're going to focus on the simplified chest and torso. This is a really important part of your sketch when you're putting everything together. If we're breaking things down, we would have the head, the torso, the arms and shoulders, and then the legs and feet and hands and all that good stuff. So of course the hands would be connected to the arms and feet. But here we go. Torso. So torsos can come in all shapes, but actually all sizes, but the shape is relatively going to be the same. With acid. Let's quickly draw in a torso. We'll do a couple of different angles. And again, I'm using a number two pencil for this. Now as we move forward into our lessons, I might switch over to my trusty lead holder, which I've had for many years. This is one of my favorite weapons of choice. But for now, we're going to use this simple two H pencil that a lot of you may have used when you're in school. They're the most common pencils out there, so I'm sure you can find one anywhere. Okay. With that said, let's get started. The torso basically, it's where your chest chest, and torso, the upper part of your body. The way it works is we have a shape like this. Now underneath that we're gonna have kind of a loop. I hope you can see this. This is kind of looking head on. And then we have a spine. Now this indicates the torso area. It's really pretty easy when you think about it. One of the things I like to do when I'm drawing this area is I have a few tactics I use to keep everything in alignment in from. One thing that would do is from this bottom corner here, I would draw an arrow straight down towards the crutch and same here. This basically would give me a an indication of how the muscles will work. In terms of your abdominal muscles and then your obliques here, and then your legs will connect with the sockets, come down like this. You can see that everything just comes together. And now we have our shoulders, which we can throw in right here. Then up here we would throw in our neck and our head. And then from this head now I'm going to teach all this in one lesson. But this is just a kind of a preview of what we're getting into. You can see that the body comes together pre, quickly. When you just start putting all these pieces together. Now remember, our sockets or arms come out here. There you go. There's the basic human anatomy. Now you can go deep with this. You can start drawing a. We're not gonna get too intricate here because I really want the focus to be on this area. Let's go in and Find some of the muscles that we would find in the torso and upper chest area. What we would do is we're gonna divide straight down the middle. And then we're going to come across and divide right around here. Now, if we're drawing a chest, the chest is going to, maybe I'll do with this with a red pen here. I'm going to draw a line here, and I'm going to create a chest. Then underneath this test, we'll have the indication of the ribcage, which I'll teach you this in later lessons were to add these. Then we're gonna come down here, which would be the abs. As we work our way down, we can see things. If something's out proportion, this is a great time to make those corrections. What I like to do is imagine that the hero or villain or whoever is wearing a belt. We can erase later if we're drawing in pencil or whatnot. We're going to stop here and we're going to work on this area. So we have these neck muscles here, which we'll get into later on in another lesson. This would be the upper trap muscle that would connect to the shoulder. Then these lines that we drew earlier would kind of be what encases your abs. They encase the ab muscles there, the obliques. And they work their way down to the groin area, the crotch. And of course, you can draw your legs. Your arms were drawing pretty quickly because I'm just trying to show you how everything comes together here. Later we're gonna get a lot more intricate on this. And I want you to get to a point where you can comfortably draw superhero anatomy. Now we're focused on a male here. I think in another lesson, we'll start working on females, but I think it's easier to focus on males at this point. We can do, we can do aliens, monsters, they don't have to be human. You can create your own, your own species if you will. Whatever you want. This The world is yours here. You can see how everything kind of falls together. I'm gonna do from the side what we did here. For an aside, if you're drawing a torso, again, you're creating is well, you got to remember. Your back holds everything up. So your backward connect to your neck. Your shoulders would fall somewhere around here. Then your abs here, your torso area would come somewhere around here. Legs would be here. Remember when we did legs we had larger bone here and then this bone connected to the equal came out to the foot. It's the same concept. What I like to do is draw from this socket here. Draw kind of a straight-up line here. Should keep everything relatively imbalance. You can draw a head in. Everything is going to stay relatively balanced. In proportion. What I'm trying to convey to you is the shape that I want you to focus on is this shape here. Let's get back to the pencil now. Let's imagine that you have a stick figure. That line is our balanced line, it's our center line, line of action or inaction. Then here we're going to have our shoulders. Here we're going to have our legs. Where does your torso falling? Falls in right around here. Connects here. One of the things I'll tell you, I'll tell you now about, I'll remind you later, is when I'm drawing arms in terms of arm length now I don't measure the arms by just use kind of guidelines and landmarks to notify me if if the proportions are right. If it's a normal tall character, I would just make sure that the elbow falls around midway here and then the hand would fall somewhere around the upper thigh. That's basically it for me. Now this is relatively simple, but like I said in the last lesson, I'm really excited to show you how to put all this together. Again, Let's do one more torso. We'll do this one from the side. We have shape that's gonna go. You're imagining that this is your socket for your shoulder. So again, if we do a front view, I'll do both simultaneously. Socket for shoulder. What I mean is here's your shoulder. Because here right into the socket. We have our back spine. We have our pelvis area, then our legs socket, neck. Here. This is where the shoulder would be. And so we can just imagine this shoulder is going to go in here. It's just shapes, everyone. Then we're just focused on shapes. I think that this is enough information for you to understand how the torso works because we're going to recap all this one. We're putting the character together. I just want you to kind of briefly go over this part of the body. I think what we can do now is we can work on some heads. So we'll do a front-facing head, a three-quarter and the profile shot of the skull. And we'll maybe even draw a quick based on there. But we're going to have a whole lesson later on in another course on faces and emotions and all that good stuff. So there you go. I hope this gave you a, give you a better perspective on torsos and chests. And stay tuned because we're going to put all this together. All right, thanks for stopping by again and remember if you want to see more work, if you want to reach out to me, you can reach out to me directly here or you can find me at Van Orden art on Instagram. That's VLAN OR dn ART. Talk to you soon. 11. Legs: Breaking Down the Shapes : Welcome back. We are now going to dive into the study of the leg. This is a male leg and what I want to do is just really emphasize on how to simplify the leg. So when you look at this sketch here, you can see it's pretty complex. But I want you to start training yourself to look for shapes. So there's a couple of ways to look at this leg. Let's start with this one over here. We have a direction that's going like this, right? So we have It's almost like an arm. You can almost call this like an elbow. This could be the upper arm, this could be the lower arm. Let's go ahead and look at the basic, the most primal shape that we can see, our cylinders. So the first cylinder that we were gonna see, he's going to be right around here. It's going to go all the way up to about here and wrap around here. And then we're going to go ahead and connected over here. We have this cylinder going this way. Then we have another one going over here. Which keep in mind I'm just keeping these shapes very simplified. Because I really want you to be able to actually, let's go ahead and circle this down here, close it out. I really want you to be able to just identify these shapes as fast as possible. Another thing I can do to help you out is two. This is just kind of like a see-through. Let's see. Let me make these look like it's dotted. So you're just seeing through the leg. And then over here, go ahead and shade it in. So it looks like we're looking inside of the cylinder. Same thing here. Okay, so we have this kind of look. Basically. You can draw another cylinder up here, connected here, and then do the same thing here. Drop-down. We had the same shapes, essentially in-between. We have this connector, which would be like the elbow here. You can go out, connect, connect. So let's go ahead and clean this up. Let's start one more thing here. If we were to be drawing an actual leg, will sure. You can also look at the shape like this. Look at the big shapes like what are we seeing here? We're seeing a shape like this. And then we're connecting to the knee. And then we're coming down here. Shen to the ankle. Cap muscle connect here. We have the heel, foot. I'm doing everything upside down, but I just want you to see, it's very easy to start identifying these shapes. So if we get rid of this, we can see that we have a leg shape. And now we can just start just playing around with some muscles here. We have an ankle that's going to fall right around here. We can connect this up to the knee. We have a couple of muscles here. They're going to connect over and we have the glutes here, the kneecap right around here. You can just check yourself to see how things look. Let's say that I removed that. Come back. See you that once you get these shapes down, there'll become part of your muscle memory. No pun intended. Then we'll move on to this leg. And we're going to actually go into this and just practice more on how to draw legs with your imagination from your memory on this leg. One of the things to remember is we have this shape here which would represent this. And then we have this femur bone going down to the knee and we have this shin bone going down to the ankle. So one of the things that I always tell my students is the inside ankle. He's going to fall higher than the outside ankle. Then from the inside ankle, It's good to connect this line, oops, to the ni. See how it curves in. Then femur is going to go from from this socket. It's gonna go and angle towards, towards this inner knee. And then this lower leg is going to go ahead and bow out and end up at this ankle. Then you can go from here to here. Get a straight point up and down. Right? So if you want to build muscle onto this, you can imagine your knee is going to fall in this region. And then you start going back to this first example. We can draw a cylinder. Connect it here and here. We have our cylinder. Then we can even start, let's say that we wanted to lighten this up and then come here and start really working on some muscle. What we could do is realize that from this point here down to the inner knee, there's gonna be a line. This is a division line from the upper muscles and the inside leg muscles. Then here this is going to bow out, especially in comic books were going to exaggerate. We're going to blow this out. And then this area we're going to draw inward towards the crotch. Then we're going to work our knee in. And then we're going to add this calf muscle. We're going to add this calf muscle. Then on the outside you're not gonna see as much of the calf. Then we're going to drop that down to the foot. And voila. Now we can go ahead and remove this. And we can see we can actually remove both of these. Now we can see that this is our muscles and let's go ahead and work on these a little bit more. So I'm going to go ahead and lower the opacity. And then from here, I'm just going to start with your own stylistic approach. Like once you learn these muscles, you can add your own aesthetics, your own style to it. So you can come up here, you can. In fact, let's use a different color. So we can make it a little bit easier on the eye to understand. I'll use this blue. I'll come in here. I'll put one muscle like this. And for the sake of showing you where these muscles fall all connect them. Then we have this big center muscle that goes over the femur. And then we have this one that kind of bows out and then connects to the butt or the glutes. Then we have these strands here that kind of go towards the inner leg. And then underneath. You don't have to get too detailed with a kneecaps. Just create a shape like this. Know that our shin bone, remember it comes from the inner ankle, connects to the kneecap. Then we have our outer, which is gonna be slightly lower. We connect our foot. And then when we come up we can connect our caps. Now we can exaggerate because comic books and superheroes and stuff are all about exaggeration. So you can do minimal muscular character like this. Or you can come in and let's go ahead and level up a little bit more. Now I'll come in with a different color. Let's just say the Hulk. Now. We can come in. We can really just exaggerate on these muscles. We can build and bulge and just make them look monstrous. Muscle here in the middle. And the thing about drawing muscles, as you don't have to connect every single line you can hit to where the muscles are going to go. So for instance, let's expand on this ankle here. And then when we get to his calf muscle, just bowed out bigger. Then I'll just show a slight line here just showing the shape and the flow of it. And then on the outside of this leg, Let's do the same thing, but without taking up this leg. Make the photo a little bit bigger so everything looks proportion. Then, even here in the middle, Let's go ahead and build this leg up. Now. We have bigger leg. We can start adding in these striations here. Once you start adding some form in some rendering, everything just comes together. And we'll put all this into practice soon. So 123, when I'm drawing feet, I'll just do a shape like this all imagine some toes. Your foot could go from the side, could go like this. He'll get this curve here. And then we have where our toes r goes up. And then goes into a cap. Now, depending on how how big these caps are, you can change those muscles to any sides. Really don't get too caught up in the line work here. Really just focus on these shapes that we're working with. To go back to practice. Let's say we want to draw a leg without even looking. So you want to test your skills. Let's go ahead and put the red pencil on here. And let's imagine that we have our socket. Then. We had this leg femur bone here connecting to the knee. This is going to bow out. But remember, there's not going to go too far. We're gonna drop a straight line here in our mind. We don't have to draw it. But in your mind, just keep keep in mind that this from the outside or the inside of his knee to the inside of the ankle is basically a straight line down. Then just draw a foot here. And then go ahead and start working in your shapes. It looks kind of silly here, but then we're going to balance it out with this inner leg. The key to your art is you want things to look balanced. So when we get to that point where you found balance, you're able to create mass. We'll go ahead and keep this coin, but we're lower the opacity. Let's just build on it a little bit more. So now we'll come here. Put kneecap here. I'll put in a muscle on top of this knee. And then on the outside, I'll go ahead and round up this muscle to the hip. Then we have these glutes and we'll call this. You can actually shade this in to simplify, just to know that this goes back behind the leg. And then you can go ahead and take this ankle carbon in the calf muscle here, calf muscle out here. Ankles lower C. Then draw a simplified shape like this. Just a fan left, 12, almost like a triangle with a curve on top. Very easy. Then you can come in and start modifying and changing your shapes around to make them look a little bit more realistic. So with that said, when you're, when you're drawing, you're going to take your time. You're going to look for lines that establish what you're looking for in your character. And what I mean by that is, sure we're looking for a quick shapes right now. We're training our minds to look for shapes. But then ultimately when you're drawing and rendering, you want to really take your time. You want to be very masterful. But the way that you're going to become masterful is by learning. You had to learn the rules before you can break them or add to them. So now we've kind of we've gotten our leaf shape in. Let's go ahead and reduce the opacity a little bit more. Now I'm going to come in with this darker lead on a new layer and just sketch the lines that I would, if I were approaching this as an artist, I would just find the lines I wanted to keep. Now we know that from this point here to this inner knee, there's gonna be a line that divides, but you don't have to draw that line or that circle obviously. Then you're going to come in, you're going to create a shape like this. This just comes from studying. You can study your own legs, you can study pictures on the Internet. You can study other comic books. It's really up to you. But what you want to do is you want to put this stuff into practice all the time. Then we put in our knee area will come here, but this calf in the inside CAF will hint at the shin bone here. Imagine you have a TO 12345. You can mess around, draw these striations here. You can do a little bit of division in the top center, which creates another muscle here. If you really want to start rendering, you can, you can just come in here and just add some lines. Crosshatching. Just create the shapes in volume that you're looking for with shadows and values. Now that's a whole different lessons. So I don't want you to get too confused with that stuff, but you can do it. So there you go. There's a basic leg. Alright, I hope that this lesson helped you. And don't worry, we're going to dive into this a lot more. We're really going to put this into practice because coming up you're going to be drawing your own legs and you can use reference if you want. But I really want you to get to the point where you can just draw these from imagination very quickly. I'll see you in the next one. 12. Let's Draw the Leg!2: All right, welcome back. Now we're going to be moving on to the simplified leg. What I wanted to do is we're going to make this really quick. Because I know that you are probably eager to put all this stuff together and create your own characters and all that good stuff. So let's just jump right in with a leg. Remember we're thinking in shapes. Let's say that we have a character. Let's do a simplified version real quick and then we'll, we'll explain how it works. With a leg. We might have a socket like this. Imagine this is the groin area, the torso meets the pelvis and all that stuff will have a socket on either. From this socket. We're going to have a big bone here that's going to connect to a circle which would indicate and kneecap. Then from there, we're going to have another bone. It's going to connect to a smaller circle, which would be the ankle. And then from there, we would have the foot. Now let's put things together. Let's, let's remember that when drawing superhero anatomy, you're exaggerating certain proportions. You're creating your larger muscles. But what you're also trying to indicate is balanced movement. You want to keep things looking like they're three-dimensional. So you want to add your values and your shadows and all that good stuff. With that said, let's quickly draw a leg that you can remember. Every time you are drawing a superhero or, or any character at all, you'll know the basics. What I like to do is again, we're shaping where we're thinking in shapes and cylinders, such as cylinders, circles, cubes, spheres, all that good stuff. So what I'll do here is I'll create a cylinder shape that we have. Another shape here which is going to be the knee area. Then from there, we're going to remember when we were doing the arm, it was very similar to this. We had the socket which would have been the shoulder, the first arm, the elbow, the next forearm, the wrist, and then the hand. It's almost the same but in this case, it's the foot. It's the leg. All right. With that said, we have a basic leg here. You can agree that this looks somewhat like a leg. And what we're going to do is kind of similar to what we did last time. We're gonna take our trusty kneaded eraser and lightly erase all this. And I'm moving fast because I really want you guys to get to the nuts and bolts of all this. And I'm excited to teach you how to create superhero anatomy. Where you put in your characters together all sides is kind of like a halting size or a Spider-Man size. You want to master the anatomy. Because your anatomy is when you're drawing certain sized heroes or people. That in itself is somewhat of a language that you're speaking to your audience. When you think, think of superheroes, for instance, like the flash. The flash would have very strong thighs because he's a runner. Or Spider-Man might have very lean agile lengths, or where the hawk might have short, stubby your legs, but still strong and massive. But he's not known for his agility, although he can run and jump in just as good as anyone else. You're conveying. Just a dominating. What could you say? A hulking character that's just kind of overwhelming in some ways. Getting lost in my words here, let's focus on this lesson, which is drawing a basic leg. And what we've done is this leg is not too muscular. Right now we're focusing on shapes. So here is where I would have the ankle. Now one of the tricks I like to do is I like to connect this ankle line to the knee like this, almost like a curve C. Then this Inner ankle, it a little bit higher than the outer ankle. Then that will connect to the top part of the foot, which you have your toe, heel here. There you go. Then from that bone we're going to draw straight up. We're gonna put it in a calf muscle. Then from the outside we're going to remember when you're, when you're drawing shapes oppose each other. This, as this loops down a little bit lower in this ankle is higher and this goes lower and lower. And this outside of the calf muscle is a little bit higher. And then connects to the knee. Then here. This connects to the pelvis area. Now, if you want to draw some muscles here, you can, you can. Here I'll show you what we can do in lightly erase this. And we're gonna make this leg a little bit stronger than it appears right now. I'm just going to draw a teardrop shape indicating one of the quad muscles, I believe they're called. And then out here I'm going to do the same. This one's gonna be a little bit higher. Then right in the middle. I'm going to draw kind of a division of both of them. Then. Where this line connects to the inner groin area, I'm just going to draw another line like this. And another one like this. This is just indicating other tendons and ligaments that are connecting muscle tissue to certain areas. Then here I'm going to just draw a little bit. Small shape kind of bowing out indicating the hip or butt area. Then here we're going to keep our calf muscles around the same. There we have our basic leg. If you wanted to add some value in contrast and all that good stuff, you can just add in a shadow. Maybe add in some lines indicating that this is inset. It's kind of behind. This part of the leg is going behind the front. Overlap, overlapping muscles. Here I might indicate just some three-dimensional shapes. Same here. When we're putting into character together, you'll see how all this works. This is just stuff that I want you to practice and understand. You know, why we're doing certain things when we get to the actual figure, they have it. There's your leg. And we did that pretty quickly then we less than ten minutes, I'd say that's pretty fast. Okay. There you go. You have the leg. Now. Certain leg muscles like from the side and everything they're gonna look different. Will do a quick demonstration. So we have our socket. Actually, I'm going to go this way. Then I'm going to put this bone here, input here. You can see I'm moving relatively quickly. What I wanted to do is add a muscle like this. Then knee, shin bone muscle connect. Now we're going to draw the outer or the muscle called the hamstring, I believe it's called the back. When you are. Studying your anatomy books, like I said before, you don't have to memorize all the body parts are the muscles. Just study how they work. Study yourself to look in the mirror. Study athletes on TV, study other comics and other artists. Just see how they put everything together. As you can see, not that difficult to create a lake. We did that one in a minute and a half. What else can we show you? Just the basics of a leg? Your leg can only move. Let's do a quick graph. We have the big bone here, so here's the, this is another side view. Here is the the upper upper bone. I think it's called a femur. Excuse me, pardon me for not knowing this stuff. And then we have the lower part, which we would call the shin. Now, what you want to remember is this is your knee. Your knee can only bend this way. Inward. We can only go here there. A certain amount. You cannot go forward if it does. You have some problems with that said, I want to show you another quick method I use when I'm drawing a bent leg. If I was drawing a bent leg from the side, I would start with the upper area here, the big bone here. Now we have a kneecap and then we have this going to the ankle. So one of the things you want to do in this regard is if you're drawing your muscles in, remember that this kneecap is kind of like your elbow intersects. You can draw on your muscles. So let's say that we wanted to draw a strong muscle here. We'll put another muscle here. Put the muscle where the bot would be, these connect. Now here is the part where from this line here you can just curvy like that. You can see that everything stays stationary. Let me see if I can use a red pen here. We have this middle part goes to the knee here. Now, the important thing to remember is the knee bends like this. You have a knee. It can go straight. And it can also be like this. As you're drawing your knee, you want to make sure that it looks believable to your viewer. The way that you do that is you remember that this part kind of overlaps and then the second part of your leg, the lower part of your leg, it would connect underneath. And then you can draw kind of a heel. It all works together. So again, we have our knee here, calf muscle groups, shin, ankle. We have these ligaments that connect behind the kneecap area which everything connects to that kind of like the shoulder. It's relatively simple when you grasp everything, which is, which is very easy, you have three shapes. Top part of the leg, the knee, at the bottom part of the leg. If you're doing a math equation, if you're drawing from this side or if you're drawing from a top like Okay, here's the top part of the leg. Here's your knee. Now this leg is going back behind you. And then you have your foot. What you wanna do is you want to play with the many ways that the leg can move. And you can do that with gesture sketches, which I think maybe in this course I'll, I'll do some quick gestures and show you my methods of doing it. Where you're just quickly throwing ideas onto paper as fast as you can. You want to convey movement, you want to show dynamic poses. You also want to show foreshortening, which is the last stuff that we're not going to cover in this course, but on my ongoing courses, I'm going to get into specific like foreshortening, composition, layouts, how to create a sketch with multiple characters and perspective. These are things that we're going to cover. Now remember, I've just started teaching on Udemy and other platforms, so I'm really excited about it now I've taught classes on my own with comic art mastery. I really loved this stuff. Really. What I always say to my students is just keep everything simple. Keep it simplified. That way. You're not over-complicate things in. The real art comes in after you've done all your shapes. So your first job is to lay out the foundation shapes of your sketch and then follow up with your details, which would be your style and your gradients, your values, all the shadows and all the textures you want to add that comes in later. But the first primary job of an artist is to do the Foundation, which is the under drawling the sketch to gesture. Just have an understanding of the basics of anatomy. It's relatively simple. I know it doesn't seem that way. If you're a beginner or even if your intermediate. I really want this to be something that becomes easier for you. Now, nothing is gonna be quite easy. It's going to require a lot of practice. You can imagine that I've been practicing a lot many, many years, many hours. But I didn't have someone teaching me like this. So I can imagine if I did, I would have learned a lot faster. Anyway, this is the basics of the leg. Again, I'll cover this again. So we have our teardrop muscle here, connects to the inner groin. We have a couple more tenants. We have another muscle here. We have the outer teardrop connects to the butt hip would be i then we have the kneecap goes to the ankle. Have a couple lines that indicate toes are going to be. Of course, you can get a lot more intricate with this stuff. This is the basics. I hope that this quick lesson on legs was helpful for you. If you have any questions, message me directly, and let's stay tuned for the next lesson. I'll see you soon. 13. The Arm Sketching in Real Time : All right, Here we go. With this lesson. We're going to start going over what I would just call simplified anatomy. And what I mean by that is every time you're doing a sketch, you're creating characters. And what you want to do is you want to capture what's in your mind and put it onto paper as fast as you can. You want to know how a body parts work, how your arms work, how the muscle groups work. But be honest with you, I don't like to overthink things. I don't like to study too much of the Latin terms for all of our muscle groups and names. So if you were to quiz me on what particular muscle was called, Most of the time I'd probably get it wrong or I wouldn't even know what it was. But I have studied enough to know what muscles are, where and what they do and how they work, how they contract, how they elongate, how they work with one another. And basically that's what you want to know. You just want to know, keep things in a simplified, easy to understand term for yourself because it's fine to know all the muscle groups. But ultimately, if you want to study those in your spare time, go for it. You don't need to know all of them. So with that said, let's just start with a basic arm. Now I'll do a side view arm and I'm just using a basic number two pencil. Hopefully this picks up on Kim. Remember that? We're gonna keep things very simplified right now. We have a ball, we have inside that ball we're going to create a socket. Now this is going to represent the shoulder. And underneath that socket is another there, underneath that ball is another whole. What we're going to put a bone, or in this case a cylinder tube. Then here we're going to connect that to a circle which would represent where the elbow would go. And then from there, we're going to add another cylinder. Then in that cylinder we're going to connect to another ball which would represent the wrist. And then from that wrist, we'll add, we would call the hint. From this, I would just drawn five small circles representing knuckles. And basically from the center of those circles, I would just draw a line to the center of this wrist. So there's your basic side view. And then let's do a front view. So in this case, I'm going to make almost a letter D. And underneath that we have our socket to connect our elbow two. Then from here, It's kind of tricky because when I'm drawing an arm and I'll show you later, this is just a basics. I don't draw straight under here. Typically. What I'll do is I'll draw from the side and lean it in. But for this case of teaching the basics in a quick simplified version of anatomy, It's perfectly fine. This arm is outstretched. This time I'm going to connect the hand. 1234. I'm going to put the thumb here. I'm going to put fingers here. There we go. Here we go. We have two versions of the arm. We can do a backside to and we will. But for now, let's just focus on adding muscles. Here we have a side view, we have a front petal. Let's add in some anatomy, some muscle musculature. And when I do this, I basically keep, again, everything is simplified. I'll remember this muscle here which is the bicep, right? And then the tricep. So I know a few of these come down to where the elbow would be. What I would do is make a line here extending to the outside. This could represent where the arm is going to turn in. Now, for the forearm, I'm going to keep it pretty narrow and then it's going to lump out on both sides. Kind of like a chicken bone. Then here. We have a connection to our hand. And then underneath the shoulder socket is I'm going to add some muscle. So obviously you want to study some anatomy. You want to know some of the muscle groups. You want to know how they work. And I go over all of them here in this course. But right now we're just focusing on shapes. We have our shapes. And now what I'm going to do is I'm going to take my eraser, my kneaded eraser. And for those of you that don't know, a kneaded eraser is just a look at gummy eraser that you can move in shape. And it's very clean. It doesn't leave any residue behind. And it's good for quickly making corrections or when you're doing a drawing process like this, what do I need to do is 33 phases. So I'll do the first sketch, like under drawing, and then I'll erase this phase two. In phase three is the final sketch where you have the ghost of your sketch behind. If you can see they're not. And now I'll go in for the kill. Here we go. I'll start with the shoulder. Now I'm just finding certain certain lines I want to keep. And again, this is a quick demonstration of how I would approach the arm. I think that it'll be very easy for you to pick up as well. So one of the things that you're looking for is when you're drawing the arm from the top side like this, there's a certain muscle that kind of almost like wraps around almost this direction two. And then from here, I'll just draw kind of a broken line all the way down to the wrist. There you go. Then the risk comes down and we draw the palm of our hand. The thumb would be. Then I'll continue these lines here that I have going to the wrist. You can see that I did this relatively fast. And from here, if you wanted to do some rendering, Let's say that you were, this was an actual sketch. You can render. You can put it like a light source. Let's pull back a little bit here. You can put a light source. Let's say our light source would be top corner. This is light going down. So anything on top is gonna be a thinner line. Anything underneath is going to be a thicker line. So one of the first things I would do is I would just come back and find the lines that are furthest away from the light and thicken them up. Then top-line keep them relatively thin. And then underneath taken up again. Yes, I'm doing this really fast, but this is really for your subconscious mind to grasp and pick up. You don't want to spend too much time overthinking here. You want this to become second nature so that you can just almost do this blindfolded. At some point. I've gotten these things memorize to the point where I can draw them almost put my eyes closed. I wouldn't go that far, but pretty pretty close to it. Then. Since we are maybe I can zoom in so you can see some of these details. We're going to cast some shadows. So I'll cast a shadow here, and I'll just shade this in customer shadow here. Then from here, I'll just draw some lines like this, like a crosshatching. Just crossover. In same thing here. I'll do some lines. Under, underneath this tricep area. I'll put in a solid and then just do a couple more lines. Under here, this area. I'd probably just draw a couple lines indicating value. Value is just when light and dark intersect and meet, they create what's called a value. There's multiple values and it's. A lot of it comes down to aesthetics and preference. But yeah, you can create all kinds of variables. Then here I'm just saying a little bit more shadow. Now, since the light's coming from up above here, I'm putting shadow underneath these lines. So you see this line here, then underneath some shadow. And then maybe I'll just make this whole under arm here dark. Put a little indication of joint here, I muscle joint. This is again, simplified. As you practice. You'll get better at this. You'll find your own nuances and the ways that, the way that you want to do it, every artist is a little bit different. I'm not. This is not how to draw my way. This is how to learn and understand how the muscles work in a simplified way. But ultimately what I want you to do is create and develop your own style that makes you stand out just like your handwriting. Just like anything. We want to be original and we want to be recognized for what we're leaving behind here, which is our artistic footprint, if you will, if you will. Okay. Here we go. That was a quick quick hand, quick arm. Now, let's go to this this front-facing arm with the Paul looking at us. So here we're going to do something similar. We're gonna take this bicep here. We're going to draw just a kind of like a teardrop, almost like a football shape. Then you're imagining this arm twisting this way. That tricep is not here anymore now it's going behind connecting to the shoulder. And then we're gonna have these sockets in. This is you're imagining that this is the the mean bone. Now there's a couple of different bones that connect to the wrist here, but we're keeping this simplified. So I'm going to draw the same chicken leg kind of shape. What you can notice is on the inside I I bowed this out a little bit lower than on the outside. From the wrist here I'm just going to draw a couple of lines indicating these little bones that we have under the wrist that connect ligaments in our fingers and our muscles. And then under here and now we're not focusing too much on your hand here. As much as the arm. But I think the way we're learning here is relatively, it's very simple. I think that anyone can pick this up with enough practice and don't don't beat yourself up if you don't get this right on the first try. If it takes you a little while to understand, it's okay, just keep practicing. Don't give up. Again. I'm going to use the same cast shadow. I'm going to create some shadow here. You can see the shadows above. Some shadow. On this side, we'll do some crosshatching. Remember these lines here are going up towards the light. Anything that's inside is going to be anything that's inside and away from the light is going to be thicker and darker. I'm gonna do a similar thing here with I did with the last one is I'm just going to shade this whole, entire inside of the arm inward. And then I'm going to create a shape here. I'm just making this up as I go along. Because what you're looking for is consistency in your art. I mean, you're not, this is not an anatomy class where you're not becoming a doctor here. You're an artist. You're conveying consistent way of sketching and communicating with the viewer or audience of your art. And if you do it in such a way that it's consistent, regardless of the accuracy. You don't have to do any measurements. You don't have to say, okay, this arm should be three hands, four hands long. You don't have to do these measurements. A lot of this stuff you can eyeball and you'll learn just by practice and you'll know it looks right and what looks wrong. If you're posting your art and you know, certain groups online. Take, take the constructive criticism. Take it to heart. Don't be offended, Don't be afraid of it. Learn from it. So if someone says, Hey, that leg is our proportion, that leg is too short or that arm is too big, or the head is too small. Say thank you. Study art. And then just do a couple of other variations until it feels better to you. There we go. We have two arms here. I think they look pretty decent for such a short amount of time that we put into them. I hope that this lesson helped you to understand a simplified version of the arms. What we'll do next is we'll do a simplified version of the legs. So stay tuned. Practice this as much as you can. If you have any questions, You'll feel free to message me directly. You can also follow me on van Orden art, which is on fund or an art which is on Instagram. Yeah. Just just let me know what your progress is and maybe what I can do is scan some high res shots of this so that you guys can keep it to study with. Let me know if that's something that would help you. Alright, that's it for this lesson. And I will see you soon. 14. Male Study: Back View : All right, welcome back. Here's our third edition of studying the male figure. In this one we're studying the back, back view. Again. Back view is going to look almost the same as the front view of the only exception. The only difference is we're, we're seeing from behind, but the shapes are still relatively the same. So if we were to fade this out and look for two shapes. Here we go, we have our upper torso area. Oops. That's fine. Upper torso area. Connecting to our spine. We have our pelvis area. And then that's going to connect to our leg sockets. We're going to have these shoulders. Keep that neck going. We're going to have a head connected to it. Really. Again, these shoulders are a little bit wider. This is the way you can check your checks and balances and check your sketches to make sure that they're good. From outside here, the shoulders, you can draw a V n. This gives us that width. Then if we're drawing our arms, we can pull arms inside. So imagine a cylinder here. Cylinder here. Then we have our socket here for to the elbow. Then we have our cylinder here. And then our hand. Same thing with the legs. Legs are cylinders. This is the shapes that you're thinking in. But don't get caught up and overthinking. This is all I ask. Now, you'll notice in this course, we're not going to define and go over and label every single muscle. I'm training you to look in shapes. Look at any of your favorite artists. I'm, I'm gonna tell you right now. Most of them don't know the names of all the muscles. They know how they work because they've observed and they've studied, but they don't know their names and they don't care about the names. Because what they, what they care about is producing art that you enjoy. That's their value. The value that they're giving you is inspirational art and storytelling. And creating emotion through a visual tool of whether it be pencil and paper or digital art, whatever. But they're telling stories. One sketch can tell a whole story. You don't need sequential panels to tell a story. You can tell it with one simple sketch. But overall, if you wanted to become the best at what you're doing, you need to practice and you need to learn shapes. You need to put them all together and learn how each one moves. Like this arm will have it, will have a segment on this. But imagine if he wanted to raise his arm over here, what would happen? Well, muscles would contract. This trap muscle would raise, the shoulder, would raise, this arm would raise. You're learning how to get from here to here. This is a stuff that you want to keep in mind. This is movement right? Now, same thing with the legs. You can do the same thing. You can do the same thing with the head. You can turn his head. You can bend his head is neck over here. We've just turned his head. Same thing here. You can turn it this way. You can. These are the things that you want to think about while you're drawing. And then you can add the muscles. Later. You can open his hand. It's really up to you. But your goal here, I'm assuming, is you're not taking an anatomy course. You're not trying to become a doctor. You're trying to level up your skills as an artist. And no one will tell you this. And I've watched many courses and I haven't seen anyone talking about this kind of stuff. So I'm hoping that this will help you. We're going to end there on as far as this is concerned. But now what we're going to do is I'm going to put everything together for you. We're going to just do a brief recap. Where are we at here? We're at five minutes, no problem. Okay, so let's go ahead and bring this back. And we have all three here. I'm going to give this to, you're going to have this to keep as reference. Don't, don't, don't copy me. Learn your own style. I drew all these characters from imagination. And I want you to be able to do that as well. Study, study, study. Apply what you're studying. Figure out what you're doing wrong with your own eyes. Ask for critiques. Don't take them personally. And then come back and keep, keep learning, keep learning, keep learning, keep applying. And this is how you become a better artist. There's no other way until we can get to the point where we can just download Picasso or da Vinci's consciousness into hours. We have to learn this. We might be able to tap into that somehow. I don't know That's metaphysics. But we right now have to study, observe, apply what we've learned. Reabsorbed, look at where we've gone wrong, fix it, and reapply it and keep going. It's a process. It's just like building anything. You have to have a blueprint. What I'm trying to give you here is a blueprint. I'm going to give this to you. It'll be it'll be downloadable and you'll be able to keep this for your references. And don't worry, I'm not naming all these. I'm not going to give you a quiz on each muscle. Just keep this for reference, print it out, keep it available, and use it. It's yours. I'll, I'll give you a couple more similar things like this in future segments. So this is yours. I hope it's handy and I hope that this brief overview of studying the male anatomy has helped and I will see you in the next segment. Okay, you're doing great. Keep it up. And let's go. Let's keep moving. Don't give up. 15. Male Study Side Profile : Welcome back In here we have our side facing mail and I'm going to, I'm going to give you a template, a PDF or JPEG template of all these combined. So don't worry, you'll have this for your reference. And you have these videos as well. Alright? So you could see that all we're doing is we're turning on sideways and I've simplified. I'm not drawing the all the muscles inside. There's when you're drawing the shoulders, there's several muscles here. But what I want you to pay attention to are the simplified shapes. Because that's the whole name of this course. That's the game of this course is to keep everything simplistic. And then you're going to be able to create sketches really quick. You can come back and custom tailor them to your liking. That's rendering and that style, and that's aesthetics. Here we go. A couple of things to keep in mind. We have his head here, draw their head straight down. We have the ball of foot. Now we're keeping that ball of that foot is where all of his weight's going to be. Now, the shapes that you're looking for here. You obviously have his head shape. Then this head is going to connect to his neck. Now this neck is the spine. The spine is curving. Then it curves back out this way, and then curves back this way. So when you see it all, you have a shape that looks not exactly but similar to this. Actually, let me let me correct this. I don't want to throw you off track. So let's say we have a head. You know what? Might be easier just to get rid of this. We have our head here. Balance, back of the head is balanced with the base of the foot. But then we have our curvature of the spine. So we have our neck spine and it's going to curve right around the abdomen, come back to the upper leg. Upper layer is going to connect to the kneecap, which is going to connect to the lower leg. And things work out this way when you, when you study art and you look at human structure and anatomy, a movement, you're going to see that there's always opposing curves. It's a weird phenomenon, but it's there. So if we were to bring this back, I just want you to as, as, as I mentioned all the time, avoid overthinking. The main shapes that we're going to focus on are always going to be your three major masses. So we have our upper chest, which connects to our torso, then our head. So you want to keep all these connected in balance with each other. If you put this head forward. Okay. Because it's moved by the neck. If you bring it back. It's okay. It's connected. Same with here. The chest. You can actually roll this torso down. You can even twist this torso like you have your have your pelvis facing down like this. And then our torso, we could twist it in such a way where his arms would be here. You see what I'm what I'm saying here. I'm hoping that this makes sense and I'm hoping that it clicks. This is the way I taught myself and I'm a, I'm a self-taught artists now I've read all the books. I've had mentors, I've, I've gone to, I've talked to so many people for hours and hours. I moved to San Diego, California just to be around artists like Jim Lee and I had a friend of mine. I don't want to say to me names, but I would spend a lot of time with people asking them questions. And the, the biggest thing that I got from that was thinking of how your body moves, how distance between masses creates energy, and how twisting and turning things creates dynamic structure. This is what we want to think about when we're drawing. We wanted to think about dynamic structure. We want to think about how to move and how to twist. We don't want to be stiff. The last thing you ever want your art to be stiff, you don't want to be a perfectionist. I'm telling you, and I'm going to tell you that over and over and over again for your own good as one of my students. And to put my name on this course, I wanted to teach you everything I know and what I've learned. Let's go ahead and erase this. Back to this. Always keep in mind your main masses. So you should know this by now. 123. Everything else is a moving limb. These legs can move. This part here that the back that connects to the pelvis to the upper chest can move. It can curve. It cannot move too far backwards unless you're a contortionist or yoga instructor. But in most cases you're not going to move it, but it can twist. I will, I will show you a segment on movement in this course just to give you a breakdown. And then if it's something that you're really interested in, I might create a whole course around that. I like to do live demos. So follow me on any social media you can find because I do live classes all the time. Just demos and I explained the thought process. I want to help you guys as much as possible because when I was learning, I didn't have this. I didn't have mentors available like you do. I had to go move from one state to another to pester people to get them to teach me things. And I had to teach myself a lot. Anyway. With that said, pretty relatively easy. I'm going to give you a copy of this, don't worry. I want you to be able to draw from this side, from the front-facing, from the side and from the rear. I'm going to keep this video pretty short. But the meaning things I want you to pay attention to are the balance. We have our heel, we have our head, we have our chest, we have our torso. We have a leg that's bowing out like this, connecting to a knee, then that knee connects to the foot. We have our arm socket. These are things that you want to keep in mind. Don't worry about all the details. You are learning anatomy, you're simplifying things, you're retraining your mind to think in a different way. You want to, you want to think in shapes. You don't have to specifically draw each shape, but you want to start thinking and seeing things and shapes. Think about it. Look at everything in your room right now. Wherever you are looking at, you're watching this on an iPad or your phone or a TV. Look around your room, finance shape. You can see everything is in shapes. Everything is in three-dimensional shapes. This is the way you want to train your mind to see things. If you were to draw this guy in a three-dimensional shape, well, you might go something like this. I'm drawing it from a different angle just to kinda show you. But that's a cube, that's a cube. Then we have a cylinder. I'm just drawing legs out here. Arm, arm, neck, head. Obviously we'd wind this up. But these, these are the way, this is the way you want to train yourself to think that you can come back and you can check yourself, you can do your checks and balances and make sure that your shapes are working out. When we get into our segment on dynamic poses and sketches, I'm going to go over this again. I'm going to use a wolverine demonstration where I show you the cylinders and we dive into it a little bit deeper. But for now, I don't want you to be overwhelmed. Take this information, grasp it, let it sink in. And I'm going to see you on the next segment. See you there. 16. Male Study: Front View : All right, Welcome. In this segment we are going to study the male figure and we're going to break it down into sections, front-facing, side, and rear. As you guys have probably seen before. You've heard and if you read any books on how to draw comics or any of that, you've seen that the typical protocol is to draw your character 8.58 heads tall. Some rules or 7.5 depends on the character could be a shorter character, could be 6.5. But in all honesty, this is a good way to learn how to draw a character. But when you're drawing actual comics, you're not going to be measuring any of this. It's just not suitable. It's not, it's not something that's going to help you. It's, it's actually going to make you overthink. What I'm trying to convey to you is how to draw more intuitively. What I mean by that is I want you to get to the point where you feel comfortable and confident that your proportions are where they should be and that you are getting to a point where you're sure that what you're drawing is, suffice, it's, you're keeping it up, you're consistent in the way that you draw and all this stuff is becoming second nature to you. Now, if I were to see here and measure these measurements all the time, it would take me forever just to get one sketch. But for the sake of learning, I think it's great. What we'll do here is we'll break it down real quick. So I want you to start thinking like an artist. When you get too caught up in the anatomy and the Latin terms and things like that. You're taken a lot away from yourself. I see a lot of critics on certain groups where you post your art. And if you don't get the muscle, this could be a tricep or if you don't get these muscles exactly right or you don't need them the right way. People call you out for it. But you know what, don't worry about those people. Your job is to produce cool art. You want your muscles and things to be believable. You're drawing an exaggerated form, it's comic book. So don't be a stickler and don't be too hard on yourself. So a few things to remember here are, Let's go ahead and fade this guy out a little bit. As we're going to cover this repeatedly. The things that I always look at are the head, the upper chest, the pelvis. Then I look for shoulder replacement. From there. I'll place my sockets for my legs now this is all done mentally. I don't actually draw these circles. I do draw this shape here, this this upper chest shape because it's a really good form to know. The more you draw this torso, the more you'll be able to create angles and same with the pelvis like these, these main masses that we covered. These are what you need to know. And then all this other stuff kind of flows into it. Now from these, I'm gonna go ahead and feed it a little bit more. The main shapes, as you've probably learned by looking at books are cylinders. You draw a cylinder like this. You draw a sphere, draw another cylinder like this. You draw a socket. Then you have your leg. Same thing with the arm. You draw a cylinder. Call another cylinder socket for wrist. And then you have a hint, this is an straight-up for your neck. That's your basics. But if you look at comic book pros and how they approach things, they learn. The anatomy, the bone structure, the movement, how the muscles contract, and how they elongate and how they flex and extend and all that good stuff. But then they keep that in mind. But really when you're drawing, we won't get to the point where you can just quickly create a sketch really, really fast. You want to keep those pencil moving and you want to get your, your information on paper and then you'll come back and start constructing things. But if you're doing all the measurements up ahead of time. I'm telling you it's going to make your art looks stiff. If you've seen these artists out here that are sticklers for these proportions and drawing the under structure first with all the spheres and cylinders and whatever trapezoids, whatever shape you can imagine. When you're drawing those shapes. You're drawing them first and try and get those shapes perfect. I think it's going to hinder your ability. What I tell my students is think in shapes. You don't have to necessarily draw them, but thinking them, then the way that you can check yourself is you can come back and you can find those shapes. So this type of a sketch here, I have a kind of a heroic character with a stance, wide shoulders, feet, kind of spread, shoulder width apart. Drop the shoulders down. I can come back and do my checks and balances by saying, Okay, let's get a red pen out here. I can say, okay, well, here's a cylinder shape, Here's a ball-shaped, here's another cylinder shape. Same thing here. Cylinder. I've already drawn them automatically. And then we have our sphere for their shoulder or sphere for the shoulder. We have this shape here for the upper chest, we have this shape here for the pelvis. We have our head shape. We got all these shapes. Here's another cylinder. We've gotten these shapes down, but we're thinking in shapes. It might seem difficult at first because you've been taught in such a different way. I'm just asking you to keep an open mind and to try this out. Start sculpting, start, started drawing while thinking in shapes, but not necessarily putting the shapes down first. Let's go ahead and I'll erase this real quick and you'll have access to this video. But here we go. So one last time. When you're drawing, if I were to go through and say, okay, let's remove this, this line here. And let's hi, this is hi, this all together. If I were to start fresh right now and start drawing a character, I would get so lost if I were to say, okay, here's a head, his feet, let me get a ruler out. His head's about this big. And let me get this ruler out and make sure that his feet end up in Erase spot. It's got to be exactly 8.5 heads tall or I'm I'm, I'm wrong and I got rip up my paper and third is away. If you have that kind of mentality, Well, good luck. You're not going to get very far. What I recommend is short, learn the rules. Use the rules to check yourself and do checks and balances, but come back and after you've learned the rules, you can break them. What I mean by break them is not segue from them. Not don't stray from the rules, but use the rules to your advantage. Use the rules to make your art look better. So let's break down the front. We could see and I'm going to go back to my green here. When you're drawing a male character. There's a few things that I want you to pay attention to. These are the things that are the forefront of my mind when I'm drawing characters. I'm paying attention to this area here, the shoulders. I'm making the shoulders wide and I'm making this whole area one piece. That's almost like laying down on top of this this chest. So I'm almost when I'm drawing, I make all this connected this shoulder connected to this pec muscle or chest muscle. And then going up to his traps. Then underneath this I will start drawing is arms and his lower arms and in his hands, whatever hand position I want. But really, let me choose another color here, this, this area here. If you look at my art, you'll see that to me. This is one big layer of muscular mass that you're placing over your bone structure. At least mentally. It's like taking a skeleton and just placing this this musculature over him. Then from there you can start drawing, working in your your arms and stuff like that. But yeah, I like to keep this almost one piece. Just keep that in mind as well. Now, a couple of other things to think about when you're drawing a male, because I'm going to be doing a whole course on drawing females to a couple of things about males are at least a masculine male. This is too close to the color of the lines, so let's go ahead and go back to green. When you're drawing the male. A couple of things that you want to pay attention to are these shapes. You want this this shoulder to the outwards. You want his arms to flare out, bow outwards to the mid thigh. All honesty, when I'm drawing a superhero and we'll get to a segment where we're focusing on superhero anatomy. I will make my arms and my shoulder is very wide. I will give him a narrow waist. That just makes him have that swimmer's body that fuzzy. It's more heroic physique. Then in terms of legs, I do eyeball it. I don't measure, but I do have the habit of keeping my feet shoulder width apart. You'll see you can almost draw a straight line down from there. Same with this line straight down the middle of the head. You're creating a balance. So if you were doing some sort of geometry, you can cross-reference. You can make an x here, go from that corner to this corner. And then your x should cross somewhere around the crotch area. Shoulder to shoulder. Yeah. You can you can check all of your math later. But I think there's enough videos and enough books out there to teach you anatomy. Unless you are trying to become a doctor. You don't need to know every single Latin term for every single muscle. Now, if that's something that you want to do in extra curricular activities and things like that, go for it. But when it comes to application and drawling, don't overwhelm yourself and don't overthink because that's only going to hinder your progress. Keep keep my words in your head when you're drawing, I really want you to focus on the actual sketching, the actual drawing because anything else is going to slow you down. And I know that your goal is to become an artist. You're trying to become, or you might be an artist already. You're trying to become a better artist. You're trying to improve and advance. The only way to do that is to simplify things. Let's, speaking of simplification, let's break down a few simple rules. Couple muscles here. Our legs. You see that there's three main muscles here. Oops, I don't want to erase, but you see that there's 33 main muscles. Well, think of it as one form, one giant teardrop. Okay. When you're simplifying, think of it as one giant teardrop. Whoops. Then you can connect that teardrop here and you can connect it here. And then later, when you're doing your details, you can come back and you can place these muscles here. And you can start fine-tuning it. Same thing here. You're thinking of a shoulder, which a shoulder has about three different muscles. But for the sake of simplifying, you're gonna think of it as one sphere, like a ball and socket. Imagine that this is a spherical shape for a shoulder, okay? Then we have our arm is going to connect. So this is kind of a view looking at directly from this side. And if you wanted to look at it from the side like we're looking at here. Then a couple of things to keep in mind are your arm, your bicep going to start inside your shoulder and go around. You've seen that whole chain link, chain link kind of drawing out there. Well, that applies to your muscles. And then you're connecting to your forearm and then your your hand. Now I know this is pretty crude them, I'm trying to imprint on your subconscious mind how these muscles are gonna work. We have our mean sphere here. And then underneath that, we have our bicep. See, then this bicep on the outside of it, we're gonna have our elbow socket. From that elbow socket. Well, I could do is shape it like this. So really if he were to get rid of this character, you would have a shape similar like this. Here. You can see how these arms, and that's what, this is, What kind of identifies a male character is. The arms are bowed out, whereas a female, and I don't want you to get too caught up on this, but a female, her arms would be inward and then outward. She would follow. If she had a waste here, her arms would flow with that waste. Whereas a male, his arms oppose the waste. You're bowing out. You're keeping distance from the waist to the inside of the arm. So keep that in mind when you're drawing because this is, this, this is part of the thinking process. This is part of your outcome. And you want to keep these, you won't keep these characters very strong in heroic when you're drawing superheroes. Now if you're drawing your everyday average Joe, you can soften them up some. But underneath it all he's still going to have musculature. Everybody has muscles, everyone has, everyone who's able to move his muscles. Whether they're big or small, is up to how much they work those muscles out. Here's the front, front-facing male. In the next segment, we're going to jump into the side facing male. Okay, so we'll cover that here in a second. But yeah, I just wanted to show you a few things that I'm thinking about. One last pointer is you want to keep balance and you're keeping the weight on the heels. Imagine that. Here's a little horizon line with vanishing point. What you want to keep these hills planted on the ground. This is where all of his weight's going to be. He's not standing on his toes. He's standing on his heels. Now, females tend to stand on their toes. A lot of times when they're, they're wearing high heels or whatnot. So another thing to keep in mind that's going to wrap up the front-facing overview. And don't worry, we're going to dive into this more and more. But yeah, I think you're getting it and I want you to think in a different way than you're used to. See you in the next segment. You're doing great. And if you have any questions, send them over to me. 17. Drawing a Hulking Character Pt: All right. Welcome back. Well, a quick recap. So far, you should have learned how to simplify your anatomy when it comes to drawing arms, legs, chest, torso, heads from different angles, and even some faces. So if you've gotten this far, what we're going to do now is we're going to just jump a little bit into creating some gesture drawings in some proportions. So what I mean by that is I want to show you different body types. Um, when we're drawing superheroes, your body language that you're sketching, the gestures, they will convey a lot of information to whoever is viewing your art. So you want, you know, your superhero type figures, you want them to be standing erect, very stoic, powerful, strong, maybe wide chest, narrow waist, maybe the legs will be outstretched or spread out, you know, beyond shoulder width. And, you know, you just want them to have that impact of power and strength. Whereas a villain might stand a little bit hunched. They could also stand, you know, they could also be, you know, erect and they could be in a very powerful opposing gesture, which I'll go over a few of those as well, kind of, you know, in your face, maybe, you know, using a little bit perspective. You can also show a lot about a character by their proportions. So as we had mentioned earlier in another lesson, I think we were talking about, you know, characters like the Hulk or even Venom or Bain who's a villain in, you know, Batman's villain. A lot of those guys are huge, but, you know, you want to over exaggerate certain elements, but you want to keep proportions kind of believable in a comic book kind of way. A lot of times when you draw a huge character, like the Hulk or you know, juggernaut or someone, their head might appear a lot smaller. And then when you're drawing someone really lean or someone, you know, like Spider Man, or if you're drawing someone like Wolverine who's kind of a short and stout type character, you know, you want to get all these body languages down and these proportions down because you really just don't want all your characters looking identical. That would be boring for you, and it will be just too predictable for your audience. You want certain character elements to kind of convey who that is. A lot of ways, what you can do is what I learned when I was drawing and studying books and other artists is, you know, using silhouettes. If you can a silhouette is basically when you completely black out a drawing of a let's say you have a pose of the Hulk and a pose of Spider Man standing next to the Hulk. Well, you might be able to tell who they both are just by, you know, darkening or, you know, completely blacking out the whole sketch. Anyway, let's jump in and I'll show you what I mean. Alright. So like a hulking character. Well, we can start with a shape for the head. And I'll just draw at I'll draw this character facing us. You know what? I'm not gonna start with the head. Because a hulking character's body is the upper body is so huge. A lot of times it's fun just to start with that torso area. And what I'm doing is drawing a pretty decent sized oval, almost like an egg shape. And underneath that, I'm going to draw kind of a rib cage indication. And then underneath that, I'm going to start working on the pelvis and what I'm gonna do for these legs. Now, I've already told you that we're drawing, like, a hulking character. So like a hulk big, you know, giant character, could be Thanos, could be, you know, think of any character that's gigantic. Most most comic books of all companies, and, you know, they have these giant characters. So what I'm doing is remember Pit Pitt was really cool from image comics. And it was kind of took elements from Lobo and Hulk, and I forget who else and just kind of compiled them into, like, massive Hulk character. Alright, so I've gotten these legs now you can see that these legs are pretty short compared to at least they look short compared to a different character like a Superman or, you know, Captain America type character, which will do that type of, you know, that body type as well. And then for the lower leg, what I'm going to do is I'm just going to draw kind of a ball here. And then underneath that ball, I'm going to connect kind of a cone shape down. And then a shape for the feet. Now, these don't have to be perfect. They're just what I like to tell myself a lot when I'm drawing is the first the first part of my art is the information that I'm putting down. So it's always subject to change. We're just trying to capture the space that we're trying to fill. So so now we have the hulking body. We have the abdominal area, which is the torso. We have the pelvis and the legs, the upper legs, the knee joints, and then the lower legs, and then the feet. Now for the arms, I'm just going to put couple circles here indicating big shoulders. And then from that, I'm going to just put a tube down just like we were drawing our arms the other day. Just kind of a tube cylinder shape. And then from that, I'll draw in a circle indicating a joint of some type. And in this case, it would be the elbow. And then from there, I'm going to draw another cylinder shape. Coming down. Now, you can change these arms. You can put the arms up, you know, across way up. You know, we'll do some arm movements later too and just kind of show you some of the variables that you can do. Now, underneath here, you see how these arms are kind of ending at the wrist here, which is kind of a little bit lower then I would probably draw for a normal hero and I'm not saying that Hulk is abnormal, but his body type is just so hulking and so big and bulky that his arms tend to look lower almost like a knuckle dragger where his hands, I'm going to just put some big circles here indicating that in this area, I want to draw his hands. Then instead of putting his head up here, what I'm going to do is I'm going to drop it down here. Now, one thing you can see is that this head is pretty small. In comparison to the rest of his body. This is something that you want to get used to when you're drawing characters. You want to embellish and exaggerate certain elements to make the features that you want to convey, you want them to pop out more. So in this case, smaller head. Now, if you put too small of a head on Captain America, it's going to look really awkward or if you put too large of a head. Same thing with this character. If we put too large of a head, he's not going to look as opposing. He's just going to look like a short dude. 18. Character Proportions Study Guide: All right, Welcome back. So let's do a quick character study. Now, this is a popular character. You probably know who he is. And generally, not, not according to the Hollywood movies, but in the comics version. He's very style, he's very short, but very tough. And he's got a lot of muscle and he's got a different variation of a body type. So let's go ahead and let's study this for a moment and then we will put it into practice. So if we were to zoom in, we can see, Let's go ahead and lower this opacity here. You should be able to see this. A couple of things to keep in mind. We have let me increase the size of this. We have head. And then draw a line straight down. There's our balance right now to keep things in balance. So we have our shoulders which fall here and here. And we can keep them intersected here. You still have balance. And then another way to look at balance is we have our heel. Are other hills is going to fall back. So we can see that if we're doing the geometry in our minds, we can see that Let's imagine that behind this character, there's a vanishing point. And then imagine the vanishing point is here. So imagine we're drawing all these lines out here, creating perspective. Once we get these lines in, I didn't do this prior to drawing. I really just eyeballed it. But let's go ahead and create a dynamic where we can see that this character is standing on a two-dimensional surface, but we wanted to look three-dimensional. We have a leg here. Actually. The best way to do this. Let's go ahead and lower this opacity as well. We'll come in with a blue, blue line. So we have our three masses. So we have our, we have our head here. We have our upper chest and torso here. And we have our pelvis here. Now these are the 123123 major masses of movement. There's always gonna be separation between the three. So you see the separation here and a separation here. You want to keep in mind when you're drawing. You want to keep those three major masses imbalance. You want to keep some space between them. Unless you're doing perspective where they are, the characters coming at you and you can't really tell what the space and distances, but you should be able to draw it in such a way using foreshortening, which if you're not aware of what foreshortening is, we will touch on it. But what you want to do is you want to keep everything in balance. So if we were to draw a leg coming here and then another leg coming here. Well, he's not going to look very balanced. And if we drew an arm here, then another arm here, he's gonna look kind of ALIP proportion. Same thing if we were to move the head over here. You want to keep these things in mind and I know that I'm really exaggerating here, but it's really true. You want to, you want to keep this stuff in mind when you're sketching. And so when I was sketching this, this one, I really wanted to keep the proportions pretty accurate to the comic book by also wanted him to look like he has a lot of mass, is very strong and he's imbalance. I want him to look very balanced so you can draw a head shape, draw a line going down. Then here's how I would approach. I'd come here this chest in where his ribcage is gonna be. And then here I would draw just a quick shape of his pelvis. Then I would imagine his legs are coming down here. And this one I would pull back a little. And so I wanted to give them that little bit of foreshortening until make it look like his left leg is going backwards into the into the distance. And then this front leg is coming a little bit more close, closer to the camera. Then we have these shoulders here and this arm. I want it to be closer to the camera and going across his chest. And then this arm here was further away from the camera, but you're still seeing the whole arm. So you're not going to say huge difference in size. Then of course we know he's got a thick neck that connects these trapped muscles here are going to connect to his shoulders. So there you have it. You have the general shapes right here. When you're drawing, what you're trying to do first and foremost is captured the information that you need in order to, you know, draw whatever character you're going after and you want it. You want to be able to get to the point where whatever character you're drawing, let's say it's someone that's well-known. Now if you're creating your own character and no one's ever seen that character before, it's gonna be very hard to identify. But if it's someone that's very well established and everyone knows, you want to get to the point where if you were to shade all this in and make it a silhouette, you'd be able to tell who it is just by his shape. Even if you put the clause this clause away, you would still be able to tell that it was who it was. So let's go ahead and put this into practice. Let's say that I take this over here. And I'm just going to go ahead and now I'm not going to spend an hour doing this, but I do want to show you how to break down a character rapidly, fast and accurately. Something that's going to help you, because the name of the game is speed. You have to get really fast at this. If you become a perfectionist, it's only going to slow you down. Let's say that I wanted to draw Wolverine. I'm gonna go ahead and increase the size here. I have his head. I'm not even really looking at this reference to my left. I'm just imagining I'm starting all over. I'm just going based on the principles of what I know on how they're draw. So if I were approaching this, this is how I would go. I'm just breaking down shapes at this point. And then I'll draw on his front leg that's coming closer to our camera. Then I'd pull this leg back. The way that, you know, it's pulled back is because it's just a little more shadow here. And it's slightly smaller than this one that's closer to us, his calf muscle. Now we have our basic shapes and let's go ahead and start drawing. So then I would go ahead and reduce this opacity a little bit more. It will come in with a more via LED color. It looks good. Then we can come in and I can start working on his face. Oops. We need another layer. Let me create another layer. Has a limit because this sketch is so big. No worries. Let's go ahead and we'll do is we'll merge this down. We'll create one more. Here we go. Got to think outside of the box once in awhile. Now we have I'm not even looking at the actual sketch, just going based on how I would approach. I drew it out with pencil traditionally, which is my preferred way. But when it comes to teaching, I like to use digital art. I like to use my iPad and it's really quick and I can do things like I just did. I can lower the opacity really fast. I can get my point across. But on all, in all honesty, I really do enjoy drawing traditionally more just because There's just something to establish if others are something that's really fun to do. To me. It has a lot more value creatively. That's just my personal preference. Now I do love digital art and I think there's some amazing digital artists out there. So definitely don't want to discourage you from going in whatever direction you like. It's just preference really. You can see I'm just still finding shapes. And then as I do this, I'll put like a belt here. Even if the character doesn't have a belt, I like to put one on it first, just as a guideline for me so I can get proportions right. And I'll put this leg here. Now, I'm imagining that there's a socket here, so I'm dropping it down to the inside knee and ankle coming up here. Just drawing in his musculature. Same thing. So you can see that this process, it just becomes second nature in a way, my glove. And then of course, as you're drawing when you're using pencil or whatever style you're using, you can come in and slow down and really start working in some details. But I think you guys get the point here. And I didn't want to spend too much time derailing from the actual lesson. So always find videos like this on YouTube if you want to watch the whole drawing process, but that could take a long time. And trust me, I've done it. I've watched some of my favorite artists still nostalgic to this day. I'll watch them for hours and hours just to learn as much as I can. But I think for what you're doing, learning these states, these shapes and these styles and methods is the best thing that you can possibly do right now. Because what you're trying to do is program this into your mind so that you can, you know, create a sketch a lot faster without overthinking because I think that's where a lot of people get caught up as they just start overthinking. And when you start doing that, you start second guessing yourself. And I always say keep them moving, the pencil moving at all times, just keep it going fast. And then when you start really diving in and working on detail, then at that point you can slow down and take your time. But when you're trying to capture the essence of your sketch, you know, keep those pencils moving. This is the basic shapes just happened here. And I can go in here and decide, you know, how I wanted to twist his hand if I wanted to, keep it the same way. I mean, you can always change things to your own liking. Because when it comes down to it, a lot of art and rendering is just aesthetics and what's pleasing to the eye. And that will come into play with your own style. When you find your style or your style finds you live, what will happen is just consistency, repetition. You'll draw things in a certain way and you'll repeat them over and over and they'll just become part of your artistic footprint, if you will. And so people will start picking up on it and recognizing it subconsciously. If you have any favorite artists, she probably know that you can identify who drew it just by seeing a sketch. I know that I can see if some of my favorite artists, and I can know who it was without even without knowing, without reading their signature or looking at the credits. And everyone can get to that point. Okay. There we go. I think that this kind of helps you to understand character breakdown and proportions and things like that. If you have any questions, cinema over to me, I'm here to help. And that's it for this lesson. I want to keep them a little short and sweet, but really keep practicing, keep doing this over and over and over until it clicks and it will click. Okay, I'll see you in the next one. 19. Supehero Anatomy: Putting It All Together : Welcome back In. Here's the I would say this is the moment you've all been waiting for. This is where we put everything that we've learned up until now together and we actually get to apply it. The name of this course is superhero anatomy, how to draw comics. Comic style. Basically, let's just jump right into this and let me go over a few bullet points with you and kind of just pinpoint what we're trying to train our eyes to notice. You know, superheroes come in all shapes and sizes. I mean, we live in an age where everyone can be a superhero. But this is the kind of template that everything started from. From this. Once you learn these rules, you're welcome to change and create and do whatever you want with them. But for now, let's just go over the basics. We have this bunch of shapes and I broke it down into shapes because what's going to happen is, well, we're going to create a form from these shapes. We're going to have fleshed them out. We're going to create, we're going to add some anatomy, some musculature. We were going to put some details on this character just to make it look a little bit more heroic. And you're welcome to create any one you want out of this. I'll include all of this in a template form, PDF, so that you can feel free to use your own creativity, use your own imagination. But let's just dive in, okay, So I'm going to just give you a straight line going up and down, which is our balanced point. Then our heels are touching the ground right around here. We want the heels, since he's, the character is standing straight forward looking at us. We want the heels kind of even. We want to we want the body, the shapes to be fairly symmetrical. We want them to be balanced. We want the legs to be about shoulder width apart. You can almost tell that there's more weight on this foot then on this one. And the reason we can see that is because the his left leg facing us is kind of like working as a kickstand. He's got to spread out a little bit further. So it's balanced, you know, is kind of like a stilts, just kinda holding them up, but everything is kind of imbalanced and we have his shoulders are pretty widespread. So when you think of it, we tried to create this balance. Everything is pointing down to the center below his head. Because typically we will keep everything balanced below our head. When we're moving our head is usually imbalance. It's just a natural occurrence that happens when we're when we're moving, when we're standing with asset. Let's just go over some of these basic shapes. We have, as you can see, spheres, cylinders. Another cylinder. We have kind of a hexagon here. And then we have our, what we've gone over before is our upper torso. We have our lower pelvis. We know that these connect to the legs and then there's these bones here. They go down to the knee, then this lower shin goes down to the ankle. And then we have our feet. From here. We're going to be connecting the pelvis or waste, the upper chest. And everything's going to work together. So what we can do next is open up this one. And this is kind of what it would look like if we were creating a little bit more form. Now we've gotten, you can actually recognize that this is more of a I don't know how to explain. I would say just a powerful specimen of a man. Let's go with that. And he's got his strong wide shoulders, he's got his **** arms. I don't know what happened to him just now. There we go. Guys arms bowed out. He's got his strong legs and everything. And we'll see that even more on the next one here. I'm diving in, going deeper now I'm trying to identify our muscles. So as you can see, we've put in the biceps here. I'm not sure why this is not drawing. Now I know why. We put in some biceps here. Tricep connected to the shoulders. All this stuff that you already know. But we're just trying to do is draw it in a way that. Is fast for us. And something that we can render and create quickly so that we can draw more superheros and in a faster rate with a quick understanding. So we're not overthinking. One of the things that I want to go over with this is that just jumped into my mind is what we're thinking of these arms. We've gone over this in the drop arm tutorial. But just kinda recap on this. Let's, let's imagine that this is his bicep and we're just creating and breaking down these muscles here. Then this shoulder is going to break into three different muscles. Then he's got this muscle down the center here. Connects, overlays this arm. And then we can almost draw a line straight down from that point to where his risk connects to his hand. And then draw a line upward. And then around, we can wrap this muscle around the back of the theorem. Then inward. This muscle here. You can usually be shaded in. It's just, it's, it's forearm, it's underneath. We're not seeing too much of it from this point of view. From here we can add in our hands. And if they were just doing a fist, it would look something similar to this. Now from worthy shoulder is up top here. What I like to do is create an arrow, almost like this. So you have an arrow going each way. Then it connects to the collarbone. Then you can imagine that underneath here is his collarbone. You don't have to draw all this stuff. You can just indicate it. And then behind this collarbone, connecting to the shoulder and the collarbone, we have this trap muscle that connects behind his neck. You've seen those big bodybuilders. Some of them have giant hulking traps. I'm not a big fan of those, but if you're drawing a big, crazy-looking monstrous character, then it's perfectly fine. I like to keep things semi believable. I know we're talking comics here, but something that doesn't distract the eye too much to make this go. Then going back down to the chest here, kind of loops under and remember it's not just one line and decrease here. I like to create two lines, at least in my mind, and then that gives us some space. So if we're creating some striations, we can make it look like there's more depth like this is actually a padding built on top of his skeletal structure. Then we can also add depth by creating thickness here. And then you can shade these lines in. Then below this, we add kind of indication of ribcage. And over here where the ribcage continuous. So we have this line. I know we've gone all over this before, but I'm a big believer in repetition. We have these ribs going outward and then down below is where his abs would be. So again, when you're doing your actual sketch, you don't have to draw every single ablate this. In fact, I prefer that you didn't. I'd rather you have just slight indications of ABS there. Unless he was in a flexing position. If he was straining or fighting or you're struggling in some way, then you can make those abs pop out a little bit more. So then from the sides here, we can just do kind of an imaginary line, which we're making it real but connecting straight up. And then from that midpoint stops and we can just kind of loop these lap, lap muscles behind the arm. Now one of the things I like to do, just as an indicator, let me from the top of the shoulder right around here. I like to imagine that there's a line going through. We can see that there's lots are spreading out like that. You, so that's that's kind of how I've trained myself to do it. And when you get used to this kind of a method, it's really easy to find so you're not doing too much guesswork. Then we go down. We have our legs. Now, we can remember that if we were to draw this line straight down here, put his groin area. Now if we were making these underwear or whatnot all the way up to his hips, we would know that this leg would come out here. Would end up over here. The bulk of the muscle. Now inside that leg we can. Now create more definition of the three major muscles on that leg. Then we have the center one here. We have this teardrop here and it outside teardrop. And it all kind of layers over the knee. And then we drop down to this calf muscle here. Then this shin that goes underneath the knee, bows out, connects to the inside of his ankle. Then we know that it's going to overlay. And then his foot is going to be a cheese wedge like this. Inside. Now, as you're drawing and you're rendering and shaping, you're gonna create more foot like structure. But these are the very basics to keep in your mind as you're drawing so you don't over-complicate things. There you have it. So a lot of people have issues with this area right here connecting the upper body with the lower body. So I've just shown you a really easy method. You just take these little points here and you just draw a teardrop to the top of his leg and it gives us our shape. You can come back into your rendering afterwards. Then what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna pop in the next one here. It's basically what we've just done. We have a lot of our musculature drawn in. We have a pretty defined superhero physique. This could be any one. This could be a captain America type, this could be a superman type or even a Batman type. And you're welcome to change and alter these. You can make them thinner, you can make them bulkier or taller or shorter. But these are your parameters. These are, this is the basic structure. Then what we can do here is pop in number five, which is kind of a rendered piece that I did here. Just to kinda show you. Now this is no one specifically I just drew from my imagination, but it gives you an idea of how this stuff comes together. You can, you can really run wild with this stuff, use your imagination. But like I said, I'll include this as a PDF for you that you can print out and you can use as reference. And I think what's going to happen is, I know I repeat this often. All of this stuff is going to become second nature to you. It's going to become a lot more fluid and you're gonna have this stronger understanding. So I'm looking forward to that happening. I can't wait to see your results, but what we can stop here, well quickly do for you is let's go ahead and take this layer here. Laying them up. Just imagine that you are creating another hero. Let's say, let's go to like a pencil colored here and I'll change to my pencil. Let's say we wanted to make this guy. You can do something like this. Put in a cape, give them some, give them a belt. Doing this really quickly here, but for the sake of helping you, just so you can see what you can do with this stuff. Given as a little. We've created a superhero. You could also do something like say, um, who else we can do. I'm doing this really quick. Forgive my terrible bat here. But we have a template. Templates, create opportunities for practice. And you want to be creative. You want to, you want to practice as often as you possibly can, until this stuff is drilled in your head and it becomes very easy to a point where you can explain it to others and you can show others how you did it. Then you can just put in, I think you get the point. And you can run wild with this. Like I said, just have fun with it. This is how I learned, this is how I taught myself. And I've studied so many great artists in my life. And I've had the luxury of being, being able to sit down with a lot of them and just kind of pick their brains. And I've really got to put all this stuff into practice. And it's an honor for me to share this information with you. But yeah, I actually encourage you to do what I'm doing. Just take something like this, a template, even create your own template. If you're using pencil and paper, you can do the same. You can get yourself a tracing table. If you don't already have one. You can just create your own template with maybe a blue line are some red pencil and then draw over it with a regular graphite. There's just so many ways, just be creative and have fun. That's the bottom line. So I hope this really, I really hope that this helps you. I will see you in the next one. I think that's about all I will cover on this one here. I think it's enough for you. Let's wrap this up here. You're doing great. Keep going. Osteon and extra. 20. Dynamic Poses Pt: All right, welcome back. And here we are. We're in the second part of the dynamic sketch of SPD, which is we're using a reference as a guide. We don't have to copy it. Exactly. What I wanted to do in this one here is I want to lower the opacity. And we can even, I'll keep this for now just as a guide. And same with this one here. Let's see, I can get rid of this one. Makes it look a little less muddy. Then what I'm going to do is I'm also gonna get rid of this reference. What I want to do is draw this study in a style that's more my style. You can do the same. So what we do is we just dive in and i'll, I'll do my best to talk and sketch at the same time. Now generally, when I'm sketching, I'm pretty focused and to get to the zone. So it's a little bit different when I'm instructing, but here we go. So I'll start with a head first. This will be a loose sketch. I'm not trying to do anything professional or finished at this point. I want to keep it fast. So I'll probably at this point start finding my shapes again. I know that his shoulder is gonna be here. I'll, I'll start working and things really, really loosely. Kind of sculpting and molding as I go along and I know that I can come back and I can tighten this up. So I just want to make sure that for me and in my style, I placed all the muscles and anatomy, how I liked them and where I like them. So I'm just kind of really just going over this stuff. The information that we already have, not making any major changes. Here underneath. I think I would make this shadowed. So you're not going to see too much because the character is bending towards us and I'm going to put a light source probably right around here. Looking above and behind the character. Then what I would do is just kind of loosely find my, my limbs. Keep it loose and have fun. Do my own thing. Might even move this leg over here a little bit. It does not have to look exactly like that photo reference. In fact, if you follow my art, you'll see that 95 or higher percentage of my sketches are all done from imagination with known characters. Of course, you know, these are my favorite types of characters to draw. But I like to draw without using too much reference unless it's kind of if it's costume design or something like that, then of course, I'll use a reference to get it correct. Or if I'm doing commissioned for someone and they have some specific details, then yeah, I would I would totally use a reference. When I'm drawing the hand. I think of a shape like this connecting and then a kind of like an ellipse shape here. And then, let's see. Come back here. I draw some small little indications of his middle two fingers and then smaller pinky. And I know that. I don't have to worry about details because this is all going to be erased, especially if I'm drawing traditionally, this would all be erased. Redrawn, tighter and cleaner. That's, that's kind of the thought process that you want to have. A process that you want to have is you want to just keep in mind things like, don't be a perfectionist. Don't try to get everything perfect on the first go. If you can get it close to perfect, hey, that's great, Good on you. If not, don't worry. Because you're going to have time to come back and clean up. And I think the less time you spend on trying to perfect everything, the faster your art is going to come along ultimately. Then I'm going to decide what kind of eyes do I want? Do I want the big time McFarland style eyes? Or do I want the steep decode eyes? Or do I want to create my own? They can squint. Nothing else to be perfect here. I'm just testing. I got this or I can come back in and I can erase and draw them bigger. I think that's kind of cool, the bigger ones on this one. Then at this point I can kind of loosely put in his spider emblem and you can make this up to you. You can make a really giant spider or really small one up to you. You can figure out what they do with these fingers here. And then you can even play around and say, Oh, here's some webbing coming out up to you. This is creativity and you're using your imagination. And I always remind myself, why did I start drawing in the first place? It's because it was fun. I was inspired as a kid and I loved it. It might have been a cartoon, it might have been a certain comic book he picked up, might have been a video game, might've been a magazine. You may have been a friend that you saw drawing in school something along the lines of your lifetime inspired you and it was something that you loved and you want to keep that mindset. So now we have this, what I'm going to do at this point, lower the opacity, maybe get rid of these. And now I have a cleaner sketch that can work with. I'll go to like a pencil style here. Lower this opacity even more. Here we go. So now I can just kind of sketch a little cleaner, which you're really, really love to draw digitally. That's great idea. I personally don't do much finished work. Digitally. It always feels like I'm drawing on glass. Some people are just amazing at it. For me, it's kind of hit or miss. I really love the feel of the pencil hitting the paper. I tend to do most of my work traditionally. Let's see. Even this sketch, this part of the sketch process. I can come back and redraw. I can lower the opacity of this if it's not exactly to my likeness, the way I like it, I can come back and redraw it and fine tune it because that's what art is, is a constant adjusting of what you've put onto paper until you get, you get it or just about right? It doesn't have to be perfectly right. But just about right. You don't want to spend too much time on one sketch. And let's, It's a passion project. But generally if you're drawing comics and stuff like that, just try and get to a point where you're drawing just a little bit faster than your last sketch. And just keep that in mind. I'm thinking of costume details. I know that he's got this delta goes here. I will draw it. And just Hence of muscle, I don't have to draw every single muscle. Then this underneath it's gonna be pretty dark because it's shadowed in and the light sources coming from above. So I'm not going to worry about details too much. Then same here. I'll just draw kind of segments and bits and pieces of leg muscle. Then we have this knee cap here. I would probably jump down to this ankle and start working that. And it's like I said, I'm not going to do the cleanup version of this, but at least you can kind of see the thought process of how I would approach this and check and see how you're approaching it and see if it if it's I don't know how you drew before you took this course. If you were always the type, it would lay things out and get your information out or if you just kinda dove right into the sketches. When I was younger and I first started sketching and drawing. I would I would just try to draw everything as is. I would start with an I and then draw the nose and then jump to the other eye and everything would be all out of proportion and other wax. So I think the best method is the structured method where you're putting all your information down, all your proportions are down, and then you're working from that information. Okay, so now we have this and then I'm just going to jump into his eyes a little bit here. Like right around this size. There are tricks where you can copy one eye and then paste it on the other side, flip it horizontally. I tend to, again, I'm very old school. I love to just have the challenge of drawing everything myself. I don't like to rely on tips or tricks like that, but you can and they do come in handy, especially if you're in a crunch per time. Okay? So now we've gotten this, and at this point you could just say, all right, well he's got this boot here, he's got this one here. He's got this costume design that goes up like this. Goes around here, goes down to this belt. Next here. He's got I don't like this arm that's furthest away, so I might actually adjust it. It looks a little too forced in my opinion. Then at this, at this stage, you can also start saying, okay, well, if we're going to draw his spider emblem, maybe the little spire here. And I'm just making this one up as I go along. Just a little dot-dot-dot. Just kind of hinting to a spider shape. Your mind, we'll put it together so you'll want to get it perfect. It's okay. Alright. Now if I were drawing this more traditionally with pencil, I would probably go ahead and start working on some shading since I know that they're light sources above, over here, remember, I would probably start adding some shadows. So if I were, if our penciling this, I find a shadow here. I would probably find a shadow underneath his ribcage. I find some darkness over here anywhere that's away from the light. So even this whole under leg, we probably should be shaded in underneath his chin. I shade this in even this foot. Probably shaded in at least most of it. Maybe the front of this knee. At that point I would I wouldn't know visually where my shadows are going to be. Now this isn't a light and shade and shadow course. This is just kind of extra bonus material to help you out in your journey. But, you know, I'll be making several more courses here in the near future, so I'll delve into that and if that's something that you really want help with, let me know. Okay, then we've gotten these shades here. And what we could do at this point is, if you are drawing traditionally or I would just shade them in. Just find the shadows. Maybe shade here. Maybe here. This is going away. Underneath his will. Just find what looks right for me. Even going down here. Maybe even this will keep that hand popped out and not much, not much shading on the hand because that's our focal point. We want that to be his web spinning, web shooting hand. When it comes to composition and things like that, we want to keep some things open to the eye so there's no confusion. There you go. So there's more of a shaded version. I know this isn't my best work and I'm not too worried about that. This is more about process and technique. And just kind of training your eye to look for certain things. You can even go in and start shading his muscles, make them pop out a little bit more. You can find this one. You can shade in. Maybe the tops. Knuckles are these fingers here. You can add some webbing for a costume elements. Just to make it look more Spider-Man, Esc. I'm not getting too much into details here. But you kind of know Spiderman, everyone's seen environment for years. So we kind of know how his costume goes. Go to the boots. What I like to do is just kind of imagine a ring going around like this and then another ring following it. And then another ring like this. Go around here. Ring, ring, ring. Same thing here. I would I would totally change their hand. I'm not really happy with that back in. Then. Just give them a mask. As you can see, I'm doing this really, really fast because this is not the most important element of this lesson. Now, I am partnering again with EDF for Chuck, and we're going to be doing a whole course on character design. And I think that's gonna be a lot of fun. We might even take some questions from you guys. Kind of create, not questions but suggestions rather. And maybe create a character based on certain elements that you might name to us. So maybe you'll say he has three eyes or he has, he's got a hawkish figure, or he's half cyborg or whatever. We might base a character on what collaborate like an eclectic way, what you guys are challenging us with. Okay, there we go. We have a spire experimental sketch. And if you really wanted to, depending on your style, you can come in and you can shade some shadow here. You can extend this shadow down. You can. It's really at your own discretion. And then you can come back and you can put in a little webbing up to you. Just make it look kind of cool when you're doing the real deal. Like if you're drawing on paper, spend some time on it. If you're a colorist or review. If you have a colorist that's collaborating with you and try and make your lines clean and you can really make your work pop out. We'll stop with that. I think that's a good place to stop. We're about 18 minutes in. And there you go. I hope that this helped now with the Spiderman, one of the things I will tell you is his head shape is very easy. If you want to do like a character model sheet. If we're doing a three-quarter view, just do the actually let me go back to my red pencil. I like to do that more when I'm doing these types of lessons. So we've got a red pencil here. For a three-quarter view, we would just draw a sphere. Go about two-thirds of the way over. Or you can go either way up to you. Draw a line, going this direction. Just drop this a line down a little bit. Here. This would be your chin point. Come in. This is your jaw line. Go up. There you go. Then from the middle here, you could put in his mask. Now since he's looking directly to the right, you might put a circle here to indicate center point. And then whatever shape eyes you want him to have, you can just throw that shape in here. Remember, the one that's closer to us is going to appear bigger and the one that's further away, you might not even see the whole thing. And you might even shape it on the contours of his face. So you might do something like this. Then you could even depending on the mask elements that you're planning on using, you can make those adjustments as well. Then. I think that's suffice. And then from here you can just put it in his webinar webbing, which is just a bunch of lines spread out equally. Then you would just do that spider web. The lines underneath, gonna go downwards, lines going upwards or going further away. So there the curved upwards. Same thing with the neck. Just draw lines down. And you can even do horizontal lines. It's really up to you. How much time you want to spend doing this. It's really up to you can even start adding some shades. Just play around with it. This is just funded mess around with and you don't have to you don't have to get things perfect when you're doing these little character concept sketches. If you wanted to do a profile shot, same thing. Just do a kind of an egg shape. That might be too much of an egg shape. But we can work with it and drop it down. Come up, go midway through the egg shape. Draw a neck. Then what I like to do is draw a curved line, eyeline. Just try it and then this one's kind of looking upward. So we're seeing we're seeing we're looking at the camera would be somewhere around here, looking up at him. Then you can just draw in his eyes where they would go. So you can just put them right here. Remember, add some shade underneath his chin. Same thing. I mean, it's all, it all becomes very second nature after tons and tons of practice. And in anything that you want to get good at, whether it be sports or drawling or playing a musical instrument, It's always going to come down to practice. And the more you practice and the more familiar you get, the better your results. And as long as you're practicing the right things, right? So as long as you have a good technique and you're practicing the right way. There you go. We're at 23 minutes. I think that's suffice. And we might do another character. I'm thinking of who we can draw next, someone with a dynamic pose. I hope you've enjoyed this lesson. I hope it's helped you out and give me some feedback. Let me know if this is my first solo course on Udemy. Now I've done a lot of teaching online, like live courses and I've done mentorships and coaching and things like that. But to record videos like this, this is my first time on my own. I've done collaborations here and you can find some of my other courses on Udemy with EDF Wojciech, but this is my first one, so it's my flagship and I hope to get better from here. So let me know, give me some feedback and thanks, I appreciate you viewing and I'll see you in the next one. 21. Dynamic Poses Using Reference : Welcome back. In this segment, we're going to focus on another dynamics sketch in who is more dynamic than spiny? I mean, really he's super agile. He's a contortionist. He puts his arms and legs and body into forms that I don't know if anyone else can. But this is a general pose. It's kind of like that superhero landing pose. It's very commonly recognized with Spiderman. So I thought it'd be a fun one to work with. And as you can see, we have a couple of variations here, different, different angles. And this is something that's really fun and cool to keep in mind, is we have this first one here, which is just a head-on shot. And as you can see, a horizon lines probably around this area here. This one, it looks like the horizon line is from above. And then this one is probably right around here. So we're getting different angles. And I think this is pretty cool. I'm probably going to keep this one very simple and go with the top, the top angle here, the one that's facing forward. And then maybe, if not in this course, perhaps in a future course, we can do more dynamic and challenging poses. But since this is really, we're focusing on anatomy. I think it's best to keep our eyes on the ball here. Let's go ahead and I'm using reference. Typically I draw from imagination and I'm a real big fan of drawing intuitively. But for the sake of practice and demonstration, we'll use this, but we'll only use it lightly. We don't need to, we don't need to draw and replicate this. This reference exactly as is. Generally what I'll do is I'll start with the head. I'm not trying to get anything perfect at this point. I'm just putting down some information, getting my my pencils warmed up here and just kind of finding angles and it doesn't matter how sloppy it is. I know like I know generally where things are gonna go. I'll just start shaping and molding until I get to that happy place where I want to be. And that's the cool thing about sketching, is you have an under drawing which you can change at anytime. You're not you're not fully committed to this. You can, if you don't like the way it's turned out, you can go ahead and make adjustments. That's to me. That's something that you should always keep in mind because a lot people, what happens is they think it's a one-size-fits-all and they'll draw on it doesn't if it doesn't look exactly like what they're trying to achieve immediately, they give up, at least mentally. They give up. And I think that's a big no-no. Now what I'm doing, instead of starting out with shapes, I'm thinking in shapes, but I'm kind of drawing in replicating what I see and just kinda changing it ever so slightly. And then I'll come back in. I'll actually add some shapes afterwards here. Let's see. We have this hand which is hopes I'll turn his, I'll keep it close to the reference, but not too close. And you can look at this as copying. But honestly, what's happening is you're downloading information to your memory banks. And so in future sketches you'll be able to recall what goes, what looks right, your memory is going to remember all this stuff. And I think it's, there's nothing wrong with copying. Even other artists copy their work. But just, I think the big no-no is don't get caught up in becoming the next artist. Don't, don't try to replicate them to the point where you get stuck in it. Build your own style, create your own style through learning. By learning through other people's art. So let's go ahead and reduce opacity here. At this point, what I could do is I can kind of gauge. I don't even have to look at the reference, but I can kind of gauge. What do I like about this so far, what needs to be adjusted? My thought process is let's keep the head. Let's see here. Let's keep the head where it is. I'm going to drop the head down a little bit. Let's see. Make sure we have our layers. I'm going to drop it down just a little. Because I think when you drop the head down, it makes it look even more dynamic. Like he's coming more forward toward you. This could be really any character that's agile it, if you can think of one or if you have your own, your own character that you've designed. And he kind of has these speedy movements, then you can do that on your own. A couple of things to bear in mind are okay, so we're thinking of our shapes. We have, we have, let me go over this with blue. And then I'll create another layer here. We'll try and find our certain shapes. So we have the top part of our upper chest and then we have that kind of connects down to the lower pelvis area. Then from there we have our sockets. And then one of these sockets is coming. We have this femur bone. There's a big leg bone connecting to the knee. And then from that knee we have the shin bone that goes down to the inner ankle. And then we put our little foot shape here. Then here on this side, we have more of a foreshortened. In foreshortened just means it's coming towards you. So objects that are closer to us are going to appear larger and get smaller as they go away. Then this leg here, so here's the knee joint. This bone is going towards the pelvis and connecting and then we have our knee joint that's bending this lower leg. That lower leg is going to end up somewhere around here. And then we have our foot here. Now, I'm trying to keep the ground the horizon ground area right around where his feet are touching. So maybe we'll keep it somewhere around here. You don't have to put this line. Then when we were talking about the upper chest here we have our socket for our shoulder. Then the other one would be around here, and then we have our neck socket here, but this neck is bending forward and putting his head towards us. And then we can put a shoulder, just a ball here. Then behind that ball we're going to have an arm bone that connects to the middle socket, which goes to the lower arm, which goes to the hand, wrist. And then we have a finger here and we have a thumb here. Those are to mean that we see. Then this arm that's closer to us, we can put the shoulder kind of more in front. Then this arm is kind of going down at an angle. And the elbow socket is actually, I can see right now that we need to drop the shoulder down if we're following this reference. This elbow socket. After we lower this elbow, elbow socket falls right mid-range of his leg. Then curves back in where there's an angle here. You want to use this as your guidelines. So there's an angle here where this hand meats. And then he's got the thumb here, then one finger here, another pinky here. Now we have all of our information. So if we, instead of curving this chest up like this, what we could do is let's erase it. And let's just swoop it like this. And you're not even gonna see that bottom curve too much. At this point, what we can do is let's see how much time are we on right now. We might move. This. It's only ten minutes. So what we could do is lower the opacity on this. We'll get rid of this drawing here. We'll keep lowering this opacity. So now we have some pretty good guidelines. We can go ahead and start filling in the blanks. A fleshing this character out. And that's a term that you'll hear a lot when you're drawing comics is flushing the character out, which simply means just adding more musculature and anatomy and things like that and just putting things into place. So let's go back to the red pencil. So I'll start with his head again. We don't have to finish this piece. What we're trying to focus on is placement. I've done a course, a collaborative course with Ed for Chuck on rendering comics. If you want to get really into the Rendering details, I really suggest you check that one out. We go really deep into how to render shades and textures and things like that. Even gets into colors and all that. Good stuff. Lighten, lightened, shade, light and shadow. Okay, let me see here. I'm going to focus on this arm here, bring this down. And so now we're gonna go over our shapes. So we have a cylinder here. We have a cylinder here. We have a sphere here. We have our upper chest. Here. We have another sphere. And we have a cylinder, a ball that connects. And then we have another cylinder that goes outwards. And we have our wrist that connects to our hand. Same thing here. We have our wrist that connects to our hand. So we'll put in our thumb, finger. Pinky. We're just working with shapes now, remember, I always stress to think and shapes. You can come back and do the rendering later. Draw this in towards his, his abdomen, and then draw in his pelvis. And we can now think of this shape which is another cylinder. We can draw through. We have this cylinder that's going to here. Then we have a ball, sphere. Then underneath this sphere we have another cylinder that's going to go back towards, sorry, this is getting a little messy here. It's going to go back towards his crotch area. And then we're going to connect that to a wedge shape for his foot. Then same thing here. We have a cylinder going up ball, sphere connect down to another cylinder going down. Socket, wedge shape. That's really the general shapes for this character. So if you have this information down, you have your proportions. From here on out. It's stylistic, aesthetic point of view. So everyone's going to come up with a different result. Unless you're and artists that just looks at pictures and draws them exactly to a lightness which the comic book world or any type of pop culture, whether it be storyboards or video game design or any type of entertainment art, you're usually gonna be creative. You're not going to copy things and replicate them to the exact likeness. Unless you're talking about maybe like a cityscape or something like that. Or if the design calls for a likeness of a character, then that would be a different exception. So what we'll do is we'll stop here. We are 15 minutes n will stop here, and then we'll continue this on the next video. What we'll do in the next video is we'll kinda draw this in our own style. And if you, if you want, while you're waiting, why don't you go ahead and practice this and try to get this pose down as good as you can. Don't make it perfect. Just get the information down because that's what we're focused on. And then what we'll do is we will, in our own style, we might even get rid of these photo references and their own style. We will create a Spider-Man or character of your choice. I like how you would actually draw it. That's it. I hope you're having fun. I'll see you in the next lesson. And if you have any questions or concerns or you want me to elaborate on anything, just send me a message in. I'd be happy to. If I get enough requests on any certain subject matter, I'll definitely create more content for you. All right, that's it. I'll see you in the next one. 22. Hulking Character 2: All right, welcome back. So in our last lesson, unless n is actually, we drew two body types. One was a kind of a hulk, bulky character who's appears shorter in this picture, but in all honesty, he usually towers over all the other characters. And then we have a standard superhero stoic type captain that you can think Captain America, Superman type body. So what we're gonna do now is we're going to render, going to try and do this quickly because I don't like to keep these videos longer than 20 minutes or so. It'd be a little bit less talking and a little bit more sketching. Hopefully you can follow along. I'm using my Staedtler lead holder pencil with a, I believe it's a to H or an F lead. Let's check here. This one looks like F, So you can see that I don't know. But anyway, F lead, which is a kind of a mix between a hard and the soft leg led almost like, similar to that of a to H or so. It's not super sharp. Usually I like to sharpen my pencil, but this, this paper I'm using is not the highest quality. So let's zoom in and get started. Well, what I'm gonna do is I'm going to start, usually I'll start with a character's face. But in this, since the hawk, It's not as facial features that stand out the most. It's usually his body. So I'm gonna go ahead and start with his body. I'll go ahead and quickly render his arms. So what I'm doing is I'm just outlining the shape of his arms. I'm pressing my pencil down a little bit hard but not too hard. We don't want to rip the paper. And I'm just trying to capture some of the lines at this point. You want to draw everything. I like to break things up. Just go with the flow. Then I'll keep working on this bottom part here. I'm not focused on any type of shading or anything like that at this point like that, at this point. Then I will work my way to his hands. So I'll draw in a little bit of the knuckles. Maybe you can draw a line downwards and then keep in mind when you draw your knuckles here, you can see that the line doesn't connect all it doesn't, it's not one line. It stops right where your knuckles begin. For instance, this middle finger here, come here, and then stop right about here. Same thing. This one will connect because it's following the outside of his hand. And then I will draw Kevin indication of a fingerprint inwards. Then from the top of these knuckles I'll just draw in almost like a V, giving a little depth to this, these bones on top of the hand. That's going to work good enough for this hand. Now, I'm not trying to get too intricate. I'm just trying to show you how I render characters quickly. Here we go. We have one arm, you see? Now we'll go over here. We'll continue working on his upper shoulder here. Jump into this trap muscle. Now we have all the information already, so there's not too much thinking involved here. What we're doing is just focused on the rendering. I'll jump over to this arm. You're thinking process is usually mostly done during the beginning stage of your sketch. You're trying to figure out the body language, the pose you're looking for. That good stuff. This is just a drawling part where you're just focused on the rendering and it's really fun. It's cathartic in some ways when you really get used to this. Typically when I'm drawing, I don't talk and draw at the same time. And it's a new challenge for me. But I will usually do is I'll just turn on the headphones, put them on. Blast my favorite type of music. Just kinda get into the rhythm and flow of things. And that's really, really fun. There's really nothing like it for me. Here we go. We have this knuckle here for the thumb. Now, this little webbing. Here's one of the knuckles. I'm going to connect them. You can put little veins later. I'm going to have a whole course. Now, me and a fellow artist, Ed Wojciech, we did a class on rendering where I get to kind of touch on how I would render a character's. I think I'll do another one. Really just diving really deep into the whole rendering of how to render your comic style to what the thinking process of it. Just In total. Watching me draw, maybe I'll even do that on YouTube. So you guys can have access. We'll see, I'll think about that later. But rendering is such an important aspect of your drawing. Because you want to convey, what you're trying to do is convey a three-dimensional sketch on a two-dimensional sheet of paper. So you want things to look like there in a third dimension here, which is a really tough thing to pull off. Okay? There's two arms down. We've got the top traps. Now I'm just going to dive into the chest. So I'll start with the left side, my left and I'll jump over to the right. I like to connect the chest muscle right to where the shoulders start. Then I'll do this line here. Since he's big Hawking character, I like to just make these, these arms and chest supermassive. Then. I kept in mind that he has this collarbone here. And this will connect to the trap. Traps. Then underneath, I'm just going to dot in the middle. Now if you're studying anatomy and you're studying other artists, you'll see that every muscle has striations and things. For his chest. I'll create some striations down the middle, kind of separating one side from the other. Then I will render in a ribcage here. You're not seeing much of it because you just kind of hunched towards us. What I like to do though, kinda like when I drew the other character from around here, I'd like to draw some ribs. 1212. I only drew two because I'm imagining that he's leaning forward a little bit so you don't really see that third one. But then underneath here I'll draw another curved line. Then underneath, right around here, I'll box it in like this. So I'll kinda now I'm imagining that here to here. It's kind of muscle popped out. And I'm probably going to shade this in just to make it stand out more. And then underneath. I'm just going to kind of show a hint of where I'd want the abs to be, not gonna get too much into it. And then from remember this area here where the ribcage stops and curves. I'm just going to draw kind of a faint line down. And over here too. I think they call this the Dante. I forget what they call it Adonis. You guys can tell me that kind of connects here. Now I'm just going to draw and I'll come back and render pants it like let's say that this is kind of a Hulk. I'll just I won't give them a belt buckle or anything like that. I'll just render in some lines here. When you're drawing clothing and that's probably another class will have to do. You want to keep your lines flowing with the cloth with the limbs. Here from the crash, it's going to spread out like this. Then you can give us some tears. Like if you want to make a tear mark, you can just kind of give it some ripple. Looking alley know how to describe these. I'm just imagining that their tears in the pants that he's wearing. You can see that we've rendered in some some sort of cloth material. Fabric of some kind. Now I'm just going to jump down to his leg. I mean, imagine that his knees right around here and then draw this muscle in. Draw in the shape of this teardrop here. Not going to connect this whole line. I'm going to divide it a little bit and then underneath here, create a line. Then underneath here, it's going to connect underneath the crutch. Crutch will go on top. And then I'm going to do too much of a kneecap. I'm just going to leave some room for shadows. And then his ankle starts right around here. So I'll just draw in a hint of an ankle and then a hint of the shin bone. Same thing here. Then I will start working up his leg here. Now this calf will go all the way to the back of this leg. Maybe you can create kind of a muscle line here and then on the other side as well. And then this calf will extend. Then when I'm drawing the foot, what I would do is just a couple of creases here. Just imagine a big toe which is kind of like a big thumb to kneel. And then a smaller TO then another, smaller TO another one. Don't give them six toes. This will be shadowed in, so don't worry about anything at this point. Then here behind, draw in a heel. And then you can give them like we did up here. We can give him some tears. I'm really trying to go fast here because I don't want this to be too long. But hopefully you're enjoying and you're learning something. That's what matters to me. We have that leg in. I see coming together. Then we'll jump over to this lake. So I will start with this teardrop. The good thing is we did our homework, we put down our foundation first, so we know where everything goes. There's no guesswork. Get sloppy and I've done this before. You guess are you save things for later? Where you know, you should correct something, but you don't take the time to do it. It's going to come back and bite. You. Don't be lazy. I'll try to take shortcuts. You can take shortcuts like what I'm teaching you now is kind of a shorthand version of how to draw certain parts of the anatomy and just chronic quickly capture things. Because I think if you can capture everything really quickly, you can spend more time on the actual drawing and having fun. We've gotten this far. I'm going to go ahead and draw a TO here TO here TO make sure it's five unless it's some sort of alien. Of course, what I would probably do in this case is a shadow here. Because usually my light is going to be behind or above the character. So he's gonna have a lot of room for shadow. Since he's still massive. Thing we did here too is we put the thumb over the top of his legs showing that his arms as they are so massive that when he opens his hands, extending closer to the camera, closer to us as a viewer. Which is, I think it's a pretty cool trick for you to learn because it just creates a sense of solid mass. Okay, so this foot, I'm not really happy with it, but it's okay. I know we can come back and make corrections later. Okay. So let's go up here and work on the head. So we're 15, almost 16 minutes in. That's not too bad. I haven't done any rendering. I don't know if I will, but I think this is. Really, if I were just learning right now, even if I been drawn for a couple of years. And I would love to see this kind of stuff. So I hope that this is providing you some good value. Alright, here we go. Now, I'm going to go ahead and draw in a hawk or some sort of character head. Maybe I'll just keep them bold. All right, so we have a circle. Then I'm just going to almost create a box. Do we want him facing downward? Let's see. How do I want his face now we didn't do our homework here, so we're doing guesswork. I'll keep his eyes right around here in the middle. Maybe zoom in a little bit closer. Okay, guys, I'm going to start here, so I'll do this really quickly. All imagine a right around here and IRI here. Knows now, since the hawk or any kind of character like this, they're really big. So I'm imagining that the face is kind of shortened square, so I'm putting his nose not too far from his eyes. Drop down, put his mouth. Then from the corner of his mouth. Connect this to the top, which would be where his cheekbones go. Then right where the eyes in drop this down. Gives us a nice thin line. Come back out of here and drawn the jaw, throwing an ear. So I have the proportions. Let's see, maybe I can zoom in a little bit more. Hopefully this camera will pick it up. Okay, I'm just gonna go ahead and darken in a few things. So I'll put an I here. Imagine that he's got some eyebrows coming over. Now we're drawing the very small, this is a small area. Cheekbone somewhere around here. Chin. Chin connects to jaw, goes up to the ear. During an ear. No, not too much detail. This smaller your character to less detail you want to put in. You're leaving a lot to the imagination. Our minds work in such a way that they actually enjoy putting things together subconsciously. There we go. I'm going to keep him He's not mistaken with anybody. Okay. There we go. Now let's pull back. Here. You could see we have a pretty nice character. Should I come back in and render? Maybe if I have some time at the end of this lesson, maybe I'll do a bonus video. Actually, if I don't. But you want to see it, go ahead and message me and maybe I'll just add to it. Because you know, on these lessons I can keep adding more video to help you and that's what I'm here for. I really want to help you. I'm pretty happy with this hawk. So what I'll do is I'll stop now and we'll come back. And we will work on this character over here. And hopefully we will have as good of luck as we did with this one. All right. I hope you enjoy. I hope you guys got something from that, and I look forward to see you in the next lesson. 23. Course Recap A Quick Review : All right, Welcome back. In this segment, we're just going to retouch on a couple of things that we've already gone over. We have some headshots here, we have some body shots. And I just want to kind of really drill this in. So it hits home. I feel like the only way I'm gonna do that is by repetition. Repetition because that's how I learned. And really I'm a slow learner. It took me years to really get a grasp on this. But that was without someone coaching me or teaching me. So hopefully it won't take it out on a couple of things on this graph are we have kind of a, I did a half Wolverine here. And you can see that I drew in this skull. I want you to be able to replicate what I'm drawing, but in your own way. When, for instance, you see what I've done here is I've kind of drawn in my own version of the other half of his head. What I'm trying to demonstrate here and what was going through my mind was things like this, like connecting this arm to the socket. Keeping, like I've demonstrated in previous courses, keeping balance here from head to heal. This geometry shape here, where we're keeping everything in balance. We have, our heels are, these are ankles, but let's say we connected our ankles to our shoulders. We're creating an x. And that x signifies the center point of your character. Really. I want that center point to be somewhere around here. Now, with this particular character that I'm drawing, I want to emphasize is how wide your shoulders are and how his arms are bowing out. We have this character with his legs bowed out, shoulder width apart as I typically do. And that's by second nature. That's just a replica replication of this character here. So if you're looking to see what this guy looks like, this is it here? This is just a typical breakdown of a figure. And you want to be able to draw things like this really fast. And you want to learn how they move. Because the faster you learn this stuff and simplify it, you can see that I haven't broken down any muscles. I've only broken down shapes. If I were to break down muscles before, the shapes, that would only hinder my progress and would make my art look very stiff and boring and uninteresting to be quite honest. There are a lot of good artists out there that can render and draw every single muscle, the exact detail. But there's something lacking. This is what I want to help you to avoid. It's okay to learn that stuff. But don't become controlled. Buy it. Don't, don't. What's the best way to say this? Just be careful not to allow the rules to kind of justify the means. The rules are designed to teach. But when you start, your art is very subjective. And when you start applying these rules, you're gonna do it in your own way. Just like when you learn how the write your ABCs. We all have our own unique handwriting. My handwriting is terrible. I can barely even read my handwriting, but I can, I can see other people the way that they write. It's amazing, it's beautiful. You have your own signature style. You have your own signature way of drawing. But you learned the rules first. You have to learn the rules first and then you can go ahead and express yourself. So let's get rid of this are actually, let's go ahead and just erase it. I'll give you a copy of this just for your convenience. But really, when I was drawing this and I wasn't even plan including this in the course. This is more of a personal thing for me. But what I had in mind was I was drawing it three heads, kind of similar size. And I wanted to kind of do this for my own practice. I may have even done this prior to designing this course, but I keep a lot of my art for my own studies. So I saw this and I thought this might actually help some people. And the way it helps me is it's a reference point. I can see, hey, how do I break things down? Because I do everything without reference. I rarely use reference these days unless I'm drawing a building or a specific character, costume design or something. But typically I'm just drawing straight from imagination and I am hoping that you can get to that point. If you're not already there. For some of you, you might be absolute beginners. And for some of you who might be intermediate and some of you might even be pros and you might have taken on commission work and stuff like that. This course is designed to help all of you. Because it's a course that's designed to help you level up. I'm not teaching you the basics, how to draw on teaching you how to simplify your drawings, how to think in shapes and forms that make it a little bit more on the simple side. And that you can apply faster and easier so that you can work around those shapes. Because once you have these shapes, once you have these basic shapes, then you can create anything from them. A head shape. For instance, if you're drawing a three-quarter view, when you get these shapes down, you know that this is, this goes up, goes here, that you're when you can do this. Without thinking. You know that you're arriving, you're getting to a point where you're leveling up. And this is where I want you to be. When you know where things go. Without without measuring, without thinking twice. This is how you know that you're progressing. If you're looking and you're taking your time and you're really slow, that's okay. But you're going to get to a point where this stuff is second nature and you'll come in now, something like this. I wouldn't be married to this sketch. I will just use this as information. I'd come back in, I would erase it and come back in with my pencil and I would sharpen my pencil. Let's see. Starting new layer, sharpened pencil. What I mean by sharpened pencil is I would make that point smaller and then come back and redraw and shape things the way I would want them. I was asking myself for a very long time. Is it possible to teach people are because that was a question that I received from a lot of friends. A lot people who tend to think you're either born with or you don't have it. And that could be true to an extent there might be some naturals out there. There might be people who were influenced by their parents or by some other artists as a kid and they picked it up. There are people who are learning from square one, even an adult age like I, I've taught students of all ages from 1516 all the way up to the fifties. And some of them used to draw when they are teenagers and then they quit. But they really never lost the lub foot and love for it. And they maybe they life, life came and they got married or had kids or guide careers. And but that voice in their head was still there. They just wanted to kind of pick up where they left off as a kid. That actually happened to me. I took for a very long time, I took a job in finance and I just wasn't happy. It wasn't me. So I left that career and I jumped back into art in kind of reconnected with that childhood dream. And some of you might be doing that right now. There's nothing wrong with that. I don't think it's ever too late to learn. I think that we all have the rudiment rudimentary skills. I think when we were kids, we were drawing all the time. Were those drawings good? Maybe, maybe not. But we had that desire. Then. This is how I would come and further in my sketch. Now, this isn't not going to finish this or anything like that because I'm just trying to teach you my thought process. But this is just a random lesson that I wanted to throw in here. If we were to bring all this stuff back. The bottom line is I want you to have fun. I want you to enjoy this stuff. And I hope that you are, you know, I'll, I'll send you a copy of this here so that you can use it for reference and maybe it ignites your memory on this quick little recap of a lesson. But yeah, this lesson here, I'm not necessarily teaching you. I'm showing you thought process. I want you to have this just for your records. Okay. So hope this helps. I'll see you in the next one. 24. The Hand: Breaking Down the Basic Shapes : Hey guys and welcome back. In this segment, we are going to discuss that one part of the body that no one likes to draw. I won't say no one. But most people, that's the hand. The hand is a peculiar thing because it's vitally important. It's really important. It conveys so much the hand in itself almost acts like it's own body. It has his own language, has its own gestures, and it communicates with the audience of your art in a certain way that you kind of have to get it right or at least possible. So let's just go over the basics of a hand. What I've done here is I've sketched out what I feel are some of the most important or most commonly used hands that you'll see in comics, in other mediums as well. But since we're focused on superhero anatomy, I thought these would be the best. We have a couple closed fists in different angles. We have the open hand, we have the hand coming at us, and we have the claw hand. I think. We also have the clenched hand. So what I think we should two is starts by going over the basic shapes. As you hear me mentioned a lot. I tell you and I tell all my students, always think in shapes and always, and always look for shapes. So whenever you're sketching, you want to look for the shape of whatever you're trying to draw. In this case, let's start with the top of the hand. Will do both hands simultaneously. We have we have an open hand looking downward and we have an open hand looking at the poem. We'll start with this one. We have this pentagon shape. Pentagons is simply five points or five sides. We have it here to 12345. However, I'm going to go ahead and I'm gonna divide the thumb. Keep the pentagon here. So if we were to really convey how to draw the fingers first and we're gonna keep the thumb as a separate kind of like a separate limb. What I would do for the thumb is I would just create a triangle on the outside. And this kind of extends. Then what we're gonna do is we're gonna remember, and we'll do the same thing. Actually. This left, this open palm hand. We'll look at from a different way. We'll focus one at a time. A couple of things to keep in mind when you're drawing the hand. Number one, we have kind of a wrist here which works as a socket, just like an ankle. This wrist allows the hand to pivot from left to right, up and down. It can twist and twirl and all that good stuff. So the wrist is really important because the wrist helps to convey emotion. And you'll kind of show what the hero is feeling or are about to do if he's got a throwing a punch or if he's clinching his fist, or if he's opening his hands to look like a claw. We want to keep that wrist mobile and we want to make it kind of shown in your, in your art. And I'll show you that here in a few minutes. What I mean. So let's say that from the center of the wrist we have a kind of an imaginary circle. I'm drawing it here for you. But from within that circle, what I'm gonna do is go straight up to, from the center of the circle to the point of the Pentagon. What this point represents is the middle finger. Okay? So then what we're gonna do is we're going to count down here. We're gonna have another finger here, which would be the knuckle here to the left it at middle finger we're going to have another knuckle and then others. So we have five fingers and then our fourth fingers. And then out here we're going to have the thumb. So you could draw essentially this kind of pointy line going towards the wrist. You can do that from all of them. And this is just for you. This is kinda like the under drawing. Under, under drawings are really important. A lot of times the person who's viewing your art will never see them. But you, you're going to keep them in mind. And a lot of times when I'm, when I'm drawing, I'll sketch under drawings like this and I'll come back and erase and then just fine tune and keep what I need. And I'll show you that here in a later lesson. From these fingers are from these points that we're calling knuckles. We have our fingers so we can extend our fingers out. 1234. And what we're going to notice is that the middle finger is going to be the longest. And it's kind of leader. And then all these others around it are going to curve, leaving the middle finger as the longest one. So we can just lightly just Create a shape like this. Now we're not going to divide the knuckles yet. We're just finding our shapes and simplifying it. But we can see that things are working out. We have our thumb here. Now if we were to kind of fine tune this and draw even more, we would know that we have a knuckle here and then knuckle here, here, here, and there and there. And the same thing. These knuckles all connect. They all kind of go along with the curve. Then we have one knuckle on the thumb. Don't be deceived though. The thumbs still has three joints. It just has a bigger one lying underneath that we don't see from this angle. Then if we were to really go into this, we would all go ahead and I'll fade this out a little bit more. We'll come back in and we'll go a little bit deeper on this, but not too much. Okay? So now I'll use red to kind of separate. Then if we're drawing a hand, a couple of things to keep in mind is there's going to be, I mean, you can look at your hand right now. There's a distance here and then this finger will start here. And then our thumb will have this larger knuckle here. They'll come out and they'll have this other area which would be a knuckle. Then who would round up and we'd have our thumbnail. Then same thing here. This area would be a knuckle connect, another knuckle connect. Knuckle connect, knuckle connect. And then here in the middle of the index finger, we're going to have knuckle and then another knuckle. One way to look at it is you could just put, kind of if you really want to define the knuckles, you can do something like that. Just connect, connect. Same thing here. You can draw the fingertips. You can do that with all your fingers. We don't have to illustrate the whole thing. I think you get the point here. That's basically an open hand. Now keep in mind if we wanted to, we could change these fingers and we can change everything. We can change the thumb as well. Let's say that we have our shapes here. I'm gonna draw a finger here, up in here, here, here, here. And this is kind of closed. I'm going to wrap this thumb around. And it's kind of we've just closed our hand. This is stuff that you want to play around with when you're drawing to kind of figure out and look at your own hand when you're doing this and couldn't figure out how your hand moves. We know that our fingers have limited mobility, meaning that they can't go too far upward. They can, they can't spread too far apart from each other. In general, when a hand is relaxed, the fingers are all clutched together and I'll show you what I mean here in a moment. But before we do that, we're going to jump over to this hand and I'm going to go back to the green. I'm going to show you how to break down a hand a little bit more. I'm going to lighten this up. The simple shapes of your hand are, imagine a line right here. Imagine a line here. We have kind of a square, but the Scots own kind of shape. Now you could draw just a straight-up square root, you could. But for the sake of getting it closer to the hand, I want to keep it around this shape. Now, a couple of things about the hand is in this area, we have a padding. It's all kind of leaning in this direction here. Then we have our thumb, which almost looks like a chicken leg, connects to the thumb. From that thumb we're going to have a little skin that's going to connect there. Then we're gonna have our fingers right? Now when I'm drawing fingers, I like to think of ellipticals. Now. You don't have to draw these in, but just think of them because each section of your finger is like three ellipticals connected. I mean, look at your own hand. And when you think of someone like Spider-Man or someone, you know, you can imagine that maybe the tip of their fingers are what's going to stick to the glass or to the walls. You can draw these ellipticals. Actually, I think I have a Spider-Man sketch out there somewhere. Maybe I can find it. Were spiderman is on the window and you can actually see his, his fingers and also as toes kind of suction cup onto the window. But what I'm trying to illustrate here is I'm gonna go ahead and lighten this up a little. We're gonna go back to the red. In, so the main parts of the hand, or let's say you have this shape. This is looking at the hand from the palm open, right? We always want to know that we have this shape here. We have a shape that goes like this and these are pads. Then we have another padding here, and then another padding here. They seem all interconnected with a hollowness in the middle. Then from each of these paddings, we have our fingers connecting right? Now. You could if you wanted to, you could bring these fingers. Close them now a little bit. Then, which is in the next illustration that I have here. And we can even close our thumb in. And you can move these two fingers around. Soviet, if your character is gripping, something, will jump over to this one to kind of show you a little bit better of an example. What I've done with this sketch and I've really simplified is I've just kept this shape here. This padding here, this pad here, this part of the thumb that protrudes outwards. And then this part that comes over and they're all connected, then this is where your fingernail would be. On all of these. You would just only have to show this part of the finger. And you can just show a hint of behind the fingers. Just kind of work in and make it look believable. You just put a wrist under here. But see, I never over-complicate things. So if you look at my sketches, I don't dive too deeply into the hands. I know how vitally important the hands are. By also know that I don't want to distract from all of my art by making the hands look too funky or two over rendered. Unless I'm trying to draw the eye to the hand, maybe the hands holding a gun or a letter or something like that. And then you're, when you're creating your composition, then you would, you would prepare your sketch to be set up for that. But most cases, I like to keep the hands pretty general. Now when we're drawing a fist, let's keep the shapes very, very simple here as well. So if we were drawing in three-dimensions, we would have a box like a cube like this. Then we'd have this part that protrudes out like this here. Comes up, up over and that's our thumb. Then we have 1234 knuckles on to three. Then come down here. We have this cushion here. Then that all connects. So let's do that one more time. But let's reiterate what we're doing in our thinking processes. We're trying to keep our hands looking three-dimensional. We have our risk connecting here, coming up. We have our other part of a rest here. Then we know that this thumb's going to protrude outward. And then we're gonna have. Now the only reason I have this index finger coming up is for aesthetic purposes. You don't have to draw. The fingers are going in that far up, but it looks kind of cool and that's why I did it. And that's just a habit. But you can see that if you just keep things very simplified, don't add too many lines. We have a shape that looks like a hand. If you were to first open your eyes and look at this, you would know that you're looking at a fist that goes with all these fist and I'm gonna go ahead and darken this in a little bit so we can see. But yeah, you can see, I'm keep in mind, I'm going to give you a graph of all this so you don't have to worry too much about memorizing everything I'm teaching you. You can always watch these videos, but also you'll have these graphs to look at. But really, what I really recommend is that you just looked at hands and just sketch them as much as you can. But while you're doing that, look for the main shapes. So one of the main shapes that I see is I see this. Then I would add this for the thumb and then this for the knuckle and then connect them. You can do that with everything. When I draw hands, I always just think in these shapes. So whatever is closest to me, I'm going to draw that finger first. So if the pinky is closer to me, I'm going to draw that, then anything that's further away, it can be drawn next. So in this case, this pinky is closer to me. I'm trying to add depth here. And then I know that this thumb is going to protrude out, pop up, boom. And then we have this little aesthetic figure here. Same thing with this. We have our little pentagon, 12345. Then drawing strip, we have this knuckle, we have this knuckle, knuckle, knuckle. You can connect those lines down. We have another nickel here bending out, boom, we have our fist. When it comes to the underlying bones, this is what they look like, but not gonna get into the name of all these. Because I think there's enough courses out there and enough books that kind of go over to skeletal Latin names. What I'm really trying to do is keep things very simplified for you so you can draw them as fast as possible. For instance, like this hand here. One of the best hands to study in comics is Spiderman hands. And that's one of the ways that I was able to learn how to draw hands because they already have these little graphs here for us. And they're making the hands look three-dimensional. The fingers and all that stuff or popping out. So this is kind of what I pay attention to when I'm drawing hands. Lot of times if I can't get my hand quite right, I will draw something like this and then I'll erase it later and fine tune it. But I'll, I'll draw something with those types of try and make it as three-dimensional as possible. Another, another very popular hand to display is the clenched fist here. Let's keep it very general and very simple. We have 1234. Then that's going to connect to this wrist. And it's going to go this way. Remember, the wrist allows your hand to pivot. In this case it's pivoting downward. Then we know that there's gonna be a knuckle here and there's gonna be a bigger knuckle here for the thumb. We can connect a triangle shape here and then add our thumb now to get the shapes right underneath this knuckle, I would put in more padding representing that shape of the thumb. Then we can draw in a knuckle here at sometimes you can draw on the knuckle like that. But you can see that it's not that hard. The main shapes being, if I go over these in red, the main shapes that we're drawing here are the shape. So you're boom, boom, boom, boom. Draw a circle here. Draw a circle here. We know there are risks is here we're bending it this way. We know that this thumb is going to wrap around. We know that this index finger is going to come down like this. And then we can just follow those lines. We know that there's probably another knuckle here depending on the angle. And we also know that underneath this thumb we can put more padding connected to the arm. There you go. Very simplified. And that's, that's a very simplified hint. Now I'm, I'm definitely giving you this graph. You can have it for your use in your practice. But we're going to have more segments and we're going to be drawing more hands. So don't worry. But take what I've given you here and just kind of practice it. This is a very beginner course, beginner, intermediate. As we get more advanced, we're going to have more difficult hands to draw, but I don't want to over-complicate things for you at this point. I really just want you to be able to look fine shapes, replicate those shapes. If I were you and what I did a lot when I was up and coming is I just drew these little pentagon shapes all the time. And just imagine, I knew that the middle finger was gonna be here. I know a lot of times these two fingers, the ring and the ring finger actually, sorry, I did that wrong. The middle fingers here, but lot of times the ring finger will connect to the middle finger. Then we have the straight up, we have this index finger. And then we have this pinky going out here. Then here we can spread this even further out. Look at your own hand for an example, you have the best reference right in front of you. You can look at your hands and see how they move. I also draw in front of a mirror. Even right now, there's a mirror in front of me on my wall. So if I wanted to draw a hand coming at me, I can just put my left, my non drawing hand towards the mirror and just replicate that. And you can too. So you can just get a cheap mirror and put it in front of you. Just use reference when it comes to hands until you have a firm grasp of how they work. So we're already 20 minutes in this lesson, 21 minutes. I don't want to go too much further, but I will be touching upon the hands in future segments in lecture. So don't worry, if there's anything that you feel like I'm missing or you need a little bit more help with this, please send me a personal note, let me know and I can create more graphs or even another video to go a little bit further. I also do allow live sessions. So if you're not following me on Instagram, you'll go ahead and find me there and I'll do some live sessions as well. I hope that this helped. I know that we barely touched on it and there's so much to learn about the hands. But I think with this information, it's going to give you the basic knowledge that you need to break down the hands and simplify them and then add them to your sketch. And if you have some sketches where you're struggling with the hands cinema over to me, I'll take a look at. All right, I hope you're doing well and I look forward to seeing the next lesson. Keep it going. 25. The Foot: Breaking Down the Basic Shapes : Welcome back. In this segment we are going to discuss defeat. Now, as you might know, the feet are kind of a strange, arbitrary part of the body that a lot of people similar to the hand, they like to avoid drawing. So a lot of artists, even professionals, will hide the feet behind some debris or dirt or smoke or whatever. Just to kind of get out of the task of actually illustrating the foot. And that's okay. Sometimes aesthetically that can look cool. But I think it's still good to know how to draw feet so that when the time does come, you know what to do. What I've done here is I've looked at, and I've created some examples of what are the most popular foot positions. And I think that I've found most of them here on this template that I've created for you. And I'll kinda go over my method of my madness here. But first and foremost, let's just look at the foot and look at some of the shapes. If you were to break down the foot, you can break it down to one simple shape, which would be an oblique triangle. If you actually bring this up. If you really wanted to, you can add another square behind that. This square could represent the heel. Then most of your weight falls hopes, not three E's, the heel. So most of your weight is going to be distributed on the heel. But when you're making movements, the weight transfers down to the tip of the toes, right? So we want to keep that in mind as we're illustrating because your art, to make it look believable, you have to make the weight and the movement and the structure of your art looks like it's in balance. You want to make things look that almost like there's a natural balance there. And the way that we do that is by positioning the feet in such a way that it looks believable. So let's go into that a little bit. Before I do that though, I did kind of a quick leg and I just wanted to show you the how things work when you're creating balance. You can see that this leg, even though it has bone's going inwards like this and then outwards like this. Everything kind of falls straight center. Then around this line here, where we're finding that this is our balanced point right around here. That's our balance point. So if we were to make this like a a one-point perspective, everything would come from there and shoot outwards because we know that most of the weight of this leg is going to be placed around that region. And that's the same with this bigger leg here. When you're drawing the foot. You want to make it look interesting, but you don't want to spend too much time on it. I'm liking it. I liken it to like an ear. You want to make it look believable, but you don't want to put too much emphasis on it unless you are trying to show off the new boots that you've designed and you want people to really pay attention to you the feet, then by all means go for it. But typically when I'm drawing a foot, this is what's going through my mind. I'm remembering that the rules that I've taught myself and I've learned from observing that the inside heel is a little bit higher than the outside. He'll just like the inside CAF appears a little bit lower than the outside calf. And this is kind of fun. It's a juxtaposition that you'll find in a lot of art. Different curves and muscles and bones. They kind of counterbalance each other. And these are pretty easy to keep in mind. Now when you're connecting the ankles to the foot, one way I like to look at it is I imagine that this ankle is a socket. This socket connects the leg to the foot. It overlaps and it's that movable area that allows the foot to move up and down and side to side. But it also connects to the leg, which is the dominant limb here that's attached to your foot. Your foot is designed to, unlike the hint. Without rambling too much, I just want to say that the hand itself has this role of creating a language on its own. The hand can show mood. We can show surprise, can show gestures and things like that. The foot can too, but at more of a limited capacity. What I mean by that is you can make the foot look powerful in such a way that it could show that your character is in a dynamic pose to explain it to you a little further without taking too much time. One thing that you can remember is let's lightly sketch a foot and more of a dynamic posts. So imagine that you have a leg going out this way. You have your your lower leg connected to your knee, connected to your thigh, connected to your pelvis. But then right here where this, this this part starts the the socket. Well, one thing you could do is you could turn that socket in Word. Then this foot like that. Or you can even go at this angle. You can twist and turn, but you don't want to bring your foot way over here because that would just look really awkward. Now I know that this is a very rough and crude sketch, but we're going to get more into it. Trust me. I'm just trying to show you the thought process at this point. I'm going to erase all this. Then when I design a shoe, one of the things that you want to pay attention to is the shoe is a similar shape as what we did the foot, it's got this triangular shape. Only. The only big difference is, let's say that this is the flat surface that the shoe is sitting upon. Then we have this part here that's gonna start the rectangle. And then I'm just going to bring the rectangle out to here. Then a cool thing about your sneakers, if you look at them, is they lift up off the ground at the front, then that connect like this and then you have a dip for where your foot would insert and then your heel. And then you have a lot more cushion on your heel because that's where most of your weight is distributed. So that's why the design is done that way. When you're thinking of your feet, That's what you want in your mind at all times is whereas the weight being distributed, where am I putting the weight? Is it going to be put on the toe like in this one here? Or is it gonna be put on the heel like this one here? So we know that when we're creating a stance like this one, most of the weight is on to heal because it's just a flat position. Just like this sketch here. Now if you're drawing someone like Spider-Man or someone who's a little bit later on their feet, you might get a foot that's the weight might be distributed more on the toes. Or someone who's running the flash. Lot of times the flash will be, the weight will be distributed on the tippy-toes. So let's say we have a character running towards us. And then we might have one leg bent this way. And then maybe this leg might be touching the ground but then this foot, How does it go? Does it go flat like this? Or do you want the tippy toes to go out like that? It's really up to you to decide that as the artist. In fact, I don't like this whole sketch. One reason because I feel like if I were to continue drawing, this arm would need to go back. This arm, we'd have to go forward. Then this arm would have to move backwards. We'd see just a small part of the arm and the hand. And then this part would bring closer to us. So let's go ahead and do another example. This is real-time sketching, so you can see my errors and you can learn from them. Again. Let's try it one more time. So let's say that we're drawing a character running. We're gonna put his head around here or we could drop it down, which will determine here in a second. We'll put one arm, shoulder here, one shoulder here. Then. Now I know that. This leg is where the the weight is going to be. So I'm just going to bring it out. Let me remove this hammer here. Which one is it? One of these shoes? I think it's both. So we're bringing this foot forward. Then this one is going to be shooting backwards. Then we're going to have this arm, which is going to be forward. Then this one is going to be backwards. So we probably won't even see much of the bicep, tricep. We're trying to create some sort of movement here. This part here when we zoom in, well, this is where we have to figure out, okay, we have the ankle here. Then how do we want this to land on the ground? So assuming that the surface is somewhere around here, I could twist this ankle. This inside is a little higher than the outside. Then I could bring to the mid part of the foot down and then behind that, I can stretch out even more and kind of shape it in. And then what we can do to kind of sell this foot is we can go ahead and lighten this up and then kind of sharpen our pencils. Then we can redraw it. So now we know we have the ankle here. Curves. We have, I'm imagining a big toe here. Small, smallest, small. Connecting to that midpoint of the foot. Ankle here. Heel here. Then going around, we have this calf muscle connecting to the knee. Then we have this teardrop shape. Remember on the legs section we have the teardrop. And then this goes in. We can come back and add our musculature later. If we were doing a real sketch here. This whole area here where he's been towards us is called foreshortening. So we're going to see the tops of his shoulder. This is a top side of his arm. His his chest is going to be around here. Actually, I'm going to keep it turned this way. Then what we're gonna do is we're showing that this shoulder is pivoting backwards. This one's moving forwards. Then we'll add our head. And I'm actually going to lower this head a little bit to give it a little bit more impact. The trick to this is to make things look smaller as they're going away. But then this leg might look a little bit bigger because it's coming towards us. It gets a little tricky. This is more of a dynamic pose. Then we can just add his fingers. Imagine when he's running the basic shape of a hand. And then 1234 fingers. And we can come back in later and do some details. But I'm just trying to capture the information I have in my head right now. We have the thumb and then we're not going to see too much of that hand. This could be any running character. These are the types of things you want to keep in your mind. The main emphasis being that we're studying feet would be on this foot. We know that the impact point is where his foot is hitting the ground. So you can actually indicate that with some whatever, fire, lightning bolts, whatever. And of course, if it were like the flash character, we wouldn't see as toes, we'd see more of a boot. But for the sake of illustration and showing you how things work, I thought it'd be best to put an actual foot. So yeah, I hope that that helps you. And then what time are we at here? We are at 15 minutes, so I'll give it another four more minutes in this lesson. Of course, I'll be giving you guys all these templates, but I don't want you to overthink things. Basically, the general shape of a foot is always going to be the same. Just different angles. If you're looking at it from a three-quarter angle, you're just going to draw a circle, shape it in. I'll keep in mind that if this is the inner heal, there's gonna be an arch here. I know that the toes here 1234. And then the ankle is gonna be somewhere around here. I'm going to work that up. And this is what you want to think of when you're drawing is just keep it very simplified. And then if you want to draw boots and things like that, you can, you can study boots and I'm going to have a course on costume design and character creation. So don't, don't worry too much about that right now. Just focus on the basic anatomy. That's what this course is about. So remember, when you're studying these foot charts, just look at the way I've broken down the shapes. I've tried to divide them into three shapes. So the main three shapes are going to be this circular shape here. Then this this part is your main part of your foot where contours and reaches your toes, then this is where our weight goes on the heel. Another thing that I wanted to point out, which might simplify things is we go to this example one. We can go ahead and open up example to, to trace over. Here's a main shape that you'll see in a lot of comics. It's right here, it's 123. Go up. See that it's such a basic shape, but look this in. You have a hill and there you have your basic flip there already. Then you can come in and you can start adding details. Another way to look at this is let's say let's say that this is wolverines foot because he has a very familiar boot. So let's say we lowered this, sharpen the pencil a little bit. Let's say that his foot started here. Over here. Then the way his boots, our design, let's say that we created the foot. We're not, we're not paying too much attention to details. But then from the center, we're going to create this line here, divided up here, and then go up, go up, and then there's gonna be a V. Then going to come out. And then we're gonna have like Wolverine boots. Easy enough, I think. And I think that if you're watching and you're putting you're picking up what I'm putting down. I think this will be pretty easy for you to if you're having any difficulty with this, let me know. Because I've been telling you from the beginning this is an on-demand course. And I don't expect everyone to learn at the same pace. So I'm willing to add more. If you need some more help with drawing legs or feet or hands or whatever it might be. Just let me know. Just send me a message and tell me what you're struggling with the most. Might even have you send in some of your work and I might look at it myself and decide, Hey, this is what you need to work on. But overall, I think this is going to be helpful for you. I liked, I think it's, I think it's a necessity for you to study your own feet, study your shoes, study the shapes of things. But realistically, what shape do you see here? You see this shape? Pretty easy. If you were to turn it to the side, you'd see like this. All right. Keep keep it very simple. Don't over-complicate things. I like to remind myself when I'm drawing feet because feet can be a little confusing. I like to imagine that there's a ball for an ankle. That ball is resting on top of a square, which would be a cube. And then connect it to that cube, is a triangular shape and this could represent your whole foot right there. Really, just keep it easy. Keep it simple. Don't over-complicate things. Were going on 20 minutes. I don't want to keep too much of your time, but this is really as far as I would ever go with the foot. But if you need more help, let me know. Now in the future, when we get into drawing dynamic poses in different characters, just pay attention to the feet and look at how I've drawn them. And I might even share and give you some of my artwork just so you can study. And I might put a couple of notes on it as well. If you think that that would help you, let me know. That's it for now. I hope that this helps and this combined with the hand training, I think you're gonna take your art to the next level and whatever you need, just let me know. I'll see you in the next one. Keep it going. 26. Examples of Applying Hands & Feet: All right, welcome back. In this segment, I thought we'd take another look at hands and feet, just on a general sketch. This was a sketch commission I did not too long ago for a client, but I like the way it turned out because I kept everything very simplistic. But it also shows a lot of character and attitude. So look what I did. So I'm just going to draw over this. So we have, the first thing we want to look at in any sketch is balanced. So if we look straight down the middle, we see that everything is pretty well balanced and that the weight seems to be distributed on his heels. And then also, if you take these shoulders and drop them down. Well, his legs, at least this one is what am I doing here? Too far out? Shoulder width apart is usually my go-to when I'm just doing a standard straight up and down stance. But this character is spreading his legs a little bit further out to give them a little bit more of a dynamic pose. And he's also the guy's arms spread out as well. What we're looking for is balance. We know that if his legs are spread out a little further, that's creating balance. We know that his weight is distributed onto his feet. Although this one here, it looks like it's distributed on the heel. On this one is hard to tell because we're not really seeing the hill. Maybe I could draw in a heel here by kind of left that out. You'll see that, you know what? I'm looking at this the wrong way I did kind of draw a heel here, but I don't like the way it looks. This was meant to be as ankle, which is the higher inner ankle wraps around here. But then I think I should have drawn this heel a little further. So that's an error on my part. You see you catch these things when you look back at your artwork. It's not a big deal. It's almost the way I would look at it is let me clean this up a little bit. The way I would kind of translate this, what was probably going on in my thought process was that he standing mostly on his tippy toes and that's his heel raised up. So this one here is more on the ground, but this one's more raised up. And also that makes a little bit more sense to me since this right leg is further away from the body than his left leg? I guess I can I can accept that. But in the future I would probably take a double take. Now. I'm gonna go ahead and Let's see, Let's get rid of this layer and what I did with the feet and also the hands. Let's go ahead and lower the opacity should be lowered at this one. Yet, What I did is I kept the hands very simple. So what I mean by simple is this hand here. It might look a little bit more complex because I put some details in, but let me just show you how to draw a hand like this. So we're going to move it over to this way a little bit. Basically a hand like this is, I'll show you the basic shapes. 12. We have this shape here that's connecting. We have a shape that goes like this. And then from inside this thumb, we have this going like this. I put a little nail on it. And then these four fingers, I probably started out with the fingers first, kind of curving inward like that. Because I know that if I have my base of my hand, I know I can connect the bottom parts of the fingers down. And then I just drew in these nails. And this is a fun way to draw a hand because it gives you, it gives the hand a little bit of language. He's got open hand. He's ready for battle. Scene with the feet. Standard feet on this one. That's why I chose this one. We have our ankle popping out here. Popping out. We have our foot main part of her foot here and then we have our heel of the foot here. Now if you remember in the lesson on how to draw feet, the things I tried to break shapes into are the mean triangular shape here. And then behind it you're going to have a cubical shape. And then behind on top of that cube you're going to have an ankle. So if you're looking at it from a three-quarter, it would look something like this and we have the ankle then we have that ankles sitting on top of a cube. Then in front of that cube we have more of an oblique triangular shaped in perspective. So let's look at it here. We have our equal. We have our cube that it's sitting on. Then we have our oblique triangle. Now, of course you're going to draw around that and you're gonna create more of a shape. So let's say that we lowered the opacity here for creating a foot shape. What would we do? Well, we would, this is where your drawing abilities come in. I would bring this out, determine what the shape of his foot is. Create kind of a contour here which would represent the arch of his foot. Come down. We have the heel going up. Then I know ankle could pop out here. And here. It's going to overlap. This is that socket. And then it's going to under lap here and connect to the leg. But this is our basic shape. Now we can also start shaping things out like this. We can put subtraction underneath some tread, I should say. And then we can shape and modify as much as we want. This is where stylistic ability comes in, where you're working on the style you're working on. How do you want this to look? Does he have shoe strings or does he have, you know, straps they go over. Just design your own footwear. In the case of this scorpion here, I kept the boots of really simple. I just kind of give them the shaped along the contours of this leg. This and then all I did was create a low contrast by shading in most of it and then leaving some room for light sight. I shaded in this, this, this. And same with the foot. Shaded in this area, shaded in this area. And this is just an artistic choice that I made. There's many different ways to draw feet and boots and things to your liking. You just want to know the simple shapes. Once you learn that it's pretty much downhill and you'll experiment and you'll draw more often. And if you want, I can include this scorpion sketch and maybe you can draw yours over here. In fact, I could give this to you as an assignment where you draw your character over here to the right of a scorpion. I might not be that hard on you because this is an introductory course to many courses to come. But I do want you to practice this stuff. I really want you to learn this. And like I always say in most of the videos, is if you have any more questions or issues that you're struggling with or any sticking points or if you need more explanation on a certain topic, reach out to me and let me know because this is an on-demand course. And what I mean by that is if I give it enough requests on a certain topic or if there's a need for it, I will certainly add more, whether it be videos, explanations, or templates to help you out or both. My goal in this is to teach you, to instruct you to become kinda find it within you to become a better artist so that you can take the wheel and do all this stuff on your own. And maybe even one day you might be teaching someone how to do it. So it would be awesome for me to see that from you guys. So keep up the good work. I just wanted to show you this in practice so that you can see things come into place. I hope this helped and if you need more help, like I said, let me know. I'll talk to you soon. I'll see you in the next one. Keep it up, guys. You're doing great. 27. Superhero Anatomy Examples: All right, Welcome back. In this segment we are putting things together. We're taking a very simplified skeleton. We are transitioning it into a couple of different body types here. The first one I started working on was this superhero body type, which, uh, I don't know if I had a I did. Okay. We have the skeleton image here. Let's see. We can see that kind of drew around it. I use the same frame and started drawing around the skeleton. So if you want, I can actually send this to you as another reference. If it helps, let me know. But yeah, so this is kind of what I want you to learn is learn these basic structures. And over here, oops, hold on. Make sure we're on the right one and let's go ahead. I'm going to switch over to red. And I'm just gonna do a quick demo on how my thought process would be for this. Okay, So that's a rendered version. I don't like it too much. Go ahead and work on this one over here to the far right. Actually. Before I do that, let me go ahead and narrow this one down in the middle. So let's focus on the middle 1 first. On this arm, all I would do is follow the structure of the arm here. Now, as I've mentioned before, I would never draw the skeleton first. This is just for e-learning. I would draw very simplified shapes and it's going to look at very loosened sketchy. Maybe I can do a complete drawing for you if I have time and I want to make that, I might have to time-lapse the video so it doesn't take too much time. But yeah, I would like to show you from beginning to end how I would approach a sketch because it might be something that can help you. But typically what I would do is I would just kind of draw sketchy like this. And then I would come back later and clean things up and redraw them. Just add rendering in details and stuff like that. For instance, like a couple of different points I want you to think of are from this inner rest here. I like to draw, at least think in the shape of this going and connecting to the inside of his bicep. This is just a simplified shape. So if we were looking at it, it would look kind of like this. Come over. This is simplified shape. And then underneath we have another shape. Then we have our socket here, which would go to our wrist, which would have another shape. And we'd have a thumb sticking out here. One knuckle here. You can do 123 more knuckles. And you can even do a line going through that center of the wrist from each other, the knuckles, even from here. That gives us our formula for our arm in our hand. Now obviously when you're doing your finished work, you don't want to draw it. You don't want to leave it like this. Now then you can start putting in other muscles. There's a muscle that wraps around. Then there's a muscle that goes up here, connects to this shoulder. And then we have our bicep muscles. We have our tricep. This sticks out. You can almost shade all this in. Underneath here. You can shade in pretty shadow. You can even add depth by shading underneath the chest and then maybe even the inside of his shoulder. So we've created a little depth there. We can widen these lots if we wanted to, since he is a superhero. We can bow out this shoulder even more. There's really no limits because everything comic books is an exaggerated style. You can even raises up. You can increase the size of his head even bigger and give them a bigger neck. This or just make them look bigger and more imposing than what I had before. This is how I'm constantly drawing and I'm always reshaping. One of the lessons I showed you, this is how I think of the muscle masses. I think of a shoulder by, I think of the shoulders connected to his pecs is chest muscles. What really good example of this, if you look at UFC fighters, in particular, economy Gregor, He has a very wide shoulder structure and it almost looks like his shoulders are built into his pecs. And it's really cool looking because it translates very well to this kind of style. Now we're going to jump over. And I'm going to dive into this sketch which I was attempting to make a bigger hulking character like a, like a big male, but it didn't quite work because the bone structure is so narrow. What I would have to do is change all of that. So I would go here. Let's wait. Which one is it? Actually, we don't need this one anymore. Let's go ahead and, okay, it's this one. So let's lower the opacity. Let's see these two. All right, Let's, let's go ahead and widen this up to make it work a little bit better because you could see with the amount of mass that I put on this character, he doesn't have any space to spread his legs, shoulder width apart, which is how I like to draw them. His shoulders are very narrow for his body. So what I would do if I were creating a character like this is the first thing I would do is I would bring his shoulders actually, let's just do it all in red. I would bring his shoulders out more somewhere around here and connect them. And I would give him a wider upper chest. Now, I might narrow in that chest to this extent and give them kind of like what I'm going for here is, you see how this connects here and then we have our shoulder socket. It's on the outside of his ribs. In my mind, I'm thinking in those shapes. We have this bigger boulder size, shoulders. And then what I would do is I would see how there's bone is so close to his body. I would take that bone and bring it out. Same thing on this side. I'd bring it out to about mid waste. Then I would curve in this bone here, his forearm, It's bowed out. And then I would just put in his just a circle indicating like, okay, this is where I went his hand to be. Then I would start shaping things like like, like so. This is really how I, how I approach a sketch. Then I'll show you how all this works here in a moment. Then I would take this head. And since he's a big character, I'm gonna keep his head kind of small like this. And the reason why is because when you have a smaller head on a big character, it makes the character look more dynamic and more imposing. It might make them look less intelligent. Bot. It works because the proportions are so wacky, cartoonish. But they're also, they're also fun and eye-catching. So you can see that this looks a little bit better already than what I had previously where he was really close. He almost looked like he was inside of a tight fitting box, like a room. Like imagine him being inside of a cube. We're squeezing them in here. And it's just not working. I don't like that. I didn't like it. And so I'm showing you something, a different approach to make it look a little bit more believable. And it's funny to say believable because we are talking about creating comics. What I'm doing is see his chest, I had it, his ribcage here. I'm going to bring that down a little further. This is just what I call an adjustment. When you're drawing, you're gonna be making a lot of adjustments. And so I have this. One big muscle here. I'll divide it in half. I'll put his collarbone up here, has traps going back to his neck. He's not gonna have much of a neck. A lot of times from the ball of his shoulder. I'll connect that almost like this. Now, keep in mind this is an under drawing and we're going to be erasing all this. Then from his waist, I would just drop it down and I would like to, instead of having his knee so close together, I'd like to have this spread out. I would go ahead and spread these legs out a little further. Giving him more of a wide stance because he's got a big body. The key is you want to keep your characters imbalance. I'm only thinking in shapes right now. I'm not worried about details from the inside. I'll recap this and I go over this in the leg lessons. But from the inside of his knee, I will just draw a line straight up. And it creates that division where you can draw the teardrop for this muscle. Now we have a better, In my opinion, might not be the best, but it's better, it's progress. And that's what the name of the game is. We want to keep progressing and advancing and getting better. Now, I might draw on some triceps here, widen up the shoulders. Now we have a character that looks a little bit better than how he looked before. Now I might I might have to drop them all the way down because I like to keep the heels down here or elongate his legs. But let's see what we're working with here. So let's go ahead and lower the opacity. Let's go ahead and read it that we can see when we erase. So if we were to see the big difference here, we've, we've completely changed his bone structure to work for this giant character. Now that we've outlined and we've done an under sketch, what I would do in my process is I would come back, I would sharpen my, I already erased it this leaving just some behind like this. So the equivalent of lowering your opacity and then I would just come back and start reshaping. So I would, I'm not going to complete this drawing. I'm just showing you kind of like a bonus. How I would handle sketch like this, character like this. Now, we do have a section completely on drawing a Hoping character. So don't worry, there's gonna be more to come. I will drop the shoulders down. And then I would drop bicep here. Now the mean the mean arm muscles I tend to focus on are your biceps and triceps. And then I'll come out and I'll do a forearm. Then the forearm, I liked this one muscle here that kind of cuts over, goes back this way and it cuts into the bicep. Then we have his hand here. And then underneath, we'll put in his chest. Same thing here. You get the jest. I mean, you could see how things are shaping and they look better than how I had it previously. That's really why I wanted to show you. If you want, I can go a little further on this and send it to you guys. Let me know, send me a little comment. And I can complete this a little bit more and you can have it for reference. But I'm giving you a lot of reference and you're gonna have a lot of these videos. So whenever you need it this course, I'm trying to make it as on-demand as possible. All right. So with that said, we're going to stop here and I will see you in the next one. All right. Hang tight. You're doing great. Keep up the good work. 28. Drawing Dynamic Poses From Imagination : All right, Welcome back. In this lesson, we are going to draw a character from scratch, and this could be a draw along a session for you. So break out your pencils and paper and let's get moving. So what I'm going to do is I'm gonna draw a character in a three-quarter view. So I'll draw a line here, just a midline. I will draw. I'll start with this chest and then work down here. And I'll draw just a circle indicating where his pelvis will be. Right now. I'm just putting down information, so I'm not trying to I'm not trying to get everything perfect at this point. Just finding information and proportions. And then I'll put his head up here. Then. I might even adjust this a little bit. The beauty of drawing digitally. And then let's go ahead and place an arm here, arm here, our shoulder here, shoulder here. We have proportions. We have our three masses, which are 123. Then we have balance. We have the feet spread, shoulder width apart. And now we can put the arms wherever we want. You could, if the shoulders are down like this, you can just draw the arms down to his side. If you want to raise his arm so you can raise the shoulder. So if you're doing any type of movement, and I'll do a course on movement. But one way to look at movement, I'll just give you a little insight. Is you have this collarbone here, and each collarbone is divided in half. Now, if you want to raise this arm, you would raise the collarbone to and the shoulder socket would move up. The shoulder would come up to here. Then this muscle that connects to the neck, which is the trap, it would be elongated until you start raising. And when you raise your arm, your muscle here is going to contract and raise up to this one might be elongated. Go down here, then arms down here. Then this one, his arm could be moved here. And I'll just do a basic arm. Then. This would be the shoulder, bicep forearm. And whether he's making a fist or whatever. Then underneath this is his tricep. Then connecting between his tricep and his bicep would be this lap muscle that would also expand like a wing because he's raising up his arm, come out. This one would be more inward, wouldn't be expanded because his arm is relaxed. Then we can even turn his head this way too. These are just creating movements. And then we can turn his pelvis over here. And remember I said in a few of my videos, I like to draw belts. And why do I draw belts? Because it gives me a reference point and you can erase that belt later. But let's say that this is a center of his belt buckle. Then I would know that his center of his pelvis would go here. And it's turned away from us three-quarters. I would know that he has a leg socket here and it like socket here. And then I would just proceed to place in my elements. This is drawing a character. Now if you wanted to do like a bow and arrow type pool, like imagine. Let's just take him down. Imagine that he was holding a bow and arrow and let's say mid, midpoint of that bow and arrow and then are the bow. And then I forget how I'm just doing this from my imagination. I think it curves like this. And then goes like this. This is where a reference comes in handy. Then from here, you can say, okay, well, his arm fall and you would want to look at reference and study archery and kind of see where things fall. But I would probably put his hands somewhere around here. Then forearm around here, then arrow going. Right above here. You can do a line for the string going trait here to here. Then you have yourself, a marksman with a bow and arrow and Archer. Put it in a hood. There you have it. Now we've kind of done a gesture of a character who's holding a bow. You can do this all day long. This is the fun part about sketching is, you know, I didn't even know what I was going to sketch that just now it just happened. These are happy accidents. Now, most of you are, you want to be premeditated, you want to lay out, you want to know what you're drawing ahead of time. Because if you just start drawing without a plan in general, it might lead to nothing. You might learn a few things from it, but ultimately you might not come up, you might not end up with a finished sketch. This could be a character who has multiple arms. Maybe he's holding a sword here. And maybe he's got a, another arm here and he's holding a shield. And just get creative. This is why we draw to happen not to be hard on ourselves and compare our artwork to other people. We're not drawing to seek praise. Now the praise does come as you get better. That's just a natural byproduct of, of just practice and just continuing to post your artwork often. There you go. So this is kind of fun, just playing around. You can see I'm just drawing in shapes, arm shapes like shapes. I didn't really turn or twist him too much, but just enough to give him, you see, this little twist on his pelvis gives him a little bit more of a dynamic pose. And that's to me, that's a lot of fun. Then if we were to move over here to this area, Let's go ahead and reduce him down here. Put it Let's see. Keep them right about here. Okay. Don't go anywhere. Then. If we were going to sketch someone else, you just want to get to a point where, oops, I guess I, there we go. You just want to get to a point where all this stuff becomes fun and second nature. And to the point where your confidence builds up that you can draw anyone in any posts. Really let you think about. Think about a Batman standing on top of a building kind of posts like, how would you go about laying that out now, just to give you a kind of a foreshadowing, I am planning on doing a course on composition and layout. That's coming up relatively soon, probably in the next couple of months, I've already started everything. So I think that will be a lot of fun for you, but I really want you to master anatomy. We also have a female anatomy class coming, of course coming. So please stay tuned for that. If we were to do kind of like a Batman ask, maybe what I would do is draw kind of a corner of a building looking upward. Imagine this is kind of a building. Maybe there's a, maybe there's a gargoyles. And notice that I'm not trying to get any kind of real details here. I'm just putting information so I'm imagining that a gargoyles would be here and Batman, so this would be an up-shot. So I know that we'd have a vanishing point up here. And for those of you that don't know about vanishing points, don't worry. There's more classes for that coming up. And I'm sure that there's tons of information. And if you've read any good books on foreshortening and drawing from different angles. But I'll be putting into real practice and showing you. Then maybe Batman does, is kind of a, I can even draw from starting from his foot upward, just kind of place things. Then this leg would go down here, we wouldn't even see it. Then I would've been his upper cavity up here, put a head here. Maybe turn is shoulder has upper shoulder around here. Put this lower shoulder here. You can see that this is very rough and crude. But at the same time, as long as you know what information you're putting down, That's all that matters. And then I would go ahead and start shaping things and you can always come and change and alter the shapes. Let's say that I just put a generic here, then put his cape going around here and here. I'm just trying to capture the essence of the character. I might even lead them down a little too far. I might even, actually I will I'll go ahead and correct this so you can see real real-time correcting. I'll leave the gargoyles where it is. And we have this gargoyles can have here. Then what I'll do is I'll imagine Bamiyan putting, to put here somewhere. It'd be we wouldn't see it is leg would be somewhere around here depending and we want to size are Batman proportionally to this gargoyles. We'd have another leg coming back here, which we wouldn't see too much of. Now. This could be his leg closer to us if we really wanted to, then we would have this upper chest. And then what I'll do is I'll draw his head kind of a block right now. Then draw arm here or a shoulder here I should say. Then hit other shoulder would be over here. The bat emblem would be somewhere around here. Then depending on what kind of bat suit you're giving them, what your style is. Then I would say, I put one arm here. I will go ahead and have him kind of touching this gargoyles, this hand, this arm, maybe. Let's see. Visible signature, three points out. We know there's chest here. Then what will we do with his other arm? That's the fun part. Let's figure that out right now together. So maybe I'm going to go ahead and give them a little pointy eyes. This is just an under drawing so it doesn't matter. We can come back and refine it. So now my question is okay, where do I put his opposing arm? I could do I can raise it and put his fist, let's say put a fifth right here, try that. Or we can make it little more dramatic and we can put a hand here. These are, these are types of kind of almost like math problems that you'll be solving as you're drawing. And then he's got a signature, three points here. It all concerned with the details of this costume or anything, because I know that this is the under drawing. If this were a real sketch for me, I would erase at this point, lower the opacity, whichever. Then come back and refine the drawing and have fun with it, and maybe even make more alterations. But you get the point. This is where our creative fun comes in and we can try different angles. Let's see what else we can do. How much time are we at? We are at 15 minutes. I'll draw another Let's see. How about a character running? Movement? Now, movement, Let's say we have a character running in this direction. So we want this character going. So let's say, let's put his center of mass here, which would be as upper chest. Lower mass here, which would be as pelvis. And then this head here. Now we can move this head up or down, up to us. Then let's say that we have our joints here for his legs. So let's say one leg coming forward, then one leg on the other side going backward. And then same thing here. We have one arm going backwards, then one arm going forward. We can already see that there's some movement here. And then the head could be looking forward like this, connecting to the body. This is where we just start shaping and molding. We get our information down. We make adjustments. If the legs are too close to the chest, then we elongate them, we make the appropriate changes. But eventually when you are drawing like this every single day, you'll almost lay your proportions out correctly. Or at least close enough. On the first go round. If you don't, you'll know how to correct them. We have a character here which could be flash. Then you'd have all these like speed lines. And at this point you would just start adding in shapes for his muscles. Maybe some lightening bolts and I'm just throwing information known. So it's gonna look really rough and crude. But ultimately this information is going to come in handy when I do finish the sketch. Here we go. Now I've kind of made a mistake because I put his arm going forward in this leg going forward. So what I would do is I would draw over that, put his knee here and make this leg closer to us. Just make a correction and this leg back here, be further away. Put some muscle in here to even open his hands a little bit. Same thing here. You see I'm not I'm not trying to perfect everything. I'm just literally just drawing over my drawing and sketching and continuing to shape and mold as if it were a Clay. If I don't get it right exactly the way I want it the first time. I just keep going until it looks better and better. And that's why it's called the process. You don't expect to every line down and just everything's perfect. Now there are some artists out there. Don't get me wrong. That can come close to that. But for the most, most of us, we're going to have to practice and shape and mold and erase and come back and refine. And that's, there's nothing wrong with that. It's actually a lot of fun. There. We have a flash kind of character running, and that's just kind of a breakdown. Now, from this step here, I won't go too far because we are running on 20 minutes here. So you can line this up and then you can just start refining. You can say, okay, well, here's his head. Let's we know how to draw a profile head because Mike taught us. We know that his eyes are gonna go somewhere around here. His nose is going to go right here. We don't know what his mood is. We know that his ear would fall here, but he has a circular thing that connects. Then we know I always draw this little line here down to the middle of his jaw. What we can do is connect this back of his head to his neck. Underneath. We know that, we know all these muscles. Then we have these triceps that connect to the shoulder. Shoulder connects the arm, that bicep and tricep. The forearm. Then behind in this underneath the shoulder connects to the chest muscles. Let me add the other shoulder here. Connects to the tricep and then elongates over to his elbow, to his hand. And then we can keep going, even if it helps you proportionally, you can turn your art this way, whether you're using traditional art or not. Just find things where I can actually say, Okay, I think I need to stretch this lower part of the body down. So I will, I will draw a line here or a circle here, connect this to his leg. And then back here, just draw a hint of the leg. I can I'm creating more movement. I can always come back and say, okay, well this legs too big, Let's adjust it or maybe his head's too small for his body. We can make adjustments accordingly. Like, I don't like this lower half of the body, so I would come back in and clean it up, erase it. I like this size of the leg. Then I would just keep doing this until it looked right and felt right. I would not take any shortcuts or or I would not I would not leave it in such a way that it looked like if you kind of fake it. Now you can fake certain things until you make it. But when it comes to anatomy and proportions and things like that, some things will just stand out and look wrong all the time. And every time you walk away and come back and look at your art, you're gonna be like, oh, that's not right. Sometimes it's actually good to walk away from your art because there might be some things that you're not seeing that you should see. And maybe you're not going to see them until you do walk away. But at this stage, nothing here is final. We're just finding our proportions. And we can come in and we can say, okay, let's hone in a little bit on these eyes. His facial expression, his nose here, put in some teeth. And his mask I think is mass goes something like this. He's got the Flash emblem here. This is basically what I would do if I were drawing a commission sketch. Of course, if I were unfamiliar with the character, I would pull out some reference. Or my client specifically asked for a certain character feature or certain costume. I would probably look that up and do some research on it. I might draw the post first and get everything down the way I want it and then come back and refine the costume. But yeah, this is, this is really what drawing is all about. It's just refining, drawing, tuning up, refining, changing until you are happy with the way things look. Experiment. If you don't like the way something looks, come back and change it, It's not a big deal. That's why we draw on pencil or were able to make changes. I wouldn't recommend drawing an ink unless unless you're that confident. Now some people do. Okay, there we go. I think that's enough for this lesson, 26 minutes. And you guys have a lot of material here. I hope, I hope this is helping you somewhat. I'm really enjoying it. I'm having fun. I'm looking forward to hearing back from you and always fill out. Feel free to reach out to me either here or you can find me on Instagram or wherever. And I'd be happy to answer any questions that you might have. That's it for this lesson and stay tuned. We will see you in the next one. 29. Superhero Anatomy: Drawing Intuitively : Welcome back. Now not to harp on this, but really, I want you to keep repeating and I want to keep repeating to you. I want you to really get a grasp on how to approach a character. This case, we're not going to use the 8.5 head breakdown. We're just this is how I would approach the character from scratch without using anything I might have even had. I don't remember. No. Okay. So in this case, you can see that I've just taken I would I did just so you know, I started with this sketch here and I eyeballed it over here to get them all about the same size. So this is just a typical I'm just eyeballing. I don't know how many heads tall this guy is. I just know that I wanted to get them all approximately the same size. And I just did that by eyeballing. You will be able to get to that point too. So if I were to draw this character here, if I were to take a little further, you can really turn this into anyone, like, let's just name a character. Let's say, Well, let's just dive in. I'm going to draw a quick head. Come down here and you know what, if you want, I can give you this as well. It's kind of crude and sketchy, but really I think it helps. So right now I'm just finding muscle placement. Not too worried about anything. I'm trying to think of who I want this character to be. Do you have any ideas? Maybe you use some mental telepathy and give me some ideas here. So I'm gonna go with, let's say build is not too big, but we can change that. Let's go ahead and make him into how about Cyclops? Cyclops from excellent. What would you do? You would just find some elements. You know that his eyes are gonna be here. So I'll just draw this. I'll put a nose and the mouth. I do like his wavy hair here. Then he has this law put in a belt. He has strap that goes across here. I'm thinking of the nineties version. Of course. It's got these little wrist things. And then he's got an x here. You might have some pouches here. Remember? You might not remember, depend on your age, but there was a time where pouches we're in. This is, I'm planning on doing a course on character design. So who would be something along these lines? You can throw in some boots here. Then we've kind of create a character, not created, but we've kind of drawn a character that we know of really quickly. This is just the basics of the character. We can give them kind of a flash. There you go. That's the thought process of creating a character. You can use this kind of template for almost anyone. I can even go back here and draw. Just going from memory. So if I get any costume details wrong, forgive me. But you can see that you can create anyone just from a simple frame. I thought you would enjoy this because this is, this is the stuff that would motivate me. I'm hoping that we are similar in that way. This one could be. Let's just say we add a little bit more girth to this character and see if you can guess who this is. Again, I mean, what I always emphasize to my students and I will do the same to you, is keep this fun. Always have fun. Because as soon as it's not fun, it's not art. If it feels like a chore to do something that you love, then you're falling out of love and you don't want that to happen. Keep the level Live, keep the enthusiasm alive. But this is how I approached my art. And hopefully giving you this inside look will help you. Because I spent months watching videos everywhere, even courses here on this platform and I just couldn't find something that I felt was if I were to put myself back into that beginner stage, what was helping me the most? Certainly practicing helps. But for me, what helped me the most is watching an artist. The process, watching how they do it, and seeing it done makes it believable. Because a lot of times what we see is the finished product. And we try to reverse engineer, which is fine. You can learn. I reversed engineered many artists, too many piece of art, even my own. But watching the process in real-time, I think, is one of the best ways to learn. So without further ado, we will keep this lesson's short. But I can send you this. I can say, I can send you two. I continue one like this and we can get rid of it and I continue this. Yeah, let me know if this is something you'd be interested in. Like, I will keep repeating this. One of the big value pieces I went and bringing to this platform, into every platform and to you as a student is I went to make this an on-demand type learning style where I'm not expecting to get everything perfect. This is my first full-fledged solo course. I've done. I've instructed live classes and I have my own thing going on. But for this type of format, it's my first. I wanted to find out what your learning styles are. And I want to be able to incorporate my style of teaching to help you. Let me know, give me some feedback and I will make this on-demand. And if I get enough requests for any certain subject or evening, I will certainly add it in and I'll send you an email to let you know that it's there. That's it. Hope that you got something from this lesson and I will see you in the next one. I'm so happy. I'm really, I'm excited for you. And I can't wait to see your results. When all this is over. Keep going. Take your time study and you're getting better. I'll see you in the next one. 30. Superhero Body Type: Pt: All right, Welcome back. On our last lesson, we did a quick sketch of a Hulk body type. Now this could be any character. But basically the things that we did and what we focused on, or the exaggerated proportions of how big this character is and how to kind of carry those proportions in a way that gives a character balance, a sense of proportion, and everything looks pretty good. But now what we're gonna do is we're gonna move over. We're going to work on a more of a standard character. So this one would be, it could be anyone from Captain America to Superman, batman, any of your, your standard go-to characters? Think of Thor, think of any, any character. It is just going to stand upright a lot strong. Chest out, shoulders, back, legs spread. And or instead of just telling you, why don't we just jump in and start working. Okay, so I'm going to start now this one, I'm going to start with a head. Last time with the hawk. I started with his torso area first, his chest and torso. But this one, I'm gonna start with his head because I want that to be the guideline that we use. Then I think what we'll probably do in the next lesson or two is kind of draw a character and your different from perspective to kind of draw a character and a three-fourths view, I think that'd be fun for you to learn and also maybe even from my side view, that way you can kind of, hey, why not just throwing a rearview like a back view as well? Here we go. We're going to draw in a head, actually going to start a little bit higher here. We have a, basically a ball from here. And I'm gonna do the same thing. I'm going to draw this character, basically head-on. And then what I'll do is you can see everything in action here. When I'm drawing. What I'll tend to do is I kind of imagine where things will fall. For instance, if this were the head, I know that there's gonna be a neck. I'm not going to draw that neck And yet, but I'm going to draw in a line here to indicate the top of his collarbone and the beginning of his ribcage and upper upper chest, which will work its way to the torso. Now from there, I'll keep that line in mind. I'll drop these lines down here. Just to create a torso. Then. Remember I like to imagine a belt here. From here I'll draw a little bit extended down and then I'll draw towards that center line to create that tidy why? Superman underwear above the pants can look from there. I'm imagining now I don't always draw these sockets in. I'm imagining them there. And depending on how I want the character to look in this case, I'm going to go ahead and make the legs spread a little bit outwards. When they're throwing a knee here. From that knee. I'm just gonna go ahead and bow a lower leg portion here. From that lower leg, I'm going to put a circle that's going to indicate the ankle. And I'm just going to draw an eight foot shape. Now it doesn't have to be a perfect foot shape. We're just throwing in the information of where we want things to go and all this is subject to change. You might, you might end up working up on the body and realize that, hey, this character's legs need to be longer or maybe I've drawn is his torso too long and we need to raise the legs up and this belt might have to come up a little bit. And that happens a lot. That's the whole purpose of these under drawings is to kind of gauge. It's a gauge and it's a guideline for us. With that said from this knee area, I'm just going to go ahead and add a cylinder from this gap to this top of the knee. Then I'm actually going to go ahead and elongate this this head here. I'll divide it down the middle. I'll give kind of eyeline. And I will draw a neck underneath. Now that could change, could become wider. We will see then from here, I'm going to go ahead and what I like to do is when I'm drawing shoulders on a normal character like a, what we're drawing now is Alt inset the shoulders like this. From there, I'll draw a line indicating the top part of the arm going down to about midway. And then from here, now, when we are drawing the arms in our last lesson on arms, what I did is I drew almost straight down and drew a arm, the lower arm almost directly under this circle here. But what I'm gonna do now, it's something that helps me, is I like to take this top arm here, kind of bow it outwards and then does lower arm instead of connecting it straight from here, I like to start from out here. Bowing inwards towards the leg. This just gives me a, another guideline that I can use for reference. And then what I like to do is keep my hands right around the mid-range of the thigh. When you become very familiar with drawing characters, you don't really even have to think about this stuff. It will become a lot more natural and second nature. And that's why I really want for you, is for this to become more of a natural process where you can spot things right off the bat and you don't have to do these types of measurements. You can use them as kind of a way to do checks and balances for your own art, but you won't need them. It anymore really once you do this enough times. Now what I'm going to do is I'm just going to start working in a little bit of anatomy. What I'll do is I'll connect this. And then here I'll create that chicken leg hands. Then what I'll do is from, let's say midway across the neck, I'm just going to draw a line like this going to the top of the shoulder, kind of representing his trapped muscles. These muscles that connect there above your shoulder there. They connect to your neck and they connect to your, your arms, your shoulders, I should say. From here. I'm gonna go ahead and draw in a chest shape here. What I'd like to do is from where to shoulder start like this. If you imagine a line going down like that. I'm going to go ahead and almost actually here's, here's something I used to do when I was learning. It's just now coming back to me. So this will benefit you. You can draw this as all one shape. Connect. Almost like you just plopped it right on top. You can see that the shoulders connect to the chest. The chest connects to the shoulder. And it keeps going into this loop that keeps going around. Underneath here. We'll draw a rib-cage. Now that ribcage can go kind of midway across the chest like this. Then from that line here you can just start drawing straight down. I'm going to, like I said earlier, I'm gonna pull this belt line up a little bit higher. Start working down on the anatomy towards his legs. His legs. I'm going to just go ahead and take this line. Remember here where it touches the adult. Drop it straight down. Same here. Then curve it towards the knee. Curve towards the knee. Same thing over here. So the knee will go I'll just go up and over. Curve this back towards the top, up and over. Curve this back towards the top. Then underneath the knee I'm sorry, underneath this area. Connect this to the back. There you go. From the shoulder way I like to do for a guideline for his lap muscles as I like to almost draw this whole area as if it's connecting right here. It gives them kind of wide wingspan. Then I'll jump back down to the leg. I'll just draw a smaller area for his knee joint socket, whatever you want to call it. Then from here, we know that he's got this longer leg longer than the hall because at least appears that way. I'll just draw a another chicken leg or a chicken bone here towards knee. And I always like to keep this part of the leg, this calf a little bit higher, almost angled, little bit lower on the inside and then a little higher on the outside. Let's do that again so we know that this goes to the middle. And then as we're drawing it, we're drawing this calf muscle which will connect almost behind the knee, keeping them pretty aligned since this is a head-on shot. Come back. Now from here, we have our ankle. Our ankle. What I like to do is we're the ankle stops like a curve over. Ankles stops curve over. And that would represent the top of the foot over here to another ankle lower. Then right down the middle line like this. Then that would be the center of your foot over here. Draw almost like a, imagine your shoe from the beginning, from the front of your shoe. You have this curve. And then it's going to curve inward and then bring the heel connect behind the ankle. You see what I did? So I'm in curve from this part of the the front of the foot. I'm just going to bring it up like that. Straight to the other ankle would say, OK, boom, that's, that's good enough for now. We can shape and change these later. If we have to. Now from this part of the hip, I'm going to this out to give them more musculature. There we go. We have some heroic legs. Now. We can also do the whole teardrop one here. We can erase these later. We all have to keep the whole lines connected. Another teardrop here. Same thing here. Teardrop. Right down the middle. And then on the outside. Now for the arms, I'm imagining that he's going to have a fist here on both sides. So I'm gonna start with his bicep on both sides. Now remember, you can just draw my whole loop representing his whole arm and you can start doing the division. The rendering after that. What I'm doing here is I'm going to make one side where you can see the top of his hand and the other side where you see the bottom of his hand. So that will change the positioning of the muscles. So watch this. All right, We had the man that bicep here connects to the shoulder. We have middle of his forearm. I'm going to put his thumb. Remember the thumb is comprised of two joints, but it also has this lower joint that moves around. And when you make a fist, it contracts, it becomes bigger. Finger here with this when you're making a fist and I'll do a section on hand. I'm just going to draw a box. And I'll just draw 1234 fingers. Then from here, I'm going to pop in the tricep. I'm gonna make this shoulder up here a little bit bigger. Kind of come down lower to the chest. There we go. Now on this side, same thing. I'm going to make this shoulder pop down. Lower, drop in a bicep. Tricep here. Divide down the middle. Now as we're doing the chicken bone of the arm, I'm going to go ahead and do these wraparound muscles here. And then draw a line or two. And then where the hand starts, I'm going to draw a hexagon. So it's going to look like 1234. This will be the middle finger or the index finger, middle finger, ring, career, Pinky, One 234. All going towards the wrist, thumb. Now, from the top, I'm going to go ahead and From the Top Center where the clavicle bone is, which is the top, the beginning of your collarbone. Basically going to draw a V outwards and then another V following that. That's representing his neck muscles. From there, I'll just draw on the shape of a head. And remember, we're gonna come back and erase this and find everything and make any adjustments that we need. Now, earlier I did this kind of like a line like this, but what I'm gonna do is to make this character more imposing on me there. From the word of shoulder starts here. I'm going to blow this out. Same thing here. And that's going to give him a more stoic superheroes desk musculature. Now from his, from the center here I'm gonna go ahead and create a chest. So I'll divide it here, hoop around. And I'll actually extend this chest a little bit inset inside the arms, inside the shoulder. Same here. Then from the outside of this original ribcage, what I'll do is draw in three lines, 123123. That's giving us our guidelines for our ribs. Now if you want to get more in depth, you can go from here. 1231, almost like a z 23. There's kind of a more superhero ask stance that is pretty standard for your captain America or whomever. So what we'll do now is on our next lesson, we'll come back and we'll erase this, and then we'll refine it and make it look just a little bit more detailed. And we'll go over the musculature, we'll go over I'll just walk you along. We'll probably start with the hawk and then we'll move over to this one. Okay guys, I'll see you in the next lesson. 31. Superhero Body Type: Pt: All right, welcome back. In this lesson. So our last lesson, just to kind of recap, we worked on this giant character here with the massive arms and their very wide, wide shoulders, smaller head. And we rendered it a little bit just to show what's what and whereas where we didn't get into the shades or anything like that, which maybe we can maybe we will. I don't know. I kinda like it where it is right now. With that said, let's jump over to his next character. I don't know who this is. Yeah, and I might make some changes as we're going along, but let's start. I'm going to start here rendering in a head. Now. I'm not going to pick anyone per se. I'm just going to go ahead and throw in head with a face on it, maybe a mask we'll see. All right. Am I actually erase and make some corrections on this one? We'll see, we shall see. What I like to do is from the outside of the head, just kind of draw in a neck. Putting some trap muscles. Those will connect with the top of the shoulders. Then I'm going to angle these chest down a little bit more. Let's take on straight across. And then from the center, some lines for his neck muscles come down. Now I'm dividing. I like to do sometimes is center. Instead of connecting those lines, I like to do a loop it back, hook back. This line to indicate that there's a bone here. This would be your clavicle collarbone. Could do the same thing on the outside towards the shoulder. Then. Imagine a line going down. Now we're dividing the chest. The chest, I'm going to draw curved line underneath that's going to be inset passed inside the shoulder and then work its way back up towards this clavicle beginning. Then in the middle we can have some striations if we dropped down, give indication of ribcage here, and then drop down even further down the center. Now what I'm doing at this point is I'm imagining some apps. Now you don't have to draw an ABS. Can imagine them here. You can shade them later if you're rendering. Now from, remember this area where the curve begins to go around. You can take aligning go directly towards the crotch. Same over here. This kind of encases everything. And then almost from this outside and do the same thing. You can connect it like this. And this gives you a nice anatomy going towards the crotch here. And then you can start working on your pelvis in your legs and all that good stuff. Now underneath the chest here I'm going to go ahead and encase it like this. That means that anything on the outside and probably going to shade in, it's gonna be in shadow. And it's giving the indication that there's muscles behind doing some work. Now, I'm going to render in a little bit of a hint of shoulder mass. Then I'm going to go ahead and throw in a bicep here. This dividing line. I'm gonna go ahead and pop in a tricep. Now why I like to remind you of is the tricep should curve behind the shoulder. You don't wanted to cover in front, you wanted to come behind. Then let's do this side here while we're at it. I'll drop a straight line here because we're seeing the top of his arm here. So you might see an indication of an elbow from the wrist, just creating the illusion of an arm. Same thing here. Now this will be as under arm. Here we go. Now you can come back and you take your eraser and now you don't have to have a lot of times I say don't connect all the muscles. You can leave this open. You can just give a hint. If you're drawing in, if you're rendering in the chest, you can just kind of loop in here. You can just shade this in. Same thing underneath here. Like I mentioned, I might have to do a whole course on just penciling in and creating textures and rendering. They can really master it. You'll learn a lot every time. So with that said, let's jump down to the torso area. I'm going to go ahead and create a belt right around here. You can see that when I do that, I'm curving this around. I imagine that it's wrapping around his waist. From the middle of this belt. Let's just put in a belt buckle like this, just kind of a rectangle. Drop a line straight down, you can come back and erase this. You can just create this area here. Is tidy. Yes, his his underwear over his pants, kind of like superman. Now, I'm going to jump over to his arm. Render in a thumb here. Remember thumb has just two joints. Then we'll put an index femur, 12341234. Then I like to do a couple of striations under his wrist. Just lines to indicate some strain like he's squeezing. There we go. Some rendering. On his other side. I'll just draw the arm facing outward. We'll do one finger here, one here, one here, one here. From here we'll just draw in some lines indicating more stress. Straining. I'll do outstretched fingers here. I'll relate this handout, probably come back and redo it, making it up on the fly. So a couple of more muscles. I'm going to go ahead and erase this and I don't like it. Don't be afraid of the eraser. If you don't like something, don't spend too much time on a mistake trying to fix it. If you don't like it, just erase it and start over. It's not a big deal. I'm going to give them a fist instead. Let's jump down to the legs. I'm going to start I know that his legs are pretty long. I'm going to start around this teardrop. I don't like to connect all the lines. I like to break them up. And then from back here I'm gonna connect this underneath this crutch to draw a couple of more striations here. Same thing in this leg. Right now all we're doing is rendering some muscles musculature just to shine it and show where it's going. Wrapping around the legs. I might even remove this area here. I'm going to pop it out so much. Very narrow waist, wide shoulders. Then we'll come back and we will work on his face a little bit. Zoom in. I really don't know what kind of face we're gonna make here. Will be creative. Let's just draw, since he's head on. I like to start in the middle where the eyes are gonna be. Then since it's smaller, I'm just gonna draw some areas where I think the I would be spaced almost equally apart from each other. Dropped the straight line down his nose. Now I'm given a longer nose then the Hawking character, because you've got a longer face. Then right here within mouth we'd go. Then from the mouth edges I'm gonna draw up to where I think the cheekbones would be. Then you can draw this straight down to the chin. Remember, we'll come back and we'll erase this, clean it up, make it look a little bit more legible, a little easier to read. Now, question is, do I want to have a mask on him or mask? Let's say the standard mask goes up like this around the base of his nose, comes over here, curves up, straight down. Could do that. You can put that could be a face. How about we go ahead and erase this here? We have enough details to know. We have enough information that we can work with here. Can really create any kind of phase what we want. So I'll start with this. I drop in the nose, will give him kind of a glaring look. Open mouth here. Will drop NHS from that chin. We'll work our way to the outside of the jaw line. Pull that back up underneath. His eye towards his ear. We're going to go ahead and put this indication of cheekbone. Remember, we're drawing really small here, so less details is more. I'll just go ahead and let's see. Do I want to give him a year? Is just thinking right now. Let's give him I'm going to go ahead and render in a year here. We have basically we have a character, but I'm not happy because I feel like there's more to add. So let's see what can I do? Pretty my thinking cap on as I'm sketching now. Let's see how about to make up a shape. How about we do draw your shape kind of like this, coming down more narrow. I'm going to go ahead and color this dark. Let's give him a mustache. Those curly mustache and goatee. Commedia. That's pretty that changed everything, right? Give him almost looks like a 0 type character. Let's give him a z. Z. Wrapping around. Just making this up here. We'll give him some gloves. Give him cape. Pull this back. Let's go ahead and give him a sword here. Angle this here so I can get it. Not using a ruler or anything. Right here. Continues cape down here. In this lesson, but we're getting creative. So it's fun. Give them some boots. Let's see. I would imagine puts would be colored black. Then. Has a hat. Jeez, I don't know. How does a hacker really don't know. Just imagining talking to a guy never draws hats. I'm not using any reference. Forgive me if this looks terrible. Give them a couple of more details. Let's say under their z here. Same thing here, z backwards. We just created a character, so not really created, but we embellished or came up with their own character design of a character that's already existing. We are 24 minutes and so I should stop. Hey, let's take a look. What do you think? Zoom in. Big, giant muscular 0. No idea. We're going to come up with that. Anyway. You could see, I think you get the gist of this lesson. I hope it helped you even throw in a little bit of character design. If we were gonna render, I'd probably start shading in the Cape. I start accentuating the muscles. Will do a rendering course soon enough. But I think this is, this lesson has gone long enough for you guys. I hope that you got something from it. I hope you had fun. I know I did. And stay tuned. We have more or less than to come. And if you have any suggestions, please send me a message, email, or you can even following message me a DM me on Instagram at Van Orden r.com, little at sign CAN OR ART not.com. Just at Van Orden or sorry. Okay. Guys, have a great day. Bennelong. Long day for me. I will see you soon. 32. Bonus! Composition, Layout & Design: Okay, This is a bonus lesson and this one is for an upcoming course that I'm working on. It will be composition, layout, and design. What I want to do is I want to help you take all of your knowledge. And I wanted to help you to be able to lay out a sketch and a dynamic and cool way, action and all that stuff. So without further ado, what I've done here is if we were to get rid of this, is I've just done a quick perspective, one-point perspective shot. And all I did was actually redo it for you is I drew a line straight across here, little vanishing point, and I just free handed this. You can do the same or if you're using pencil and paper, you can use a ruler. If you're using Procreate. Procreate has its own perspective grid tool that you can use. But I'm kind of old school. I like to freestyle. And so there I created a grid like this. And then what I did after that is I threw on some characters in action. So let's go ahead and lower the opacity on this. Lower the opacity on this. At this point, I've drawn a couple of characters. And since this is a bonus, I'm not gonna spend too much time because we're going to have a whole course on it. But this is the fun part. It's, right now you're learning superhero anatomy. You're learning simplifying shapes and putting them down so that things look a little bit more dynamic. If you've gotten this far and you've taken every single segment or section of this course. You should be a lot better than when you started with this. All we're doing is let me go ahead and switch to a blue. A couple of rules to keep in mind. We're gonna have a whole course on this in the future. So don't worry if you forget. But your horizon line is basically your eye view. This is where your cameras, this is how, this is your height. This is you standing up looking at this picture coming out, which means anything above this. You're gonna see underneath. You're going to see an up-shot. Anything below. You're gonna see on top. So these are types of things that you want to keep in mind when you're laying out your sketch. And then ultimately what you're gonna do is you're going to, you're gonna keep going with that layout and you're gonna keep shaping and molding your characters so that you can create a composition that looks cool. When you get to this point, you start drawing buildings in the background, which you'll get there, or speed lines. You know. It's gonna be a lot of fun because you're gonna start creating action and movement. And to me, if you're thinking about comic books or animation, or storyboards or film or video game design. You're thinking action and movement. So with that said, you know, this is a simple one-point perspective. But you can see how much you can actually do just by twisting and turning. And what I'll do is I'll emphasize that right now. So let's switch over to a red. So a couple of things. Look at this. I created a shoulder here and I shoulder here. I've created an action line. We get an action line here. We have a leg that's coming out this way. This leg back here is pulling away in the distance. We have his head tilted downward. Because the further down you tilted, the more impact it's going to have if we were to raise his head let's say if we were to raise his head up here, you could do that. But it's not going to have the same impact as dropping this head down. This is just one of the rules of creating a dynamic sketch, is your learning movement. You're learning placement. You're learning how to create composition, which is looking at the shape here. We have a triangle. The triangle is the most common form of composition there is. You want to create shapes. I didn't draw a triangle first when I did this. But I did imagine different points. I imagine a head point right on, right on center line. I imagine this Batman head down here. And then I imagine Superman up here. Because it creates a dynamic composition where we know like instantly, even if we know who these characters are and we know what their powers are, we know that flash is the fastest runner. We know that Batman is kind of like this dark shadowy creature with a, with a cape flowing behind them. We know that Superman can fly and he can shoot laser beams from his eyes and he'll be up top. You'll flying above and kind of overseeing everything, right? So these are the types of things that you want to have in your mind when you're sketching. There's a whole process to this. There's a whole way of thinking behind the thing. The thing is this can all apply for anything like, okay, let's start from scratch. Okay? I'm gonna go ahead and use the same exact format. But imagine that we're going with a more stagnant sketch. Like let's say that we wanted to create a character up close and personal. So we have a character here. We're using the same exact perspective lines, but this picture is a little bit more stagnant. And then we can put another character behind. Now. I'm just placing characters. This is just information in another character back here, which would be taller. Since we're looking above the horizon line, we're looking, It's kind of almost like an up-shot for this character. What you could do is you can put a hand here, a hand here. You can see I'm drawing ultrafast for two reasons. One, I'm trying to capture the information that's in my mind right now and put it down because it's just information is just data too. Because I'm instructing a course and I don't want to take too much of your time. You have to train yourself to draw fast input information don't pass because I know that can come back and refine. Now, we have one hand here. Imagine who is this? 123123. We already know. We already know. Same thing. So these are types of compositional layouts and design. And you want to kind of be able to recognize characters right away because a lot of this stuff is subconscious. If you look at any character, like, even like Mickey Mouse or, you know, you can recognize them by their silhouette, and that's how you want your characters to be. So here we go. We've created another layout with the same The same background perspective. Now another one that you could do, how much time are we at here? We're at nine minutes. I'm going to do a quick one. This one, let's say just top of my head here. I'm just going to draw a circle. Action line. Foot, foot. Who is this? Arm, arm, arm back here. Drop this head down here. Why? Because it makes it more impactful. Look what we've done, who, whoever we laid out here. Well, it doesn't have to be perfect. We might adjust and change all this. But at least we were telling the message to our mind, who were trying to draw. When you do that, you can put the information down faster because your mind is going to feed you the information. Of course, you can look at reference and all that good stuff and I'm not against using reference. But if you're wanting to become a quick artist, you want to be able to do this stuff really fast and put it down on paper as fast as you can. If you look at your favorite artists and you watch them draw, you're going to see that the first step that they do as an under drawing, they are really just trying to capture as much as they can. Now you can shrink this down. And they're trying to capture whatever they candidates in their mind. And then from there trying to it down on paper before they lose that image. And then they know that they can come back and refine. That's not a problem. Okay, Then here you can put like buildings, rooftops here. More buildings here. Keep it, keep it going. Do some buildings in the background. You can make it even more dynamic. I'm really just touching on this stuff. Same thing here. You can create a character that's really, really opposing are imposing, I should say. Looking up at them. Don't worry, I'm creating a whole course on this stuff. This is just a quick little sample of how we can lay things out. Then we can have a character here. Close up. Then we're going to have some other characters in the background. This is typical comic book style you're creating. This is a diamond diamond composition. I'm happy to teach you how to do this. So stay tuned for that. I'm going to end this bonus lesson here. I don't want you to go too deep off the rails of superhero anatomy in a simplified form. So keep this all in mind. I'm happy. I'm really proud of you if you've made it this far and you haven't skipped any other lessons. Go back and watch them again if you have any questions, send them over to me, Let me know what you think and if you want me to add anything to the course, send me a message. You can find me on Instagram, or you can send me a message here wherever you want to do. I'd be happy to help. There we go. Keep up the good work and I will see you in future courses.