How to Draw with Light and Shadow - Rendering Techniques

1. Introduction to this Class: Hello everyone. My name is Robert Marzullo, and I'll be an instructor for this class, how to draw with light and shadow. In these lessons, you're going to learn how to control light and shadow. We're first going to start with some basic practice activities, get you warmed up, you thinking about some various concepts. Understand that not all rendering needs to be pristine and clean. Rendering can be more broken up, and it can add lots of energy and texture. The main thing is to think about gradients, and again, the transition from light to dark. Will learn how to keep your light source in mind as you develop your forms. This understanding will help you to draw and think more three dimensionally about your illustrations. You will work through various project files to implement what you've learned and help you to commit these concepts to memory. You're also welcome to share the project files with me along the way so that I can gauge your progress. Also, let me know if there's any way that I can improve upon this class and the content for you. As well as answer any questions you might have. Thank you for considering my class, and I can't wait to see your progress. Good luck with your art and bye for now. 2. Basic Fade Practice: Welcome back. So now what I'd like to talk to you about is really what I call A B fades. Okay? So just picture that if you labeled the bottom B and the top A, vice versa, it really doesn't matter, could be a down here, B up here, something like that. A B fade. And all I really want you to focus on is that we're going to try to transition fades from the bottom to the top from dark to light. This is just an exercise that I like to do, and hopefully this will help you feel more comfortable with the projects that we're going to do later. But essentially, you got to realize that you can create fade all sorts of ways with all sorts of lines that you make. They don't all have to be super clean. They can be messy in areas. And they can be cross hatched in all sorts of ways as well. So I like experimenting with concepts like this so that I can get a nice range of ideas that I can use, textures, rendering styles. And I think at first, a lot of what we look at is, you know, how clean can we make the lines? A lot of artists will get caught up in that. And it's okay. You definitely want to try to get better at rendering and line control. So what I'm doing here is I'm making a bunch of short little marks in succession that are well within my ability of control in relation to my hand position. So I'm resting the base of my hand against the screen, and I'm just pulling you know, a comfortable distance, where if I tried to do it like this, a whole thing is still do it, but now it's getting out of my comfort zone. You can see by the ends there. And likewise, if I go like this, now I have a really hard time controlling the lines distance side by side. So again, using the distance that's appropriate, and so with digital, that means zooming in and out to getting to a comfortable area. Sometimes rotating the canvas, which I do quite a bit, you'll see some of that. And then sometimes speed helps, sometimes slowing down helps. Varying up the way that you create the strokes based on speed. And there's a few different ways that we could implement the change in tone. So as I come up to the middle of this box and say that's where I want my fade to start occurring, right? I could either break up the lines, start adding more space in between the lines, something like that. I could also cross hatch further down into the base to give the O comparative darkness, the contrast, basically, I could put that at the base of this. What I mean by that is I could come back down here, and I could start cross hatching a different direction. You see, I'm not being too awfully careful. I can go into the other part of the illustration if I want. You don't want to get too caught up in the perfectionist mentality when you're doing exercises. At that's what I tend to think about because I want to explore ideas with a sense of freedom and have fun with it. Because if I can do that, that means I can sit here longer and create longer. But if I'm so caught up in perfectionism and, my lines just aren't right, and how am I ever going to get good if I can't control my line weight or whatever? Like, you don't want to get too caught up in that. Just allow yourself to have some fun with it. You know, an experiment, try a different layer and try going through all these lines, even. You know, you could put another passive lines that are bigger. Obviously, more intense lines as far as more thickness. That's another way to get this this bit of fade here. And so the goal here is just to generate a bunch of lines and get this area to start fading. So just so I don't bore you to death with this, I'll speed it up just a little bit, and I'll keep narrating to explain the process, but you can see it's really going to be more of the same until I get up to this point where I want to start seeing a fade, and then I will do, some variation with these lines. So let's go ahead and speed this up just a bit. Okay, so again, more of the same and as you see, I'm just picking different angles, drawing the same type of lines over and over, you could literally copy and paste ses if you're working digitally and you wanted to move a little bit faster. I personally like it. I mean, there's a certain amount where if it takes too awfully long, I will do whatever it takes to save time, like recycling old illustrations, things like that on a light table or digital. But There's a certain part of it where I don't know, I just find it to be a little bit relaxing. So putting on some good music and then just getting to it. A lot of times the repetitive stuff just seems like it takes longer than it really does. So usually if I pay attention to the clock after the fact, trying not to look at it while I'm doing it, I usually am happy to see that it didn't take as long as I actually thought. It's just that time sort of slows down for me as I'm doing repetitive tasks. But again, it is a very useful technique, and it's something that I like starting here with people because I like to show them that if you can draw a couple of straight lines in succession, then you can do this, and they don't have to be this straight. It's very It's very accessible to anybody. Now just cross hatching it to get that next level of depth and darkness. Remember, you don't have to even just do this with two angles. You could do this. If you've got more patients than me, you could do this multiple multiple times and really get a nice rich sense of gradient and texture to this. This is an effect that I've seen for years, and I absolutely love it in my work. It gives a nice contrast to a lot of different areas in the work. Yeah, just very versatile and good to know. Okay, so now for the next one, similar concept, but what I want to show you here is that you really don't have to even use lines if you don't want, so you could do stiple shading. Now, you can sit here and do these little dots over and over. And if you've got a ton of patients that that can be fun to do, you can also just do these little scribbles. So I think that's a little faster. And kind of a bit more fun in my own mind, I guess. But similar concept, we're just going to start with a heavier version of this. This can mean more pressure on top of these little squiggles, or it can just mean more of those tighter in succession. It's still a form of stipple shading and can be, you know, great for all sorts of areas within your work to apply texture and grit and imperfections. Yeah, the stuff actually is pretty useful. Same thing, I'll work up the side to establish that AB fate I spoke about. Just as we get up here, we can start to break that away and get lighter and lighter. Don't worry your scribbles don't have to look like my scribbles. They can be entirely unique to you. And I really like doing stuff like this because there's almost no way you could mess it up. And even if you did, you could go back with negative drawing, a little bit of white out, and you could do these little squigglies in the opposite direction. But again, this is going to be pretty repetitive, so I will lapse and expediate the process. So let's do that now. Now, this one, I would say took me most tried my patients the most. Let's just put it that way. But remember that you don't need to do this every single time. I mean, some of you are absolutely going to love even doing this, right? There's people that just really get into pointosm and stiple shading, and they have that connection with it, that patience. Hopefully you're like that. Maybe there's times you have that and times you don't as well, but just remember that you can save all of this and you really can reuse it. It's your, there's ways to use it as traditional piece, scan it in, save it as a layer, and again, put them in folders. This stuff. If you're bored, you could fill up a page of this stuff with a bunch of varieties, and save them where it's accessible, and it can be, again, a tremendous time saver. You can see that now I'm starting to fade that off, just breaking up the dots, spacing them out more, scribbles, I should say. Again, you could play with all sorts of variety to the types of scribbles, the types of marks that you make and really explore this idea. But it's simple and fun to do, and again, I think this is another one that's pretty accessible. To most people with a basic understanding. So we'll stop here and head over to our next lesson. 3. Rendering with Broken Lines: And welcome back. So for this third one, I want to show you how we can use lines again. But this time, what we're going to do is we're actually going to we're going to do a couple of things. So I want to get you in the habit of seeing what you can accomplish with thick to thin lines. So starting more heavily at the base where the shadow would be, fading off as you go upwards. Okay? And there's lots of ways you could do this. If you're working digitally, you could hold a software like this, you can actually hold shift. You know, I'm sorry. That's not the software. That's another one. So used to using different softwares. Here you'd have to use the ruler. And this would be more time consuming, but it's something you can do if you feel like your hand eye coordination or your control, I should say, isn't quite there, and you could even copy these, right? You could draw one and copy them across, or I would recommend maybe draw one, copy it over, different varying widths, and then get in between it and fill them in B I personally, I've kind like the hand drawn look. So even if I'm going to do something overly digital, I try to mix it up, okay? So that's one way you can do it. If you need a ruler, if it makes you feel more comfortable, I do want you to also make time to practice just doing this. And so all I'm doing there is I'm kind of sculpting the line. They're not all going to be perfect. In fact, none of them will be perfect. But that doesn't matter. It's about just getting a kind of organic feeling to the lines, I think. I'm going to actually take this a bit further in the way that I want to show you with this particular one. We'll do some cleaner ones later on, but then this one, I'm actually going to purposely bump it up, like that. I think that's a great way to look at it almost immediately because what it does is it's easier, for the most part. It's a lot harder to focus and get this nice pristine clean taper. I think anyways. I guess we're all different there. But but I also like the texture and the imperfections that this provides. This is great for tattered material, brick, busted up concrete or pipes, or you name it, anything that's weathered. So we're going to do that one. But again, keep all those variables in mind that you can use a ruler, that you could draw one and then edit it if that makes you help you to get through this bit of the tutorial. But don't let that always be your go to. I think it makes sense to practice drawing by hand and developing your skills this way as well. And don't be in a rush to do it, be patient with yourself. Yours also can be messier as far as these brakes that I'm creating. I think these breaks add a lot of energy and effect to it. Again, it's actually easier. Oh, by the way, you could actually draw in another layer beneath this and Yeah, you can hold shift with the software. I'm sorry. So shift. I must have held it down properly. I just thinking, I use this all the time for grids. But you could draw a grid like that on a previous layer. Same thing with traditional, you could draw a grid with your ruler. Roller rulers are great for that. And then you could put it beneath the other sheet of paper on a light table. If you got one. Some people will just use their screen if it's bright enough or a window. That all works. Just be creative with it. But just these little line breaks. You can even stagger them. You can bring them off to the side a little bit. They don't need to be completely straight up and down. But hopefully you can see that even by doing this, we're starting to get a little bit of fate and you could go back down to the base and you can widen these a bit. Right? You could even go down to the base and widen them and create another shape. So if I go with a curvature like this, again, I'm creating another I don't know if you call that a negative shape. I guess you would. And that can be really fun. You could go through this and you could do a wave and you could taper these so going stronger at the base, but maybe lightening them right as they come up to that other shape, and I would obviously put that in with another layer so I didn't have to erase it. See, I mean, there's all sorts of neat and inventive ways that you can make this rendering more interesting to look at dimensional, your own, you know, your own style, your own imaginative way of piecing it together. There's just so many possibilities with this stuff. And something about doing these little breaks makes it a lot more relaxing for myself. Again, we could all be different there. But it's almost like the breaks give you a break. They give you a way out more easy going way to look at it where when we're trying to be so clean and pristine with our lines and our drawings, again, this could be more personal to me, but definitely what I feel is that I will get a little bit more anxious or self critical of what I'm doing. There's times that I want things to be very clean, so I just do that, but I also take breaks from that way of thinking, maybe move over to something that is a little bit more gritty and lends to imperfections. It's one of the reasons why I really enjoy loose sketching, especially as it pertains to figures and scenes. I would rather sit there and sketch all sorts of rough ideas because I'm in a non critical part of my illustrative process, and it basically is more forgiving. On my you know, I'm less likely to enter that perfectionist mentality, which is, I don't know, more look at the more I do this stuff, the more I think that's a very destructive way to be at times, you know, maybe everything in balance. But don't stay there too awfully long. Learn to critique your work to get better, but then get right back to loving everything that you do and realizing that the long term journey is where the transformation happens, not the overly critical. I've got to be better tomorrow type mentality. That's a sure fire way to drain the energy right out of it, I think. Again, you can see, I'm just randomly placing these. I'm starting to get to where at the very tip. I'm spacing them out further. You could go back and put little dots and blips here and there. You can really push that This one is obviously a much faster approach, but I'm still going to time lapse this next little part just to speed it up for you. Again, it's more of the same. So let me do that right now and we will get this part wrapped up. I just got to admit that a lot of times when I'm doing a technique like this, I do see an opportunity to just copy one side and move it over to the other. But even if I do that with a layer or even folding the paper over and light tableing the other side, I just go back with some white out and I make sure to make it look a little bit more natural, a little bit more hand done. But again, I'm always looking for time savers when it is something overly repetitive. You can probably tell that all the three effects, this one was actually much quicker. Okay, so there we go. And then also, like I mentioned, another thing you could do is you could practice adding a couple of things really. You could add some lines this way. And again, they don't need to be as clean as you might think. So really, they just add a little bit of texture. But in a sense, it's sort of like cross hatching because, you know, the more you add of these at the base, and then slowly fade those up, if that's your goal, then you'll get a sort of darkness at the bottom. And a little bit lighter effect at the top and then you could break this texture off like this. So there's all sorts of ways you could approach this. So it doesn't need to be just 45 degree angles and things like that. You can really get super creative with this. You could go heavier with the textured lines at the base like this. And then you can also come back with your negative lines. You could go on top of these and make them pop a little bit more. You could do something like that. You'll see this effect a lot with veins, just that little bit that might catch the light. I'm not going to leave that, but that's just another thing to practice, and then another thing is just to come back through the tips of the part that you want to fade more. Again, you could do that over here. Same ideas. You could put negative shapes and squigglies all through there. So all of this stuff is just great practice and gives you hopefully ideas for different ways to render. Again, these are just on a linear or what I call an AB fade. But now what I'm going to do, we'll go to the next lesson. We're going to talk more about wrapping certain lines around a spherical object and talk about some of the lighting terminology. So with that, let's move on to our next lesson. 4. Single Light Source: Yeah, we'll come back. So now, we'll talk about doing a similar sort of effect, mainly just cross hatching, and again, play with all sorts of variables as far as line weight, thickness, length, stutter stepping the line, line brakes, you know, all that good stuff. But in this case, what I want to do is first think about this as a single light source. Okay? So if the light source, if we were to orbit around this, it's my really poor orbit there, and the light was, we'll say right here. Okay, so it's going to radiate towards the object, something like this, right? And based on that, we're going to get some oval like that. Somewhere in there. That's the idea for the first one. As far as orientation of the light. Again, I find it hard to just say, Well, here's a light right here because you don't know if it's on the opposite side. And if it's on the opposite side of this, we'll do another example of this, but you're going to get what's called rim lighting, or edge lighting. It's because it's on the opposite side and the light can't wrap all the way around. Same idea is like look at the phases of the moon, right? So with this one, we're going to say that our area of influence is something like this. And then we're going to start to wrap our rendering lines around it. Now, if you're not comfortable doing that and, you can't say taper or align and make a curve at the same time, you'll see mine aren't going to be perfect either. But if you don't feel comfortable with that, remember, just like the example furest to the left, you can still get away with a similar effect with a pretty straight lined approach. I'll just start there, do a quick example of this, just to help out those that aren't ready to maybe curve those lines because I know it can feel a bit tricky. And I'll even do this messy just to show you because again, I think it's important to be aware that you can still achieve this effect with something as simple as a bunch of little lines. And over time, you just get better and better even controlling this, right? So I don't do this one as much, it's probably going to come out a bit wonky, but that's all right. The only rule I really follow here is that every time I go over a given area, I just try to change the angle of the lines. I don't even know if that's entirely necessary, and I'm definitely not doing it to some sort of perfectionist. It's not like I'm not hitting other lines that might be parallel or breaking that rule. It's not a rule, essentially. I'm just trying to do that as I move through this. And so I can do that two or three times, probably more. But I usually land to about three, maybe four, as far as overlapping angles. So say you get it to about right here. Okay? And then my goal is to create more of that fade. Right? So say the next portion is faded. I could go about it a couple ways. One, I could just come over to the very edge, and I could add some heavier lines. I'm just going to go all the way around like this, nice and even. Right? And I don't have to stop there. I can really just keep criss crossing and darkening that edge. Likewise, as I come up this way, I can separate the lines more. Really just start to put less pressure on the pen, applies to whatever you're using. So I can just break those up pretty easily. And again, I can go back with negative lines if I kind of push it too far or, you know, maybe I have too harsh of a line right through here. I can break up that line, generate more of a fade just by using some negative lines to the direction. So again, if you feel like it's a little bit difficult for you to get the lines we're going to generate next, go ahead and give that a shot. Again, there's no rhyme or reason to this stuff, or maybe there's a rhyme or reason, but there's no one way to get it done, ok? There's lots of different ways. And I actually really like that look right there. And again, there's a time and a place for it. So if I was to I guess I'll just do the next one. I can reuse these. If I was to take this and say, Okay, but I want there to be, the style that I like is going to be the thick to thin wrapping around it, It's just one particular way to think about it. So I'm just re pressurizing that line, basically sculpting that line, and then letting off it and continuing around that curve. I wouldn't say that this particular curve matches the sphere completely or anything like that. Is just my approximation. To me, it's better than just going flat with it. But that's again, just my own perception of it, right? I just what I'm trying to accomplish, what I think I can do and what I think might look cool, what I'm used to doing, because I've done it on lots of spherical similar type forms. So whenever I render anatomy, I try to think of it more spherically. Not entirely a sphere for every portion, obviously, but it's got spherical aspects to the form. And so this is the way that I typically render. So something like that. And again, your years can be wider, they can be more broken up, they can be all sorts of things. I put a very thick one right by a thin one there. That's kind of noticeable. Maybe generally try not to do it as noticeably as I did there, Go for a not consistency, but whenever you have a really noticeable contrast in anything, it does become sort of a focal point. So if you get those kind of oddities in your work, that could be hy, that basically you're putting something that's too noticeably different right next to something else. So if I was to do a very Fortis, if I did a very clean line. Let's try to do a clean line here. As I say that, I start to mess it up. Go back. Imagine that. So I do a nice clean line, something like this. And then all of a sudden, I do a very thick pumpy line. All right? Well, that becomes a noticeable focal point pretty quick. It's got to be probably even a little bit more dramatic than what I just did there. But it does do that to your work. So be careful. It's not that you can't have inconsistencies. They're all going to be a little inconsistent. Just try to balance certain things out. Le line thickness is probably a good one. You see, I'm really shifting my curve here. Didn't mean to do that. I probably should have picked a point of reference of, say, maybe a center and pointed towards that because you can see that by here, I would have been more like this. Let me do that. I'm going to leave that dot there, and I'm going to go back just a little bit. Where did I really start going on? Probably about there. Okay. Let's try that again. It's a little better. I just want that curve and now at least I'm trying to somewhat point it to that dot. I'm not trying to go exact to it and get too awfully critical. I do see that I'm starting to suffer on my line width ale bit. Now I can go back and edit that just a bit and bring these together. I can do that as an afterthought. But I'd rather slow down just a bit and catch myself in the process if I can. Over here, I'm going to start to need to taper it down anyways. I'm going to start to do that. I think it's really the angle in which I'm pulling these lines, which is causing me to get a little too much spacing. It's another thing with that whole finding your comfort zone and rotating the page. There's nothing wrong with that. It's always an effective way to make sure you're in control of your lines there as best you can. Okay, something like that. Then now I'll cross hatch it. Basically, any number of ways we could do that, but I'll just pick an angle here. I'm also going to go a little bit thinner since I made these initial ones thick anyways. I'm just going to cross hatch on this angle. Sometimes I really zero in on the little diamonds that I'm creating. If you notice all those little diamonds that are being made by the overlaps of these two lines or these two angles of types of lines, but obviously a lot more than two lines. But anyways, that's something you can pay attention to. It's like that secondary pattern that you're making at something you can pay attention to. But just like that, we now have a little bit darker tone. And a bit of aid there. And then with this, I would definitely want to come back. I feel like these are a little too inconsistent here. So just some negative lines right through here. I can even bring those right down into the overlaps. And I don't know, personally, I really like that kind of look. I mean, there's again, many ways you could take it, many ways you could think about it. But those are both a single light source with the light sources closer to us, and probably what I would consider more of a diffused material. And so diffuse just means the light hits it, and it disperses like kind of, across. So if you think of something specular, like a bowling ball, the light hits, and it's a very intense point light, almost a spotlight kind of look on one point. L the light would just go like oh, I had to be on black here. The light would just look like this, like a glare, right? So that's specular, but diffuse when the light can hit and it can travel across You know, it just fades across the object because it's not so specular where it's constricted. So chrome is specular. I would say, a T shirt, cotton is more of a diffused. So to me, this is more of a diffused and a more softer way to light something. And again, with that, you're going to generally get more fade, so you could do a lot more of a transitional of dark to light. You could have a lot of medium tone here. You could have some smaller little bit. You could really carry that a lot further than I did here. But hopefully that gives you some ideas right there. So now we're going to go over to the next lesson and I want to talk more about Cor light and our core shadow and how that occurs and how we can illustrate that. With that, let's move on. 5. Dual Light Source: And welcome back. With this example, I want to get into showing you more about what I think is a lot more popular for the most part. Maybe the single light sources, but dual light sources are really neat for illustrations. They just make things pop. They can allow you to bring in a secondary or multiple colors on each side of the objects. It's just super effective. What makes this happen and I would say most things are reflective, at least a little bit. On that always opened my mind up to this is as you start to digitally paint, even sculpt, and things like that, you realize that skin is more reflective than you would assume, especially as you play with these little sliders and stuff. And I never thought of skin as being reflective. But the more you study photography and lighting and try to illustrate it, you realize it's actually quite reflective, and that's why it can look so dynamic and cinematic shots with the proper lighting. Well, so how does this occur? So it has a sense of reflectivity, that's part of it, and it could be skin or anything else that's mildly or relatively reflective, and most things are. And so how does it occur? Basically, you end up with a light source on one side. So again, if we were to think about that orbit I spoke about and our light ball being like right here or whatever sun, and it's radiating light, and you can think of the radiant lines as perspective lines really, and it hits, but it can't possibly wrap all the way around, as we've talked about, and that would give us a single light source. But what if either I don't know, you're out in space, and there's another light source, or this light is actually catching light from even the initial light source, but it's on just the right angle where it can bounce back. But we'll say in space, you got multiple light sources, multiple stars, things like that. And then all of a sudden, you get bounce light. So Bounce light or two light sources, in this case, will radiate, and then it's almost like they kind of fight back and forth is the way I look at it. So you're going to have one that's more dominant and one that's secondary. So with that, they basically create a light source on both sides in this middle area is what's referred to as a core shadow. So that's CORE, forgive my bad. Writing here, core shadow. Okay? There's that. And I'll illustrate this for the material for you to know the terminology if you don't already know it. I'm sure most of you do. And then we render from that point outward, however we choose, and we get this very dimensional. This doesn't look great, by the way, but we'll get there. We get this very dimensional thing. Now, the other way to think about it is this is that this is like this would be more like skin or objects in your room right now. That really what happens a lot of times is that you end up with I'll draw it on this side, I guess. You end up with something like this. So you have a light source. Again, a little let's just do a sun. That's easier, right? Little sun there. Or a light bulb in a room, or the sun's coming through your window. But it bounces off the table here. What's call this a table. It comes down here, hits the table, right? And then it bounces off this like a mirror and hits the other side. That's where you get, again, this idea that you have a single light source here, bounce light here, shadow here, and something that's a bit more dimensional to look at. And then based upon if it's very specular, you even get a bit of chrome reflectivity through these areas. It doesn't completely become shadow here, but it can get pretty dark right through the middle there, and this can break off, like how we're going to fade this as lines, you can even do the same thing with the chrome like stuff, and then down here, you'd probably do, you'll see this a lot of times, especially in comics, we'll fade like that. All of that is because of the way that light bounces around, refracts of things, some are more specular, some are more diffuse. That's the concept of it right there. There's other things to think about as well. Like, for instance, the The difference from a drop shadow to a cache shadow. I'll do that just real quick. And again, I'll illustrate this for your written material, your sheets. But that's a drop shadow. If you just took this and it was hovering above something and it casts a shadow downwards, it would be a drop shadow. The difference from that to a cache shadow is a cache shadow is elongated like perspective. There's ways to figure this stuff out. I'll be honest, a lot of times it's just better to eyeball it, I think, but there are actual ways to map this out in perspective. It usually requires finding the edges and dropping them to the ground plane. But we'll just do a down and dirty version for now. And then usually what happens with a cat shadow is that it starts a little bit darker, and then it fades. Which makes total sense because it's dissipating because the intensity of the shadow where the lights block the most would be right under the object blocking the light. And then as it fades away, what's going to happen? You're going to get more atmospheric light and bounce light to start blending this off. Okay? So all these things kind of tie together and start to give you a better understanding for how you might utilize light. And actually, this would probably be it wouldn't be at the very edge, by the way, I'd be under it just a little bit. If you put it to the very edge, it looks a bit less dimensional, right? Anyways, there's that. Now what I want to do is illustrate the dual light source for you. We'll go and keep it the same curvature as the other examples. For this, what I would just do is essentially sketch in an area of influence. Play around with this and where you might want this. And then again, for this bounce light. And so the bounce light, you could do something like this, but it would look like the light source is on the opposite side and you're getting a bit of rim lighting. I don't particularly like that. I would say it makes more sense to do an oval like this, or maybe it's just the way that I like to do it. I'm not sure. We're going to do something like that there. And again, this is another thing where you can play with all sorts of variables, right? You don't have to use the shapes I'm using here. I want you to experiment. I want you to also think about when you bring these lines around, getting that last little bit of curve right there, or more noticeable curve right there, gives it that feeling that you're wrapping around that sphere, right? So don't get in the habit of just going real straight across. It basically kills the spherical nature of the form. So I would keep that in mind. And then, again, you can play around with these. You can move these around, especially if you working digitally, and you can find, maybe you don't want that much core shadow. Usually the core shadows aren't very big or I don't know if you want to say usually there, or if I should say usually there, but from what I notice. So I'm going to take it like that. And then I'll go and clean this up. Turn this, so it's easier to draw that. I'm going to render this anyway, so I don't need the line to be too awfully perfect. And I'm drawing a line through here because these aren't connected at this point. Number two, you could fill this in a lot larger than I'm doing. By larger, I mean, you could have the core shadow take up a greater percentage of the spherical shape, and you could use negative lines back in the opposite direction. If you're more comfortable, you could fill this in all the way up here and then you would use white lines in reverse. Erase it back. All sorts of ways to do it. Now, I'm going to take this and render up towards the light source. Actually what I'll do is I'm going to put a dot here and a dot here, and I'm going to render towards both of those. And you can pick whatever lines, whatever type of lines you want for this. I'm going to go with these tapered ones, thick to thin, pointing towards that area. Okay. And let me go ahead and time lapses. It's just going to be more of the same, and I'll render all the way across here and then around like this. And then cross hatch up. So let's go ahead and time lapses. Okay. So I'll just continue bringing these lines around, trying to keep some curvature. And then once I get to the center, you could consider that the apex of the sphere from our angle. Then I'll try to wrap around to the other direction. So this is really a good hand eye coordination or hand mechanics coordination, I should say, dexterity and getting an ability to rotate lines around I don't know. I just feel like it's a good exercise. So hopefully you'll see the benefit in it. This area is much easier because there's smaller, more abrupt strokes, but same thing, pointing to that point of reference. And then now we'll crosshatch that. I find this to be much easier. I felt like it was a lot harder to do the initial lines. This part is much easier. I also break those away as they get to the light source side. So you can play around lots of variations with that as well. All right. So there we go. And remember, you could still come back with this, say this harsh line through the middle was a bit too much for you. You could practice coming in. Actually, let me do this even on a separate layer. But you could practice coming in here and trying to soften up that line. Probably say go with the direction. Pretty much. I mean, you could take it in a different direction. Again, play around with the variables, but I think it's easy enough to just go like this and continue some of the lines we already got. Sometimes I'll draw right through the previous lines above, maybe another angle right here. But I will admit that this portion usually works better if you do it all throughout as another layer, has a bit more consistency to it or something, and it also works better if you do it with a style like this. If it's already me, criss crossing over top back and forth, doesn't really matter. It's kind you know, easier to do that, I guess, but same thing here, I could probably go across this way. You'll find certain ways that you texture will work better for doing this negative after effect. If I continue this as a starburst kind of look, it should work. I don't know. I don't know if that helps or not, but it's another way to look at it. Again, if you're trying to soften up that edge, if I take that away, more of a harsh edge. I don't mind it. I actually like a lot of my comic work to be rendered that way. But there are times that go back and add, again, some of those negative lines at the very end, just to tweak it a bit. So we'll go ahead and stop here. Hopefully, this gives you some nice warm ups and ideas to practice. Let's move on to our next lesson. 6. Drawing the Arm Model: Everyone, welcome back. When this one, we're going to talk about shadowing and rendering. What I'd like to do is first start with some basic ideas. I'm just going to draw a portion of an arm, a leg, and we'll render those because it's a lot of what you're going to be doing when you draw a comic card anyways, but it can apply to all sorts of things. Forgive my little glitch there, updated my system and now it drops in a little bit of text as I'm drawing, not a big deal, but it's a little distracting, so to be aware of it. But essentially, when we go to shadow anything, it's really a similar idea of creating basic ideas of, where the lights emanating and hitting, where it's bouncing and hitting elsewhere. So I think that when we go to draw characters, there's a lot to consider, right? A lot of different volumes and shapes, and a lot of areas that could be bouncing from. So and then you get into stylistic choices as well. So there's just a lot to consider. And I think that's why I can get really super confusing rather quickly. But what we'll do is we'll just draw some basic models basically to work from. That's all this is, I'm just constructing some models that we can shadow and play around with. You see, I'm using the basic cylinder structure. You don't have to do that. I like to. It just gives me a little bit of idea where these directions and volumes are going, and then I can drop anatomy over top. I've got other lessons on that. Again, that's not really what today's lesson is about. But I figured I would show you the process and build up just because. And so that'll give us a basic arm to work with. And then you can get in here and erase some of your cylinder drawings and stuff like that. Scale up this brush, get that out of there. And so we'll start with this one first, and in the next lesson, I'll do a portion of a leg, and we'll use different shading methods for each area. Maybe even incorporate a little bit of suit designs. I'll probably do separate lessons on just suit designs that's been requested more than once. So always remember that reach out, let me know what lessons you want to know specifically, and I will get those on my list. So with this, we've got a series of shapes now to work with. And again, with anatomy, it can get tricky because you know, you could consider each shape individually, but you need to do that as well as think of the entirety of the arm, g, whatever it is, full character, right? So if you get too awfully confused by each area or maybe focused on each area, so you do this area, this area, this area, It can look really segmented and kind of weird. Um, no, some styles, it looks really cool, nonetheless. I mean, it really does play into a couple of things. And again, I think that's why it can be somewhat confusing because sometimes it breaks all the rules and looks really cool because of style. I think that generally, if you have a more overly stylistic interpretative thing going on, so lots of hard angles, lots of dramatic charcaturizations and the work, then you could probably get away with even more stylized shadowing and rendering as well because it just sort of like plays into the whole cartooning role of it all. It's like, that's definitely not realistic, so what does it matter? So where if you have a more realistic depiction of your characters, then maybe people sort of expect the light and shadow to be realistic as well. I don't think that's a rule. I'm just sharing with you my opinions about why that might, you know, people might expect a certain thing, like a certain directional pursuit to what you're doing. But so we've got this arm in place and say we, you know, just pick an area where light source is. And so I like to use a dimensional kind of representation. You could do something like this. I'll see this one done quite a bit. And so what it does is since you can see the three dimensional shape of the arrow, it makes you realize that we're sort of closer to the viewer at this point. If I was to do something like this, you don't know if that arrow is further away on the other side, closer to us. There's just no There's no orbital way to kind of depict that. Until you do something like this, you could put the orbit there. That's a little bit easier to discern as well. But you can see that this one now would actually reside somewhere over here, just higher up. But as far as the orbits concerned. And this matters because if you don't think of the light in a very spherical way, just like your subject matter, in this case, just a basic arm, then obviously, you're going to falter as you apply the light source. So what I would perceive is that at this point, this light is emanating down like this, and it is hitting, we'll say, at the highest point, you know, you got to think about the bicep area going around like this, right? Well, it has what I would consider an apex in relationship to the light, which would be probably right about there. So we could start with that concept. Now, I'm not saying I'm going to be able to focus in on that all the way through, but at least if I start there and say, Okay, let's say the highest point of the muscle that it's hitting right there is that little plus sign, and that's our peak of our light source. Well, now we can start to shadow, and we really got a great idea of how this might shadow. So I'm going to start with a single light source on this particular one. So say I shape the bicep like this. Okay. And one of the things I like to think about as I shadow anything really is how much width, you know, how much depth, how big is the volume of that area? So if I put this line, for instance, if I take this line and I go for one, if I go like this, I mean, that just really kind of kills the shape of it almost entirely. It flattens it out a bit. It doesn't entirely because this side over here drops down. It actually, in some ways, actually works pretty well for the bicep because the bicep does have a difference of width as it goes around like this. And so thinking about that and getting that in with your initial shape of shadow works out really well. So I might take this and cut this way and drop down this way and bring it, you know, I try a few different shapes. Obviously, if I'm looking at reference, I can pull from that, but I like to draw stylistically, as you probably know if you follow my lessons. And so I just play around some of these shapes, but I make sure to get the difference in width and the implication or implied volume as I move around that form. And then needs to happen really to every muscle group, but that's something I do think about. I'm going to try something like this. If the height and sort of not really the apex, but the apex of where the light would hit is right about there, then I have to perceive that as it gets down to this muscle that's behind it, this tricept that's on the back of the arm, that it wouldn't be the same idea. If I took the shadow here and I tried to relate that down to here, I might do something like this. It's probably not bad, but I don't know. I just envision that now we're further away from the light source, and so I probably need to do something more like that. I need to have more shadow down here, not less. Again, that's a little bit of a guestimation. I don't know that to be a fact. I'm just saying that that's how I perceive it. And so here we've got this smaller muscle group. Really, I just feel like this would catch a lot less light anyway. I'm going to do something like that. Here. Maybe you get a little bit of light right there. And by the way, this is a more darkly lit model at this point. When you're putting these heavier shadows. Another thing that I like to think about when I go to light a character, model, whatever is, what percentage of shadow do I want on this? Sometimes I like to darkly light the model just because it pops more on a particular scene, especially if there's a lot of, like, surrounding details, then I think heavier shadows works better because it makes the character stand out really well. Obviously, mood is a big one, the biggest, really, like how dramatic is the scene, what is the mood of the scene, things like that. So as we get over to here, again, we think about this initial point right there the bicep and that peak of the light source, and we come over here and say, Well, this is going to actually catch a lot of light now, so maybe just a smaller shadow there for that bit of definition. The muscles on the thumb side. We can say that over here it's going to get a pretty large shadow. Now, another thing that I do, and it's a little bit of a style choice is I do these little points going into the smaller either divides of muscle or direction of the muscle. It's kind of tricky because I think that if you do it too much, lots of little triangles, lots of little points, it can get overdone really quickly, and it can start to look like broken glass or something. So I do a little bit of it, but I try to be careful to not go too awfully crazy with it. You really want to play around with some more organic shapes as well. You don't want to go too angular to organic, you want to find a nice mix. I also feel like there's a little bit of shadow from this tendon, so the bicep connects down through here and you get this visible tendon, usually if somebody is flexing their arm, this looks and feels like a flex position. Those are the base shadows that I would do. And I would just continue on with this. Again, play around with a mix of angular and organic shapes. And also, if you're a little bit more new to this, lean a little bit more heavily into angles. Angles are generally easier to work with at first. That's why you'll see a lot of cartoon like styles that use real heavy angles. And It also to me, it's a little bit more of a design approach, designed way of thinking. You got to figure like if you were rough out of a city in a building, you start very structural, very angular, right? It's easier to map perspective. It's easier to map size of spatial relationships, all of stuff. So just use that to your advantage. If you're a little bit more new to this, be okay with some more heavy angles. You can always go back and make things look a little bit more organic after you do sort of the design phase of what you're doing. We're going to stop here. We're going to go to the next lesson. We're going to fill these shadows in, talk more about this and get to some rendering. With that, let's move on to our next lesson. 7. Adding Rendering to the Arm: Welcome back. For this next portion, we can start to fill this in, and you could block this in with a solid brush, really, I would want to sculpt this another layer. Maybe I'll soft erase this first. What I'm going to also show you is like a dual light source, maybe a shiny material versus a something more specular versus more of a cotton or less specular. There's different terminology for that is escaping me. But it's good to think about those aspects of it. Sometimes you're drawing real shiny leather, other times you're drawing just a basic material. Sometimes you want something that looks tattered and gritty or worn leather. There's just all sorts of different things to get in your work there. There we go, we just block that in just for reference, really. And so now, when we go to render this, once you have this basic larger bulk of shadow, I think the rendering gets pretty easy, really, but it's good to go in with a game plan. By the way, you can also segment into these areas different ways. You don't have to leave it here. You can break this stuff up a little bit more, get some definition in there. We'll talk about doing veins in the other direction. So these concepts overlap. For instance, one of the other things that I really think we have to keep in mind when doing this is that You know, when you draw your wrapping lines, that go like this, so you're using these to flesh out the shape of that particular muscle group, right? Which I recommend. I really recommend drawing lots of illustrations where you do just this right here, and you can do it per muscle group or per the entirety of the entire arm or both. You could do the divisions like this, per muscle group, or just the whole thing, which really, I think it makes more sense to per muscle group on something like this because you really need to think about each of these areas as dimensionally as possible. So that when you do go to render, that plays true and you're rendering. So for instance, if I take this and say, if I render like this, for instance, right? This really fights the look of it. So let's say I do this. Right? I mean, you can probably tell almost immediately that that fights the look of the underlying form. It feels like a negative. It feels like I'm trying to push these forms down and in to space. And that's just the opposite of what I would want to do, right? You can see it really I mean, it just almost immediately, just really looks bad. You know, I mean, it shouldn't look that bad for those little of lines. So another Another thing that happens, and I want to point this out. Again, these ideas overlap quite a bit. So I never know what to teach when because there's so much that connects. But basically, when you start to render across this, I would recommend that you go up and around like this, right? It doesn't mean they exactly have to follow this, but this is the overall way that I would try to shadow this area. So that's kind of the shadow mapping that I would consider for just that area. Also, something I see a lot that I think really hurts what could otherwise be pretty good rendering is when people bring their lines either with no taper and or really spaced out like this. So to me, like it's going in the right direction relatively, but it's not it's not holding together, it's not cohesive enough. You got to kind of think of this rendering as values and shifts in tone and value. So personally, and some of this is personal preference as well. So I have to really be careful how I explain this to you because I don't want to hinder you from doing something that's better than I do, cooler than I do, a different perspective on the way that I would do it. You got to keep an open mind all this. But a lot of times, what I think, I guess, again, I want to make sure I'm not pushing my personal views on you, but I think that rendering that is tighter in succession and then has more taper to the lines Emulates the effect of shadowing much better. It looks like it's going from dark to light. To me, that's what I like. Again, maybe a little bit of preference there. But I would definitely go around the volumes more. Just think of it like you're basically taking dark and you're fading it with the taper towards the light. That's one simple way to look at it. And there's all sorts of ways you can accomplish that. I mean, you don't even have to use tapered lines. You could stifle the entire thing. I guess that's really what you need to do is like when you practice these lessons, also go and look at all your favorite ways that shading is accomplished and say, how would I incorporate that into my style? How would I my own version of that. But I would say to start with something like this, practice your ability to taper and then also keep an eye on how close they are together at the thicker point, so this point down here towards the shadow because that's the part that gives you that ability to fade off that harsh line. That's really what I'm looking at when I do stuff like this. I'm trying to say, how can I fade off that harsh line? How can I direct the light source? How can I make it look cool at the same time? There's always that factor as well. You see, I'm starting to space model a little bit more. Now, there is another potential reason that you would space model a little bit more. Maybe you're going to cross hatch it and when you cross hatch, you generally fill in that negative spacing. There's that as well. I'm going to show you a few different ways that I would look at rendering stuff like this. Let's say it was at my base shadow that I wanted to apply. It's a little bit off. I feel like I went too wide here. It does take a certain amount of concentration. I usually do a little bit better when I'm not yapping over a video. If we go over here, now I can take this and I can cross hatch. You can use different angles. You can use for five, you can use, whatever you want. I do this visually, but if you notice, what I'm doing now I'm breaking it off the other way. I'm starting wider here. Or tighter in succession, really. Then as I bring it up this way, I'm thinning the lines, but also spacing them out further. All sorts of ways you could do it, but you can see it now it adds another level of shadow right there, and I can continue that on in all sorts of ways. I feel like this error right here would be a little darker. It's too light right there. It's too You know, it's too plain. Doesn't look cool. Always throw that in there. It doesn't look cool. It doesn't look cool, I add more lines. Same thing and I might cross stch down this way, and I'm really repeating the same technique. I don't want to get too awfully crazy with it, but I don't want it to look too plain Jane either. So I'm trying to just play around with this. Some this way. There we go. Then sometimes I will just bring lines up and around the form like that. I just feel like to me it does two different things that I like. It rounds over the form visually this way. It almost gives it another plane change. Now, if somebody was to come in here and color this, say I was a colorist and I took this from somebody else's work, I would look at that and I go, maybe they're trying to tell me that this area right here should be a little bit darker tone of whatever this is, suit design, skin color, whatever it is, a little bit darker than here. It's almost like you can again direct the lasers. Remember what I said originally about this little x, which I'm going to get that out there now. But that that's where the peak of the light is kind of hitting. Like, if you were going to put a glare, you might go like this. Like say it was kind of a shiny, you know, cyclopes arm. I'd probably put a glare like this, right? And then I would start doing those segments.'s doing a messy version, we're not going to leave this. And then I would shadow against those segmentations to make it look like a metal arm. So again, it's sort of that continuity way of thinking that, well, if that was a lines that went right through there, it would direct the volume, and it would also give me a plane change. I guess I'll throw in a third, too. Again, I think it just looks cool. And a lot of times, when it comes to rendering I hate to say it, but that's a big motivating factor for me. Does it look cool? When I initially started rendering, it was all about, did it look cool? I didn't know where to put anything. So I was just I don't think I had a real good concept of light and shadow. It was more like, Hey, this kind of looks neat. I think I'll do that. So I think a lot of it does as it pertains to comics. That's kind of a big one. And so really, I'll just repeat this. Now, as I worked down into say this area of the tricep, I would do the same thing, but I would actually Probably bring the lines over even more. I'm going to do that. Now I would also simplify it because it's a smaller area. I don't have as much room for a lot of multiple angles of cross hatching and defining a top center to the form as much, at least it doesn't feel that way. I'm just going to add some thick to thin lines on an angle like that. I could still cross hatch. Maybe do through here a little bit. Remember two, you can make these lines different thicknesses as well, just from neighboring cross hatching. So what that does is it just helps it to not all blend together. So you could do some real tiny little lines for your cross hatching versus some heavier ones for your initial hatch work. And I'd probably leave it like that. I'll go back probably at the end and do some little white out effects. I like to do that in a lot of the work. So same thing, smaller area. I'll just like this. Now, the other thing is, they don't all have to be as long. But remember, as you shorten them, you're kind of saying to the viewer or colorist, even, because you got to always think, you know, you're relaying this information to the next person. Now maybe you're the colorist, but you're kind of saying Oh, light hits there more predominantly. That's why I left it open. I mean, again, that's kind of the way I look at it. So, personally, I feel like this area, I can't remember this muscle group, but Anyways, to me, it's going to get more in shadow. Even if they're nice little thin lines, again, you could run some really thin ones like this if you wanted. I feel like that makes more sense for that area, that this is going to get the bulk of the light. These other ones, not so much. So something like that. Then as we get to this top shoulder area, we can do the same thing and we'll render, I'm going to take these up and over. Think of this like a hill. I'm going up and over the hill. Again, if you had to map out, now, a little quick tip for you, you could put another layer in here and use another color and just real lightly, and you could do your wrapping lines first. If you have a hard time directing the rendering, There's no harm in doing this first. I mean, look how much more dimensional that feels. Of course, your rendering is going to make more sense going over that. You're going to have something to pay attention to. So keep that in mind. That I'm not going to do that, but I just wanted to give you that little FYI there. I sort of just like doing it like this. Now, another thing to keep in mind is that maybe you don't render as well with the hand mechanics of pulling up and over. So don't feel like if you're watching me do it this way, that your arm has to be oriented and by arm, I mean, this arm, not your arm, your drawing of an arm, that it doesn't have to be oriented this way, okay? Be open to rotating the canvas. I like to challenge myself to render this way, but I can feel it right now that it's not my strong suit, that I'm struggling here. I do like to push the struggle, though, because I think that that makes better And there's times I do like to just render upward. I just want to get the hang of it. But I'll be honest, my ability to render is a lot more controlled as I pull down and towards the bottom of the screen. So don't be afraid to utilize what's best for your hand mechanics. So if it's better for you to rotate this and pull down, it's faster and cleaner. I mean, you probably see a difference already. There's a difference in my hand control there. So you have to use those mechanics to your advantage. Again, I still like to test myself. I would still recommend that you test yourself, but don't fight the uphill battle the entire time. If there's just a better way to do it, and it's saving you time than, you know, work smart and not hard kind of sort of ne to playing at some point, right? So now I'm going to cross hatch this way, same concept. I'm just going to space these out. I like to also stutter step the lines occasionally. So you'll see me do a little bit of that. You can also do that just by going back with white out. So we're going to stop right here. We'll head over to the next lesson and continue rendering. So with that, let's move forward. 8. Additional Cross Hatching: All right, welcome back. So we'll continue on with the shoulder area here. Again, I could keep cross hatching to get the next darker tone, darker value. While adding style. I think I'll bring some up even on this side. You see that over here, this is where the light would be. A lot of times it feels awkward to render on the light source side. What I said that precips or peak is right about there in the bicep. Well, in that case, the light would really be pretty strong there, but we need to also consider the muscle group is going down and wrapping away from the light. So there needs to be a little bit of value shift right there. Maybe not a lot, but at least a little, I think. And also, you could still make the argument that there would be a little bit of rendering on the very edge because this muscle is it's not like it's rounding, and then it stops can't even do an arrow here. It's not like it's rounding, and then it stops flat, right? Doesn't do that. It's rounding away from our view, like a globe, like a planet, similar to that kind of concept, some spherical. So in that case, you could do some rendering on the very edge. Just keep that mind and you'll see a lot of artists do that. You probably pick up on that, I imagine, but just something to point out that it's okay to get a little bit of that over there. It's not like the side with the light source can have no shading whatsoever. I'm really sorry that it keeps popping up random file names of other things that are worked on. That's crazy. So Let's see with this spot, Let's get this out of here a little bit, clean that up. Now, you can also get in the subdivides of the muscles, right? So if there's a little striation right here, you could shadow that independently, or you could just add it as another shape and then add a little bit of, like, area around it. I think that still works. It doesn't need to be rendered identically to these other bigger groups. And remember what I said about maybe adding something th this kind of peaked area or another shape that's kind of going like that. You don't have to do it, but it's something again, I like to do. I think it looks cool stylistically. I'm going to add that in there. Sometimes I will do a little cheat too, when I'm working digitally and I'll throw these things in. I go, what would that look like if I put it over here and I rescaled it, and I just play around with the tools like that. So sometimes it yields a better result. We'll get down into the form area here. Same thing with this area, I'm going to block this, like this. You can bring these tapered lines really heavy to the sides. What's nice about that is it starts to shadow it this way to this way, just by widening or thickening the tapered lines on the shadow side. Again, I can run some thin lines right through there. Okay. Now at this part of the form, I can render up and around and just to speed this up, I am going to rotate it and take advantage of my own hand mechanics. Again, pulling down feels a lot more comfortable and a little bit quicker. Now, another thing is you don't have to go thick to thin pointing towards the light in this way. I'm going to show you another method here in a second, which is probably pretty obvious, but you never know what to explain with these videos, what somebody might be questioning and wondering. That's why if you do have any questions about this process, make sure to comment so I can help you figure it out. Let me know what to actually answer. I'm going to cross over here. I feel like this area would be der. Like that. Another one that's neat is to bring lines up and over. I picture like they're leaning against the other line. It creates a little bit of a diamond in there. You'll see a lot of people do this really well with a cro qui. Never really mastered that pen. It doesn't have to be a can be anything, but it looks really good with the natural taper that a does. When you can master suckers. Just like that. You see that, again, gives another way to kind of round over that form muscle. But the other one I wanted to show you is that you could really you could do it so many different ways. I mean, obviously, there's not an infinite amount of ways, but there's a lot. But another one is just like thicker lines. And shoot, they don't even have to be thick to thin. They can just space out. It could be the same line, just slowly spacing out. And this is a really nice look. There's times I really get into applying that sort of shadowing. It almost feels like it would flatten it out, but if you do it in just the right way, especially if you render the other lines this way, you can get this kind of spherical thing going on just by the way that you know, you bend them around like that. And so I don't know. It's just another neat way to render. I don't do as much of that one for a lot of anatomy, but there's times I do it. Like, so another thing I like to do is really just change up the rendering based upon the scene as well. So if I'm rendering this sort of cross hatching that I just showed you all through here for the anatomy, I'm not going to use that for the background stuff. I just like that difference from the character to the scenery, you know? And usually, it kind of boils down to if it's something more straight and angular, then I typically use, you know, more straight lines to render it as well. So again, a couple of little cross hatchings, that. I could do those same little angles, but it's probably a bit too tight in that area. And then for the veins, it's sort of like wrapping lines, right? And so I generally will draw across this stuff in this way, like real light, and I'll start to try to figure out the shapes. And I really should pull up like a vein chart in one of my anatomy books. I usually don't. I just sort of draw some in. I do a little bit of white out through here, and I just I look down at my own arm, and I s find some shapes that I typically have used in the past. And that's how I do it. But just keep in mind, there's great anatomy books that you can pull from and see the vein flow, and it's probably for the best. You're going to get that sense of knowledge in your work, which people appreciate. But I've seen a lot of art styles where they do it stylistically, and it looks pretty cool, too. But the main thing here is that you think about again, that underlying form and volume. You got to always think about that as you go. And then when you draw the veins, they need to look like they kind of roll around that even as they're doing these kind of zigzag cross sections, you know, sprawling kind of veiny thing that they do. So yeah, it's kind of tricky because you have to think of a couple of things at once. Much like everything in comic art. It's just not just one thing, right? So figure out the direction of these veins, first, make a few mistakes like I'm doing, get those mistakes out of the way, fail faster. And you get the bigger tendons from the wrist areas. You could probably start there, put some heavier shadows on those, and then spin these out and around. Now, another thing you could do is you put them on another layer, which is what I should have did because it does make them a lot easier to just draw, especially when you go back and forth from dark to light, the white out is much easier or white digital ink digital lines. But just keep doing that. I'll probably have to soft erase this just because it's a bit messy right now. I push this all back so I can see the mess. What you're going to do is just show the way that it's reacting to the underlying forms, both in the larger way of the way it wraps around spherically and in the smaller ways of where they overlap and hit one another. Like these tendons here from the wrists, you got a vein that goes over, while it's going to create a little pocket of shadow in there somewhere. You pick back up on the other side. You just continue a little bit of that. K Same thing here. We do a negative line right through the shadow, that looks cool. You can also put a little bit of bumpiness to the shadow over here. For instance, instead of just one smooth line, you say, well, the vein gets wider here, then out there, wider here, and you can do that usually with the shadow. You can apply it on the other side as well, but you want to me personally, I try not to draw this line on the other side as. You can still get it to show with adding the rendering. Through it, and then go back with the eraser and just get rid of the line. Maybe leave just a little hint here and there. But I don't know, it looks really looks really good when you can get confident enough to not need the lines on the light source side as much. You want to play around that concept. Then for the vein, you can add just tiny little bits of rendering, like that. You can fade those out, pick them back up, so many different ways to do it. Alright, so we'll go and stop right here. We'll head over to the next lesson and start to ink the lines. So with that, let's move on. 9. Inking the Arm: Now we're going to go ahead and take this and ink the work. The reason why I'm going to time lapse, the ink portion for most of these, and I'll slow down some areas and talk about it, but it's really redundant. Hopefully you can gain a lot by observation here. So essentially, just shaping the work, filling in areas, and the same idea will apply to the cross hatching, as I spoke about before. We really need to zero in on the idea that we're trying to wrap these lines around the forms. Not every style will require that, and I'll show some different examples where you can still kind of emulate that more. But again, if you're new to this and you really want to get the most depth out of what you're trying to do, it's better than you know, fighting the form. And by fighting the form, I just mean, if you're not kind of perceiving that the rendering lines in some way are wrapping around that volume, Then obviously, you're going to start flattening out certain areas and hopefully, I've already illustrated that well enough with the other examples. But that's really something that I think helps us a lot to reinforce the dimension that we're looking for. Now, it doesn't mean that every bit of rendering works out exactly the way we hope. Some of it, you just kind of have to let B and then come back with future revision. So what I mean by that is, find a style that works for you. It's not like it all has to be perfectly congruent with the underlying forms, or it's just a waste. There's a lots of styles where they just kind of throw it in because, again, as I mentioned before, it looks cool. And I don't think there's a lot that's wrong with that. I just think that again, if your goal is to, like, really get this nice dimensional feeling to the work with your rendering, then one way to achieve that, probably the easiest way is to really think about those lines curving around the form. Next, it's just thinking about it as a gray scale tone, of value. There's times I've seen other artists and I've tried this myself, where you can jump in and do a quick digital paint kind of version, especially if you're working digitally that's as simple as adding a layer. And you can sort of add in even more ranges of values, like digital painting. You can use a soft brush, hard, whatever you want. But the idea there is that because you instill this kind of dimensional value system, your rendering will make more sense. And like anything else, it's just because you have more points of reference. And I'll show an example where we do that as well. It's similar to the idea of the wrapping lines. Again, any way that you can start to think about these areas as three dimensional forms in space, then your work just tends to get better anyways in lots of different ways, but very specifically in the way of creating shading and cross hatching. Now, also remember that you're going to want to play around with lots of different ways to establish these lines. I tend to go with longer, more tapered lines. That's just one particular way. Obviously, there's so many different ways you could do that. You could go with very tight abrupt lines. You don't have to taper them. You want to try the different variables, but This is a style that I've developed over years that I really like. It's not the only style that I'll utilize. In fact, there's lots of times that I play around with a messier style. So again, I'll give you different examples so you can really pay attention to this stuff. I wanted to start a little bit more clean and concise or what I do the most of what I aim to be my own particular style. But again, that's something that I developed over many, many years. So don't expect that you need to start rendering and get my style or another artist's style that you really admire, it's great to admire that and take observational notes and add little things into your system of doing thing, your style from these people that you admire, for sure. I think that's one of the best ways to level up our skills and learn more efficiently. But also, be careful not to pressure yourself with getting a replication of that because For one, we have no way to know how long they persevered through certain things. And chances are, they went through a couple things that didn't work and things they deemed not functional, not part of their style before they got to the one that you see that they really had a kind of eureka moment on. I like, Wow, this is my style. I love this look. I finally found it, right? That takes years sometimes for us as artists to find those moments. And then ultimately, it inspires us, and it makes our work better. So again, you can't just hope to look at somebody else's work and immediately have that sort of euphoric effect. You can definitely learn and grow faster from seeing what they do well and what they do right. Of course, Paying attention to their shapes of shadows, paying attention to the way they use their line brakes. When do they double up lines? When do they make messy lines just in certain areas to kind of show that compositional difference from area to area in the work. Like, there's times when you really need to, like, mess things up and add some grit and grime to the work, right? And certain artists do that really well. But again, pay attention to that, learn from that, but don't have false pretenses or expectations that now make you feel like, well, they can do these clean, beautiful lines, but I can't probably worked really, really hard at getting their hand control that way. And that's why I talked to you about turning the screen and really zering in on the way that you hold the pen even. Like, you know, you do want to think about these things. It's not that it's going to be the all determining factor because really, I think the big one is just time. And you're going to have to create lots of illustrations with lots of different lines so that you start to feel what works and what doesn't. And that again, just doesn't come overnight. So be ready for that perseverance and that hard work ethic and just enjoying what you do so that you can put enough time into it so that you get the results that you're after. But again, trying not to have those expectations early on, where it's like, Oh, I got to make my stelf look like, you know, whomever's work because that's just a recipe for whenever we compare ourselves to things we can't possibly know all the details of it, it can be disheartening. So, here I'm putting in some negative lines. So I do this as well at times where if I want to sculpt the shadow even larger, and maybe in this case, I didn't take the time to put the rendering on a separate layer. So if you're working digitally, I do recommend that, do your shapes or shadows on one layer, your rendering on another. It's not that you can't fix it, as you see, I'm doing it here with white out, and I'm going to usually play around with it for a bit to get what I'm after. But what I'm really looking at is the shape of the highlight on the bicep just wasn't quite what I was looking for. So sometimes I will go back with white out, and I will re sculpt that area in a negative. And actually, I do that, I wouldn't even say sometimes at this point. I do that all the time. There's something that's so cool about being able to use white out in the illustration that immediately, it helps you clean up the work more efficiently. It helps to add another level of detail and style that I never seem to get if I just draw with, black and, you know, black on the white page. It's not until I go back with the white that I sort of find other design elements and ways to sculpt the lines. It's super honestly, I can't even explain it because it just seems like I would just eventually pick up on that and draw the way that I want to see it. And still, even after all these years of drawing, it's not that way. I just really love going back with white out and creating, you know, like, especially like you'll see when we do the Face example, tiny little fine lines and things like that. There's just certain elements where it's just much, much easier to go back with a white pen, in this case, digital white ink, if you want to call it that, white lines. And it's just really, really effective. And I remember picking that up from watching comic artists just use white out pens. And so it was one of those techniques that I really wanted to incorporate in my work. So here just adding some finer lines to the hand area. Another thing is, don't be afraid to shadow smaller areas. So for the longest time, I was always kind of apprehensive about shadowing fingers, for instance, because they're a lot smaller volume than say, the upper arm or the chest or the bigger scene in entirety, right? And you really can't do that. I don't think it always looks weird if you have like this good amount of shadowing everywhere else. Then there's a lot less on a certain area. Again, it's that continuity or that consistency through the work. Just remember, you can use very fine lines in smaller areas, and that's what I'm doing here. I'm doing tiny little sketchy lines. Now I'm a lot more comfortable with it, but that's something else I wanted to mention to you because I remember more in the beginning, I was actually very apprehensive or even just wouldn't do it. I just wouldn't add those tiny little shadows and sketch lines in areas like fingers and smaller details. Just remember line variation can be all across the board. I could have definitely taken this to a lot more of an extreme version of that, losing lots more line variation. And that does, in turn, help you to kind of give a sense of scale within the illustration. So we'll go ahead and conclude this lesson here. And the next one, I want to show you how we can take this illustration and now add a secondary light source to it. So with that, let's move on. 10. Adding a 2nd Light Source: All right. One quick tip on this. We're going to do a dual light source and some different parts so that, you know, you've got different ways to perceive this and utilize it in your own work. And remember, this is just I know we use arms and legs a lot and stuff like that, but these are just models. So for instances, but you have to take what you learn here and utilize it on a variety of other things. I actually forgot a little spot here. It needs to be rendered in black. But what I want to show you real quick is that you can also take some of these single lit ones and easily convert them to a dual light source. So let me show you that. A lot of times it's better to go in with the idea rather than to do it as an afterthought. But I'll be honest, I do a lot of after thinking. So what I can do is pick an area such as, right here, and I could say, well, this is a low bounce light. Make sure I've got pure white there didn't look. Maybe the brushes into full opacity. But I can start and I can block in a little bit of a bounce light on the underside of some of these muscle groups like this. Yeah, you know what, I'm not at full capacity. That is the problem. Okay. And just like that, I can drop this in rather quickly and I could test it out, see if I like it. Like anything else, it's probably even good to do this from a distance. You can really see it all work together. But what's nice about this way of doing it is that if you've got enough predominant blocks there, it's easy enough to drop in and even connect some of this, which really gives a nice look when you get it just right. So you want to think about the light source being stronger obviously at the base where it radiates or hits and emanates off the surfaces, but it might roll into the next neighboring muscle group, like we talked about with the shadows. There's a certain point where the stuff has to interconnect or it'll segment too much and look a bit funny. I feel like this is a bit forced, so I'm going to go back, but I just wanted to explain hopefully part of that process. But you can start off with just having the light catch certain areas. Obviously, like I said, more heavily on the bottom, where it's closer to the light source, things like that. Have it maybe intercede intersect with the vein here. Then from here, we can just render out from that. You could start more heavily like that. It's on a floating layer, so it's easy enough to do. Then you can just render into the shadow area in the same way that we did the cross hatching and a black ink style, and go like this. I probably keep the edge here pretty solid. So this is kind of fun. It actually reminds me of if you've ever used the scratch paper, you get those pads of paper that you scratch away the I don't know what that is. So kind of surface, and it's a similar way where you work in reverse. And it's a neat experience, actually. I need to do more of it. But you can see that just like that, we can introduce a secondary light source. Again, I really don't like doing it as much of an afterthought like this, but It's there if you need it. There's just times that you might get done with a particular part of your piece and go, H i, you know what? It's just not rounded enough. I really want that dimensionality. I want to introduce another cool color into the lighting of the character or whatever it is. This is a great way to do it. Because you got to figure now, you can do that cool secondary coloring that really adds drama to the piece. Blow this off any number of ways. Again, there's probably no point for a full segmentation right there, so I'll just connect that. There we go. Check it from a distance. Yeah. I mean, I think it actually adds a lot of depth and dimension to it. Another thing we can go into here. And fade this back. A lot of times the blunt edges of anything will be distracting and the rendering can soften that up. That's what I was seeing right there. I was just a little bit too blunt like a stop, a full stop. You could probably even come back with some black in here. I wouldn't get too awfully crazy with it because you don't want to really you don't want to be too distracting and I feel like it's on the level of that right now. I'll leave it right there. Then if anything, I would probably add maybe I'm going to shadow this a little bit more. And then maybe we'll try it one more time right here and then we'll call it good. Because like anything else, whenever you're adding white highlights, white out, highlights in the eyes, it's such a powerful and neat effect that it's like it can be overdone rather quickly, so you've got to be careful, and that's usually how it is with any effects that are really predominant and strong, especially if they kind of while you out a little bit. You got to be careful because that's like it's real easy to overdo that because you're so impressed with it. We got to remember that you know, that could just be the wile factor, right? And too much of that will be distracting to your viewer. So there we go. I'll show you the difference. Again, I think this is a great way to introduce that secondary light rather quickly. And I just got to reiterate, I would really recommend going into it with the right idea, for the most part, but it's there if you need it to add it as a secondary effect. We'll go ahead and stop right here. We'll head over to the next example and explain more on light shadow and rendering. With that, let's move on. 11. Drawing a Leg with Dual Lighting: For this next example, we're going to do a dual light source, and we'll just start with We'll do an upper part of a leg. Again, something that you're going to probably be doing quite a bit. I'm going to go with a very stylized muscular leg because that's usually what I draw, but you can do whatever version and variation you want. With the leg, I just like to break down. I draw like this shape for the quadraceps. This for the adductors. I think they're called a ductors. It widens out there, gets thinner here inside of the knee, inside bends in. They both bend in or outward, I guess I should say. But one has a more angular one, one is more of a smooth curve on the outside. But again, this can be anything you want. You don't even have to draw a leg if you don't want. I just like it to be something recognizable at this point. Again, I feel like this is if you're following my work and you typically draw on comics and anatomy and things like that, then this should apply to you hopefully. But you can tell me if I'm totally wrong on that as well. Always good to know what I'm doing right and what I'm doing wrong. Okay. So with the quadraceps, I'll break those up by doing the split down the middle, the recs and the Bastus medialis, Bast lateralis. And I'll leave you alone with the terminology there. I just want you to what I'm doing and where I'm going with this. Now, I'm ready to apply some shadows and get this kind of fleshed out a little bit more. Again, you could go really heavily segmented with this and really you got a little bit of a divide here. You can also bring out the definition to the Sartorius, but it's not generally very visible, but since we're in the land of comics, anything goes, so I guess we can add that in. It'll also give us another thing to render in more detail. So the thing is the pick your dual light source, right? So you're going to have a light source that's more heavily on top or it could be stronger on the bottom. This character could be standing above a city, and there could be a light bab hanging over top on the roof above them, and there could be a lot of light emanating from the city lights below. There's so many different possibilities. That's really where you just have to again draw these visual representations, these three D arrows and maybe do one big one small. I'll take this one and it'll be more on the opposite side just a little bit. And I'll make it smaller because that will tell us or at least give us an idea that this is a less dominant light, something like that. So now we need to think about how these two light sources might affect our model. We need to think about how they're pushing against one another and creating a core shadow between them. And so as I shape the first shadow or light source, whatever way you want to look at it, I'm going for how I think that top light source would affect each of these segmented muscles. I can start more divided at first, but then I have to sort of interconnect those as well. And then at this point, we need to consider, at what point does the light source kind of stop radiating or stop being so intense on the surface of these muscles? And at what point does that secondary light push back against it to create another shape on the opposite side? So again, they're sort of pushing back and forth. And at this point, I also like to consider how specular or how diffuse this material might be. Am I going to render this material like this with these little short abrupt little lines, or am I going to do something like the previous example where I have a lot of long strokes of cross hatching. You know, even that plays a factor. Is this a more specular material? Is it more of a satin or is it more diffused? Like, all those things play a role? So, and I'll make some more examples where I talk more about the differences in specularity. Again, the main ones I think about diffuse specularity, maybe a satin, which is I guess, more of a name of a material, but they all have different ranges for the way the light reacts, and then therefore, your rendering can change based upon that. So you can pay attention to the shapes I'm using. Again, I'm going to say this multiple times that the shapes of shadows are sometimes stylistically done. I would say a lot of times. I mean, if you study life and then you try to transform it into your own work, you're going to make some very different distinctions on the shapes of the shadows. Typically go more angular as you can see here. I have a lot of points. Obviously, there's a couple ovals and circular shapes, especially on the inner part of the leg muscle. But I go very angular, and that's to say stylistic choice. You don't have to do that. You can play around with all sorts of shapes. The main idea that I'm trying to convey here is the differences that the two light sources would have on each side of the leg. And then when you go to ink and color things like this, as I mentioned, I think, in the arm example, it provides us this really neat kind of cinematic way to light things, and it really rounds out the form. So that's all we're really focusing on at this particular point. So again, the shapes of shadows can be really all sorts of variations. I did this back bow thing with the muscle, it doesn't have to be that shape. I would say that that's a little bit more of a stylistic thing. The one thing that I'm trying to do here is I'm trying to make it look like that this muscle here in this area here are a lot larger by comparison. That's why I did this bigger opening like this and like this. I almost draw your eye to it and say, k, those are wider areas. Those are areas that have. Again, remember, if we used our wrapping lines, this would really bow out more than the others. So with this. These are the two big masses of that area. This one would be if the camera was on the other side of it, and this one is pretty small by comparison, maybe even a little bit flatter. I mean, it's on the peak of the leg, but it's, it's not as big of a muscle group, at least the way I draw it. Maybe that's not accurate based on reality, but the way that I draw it. So something like this, and you could even do a half shadow across the knee. Let me fill in the rest and then I'll make that decision. I don't know if it would reach over to this other side, so probably not here, probably not here. I probably just fill these in. I feel like the side of the knee would get more right here. I'm going to widen that out. Something like that, maybe. I feel like the knee here possibly would on the side. But what I'm really in the habit of doing is drawing all these lines down the front plane change of the knee rather than trying to light it to the side. That's probably a mistake on my part, but I'm just going to go with it because it feels the most consistent with the way that I do things. There is that. There's a lot of times when I will do things out of sheer habit and what I feel comfortable with. I'm going to leave that. I will put a bigger shadow over on this side because we get the light coming down and we got the other light coming up to the side. I feel like this would probably have some shadow there. That might be wrong, maybe not on the very top of the knee. But again, I'll keep pushing these ideas around and then testing them. The other thing that I'm going to introduce and I'm going to sketch that in now is just wrinkles going through it. Again, just like wrapping lines all the way around these forms and helping to explain the forms by hitting them and wrapping around them. Wrinkles are always a great thing for your comic art to make things look more impressive. Don't have to add a ton of them. You could just add a few here and there, but they generally will make it look more impressive. Even something like this where you put a wrinkle through the front. Again, that little dip that would occur in between the muscles, a couple of little spots on the side, and you can do that wherever you want. As much or as little as you want. Just make sure that when you bring that wrinkle around, utilize it to explain that underlying form that it's passing over. I'll just draw straight across when you could use that curvature to help define your drawing a bit better. And you'll see, I won't use all these, but I like to throw a few sketch lines in here to try to pick apart what I want to keep and what I don't. So that's really it. Like, just as quickly as that, we've got a dual light source upper leg with some wrinkles, and I feel like that's enough to get us going to where now I can add some rendering to this and bring it together. So with that, let's head over to the next lesson and continue on. 12. Drawing Our Shadow Shapes: And we'll come back. Now we will take this example, and I'm going to go and jump more towards the inks faster. Really, it's the same concept. You can draw it out. Generally, what I tend to think about when I'm sketching or drawing is that I'm a little bit more open to transforming the work, adjusting the work, sketching, finding ideas, things like that. So that's really. Other than that, it's the same concept, and over time, if you practice going to Inks, it'll feel awkward at first. Now, digital, you know, I want to say digital and traditional interchangeably, really, because so I was going to say digital makes it a lot easier, but that's kind of like the perception of it. So for instance, traditional, I've seen artists and I've learned a few techniques myself where you can get really good with whiteout and you can start pretty messy and adjust things with whiteout. It's rather amazing. So find the artist that had it Find the artists that you see that do it really well and zero in on that and study. It's really neat. That being said, digital at first will feel easier because you can just flip back and forth from light to dark. And so there's all the various brushes. But again, it's really the same. If you put enough time with your traditional techniques, you will figure out some very cool methods. You'll find different white out pens that are more opaque. I like to use a posca, I also like using the the painted white out, and you'll find different brands that are more opaque than others. Some, you'll go to apply them and they seem very light, and it's like maybe not what you want. You know, the thicker it is, usually the harder it is to control, but you get a nice heavy white out, which is really nice. So, give it a shot, try both. In this case, obviously, I'm just using sketch book pro here, but same thing, I'm going to block in the shapes of shadows. I'm trying to incorporate little bits of angle as you can probably see as I cut around this. That's again, just a stylistic choice. Does it have to be that way. You can go with a lot more curvatures in your work. It's really just personal preference. And what I'll do is get a lot of this shaped in then do a flood fill, and then we'll get into adding the rendering and shaping this. So the other thing to think about is that, if we look at the light source coming up from this area, and then basically, widening out here for two reasons, one, the adductor group or this area of the leg it's pretty hefty, right? It's a big volume to think about. So we can make that wider there based on that volume. Also based on the angle of the light source. Same thing here with the medial muscle, it's pretty big and it's that direct angle to that light source. So realistically, this could be the same. And I would say even this, but you do want some variation or at least I like to show some variation. I just feel like if I took the same line and I went like this, even all the way around. Forgive that lettering that keeps popping up, sorry for that. Figure that out. But if I went even all the way around, the same thickness right there, all the way around. There's a time and a place for it, but it just flattens it out a bit more in my perception of it, my perspective of the way I see it. Again, I just want to give you some information on the wh why I'm doing a certain thing. I might instead of making this two straight, I say, Well, what if, just on this bottom angle, I cut it over just a little bit more, just to make it a little more give it another variable right there. It's not too awfully even. I don't know if that's the right choice. Again, I move these shapes around a lot. Sometimes they'll say, well, maybe you should curve this out a little bit and then create a back bend right there. Does that look more appropriate for that area? I think it actually looks a tiny bit weird right here. But I'm going to leave it. I'm going to leave it just for now. But again, these are things that I do. These tiny little adjustments and angles. I know it almost probably seems like, does that really matter much? I think that it does in the way that when you don't know what you're doing, and you're trying to find your style, find shapes that work well for the way that you're drawing things, I think that these little changes do add up. I try to tell people, I'm a bigger fan of small incremental changes than big sweeping changes because I feel like when we make large sweeping changes to our we pass by the intricacies or the neatness, the things that really zero in on making great R. Just my own personal idea there, But I just feel like if you're always constantly dramatically moving one way to the next, you're probably missing the details. You're probably missing the tiny things that really zero in on a professional look. That's why I think a lot of times we can see art that looks pretty darn good, and it's just missing a couple of things. And it's probably because they're really making the big changes, but they've just got to zero in on the tiny little things that make a big difference. So And, you know, I'm not excluding myself from this. I got a lot to learn, but it's just one of the ways that I tend to learn and study. So right here, we'll get this bigger shadow at the base here. Now, another thing that I've kind of mentioned, it's easy to do. I mentioned it in the previous example with the arm is it's easy to want to put a bounce light here, a bounce light here. And I'm not saying you can't be careful that sometimes will start to get a bit distracting. Like, it's easy to over use a good effect, right? Like I mentioned with white out. That a lot of times when an effect looks really cool, it's like a bit of eye candy. You're like, really like that look, and so it's easy to want to put it everywhere. It's going to somehow just make the art better. But that's usually not how it works. We have to keep in mind focal points. And so if something really draws your attention and becomes a focal point in the artwork, That's good when you're directing that and utilizing that to your advantage. It's bad when you don't really have a rhyme or reason, you're just putting them everywhere. You can over dramatize or put focal points in multiple places. Well, then it takes away the potential of the real focal point where it should be, things like that. Try not to do things just because it works well in one area, so you decide to put it in all areas. There is a right time and place for certain things, especially highlights. In this case, that's really what the secondary light source could be considered. It's another highlight. It's another way to round out the volumes. And I'm also trying to break up lines here and there. That's another thing and add line weight as I go. So I guess I should probably touch on line weight as well because it does tie in. But generally, what I would say is that line weight is heavier on the shadow side, right? Well, you know, here, we've got light on both sides, right? So where am I going to put the heavier line weight? So let's take this wrinkle across the leg, for example. I'm going to put the heavier line weight or shadow at the bottom, I'm going to wrap this around the form as much as possible. And instead of drawing a line on top, I'm just going to put a little line that picks back up on the underlying form. And that conveys that little sense of a wrinkle, and then a good colorist will come through and add a little highlight there. Same thing with all these. Now, the lights coming up here. So would I put the shadow on the top? Um I don't I guess right here, I might try to do that. But yeah, I really don't think so. I would still put the shadow on the bottom there, so keep a continuity from that. I'm not saying that's the right decision that could be a bad decision based on where that light source is, but I just feel like maybe Maybe on this one, I would because I feel like the light would directly hit the bottom of this. I probably can't put the wrinkle there. But here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to drop some of these n, and I'm just going to go back with white out and touch them up. On this side, I definitely would put the shadow on the base because this light is hitting this side of the leg. Over here, we're still getting that downward radiant light. These would definitely have a shadow on the bottom. That's where this stuff does get confusing. But again, remember that this little white out technique, You can really let you quickly jump in there and check this stuff and go, Okay, what does look better from an angle like this? Does this work? You can just go back and forth until you get a little more confident on it, what works and what doesn't and why? Good stuff. Yeah. Regardless, I like these types of lines, even if they're not in the perfect place because they add so much more depth to all these areas. Again, you can really play around with them wrapping around the underlying forms and volumes. It's just a neat way to immediately create more depth. So I'm a big fan of that. Anyway you can Me this stuff look cool and dimensional faster. Yeah. And so back to the line weight itself is I would generally put heavier line weight at the bottom area. This is an area where I would definitely put it. I feel like it's a little bit it's a little bit contradictory to the light source there, but I still feel the need to do this. This is where it gets tricky. Generally, the heavier line weight is going to be on a couple of places. Now I've seen artists use it in all sorts of variations, by the way. It's usually going to be on the more bowed out area. I remember hearing one of my favorite artists, Todd McFarlane explay this. And he said that he puts it on areas where the area bows out the most because it adds curvature to that volume. I can't remember how he said it, but something like that. Now, a lot of artists will say, well, it goes on the shadow side of the line. So if you've got the leg turning down away from the light down here on the bottom left, you would put it heavier down here because this is on the bottom of the form, and it's away from that more dominant light up top. Right? So now with a secondary light, would it be here? This is the bottom of the form, but there's another light emanating right to the bottom left of it. And I would say yes, still. Why? Because as soon as I added it, it looked more dimensional. Now, I can't add it where there's already a shadow unless I had a break in the light source, like edge lighting. That's kind of what this area is over here. So I can add it there. There's already a big shadow there. So I would add it up here right by the light source side, again, because you can see it immediately rounds it out more, and makes it feel more it gives it a little bit more definition on the page, I guess. So sometimes you're going to use line weight to make things pop. Other times you're going to use it to help explain more of a shadow, you know, where light is not as dominant, you know, waiting the bottom of a line or shape to imply shadow. Um, so there's a few different ways to look at it. If I find any more as along the way where I can explain it better, I will, but that's really the gist of it. Is that generally it's for shadow, but I also use it to just round out the, you know what? There is one more. The other thing that it does for you is it gives you a contrast to the inside lines. Faces are a really good example. You want good line weight around the head of your character around the faces of your character because it makes the interior lines of the face read as smaller and more fine. That's what you want. Well, you could have a style where you have heavy lines on the inside of the face. But generally, the inside lines of anything you draw are usually a little bit thinner, and so line weights another way to make that happen. And then finally line weight around things that are much, much closer. Like if you're drawing a fist coming out towards camera, you're going to put this big heavy line weight around it, and then move that smaller as you go back into space. So that's it. We're going to stop here. Next, we're going to actually apply some rendering now, but we've got the ink lines in place so that we've got something solid that we can now render. So with that, let's move on to our next lesson. 13. Adding Cross Hatching to the Leg: And welcome back. Now, I just want to give you an idea. Remember what I said about if you want to, you could place wrapping lines around a given area, really map out that dimensional feeling to the form. Let's go and give that a try might as well. This might help you. If you're somebody that has a problem with drawing very flat lines, give this a try. But remember, you have to roll it around these forms as best you can because you could obviously just draw these lines flat. I don't even like what I did right there. Let's go back. Let's start with this. You have to wrap these around, like how they sound, wrapping lines and really try to imagine the depth perception on these given areas. You could do it here as well. I don't think it's as necessary, but might as well. Let's see how you have to try to curl those. If you're working traditionally, this just means light little sketch lines. Remember when working traditionally, a two H lead is generally better when you're going to ink over it. I mean, I like using a HB lead, but it gets messy real quick. Especially if you're lefty light mean and you smudge through it, that's always lovely. Okay, so there's some wrapping lines, just as a reference point. I guess I could do the knee as well, but that's really enough. That's how I would think relatively dimensionally about the underlying volumes. So as I go to render over this, it gives me a little bit of an idea. Now, as far as mapping this, as far as having an idea going into it or the way that I want to render this, remember there's all sorts of ways we could do this. There's lots of styles where they just simply get in here with a cross hatch. Going to do a quick version. I've got it on a different layer so I can do it and get rid of it. But I just want to show you how if you don't like the real time intensive stuff that I typically do, which will probably give me carpal tunnel sooner rather than later because I work so much harder on creating those lines. You can see that that right there works pretty well, and I'm not having to really overly develop these. It's not the type of look I really like. I mean, I don't mind it. It's just I like the other stuff better, and that's why I put the time in. But you could definitely do this, and it's much faster. But I'm not getting as much taper. I can still create gradients because each time I add that next angle, then I'm still getting a nice sense of gradient on it, right? I'm just widening them out as I go away from the shadow side. I can rotate this and get ice comfortable angle to the way that I like to create the brush strokes. You can even do the vertical lines as well, same way, something like this. Some of these this way. B, again, much faster, actually, I don't want to bring lines up that way. I'm get going a little too fast. You can still go back with your negative lines, your white out, and cut into these again. I'm a big fan of that as well. I think it spruces it up a bit. It can clean up little errors where I went over. Let me get rid of the blue there. So you can see, just like that, it does create relatively nice gradients much much faster. And again, I know that that's something that I don't know. It's tempting because it is much faster. And you could still come to the other side here and say, well, I'm just going to do a little bit different style over here because well, I don't even know that you'd have to, but let's try it. Let's try it this way first. I'll create some lines radiating this way. Maybe this way. Didn't like that first gapped line, so I'll fill that in. And then over here. A fan of that. Let me go back. That's the other thing with going a little too fast is I actually just I tend to lose focus and control because I'm trying to blaze through it. But it's hard to not want to do this stuff faster when you know you can't. When there's a technique that still is relatively pretty nice, if I pull back from a distance. I mean, that still pulls together because that's the other thing we got to think about too. When you do finish this and you pull back, does it read well because that's what you're looking for. A lot of comic art is reduced. Same thing I would add some lines blow here. Technique for this is just you have to practice going from one point to another and pulling. You'll see how I put a little curve right there. Well, that's because my range is more like this for a nice straight line. Since I know that, I'm going to zoom in and out to the area to to not go any further than that. Then speed usually allows you to get straighter lines versus if I sit there and I go like this, I'm actually more likely to pull off to the side for some reason. I have to go to a certain speed. So practice with various speeds, distances, learn what your pull is with your wrist movement before you start to veer off and just little things like that. Here I'll do lines that are parallel to this. Cross hatching this way, same here. Now, after you get done dropping in some of these lines, you can go back and pull back out your wrinkles if you happen to bleed over it a bit. Same thing with that white out effect, you just go back over and re establish those. I'm just trying a few different angles here. You could even add tiny little lines with the wrinkles. Obviously below them, and that's like that line weight thing that we talked about, you could even add little tiny bumps if you really wanted to push those up a little bit more. Here's an area where I would need to go back and bring it back out with a little bit of white out. That's about it because I wanted to just show you how I would do a faster version. Again, that's not traditionally how I do it, but there's a lot to be said for it because it's much much faster. Now with this one, I'm going to do the other style of rendering that I like to do, where I go up and actually, I'm on the wrong color. I'm going to go up and around this area. I just need to pick how far I want the shadow to go up and around this area. Again, I'm going to rotate this because it's easier and faster for me to pull this line. Et you see, this is a lot more time intensive, obviously. It doesn't need to be this clean. As I mentioned, I stutter step in some of these lines. I like the look it provides, and then I'll go up and around this way now. I can widen these out as I come up around this w. Now, quick little cheat. I know I'm going to feel a little guilty showing you this, but I got to show you is you can take some of these. And when you start utilizing your time, and it takes you longer to do a particular effect, you start thinking about stuff like this, especially digitally, you're like, Well, if I just took this and distorted it, I'm not going to do that, but I just wanted to show you you can do that, and I'm not going to check your work and blame you for it. I just think that sometimes it does work out. As long as you don't feel guilty, that's the main thing. So same thing, T the thin lines. Wrapping up and around that form. And it doesn't have to go exactly with those other lines that we established. If you have those on the page. It's not a big deal. I just wanted to show you, again, another technique to sort of think about it so that you don't draw them too awfully flat and that you try to think about that underlying form as you render. That's it. It's like every line has to go that exact direction. And then as we go to crosshatch, Let's go this way. Actually, I want to probably put them on both directions. You can really round those out. You can also get some nice variation and how thick to thin they are. I think the reason I tend to do it this way is I'm really trying to get a little bit more that feeling of nice cro quilt work that we just don't get nearly as well with digital. I've always said that. I love creating digital lines and inking this way. Definitely love the coloring process digitally. But I always admit that nothing beats, cro quill and a brush when you really know how to use them. But there's a lot of benefits to digital as well, just like having all your tools in one device is a pretty neat aspect. So same thing here. Up and around. Now here, I'd probably want to bring these lines all the way up this shadow. But I'll just shore them up a bit. I'll make them a bit shorter. And then you see there's an opening here, so it naturally makes me want to not render as much over there because it feels like there's a light source there, right? So again, this rendering is was connected to, you know, where's your light source and you know, is the rendering helping to explain what you've established with your shadows? So I'm going to leave that opening up there. And obviously, your rendering doesn't need to look like mine. Experiment, play around with this, fill up pages and pages of just rendering, just practice running all sorts of different ways. Different angles, different thicknesses. Try dropping in heavier shadows, lighter shadows, all the variations, all the variables. All right. I'm going to just continue on with the same kind of angle. I feel like it's working pretty good. By the way, if you are using Sketchbook pro like I am. Keep in mind that when you hold space bar for this hockey puck, you're better off rotating out here. If you grab towards the middle, it spends really fast because it's based upon that little.in the middle has a rotation point. So slower rotation, faster rotation. So seeing like that one, I feel like the upward lines really do a lot for. I'm going to bring those lines up this way. Maybe thinner, tighter in succession, for the most part. Each one of these angles and ways to generate lines adds a different gradient. You could even bring this one line all the way up the side here like this. There's just all sorts of ways to look at this. In fact, I think that's what this needs right here. E's pull back, check it from a distance. Get rid of the blue for a second. Yeah. That's the style I like. It feels more controlled and I don't know. I just like the look of it, but it's all preference there. But we'll go ahead and stop here. I know this takes a, but it's necessary if this is the look you want and hopefully you're learning through this process. Let's stop here, head over to the next lesson and continue on. 14. More Rendering to the Leg: And we'll come back. Now with this lower left area, which actually really I still got some in this area down here as well, but I want to start talking about this lower left here and we'll fill it all in as we go. But you can really think about this or if you want. You could try to render this in a little bit different way. You'll see this very commonly. I guess this was a real big 90s thing. I would imagine it still is today. But by rendering that different way, what I like about it is it gives another variation overall to the look of it. I kind of reinforces that idea that one light source is one way, one light source is another. Personally, I like it. I think it again, I like introducing variables and variation rendering. If not, it can just look a little bit kind of overdone. Like if you do the same rendering all the way through an entire piece, it can still look very dimensional if you're good with the light source, but It just doesn't have the same rest and relaxation for the eyes, I think. It just needs to have those variables to look as good as it could. That's what I'm going to do. I just want to do that part real fast, which actually don't mind the look of it right there, but let me go back and try to do it a little bit better. I maybe sometimes fast works, right? Let's do it without that blue line in the wake. I'm not going to need the depth and dimension as much. I really got to figure out that. Reason why it's doing that with the text. So even though I'm going to go more parallel to the shadow, I still have variables of. I could go thick to thin. I see that even felt a little bit uncomfortable for one aspect of the way I was doing it. So let me go back. So it felt like the speed or the amount of Zoom. You go like this and get that angle just right. You know what? Actually, bring it down this way. Now, another way you could do this, if you wanted the shape to be very, very clean, you could actually introduce a selection first. The way I'm going to do it since I know it's on a floating layer, I'm going to go from this point, but I'm going to overshoot a little bit. Rotate it and I can just erase back. Clean up that shape a little bit. Wow, I think I might have like the faster version better. Maybe I need to try that. Yeah, I think I like that better. You can always go back and thicken up the lines a little bit more. Okay. And then erase the edges. So I'm just kind of imagining that shape that would continue around the muscle right there. I can't think I'm going to try this one again. Again, with the speed part of it, I need to be a certain distance. There you go. Because again, if I pull it from too much of a distance, I blind start to flail around a bit. Yeah, I actually like that. So this area up here could be better. I could scrutinize it and keep going back, but you have to be careful that as well because, you know, time is of the essence, right? You don't go too far. So down here, same thing, I'll continue on with this sort of rendering that I've established in the top middle of the leg. I'll break these lines apart as they move towards the other side. Something like that. I'll rotate here. Bring some this way. Break them up a little bit. I'm going to get that bottom plane change of the knee. And I can add a little bit on the top portion. Okay. And a little bit of going down this way. I don't even know if I need any right there. It feels a little bit and a bit forced. I'm going to leave that are out and a little bit more right here. And some right here. Again, you could put the tiny little bumps on the bottom of the wrinkles if you want. I don't know that it does a whole lot for it, but it can bring that ridge up just a little bit more. Let's check it from a distance. Usually at the very end, I'll just go back and I'll just a line weight a little bit more. I might add some little renderings here and there. Now, if I wanted this to be a tattered material, I would just add more imperfections. This is like a smooth suit design. Again, it's a dual light source. But, that's really probably about the extent of what I would add to an area like that. Maybe a little here. I don't know if it needs to. Let's try it. Yeah, probably leave that. There you go. Now you've got a dual light source example. There's other ways you could go into this. You could add some more cross hatching in this secondary light source. I would avoid making it where it starts to look like you're just emulating the other angle. I don't know if it needs that. Let's see it without. Because again, I really like that variation of that distinct difference from the one light source to the other. I would probably leave it like that. With that, let's go ahead and move on to our next lesson. 15. Lighting the Face - Top Left: All right, well come back. In this one, we're going to go ahead and shadow the face and talk about that, I've drawn this simplified stylized face. You can download it work along or draw your own. I just want to talk about some of the things that go into shadowing a face like this. First off, we're going to take and again, pick an angle of the light source. We'll do something like this. There's our dimensional arrow. Then just to speed things up in this particular one, I'll actually introduce another layer and block this n with a tone. I find this to be a helpful way to hurry up and get some of these ideas in rather quickly. We're going to cast a big shadow from the nose. And this is from the top left down so that shadow will carry over through here, I would imagine. Bit of shadow from that wrinkle. We're also going to block in some of this side, I would say. Since this is a more stylized character. I'm going to probably go a little bit more angular with the shadows. So something I would recommend to for this is that when you are learning, trying to get better at the stuff, lean into the oversimplifications. Stylizations, and simplified shapes, and that applies to shadows, that applies to your drawings, everything. Then over time as you want to refine and get into more complex concepts, you can. But generally, simplifications will make your life a lot easier. Get the ball rolling basically. I probably bring this shadow even further over now. I might do some negative linemking with details like the glasses, But for now, I'm just going to look past that. Probably a little bit on the side plane. So another thing to think about when you're doing this is, what are the major planes? So if the lights coming down this way and hitting, say the nose, it's possible we'd get a little bit of shadow, maybe even some edge lighting to the that bottom plane of the nose. We could probably block it in, but it's pretty close. I'd say we probably could. So I'm going to leave it for now, but again, that's something I might edit back in the other direction as we move forward. A lot of this I do check as I go. I'm just placing it, staring at it for a bit, working on something else, coming back with fresh eyes, and it's usually the best way to figure these things out. I found drop shadow from this big early mustache. Top lip would be in shadow anyways. Again, thinking about the plane changes that are facing away from the light, And obviously, if you really want to push the style of something like this, you can go kind of crazy with the dramatizations of individual features as well. If I really wanted to make this chin look pretty pronounced, I could put this weird shaped shadow in there, right? It's not something I particularly want to do, but again, these are ideas that you can think about when you start to place this in here. Nice, big shadow obviously under here because the lights way up here, pressing down. So we're going to get a nice heavy shadow from the head there against the neck. Probably a little bit from the collar. You definitely get a little bit over here and under here. And the hair, I would still use these bits of separation with the shadow, even though the light source. It's not that the light source is actually right at this very spot. It's at that very angle. So hopefully you get that. I just couldn't draw it way off the page. But at the same time, I'm still going to think about as I move this way towards the light that I'm going to do larger pockets in the hair, maybe move down to strands. So I can start heavier th here, and then as I work up here, go into strands. That's a reoccurring thing you could do. You could do that with the eyebrows. I don't think I'm going to fill these in real heavy. I think I'll keep them more stylized. But it's the same concept with big to small shapes all over the place. You could do the same thing here, block the underneath more heavily, some heavier pockets to create a sense of volume to the hair. But then as you move towards the light, maybe thinner, but they wouldn't create any pockets of shadow, just maybe a little bit less. That gives you a sense of wrapping around towards the light. Some wrinkles over here. Shadows off the high folds. You could do some off the lenses as well. Here it would probably just block in together. Right here, you'd get a little bit of separation and some details from that. And then from here, I'll just finish drawing in some of the smaller details, just little wrinkles through the brow area. If I want to any more wrinkles over here. So again, I would just bring this together with rendering. So now, you can see like that, it's pretty messy, but it's an idea. I know it's a way to level up to the next set of ideas, basically, way to kind of relay the next bit of information. So we can take this now and we could start to beef up some of the shapes. We can add to it a little bit more as we go, Oh, definitely be one right here on the side of that wrinkle. But now we would just clean it up. We're ahead and stop right here. We're going to go to the next lesson, draw another version. We'll get a couple more of these in, then we'll ink them and talk more about that process. With that, let's move on. 16. Lighting the Face - Bottom Left: Welcome back. So now we will take and create another one, and we'll go ahead and move our arrow. Let's take this and see if I can recycle my arrow. A little smaller. Let's do an upshot from way down here so that dramatic upward lighting, and let's see what we can come up with here. Another technique for this as well is to start way back. It's really up to you, but it can be another way to forge your mind into simplifying. It's pretty hard to over detail when you're way far away from something. You're going to typically use bigger shapes a little bit more instinctively. Yeah, it's just another encouraging factor to get you to simplify and just picture that using a big marker on the stuff. Blocking it in rather quickly. And also just working from a distance saves time, right? It's always a huge time saver, especially when you're digital. Well, you know, I would say always when you're digital. I think you al I already mentioned, you can't really zoom up as much in traditional, aside from the big crazy spectacles, you know, the big glasses and magnifying glasses and stuff like that, but you can still do it. So it's just really it's almost too easy with digital. Yeah, we can really turn it into a bit of a bad habit. We got to be careful of that. Same concept, we'll start very heavy with the shadows on the top. In this case, I'm thinking about these smaller plane changes, obviously. Really you could start there. There would be a plane change on the top of the cheeks, because the cheeks round up and then back towards the eye. There's going to be a plane change and shift right on the top of the cheeks. That's the one you've seen a lot of scary photos, with the lights coming up and they look terrified. There's always that big shadow on the top of the cheeks. You're going to see the bottom plane change in the nose. Really the simplest way to think about it is that it stages back and forth. You're going to get some on the top of the mustache. That makes the bottom plane of the nose pop out more. Then back and forth, you go. This will be filled in here, obviously, top of the lip, bottom of the lip, but it's not the shadow that would typically drop from the bottom of the lip, it's the top of the skin right here. I think you really need to think about that because if not, you can end up shadowing it the same way you would. We're so used to seeing a shadow at the bottom of the lip. But again, this isn't that shadow, and really it would be thinner by comparison. That's the other thing. Make it nice and thin, but it's still there. I don't know, that almost feels too thin. I'm going to go a little heavier. Then the shadow here is the top of the chin, so it's the light hitting the bottom and wrapping around and up and this is the shadow it's leaving. It takes a little bit of practice to get used to this. Same thing here. It feels like I'm dropping in a drop shadow from the chin, but I'm not. I'm actually thinking of this as a round and away from the light. I do more of this. I guess realistically you would probably round up the negatives of the shadow more like this. Hopefully that makes sense. Same thing here, I probably wouldn't block in the entire bit of hair mostly. But if I left any light, it would need to occur on the part of the hair that rounds down and back. But then it can't go too far down because the top of the head is going to be creating a shadow upward. This is a tricky era. It feels like just block it all in and maybe do a couple negative lines to show some hair strands. We'll play around with that entirely sure about that spot. I feel like there needs to be a little bit of light I don't want the character to look like they're fully in the dark, but. Some of these are tricky to figure out. The main thing is start with the shadows and then push down towards the light. I'll block in this entire ear because again, the light is to the bottom left. Same thing here and here. I'm going to put a heavier shadow against this area. Little bit here. Some against the iris. Then some on the top of the eye and the top plane of the ear. Probably the side of the collar. And I would imagine even the collar is going to create a drop shadow back up onto the neck. The other thing we got to think about is when the light hits something from the bottom. Well, how much could it possibly catch before it rounds over that object. So realistically, we could probably bring the shadow from the mustache all the way down like this and just catch the bottom of it. So I don't know. That feels like it might be a little bit too much. I'm going to go back, but maybe something in between what I had and where I tried to take it cause that almost feels like a little bit toole too light of a shadow. I But again, as we clean this up, we can push things back and forth. Pup a little closer and check it. You see it's a bit messy. But again, I like doing it this way because all I really need is a reference point. What we'll do when I get to the inking part of it is I'm just going to drop it back like that, and that gives me some really good work to polish off to ink and clean up. That's really it. So we're going to do one more example. Then I'll time lapse the inking part and move on with that. So with that, let's move forward. 17. Lighting the Face - Top Down: And welcome back. Now we're going to do one from a top down view, but also we're going to do it with a more extreme version of it. So this is probably a little more typical of most shots, that top down kind of perspective of it. But then as soon as you take the shadow and you go really heavy downward, it brings it more to the front and again, more dramatic. Another thing to think about when you're shadowing is, and I think I've already mentioned this, I've probably mentioned everything twice at this point. But another thing to think about is what percentage of the character is in light versus dark and really playing around with that slide or that variable because you can really intensify things based upon that. You'll probably find your style for again, what's typical, what you generally default to. But what's nice about this exercise is it gets you to break out of that comfort zone a little bit and play around with some new concepts. That's really the beauty of zeroing in on any one aspect of your illustrations. Because if not, we tend to think about everything at once and default into our comfort zone because we're trying to just get an entire piece out. But if you look at each individual element, then you can really again play I tend to think of like sliders. Almost like when you're designing a character in a game, you get those cool sliders, tug back and forth. Try to think of that with your own artwork. And all those different variables you can orchestrate to make some cool style choices and designs. Again, really trying to push some of the same shadows, but obviously the shadows are on the bottom of each of these little areas, and even though it might look like right here, I'm putting that one above the cheek, like we did from the up light, this is actually the bottom of the eyed. Some of them are just going to be really close to the other ones, but just on the opposite And here we could probably block in the whole eye cavity, really, except for that bottom eyelid. I really like that shadow that shows the thickness of that bottom eyelid. That's really the thing you have to think about with a lot of the stuff. What kind of thickness would I see to each one of these areas of the skin, folds of the cheek, the eyes, how thick are they? How wide are they? How thick is this ear? If it's a cartoony ear, we'd probably see a pretty big shadow on the bottom. If it wasn't, you know, maybe and if you didn't want it to feel as thick, you just shorten that shadow, and it's going to feel like a thinner volume. You know, so the thickness of the shadow is very descriptive of these areas. And some shadow to the collar. Same thing with the hair will start heavier down here and then just break it up as it comes to the top. Shadow from the glasses. You could even do a shadow from the lens. You might render that a little bit lighter, and sometimes it'll become distracting too with neighboring shadows. You see the bottom eyelid and the shadow from the glasses, almost look a bit like two wrinkles under the eye. We'd have to be a little strategic probably with the rendering there, but I still like it. I'm still going to leave it. This ear would probably be blocked in. Now, we could probably bring the shadow from the mustache up a bit higher. Again, we're trying to go for a little bit more drama. Now, the other thing too is we could really push the shadow pretty heavy down here if we wanted. Again, something else we have to do is we have to think about the individual volumes, but then we also have to think about the character entirely in this element of light and shadow. So brighter up here, and then as we work down into here, we could really play around with these shadows and pull them up pretty heavily just to see see if it works. What it does is by comparison, it intensifies the light source up here. That spherical nature of the top of the head. All that gets more intensified. We probably don't want to take it too far. It might be a bit much, but because now what it sort of does is it sort of makes the jaw look like it's very thick. And I would say on a character like this, you know, he doesn't have a very thick jaw. He's more of a, a skinnier guy, so I'm going to go back on that part. I think that's a bit too much. But still something to think about. We could still introduce that with the rendering. Let me just go back to here. Pull this back. Because again, it just makes it feel like he's got this really thick jaw, which I don't like that in this type of character. He's more of a scientist, not a football player. Okay, what else? Probably a little bit more shadow on the iris, even though Actually, that's probably about right. We could probably even bring the shadow on the bottom of the eros like this. What that does that helps push away that next neighboring edge of the top of the bottom eyelid. Top edge of the bottom eyelid, that's hard to explain right there, but that's what I mean. There we go. That gives us enough to work with. And obviously, we could keep pushing that. We say, well, what if the cheek bone was a little more defined from an angle like this because it does stand a reason that the shadows would maybe start to curve around the bottom of the cheek bone. So we could play around with that. I mean, there's all sorts of distinctions you could make here. But again, it's really nice comparatively. So what I'm going to do now is I'll bring them all side by side. I'll go and income. I'll time lapse it because it'll probably take me a good 30, 40 minutes, maybe an hour. I don't know. It depends on how it goes, I guess. But I'll narrow it through the process, get the key points about it. In fact, here, let me just bring them all together right now for you. Okay, so there you go. So now you can see just, you know, the little bit of difference there. It's not massive, but it's enough to play around the concept and see, a bit of variation. And again, that variation is great to explore, will help you develop your style. But let's stop here, head over to the next lesson in Inks, and let's see what we come up with. 18. Inking the Faces: Wel come back. Now we're going to go and ink these and basically, I'm just looking for the big shapes first. I want to start this one with the shapes of shadows, really talk about what I go for, what my goal is. My goal is to obviously clean up the work, but also find stylistic choices as I do this, little angles, little different ways to explain various shapes. I might draw nose a specific way for quite some time. Then find a new shape that I don't know, just looks more creative and something that I start to think might be a better fit for my style. As I'm shaping this, I'm always looking for those new and inventive ways to draw and ultimately shape and stylize the variety of elements within a face within a character. I think that's one of the things that allows us to continually develop our art style, but also find ways to save time. I'm a big fan of that. If there's something that I can draw stylistically with a more simplified shape and it still looks good. I'm still happy with the end result, then I'm definitely going to incorporate that into Martyle. We have to also remember that when we get better at drawing things based upon looking at the shapes of shadows, it relates really well to size reductions. When you go to draw your smaller versions of your characters, you really lend to that way of thinking those big shapes of shadows that again, simplify the work, make it read more quickly to the viewer. So it's definitely something to really zero in on and pay attention to. Another thing that I think is helpful when doing this is looking for patterns. If you notice with the hair like shape, it could be overly repetitive C or curves, moon like shapes side by side. But if I left it that way, it just wouldn't have the sense of flow or fold. What I do is even though I repeat those shapes of those C like bends, I occasionally cut into them and it starts to create this W or like shape that I usually see, especially on the side of the hair there. But again, looking for those patterns when you're inking can again, aid with simplifications, aid with speed, give you a sense of comfort, and all that good stuff. So look for those patterns. Now with the shapes of shadows in place, we can start the rendering phase for this first lit scenario. Again, a real simple way to think about this is if you were to point your lines towards the light source, that's one way to explain the idea that is going from dark to light. Other way is just to crosshatch them, multiple two times three times different angles, and each time creating a sense of gradient or light and shadow just dark to light. You're basically softening up the edging of that. But again, you want to think about the underlying form and the character in this case as a three dimensional object and try to round over to that. For this next example, I'm going to start with just line art, mainly to because I want to expediate this and show the variation, show the different approach, but I'll use as the line art for the third as well. But the thing is that when you go with this approach, it can be great in a systematic breakdown of the artwork, and also creating different lines and nice clean lines all the way through. Maybe e zero and on line weight, but in this case, I didn't because I'm going to fill in a lot of that with shadowing anyways and rendering. I'll leave the line weight more to the end. But it did give me that next version that I needed for the third example. But the only drawback to this part is, I feel like it almost takes a little bit longer because now we still have to go back and get in our shapes of shadows and stuff like that. This is just personal preference. You'll want to try different variations of all of this. Do you feel more comfortable blocking in big shadows? Do you feel more comfortable with a large brush versus a very thin brush? Do you feel more comfortable with a marker versus a fine point pen? All these things will affect your style, your comfort as you move through the artwork. Again, play with these variables. It really helps you to zero in on what your strengths are or what you currently feel more comfortable doing at this moment. Also remember that if you feel stuck, if you feel like you're not progressing, sometimes it can be really nice to jump in with a different approach. So for instance, if you feel better using that thinner line approach, maybe challenge yourself the next day or for the next week to use a big marker and see if you can shake something loos. Sometimes we get a little bit too caught up in our repetitious monotonous behavior, and it stifles our creativity or at least that's what I've experienced. So now you can see with this one, I'm trying to put those really deep, big shapes of shadows under the chin, under the eyes, under the nose, going for those major plane changes and getting and also adding a larger volume of shadow. Now, there's a lot more nuances to light and shadow, like how far back is the light behind the head? Is it a spot light versus environmental lighting? There's a lot of variables. So this is meant to be, again, a simplification of these ideas, to get you rolling, to get you thinking about this and practicing in some different ways. But the main thing is, is just to take your sketches like this and move that light around and experiment so that you do start to open up to the possibilities. Again, the simplest way to look at this is go for those big shapes. Then from there, you can always break into the secondary details, the forehead wrinkles, the wrinkles around the mouth, things like that. But first, get those major plane changes in. Okay, now we're going to start rendering this. And again, same concept, if you want to keep it very simple, just think of the shadow breaking apart into tiny little lines that point right towards your light source. That's the easiest way to consider this. But then the other ways are well, anything from stiple shading to various cross hatching to various line thicknesses. Also experiment with line length, for shorter volumes, so that if you notice the wrinkles right by the nose, aren't very big folds. By the time you went up to the cheek bone, how much distance is that, not very much. So it would make sense to use finer or tinier little rendering lines for that specific area. But if the volume is larger or say you wanted to shadow from the base of the chin all the way up to the side of the temple, you could do that with a bunch of tall, thin lines, of course, and then cross hatch maybe the cheek bone, the jaw, under the lip, things like that to bring that fade kind of to make it more dimensional. But generally you're not going to. Generally, you're just going to grab each volume. By that, I mean, like the chins of volume, the cheek bones of volume, the side of the masseter muscle by the ear, that's its own volume. Again, breaking these things down into planes, volumes, and then adding your rendering to reflect what it is you see there. Now blocking in the third example. By now, hopefully, you've got some good practice going in and you're starting to see some patterns here, some ways that you can break down your own artwork and simplify things. Again, going for the major areas. Obviously, the top of the head would be in full shadow from a single low light source, and just grabbing big pieces of the top areas of each one of those different forms. The lip, the chin, the nose, each one, treating it individually, All right, which will give an overly segmented look. But again, you can do that at first and then slowly kind of connect them together where needed. Now, I particularly like a nice segmented look for this kind of dramatic uplighting. I think it really makes it look more spooky or something. I don't know what the right word is there, but, you know, it adds to the effect, and I like it. Again, as I've mentioned, at other parts of this course is basically when you know, you try to make as many decisions based upon what you know to be true and what you've studied, what you've learned from different artists, from studying from life, all those good things. Then there's a certain amount of it when you come to comics or any kind of storytelling where you're creating the characters, whether it be comics, manga, storyboards, you know, you name it, any of that. You're going to just bring a certain amount of your style to it. It's not like everything's going to be 100% correct. Oh, yes, the shadow would have only hit here and the light would have only hit there. Maybe in a perfect world. But we're being creative here. So we're going to take creative liberties with that. And I like that ability to sometimes stretch or dramatize something that I think just might look cooler this way versus the way it really is. So I never take that off the table. In fact, I enjoy that aspect of creating imaginative characters. But it also takes a certain amount of studying where it's connected to some real knowledge of an understanding of the subject matter, or it just doesn't work, right? In fact, there's always a time at a place to study the way things really look. But then you have to basically translate that into your own style and take some creative liberties with it, explore some various ideas, go against the grain, mix it up. I think that that again, is another opportunity for you to develop your style and some self confidence with your own abilities to say, I know this wasn't right, but I made it work. I think a lot of the artists that I admire that I've grown up aspiring to be a little bit more like and things like that. I think I've always found and appreciated that in their work. Now, some just do things so well, it looks like it could have been a painting or a photo. And then others, they do enough of the areas that are right that need to be right, and then they explore just a variety of other things that are just sensationalized or super creative or arcaturized, Um, but that's really it. Hopefully, these lessons are bringing you, again, some good information on how to go about this and how to explore these various ideas, and I'd love to see your work. So thank you for watching and more in the way.