Transcripts
1. Introduction Video: Hello everyone. My name is Robert Marzullo, and welcome to my course on creature design. In this course, you're going to learn a lot of different techniques and exercises to hone your skill set. I've been creating creature designs and comic art and illustrations for over 20 years. I've learned a lot of techniques along the way, and that's what I'm going to share with you. By developing these exercises and really filling up the sketchbooks with lots of variety in your work and understanding what some of these varieties mean and how to construct them, you really have no end of ideas and you'll be able to create all sorts of imaginative concepts. You'll learn about thumbnailing and the benefits that holds, how to really create variations within your work, how to study from life, why that's so important, why it allows you to never really run out of ideas. So just lots of good information in here that I've acquired over the years that I want to share with you. Keep in mind this is not software specific, so this is for digital or traditional artists to learn from. By the end of this course, you're going to have a lot better understanding of how to create a variety of ideas and how to combine those ideas to create all sorts of new inventive concepts. It's really a fun and interesting process. You're also going to learn how to make proportion changes within your character and why that can make such a huge difference within your design. Then we'll take everything that we've learned thus far and we'll implement it into a project file. So we'll work from a script and we'll create a character concept much in the way that we would for a client. This will teach you how it really goes in the professional world and get you ready for that type of experience. I'm excited to teach you this course and I can't wait to see what you come up with. Good luck with your art and I'll talk to you soon.
2. The Spine Says It All: Welcome back everyone [inaudible] here, so now what we're going to do is, we're going to work on the spine creation and the reason why this is so important is because everything is housed off the spine and everything weights against the spine. So if you have a better understanding of the way the spines are structured, then you're going to be able to come up with lots of cool creature concepts. It's just a great place to start so if you've ever drawn bodies like figure drawing, you're going to do things like an action line, you're going to find the most significant line through the body. A lot of times that will relate to the spine just because of things like posture and again the weight, everything's housed on that. So what we're going to do first is, just draw out a spine to a human character because it helps us to see by comparison so we have a little bit better understanding naturally of the human spine even though we don't really see it in this fashion very often but we understand the posturing and the weight, we see a lot of people and the way they stand, so we can relate to it. From there, we're going to take that information and we're going to draw it a few others and then we're going to see the differences. A lot of times when you're doing creature design concepts and drawing anything really but it very much relates to creature design, you'll do a lot of things by comparison so when you draw out of a certain character, you'll look at it and analyze it and go, okay, how can I make this a bit cool? How can I stretch the magnitude of the size of the ferocity, or whatever it is you're trying to convey in that creature design. Is it more innocent and a loving type little creature? Then you do that comparatively, you look at the things that are working and the things that aren't and you just maneuver and that's what sketching is all about. Even what you see me doing here, sketching out these pieces of the spine, they're not entirely correct it's probably a lot more imaginative in some ways but it'll get the point across but each time I soft erase and re-sketch I am fixing little components of it. I'm adjusting things and moving them around, I'm checking the work, things like that so that's the same way that you're going to sketch out your creature concepts each time we're going to hone it. We're going to talk about that with thumbnailing. Thumbnailing is a great way to be able to do just that and it's just slightly moving the lines around, slightly adjusting things until you keep getting better and better version of what it is you're trying to put down. So if you notice with the spine here, there's a lot of curvature, it's not just straight up and down and that's why I wanted to do a profile to really show that because it's very easy to draw characters and creatures too straight up and down and really getting this repetitious behavior of drawing the same static pose. It's very important not only in just in character design to get anything less than static, dynamic as much as possible but both creature design it goes into a whole another level because there's a lot more expressive behavior in the body of creatures. There's just so many things that you can accomplish in so many rules that you can break with creative design that you really don't want things to be straight up and down at all, pretty much never. So what you want to do here is really focus on the ability to draw out these spines in a really imaginative way. But again, we're going to start with a base of realism and the thing that we know most realistically would be the human spine. Keep in mind there's lots of humanoid characters where understanding the spine, and the rib cage, and the cranium like this will still help you with those types of designs as well. So just finishing this off and drawing through this and getting enough of that information and placed understand it, and keep in mind whenever you do sketches like these you want to catalog them, you want to save them. You can always use this as a foundation to build up your creature concepts. Another great exercise is to actually put this in place and try to draw maybe five different creature concepts over the spine. If you're working traditionally, that means a light table, and some paper, or tracing paper vellum but that's always a great exercise to really stretch the imagination as well. Now we're going to do another very recognizable spine structure, this is actually from a raptor so we're going to draw out and really pay special attention to the elongated spine and the curvature that we see within this type of character or creature. Again, this relates so well to so many various concepts that you could come up with. So by doing this we can really start with a base foundational element and we could work up from this, and we could create dragons, we could create creatures that have multiple sets of legs, just whatever your imagination can come up with. That's really what you're going to learn throughout these lessons, I'm going to show you how to really stretch that concept. Start with the basic, start with a foundation like this, and then apply a bunch of different things over top, various wings, different legs, just different things to really get an idea going, and then elaborate from there. You can see I stretched the proportions out a bit as well so that's another thing that's really big in creature concepts. Now here we're going for a little bit more of what it would actually look like, a little bit closer to realism but a big part of creature design concepts is to know when to really push the proportion, so really stretch the proportions. You can actually come up with some pretty imaginative ideas just with changing the proportions. There's just lots of little things that we associate as being correct by the way the proportions are done so if you give something and overly long neck, or a bigger than average tail, smaller head. For instance, if you make the head smaller, you're going to make the creature look more massive by the relationship of the body. Another trick is if you're doing this creature that you want to look very large and monstrous or whatever, you can give them these tiny little eyes and just that comparison will generally make the head look larger. Proportions are very important to either making something realistic, like we're going for here, or making something looking a bit more fantasy based. Again, just drawing through this and notice as far as the sketching part goes that when I soft erase it down and I go to a draw back through, that's when I come back and with the confident line making. In the beginning, I'm very much a scribbling in ideas. I want to talk a lot about that through this lessons because I always get a lot of students that will say that they struggle with getting their ideas down in the sketching process. Keep in mind that loose sketching and light sketching is very much part of the creative process, that's what allows you to see into the work and figure things out. I don't always know exactly what something should look like. If you're working from reference you have that as your guide as well but the light sketch lines are a workup to finding the right line so don't think about it as much as having to put the right line down exactly where it needs to go the first time, because I think that stagnates you and it makes you a little too critical of your work too early on. You want to really let the sketch lines help you to find the right placement. Always nudging lines around, always moving things around and then once I have a firm understanding of what should go on the page, that's when I come back with a more solid line which is still not against soft erasing but I'm fixing that if I can make something better. So notice that spines very elongated, notice the proportion skills, there's a lot of similarities to even the human spine but there's those major differences like the, obviously the tail structure, and the way the neck is elongated, and even though elongated cranium, just lots of neat little details that you can study from there. Again, this is the foundation of how you'll start to understand different animals and then you can start to put it all together and make just lots and lots of co-creature concepts. What I really want to stress to is, if you learn to pull certain characteristics from a variety of animals and from nature as inspiration, even plant life and sex. If you really get good at that, you're never going to run out of ideas, you just going to have a multitude of possibilities. It's just amazing when you start to really think about that and you start to really pay attention to the things around you, there's just tons and tons of great inspiration and reference. So like this right here is a skeletal structure of a fish and it doesn't seem like much but when you start to compare it to the differences that you see in the previous two examples you realize that there's actually a lot of tiny differences going on. The structure of the head is very different, it's almost bird-like with a bit of a beak, the way that the spine runs right through the middle of the body in this perspective, and fins out is very neat, the way that it has a top and bottom arch, that fans and connects to the spine. These are just little details but it gives you lots of great information to work from when you got to structure something. One of the things that I think it's really neat about studying the spine is that, we don't have to leave all that information on the inside of our character, it can be a foundational base where we apply anatomy over top, or it can be an exoskeleton and you can come up with all neat ideas. In fact, I think some of the best alien creation type designs seem to always have a bit of fish-like qualities on the exterior of the body. Likewise, there's just so much great reference when it comes to aquatic life it's just there's so much that we're not used to seeing that it has much of a almost an alien-like appearance. There's a lot to be harnessed from that, studied from that and that's why I really like doing these types of renditions. It's always a great warm up, and it gives you just a bunch of ideas, I think almost a little bit subconsciously just by creating these studies it just makes you change your perception or your perspective on things a bit more. Then when you go to draw your own stuff, the ideas just going to work themselves in so I get a lot of people that ask, how do you come up with these ideas? How do you see these thing in your mind and then put them on paper? I don't know that it's that conscious all the time but by doing the studies, it becomes a little bit more subconscious than it just becomes almost reactionary. So you're sitting there, putting down the work and you think, well, I'm having this really creative moment and I'm coming up with this great idea but in all reality it's just some resemblance of life experience and things that you've practiced or done before, maybe studied from even another artists, or life generally, and just lots and lots of sketches. You really want to sketch often to really get a confidence level with this type of stuff. It's not always imaginative drawings, sometimes it's a combination of realism and then putting your own spin on it. Another great technique for stuff like this is to actually draw a lot of the foundational information and then hide the reference, and then just draw from your mind. In fact, they do that quite a bit because I want them to be more expression in the work. If I wanted just a picture, I would just grab a picture so I try to make sure to experiment in that way. So make sure to do lots of studies like these, grab spines from all different animals, invertebrates, vertebrates, just everything you can get your hands on and really study some of the shapes and designs that you see within there, it will really help your creature design. In the next lesson, we're going to cover the cranium design a little bit more in a more imaginative way so with that, let's press on.
3. Thumbnailing Your Concepts: Now we're going to talk about thumbnailing the work. Thumbnails are just rough sketches, loose sketches, and generally timed or at least really fast, faster than you're normally used to working. The benefit of this is you generally will get more expressive ideas. It also allows you to get a lot of ideas on the page rather quickly, which is really important for conceptual design and for getting just the brain box going, getting the creativeness going is so important. This is probably the most useful technique when it comes to getting creative, I think. If not what ends up happening, you might spend too much time on one illustration, and then get it to some finality and then really not even like it. I've had that happen. Essentially what happens here is that you're able to get all of these different expressive ideas down and really experiment because you're not spending too much time on any one concept. Each one of these sketches took about five, six, some of them maybe seven minutes. I tried to time some and then others I just make sure to draw more quickly as I progress through it because you do speedup as you warm up to this. The main focus of this is just to incorporate again some different animals so like this dragon and insect combined. Then the first one would be more of like insect with maybe crab-like features. The head, I don't know. That might be the head of maybe another type of insect, so even a combination of a few different insects. This third one is more of like a centipede, snake with a little bit more of an eerie animated look [inaudible]. A lot of times what I'm trying to do is incorporate a couple of different elements, like anything else with creature design, but then also really experiment basically. The essential ingredient when it comes to the thumbnailing is that experimentation is so much quicker that allows you to really jump in there, put some ideas down, and not get too bogged down with any idea of refinement. You can obviously make changes to the work. That's always a good idea. You don't want to really only think in one direction as you create this stuff, but if you sketch very lightly, and you keep it very rough, the ideas will seem to flourish a bit more. I think it's really important to do that. Now one of the things I will do when drawing this way, because almost immediately I get the overall structure down and then work from that so I do still tend to draw in a little bit of skeletal structure, like we talked about in the very beginning. It's very important to think about the spine, think about the head shape, but then also what's neat about this is since you're able to pull all these ideas down next to one another, you can avoid making the same mistakes of the same pattern in your work. You can look at the ones you've already done and go, okay, I got to make sure I try something different. We're going to talk about that in the next lesson two about really varying up the design or purposely varying up the design where here that naturally happens, but I'm not really going for too much variation. You'll see a lot of them tend to come out very reptile and insect-like because that's some of the things that I enjoy the most, but this one is very mammal-like and trying to do something weird with adding an extra set of arms and again just that whole experimental type thing. Now here I go for something plant life, and I really recommend doing this as well where you don't just think about the traditional animals, so to speak, and you think about, again, plant life, microscopic life, even elements. For instance, you'll see a lot of cool creature designs and they're not just drawn with creatures. They even have elements of fire or a rock or water. Those things are really cool. They give another spin to the character and immediately it make it different than anything we've seen. It's very important to think that way. It doesn't have to just be animals and insects. It's really anything that you can combine together to come with some unique perspective. Obviously the way that you design it and the way that you draw it will bring that other end of the creative unique spin on and or whatever. This one, very frog like and then just bouncing around doing some difference, markings on and things like that. Just so you know, you don't have to always soft [inaudible] like I'm doing here. That's just something I like to do to put down some immediate structure and then come back over top and do a little bit of refinement, but a lot of artists will do thumbnails where they don't erase at all, and you will get quick privacy from that. That's up to your own judgment call there and what you like to do. There's no right or wrong way to do this. The main thing is that you are just a little bit aware of the time. By the end of all these sketches that you'll see on the page here, I took about a little over an hour. That's really the most important part of it, because you can easily warm up with something like this in the beginning of your day and not eat up a tremendous amount of your day. That's probably the most functional part of it. Again, you're going to be able to reference these and look back and go, okay, I've got some nice variety or maybe I lean a little bit too much towards reptiles. Maybe I need to put some more aquatic life in there, put some more mammals in there, more humanoid features, stretch out the proportions more, things like that, so you can make those decisions after seeing the work comparatively which is always nice. Here I tried to do something more sea life, but with a weird take on the head shape and things like that. Oftentimes you can really just change something almost just distinctly in one area. It will oftentimes look very alien, a very creature concept. Or you can obviously just go entirely different. By the end of this, I'll show you one where I just do something very creepy and weird by comparison. I look at everything on the page and I go, okay, what haven't I done? What else can I do here? In this case, I want to do something with an asymmetrical value, so one arm being a lot larger than the other. That's another thing that's important to practice because you can oftentimes make something look very eerie or creepy just by giving you that huge asymmetrical difference. It also pulls you out of the mindset of continually making things symmetrical, which can actually get you in trouble with your art style because it doesn't allow you to think. Again, in any unilateral direction, you don't want to always think in one way of creation. You want to really vary up your style. You want to try different things. In my opinion, you're always going to learn the most by doing things like that. Asymmetry is another way to break that middle barrier. Here's something that I draw there. I just wanted for something really creepy and strange. I think this is also another good way to break out of those mental [inaudible] and just do something entirely creative in this case, eerie and strange. But the neat thing about drawing this way, especially with the creature concept, there is no confinement, there's no arms. You can't even tell [inaudible] this thing's spine might be. It's very different from the other creatures, and you can really just be entirely imaginative with it. Again, another way to break that mental barrier of always doing the same thing and always drawing the same way, and again, you're going to do that with other ways like drawing with different size pens and brushes. You're going to do that with varying up your speed in the way that you create. Some artists will even do it by drawing things upside down. There's just a lot of ways to do your studies where you'll just help yourself not to create in the same way all the time, which in my opinion stagnates your creative ideas. Just finishing this up, so give yourself an opportunity to do some thumbnails. Time yourself. Start with 10 minute thumbnails, work down to five. Even attempt some at one minute. Really study the differences and the expression that you get with your work. Let's move on to the next lesson.
4. The Brain Box: Now in this lesson, we're going to talk about the cranium. A lot of the overall expression of the creature can be defined in the head obviously. It's the area that we most relate to on humans and various lifeforms, anything, whether it's eyes, we typically will relate to that the most. We look at them eye to eye so to speak. I think this is helpful to do when studying just the cranium is really to pay attention to certain things like this one with the mouth going past the eye, that generally is a predatorial type thing. You're going to find that in reptiles, and obviously reptiles are known for being cold blooded killers kind of thing. When the mouth almost overtakes and the mouth and jaw area overtakes everything about the structure, it's generally a very predatorial look. You can be aware of that and obviously spikes, like I like to do in my illustrations, always signify a more dangerous animal. You really want to just focus on the things that you can study about those creatures and the differences. When you see something that's a predator, making sure to take notes of what makes it look like a predator and what is even functional in the way that they are a predator, the way they consume food and the way that they entrap food and things like that. If you're aware of that, then you're drawings are going to come out a lot better, a lot more effectively. Now with this one, I wanted to do something that was more squid-like. It's got the tentacles off the face. But also, in this one I wanted to make sure to illustrate that maybe it's a little bit harder to tell if this thing is a predator. It's going to look eerie and feel like a bit of a predator but maybe it's a predator in a different way. For instance, with the skin type or this type of creature, you could almost make the argument that it has some coding that maybe is poisonous and that it entraps it's food that way, lures them in and then sometimes even creatures will lure other animals in by appearing to be less predatorial, but they have a self-defense mechanism. All of these can be thought about when you're doing your creature designs and your concepts. Generally, if you're going from a script, you're going to be told a lot of these things when you go into the design process but I think that when creating your own studies, it's still very helpful to think this way. You want to just imagine as much about the concept as you can and I always find that that helps me get more visual information about whatever I'm doing. I don't just simply sketch it and hope for an idea. I think about the background of a creature or character, details of it, even try to imagine the way that it would react using its features to attack another creature and things like that. So you got to really get in the mindset of the functionality of these concepts and past that, some of it's just having fun in rendering and putting in cool little details, things like the little spines there, little shading lines and things. That's just real render work. That's after the concept is already in place. Then I don't have to think about the design any longer and I can just try to make it look cool. But that's after I think about the functionality of what I'm actually drawing and the idea of what I'm actually drawing. So you could probably notice here too that I'm not flying through the drawing process. I'm taking my time and rendering out a bit more. This is unlike the thumbnailing stage where you really rough through a bunch of different ideas. In here, I spent a little bit more time thinking about the refinement and more detail of the character. In this particular one, I want to do a creature that is all mouth. I think this is fun to do as well. It's almost a little bit more resemblant of combining. In this case, I've thought about a few things. I thought about a reptile, I thought about plant like a Venus flytrap or even a clam. Different things that open up and they're pretty much all mouth and the other features being more secondary, that's why I put the eyes back of the head where it almost looks like it can't see at this point. So some animals have to make judgment calls. They'll see a prey and then they react and past that point they can't see it and they have to just generally they're so quick and precise in the way they react and that's how they capture their food. That's really all the thought process that went into this one, and obviously something very monster like. Then even with the teeth, I wanted to characterize the teeth. So really stretching the proportions and making those very almost animated and blocky looking, they're so large, but just all those little concepts to put it together and make something that's a bit more strange to look at. Obviously, giving it three sets of eyes makes it very alien like or I guess resemble that of even an insect. So again, just combining a multiple series of ideas together to make something different. I think that by showing this as being just this big mouth that just obviously is looking to bite or consume something, there's really no question that this is a predator. This is very predatorial looking, the way the mouth opens, the spikes on the back of the head, the mouth being the largest presence on the creature. I don't think that there's any argument that this would be a very predatorial type creature design. I think if you're more aware that you're creating either a monster that's dangerous or one that's cute and cuddly or whatever you want to, that range, then you're generally going to get a lot more effectiveness out of it. If you're just drawing to draw, then you're not really being aware of that. In this particular one, I wanted to do something that was obviously a lot more cute and cuddly and really show by the difference that the proportions make a huge difference on this, so big round eyes, big fluffy ears, little spikes but they're not even to points they're rounded over. He's fuzzy, he's smiling. All of these little character traits obviously immediately identify this creature is not a predator. It's very much not so,. Now it doesn't mean that again, it's not hiding something, some amazing ability that we don't know about or whatever but from face value, it's very friendly and maybe cuddly or something. It's just again, trying to show that comparison in that range will help you to not pin yourself into one way of creating and you need that variation. The dangerous creatures aren't as dangerous if they can't be compared to the little cute and cuddly ones. Now for this last one, I wanted to do something that was very crab-like, almost identical to the way a crab is with the exoskeleton, still a bit of a gruesome face on the inside, I thought that would be fun and some spikes on the outside. But my impression of this, and obviously it can be different to different viewers but what I was going for is something that does look dangerous, but probably isn't. In fact, it's probably something that that's its defense mechanism. It uses the spikes on the top of the head and maybe even the eerie look of the eyes and the teeth more as a way to fend off predators. In reality, it probably be something that would be pretty easy to capture or kill. Now, again, that's all depended upon the viewer and how they interpret what I drew but that's what my ideas I was trying to create this. That's again, one of those things that we have to try to practice and hone our skills that we're not always going to be able to convey our exact meaning. That's what criticism is all about and somebody can look at it and go, "I think that thing looks very dangerous. You made it look too dangerous." That's okay. Taking that criticism constructively and making the changes are very important so you have to always be aware that just because you think you're putting something down correctly or effectively, or you think it looks cool that it could be perceived entirely different from somebody else. If that somebody else is a creative director that you're working with, then you have to immediately identify with that and rectify it. Always being open to changes and that's really where the thumbnailing comes in handy because you can generally eliminate a lot of problematic areas like what your major bulk of the ideas might be so that when you do get down to refinement, like we're doing here, it's a little more accepted. That'll bring this one to a close. Make sure to fill up a few pages with different creature concept craniums, and see what you can come up with and let's move on to the next lesson.
5. Creating Variations in Your Concepts: In this lesson, I want to talk to you about creating variations of the work. What we're going to do is start off with this particular sketch and do something weird and crazy and obviously, some very stretched out proportions on pretty much a humanoid skeletal scalable structure. Then obviously some major difference is in the legs bending back and things like that to where it looks a lot more alien in concept. But essentially, once you get the scalable structure and the posture in place and some of the larger form and we solve to reset down, you see me start to detail at here. We're essentially just using that light sketch as our structure, our foundation to apply all this other information. The reason that's important to know, is in the beginning you want to get in just the larger broad strokes, almost like the concept of working big to small. You don't want to jump right into details. Unless, of course, you're doing thumb nailing, you can detail some work. But even there you want to think about the concept first and allow yourself to work up to that. If you jump in too soon and you start detailing maybe the face or the arm, you really might stagnate the overall conceptual design process. Some people can work through that way just fine.But I feel that it works better if you get the larger broad strokes and fast. Like with this one, it started off obviously is a reptilian or reptile type body. Then I added in some humanoid arms. Even the hands could be reptiles/aquatic. The head shape is obviously a little bit different than a traditional reptiles, more elongated and then down. I always find with reptiles that really you can just combine a bunch of those together and make a pretty new version. But again, if you stretch out some of the proportions, if he add some elements that are just specifically not reptile looking, you immediately get a new creature concept. The neat thing about any of this, is that the more you just learn to combine certain elements, whether they'd be insects, plant life, ocean life, any of that stuff, you're just going to get a variety of new ideas. The more you draw that out, the more of those ideas will present themselves in your studies. With this character, a few of the traits that stand out that are just not typical, would be the overall proportions of the body in comparison to one another, the fact that it has two sets and nostrils, even though the weirdness of the teeth compared with the chin, the hair on the arms. All these little elements help you to look at it differently and go. This is just a poorly drawn reptile, it's a creature design. For this next character, I want to draw something more massive. Again, we're trying to go for variations, we want each character that we put on the page to be significantly different from the previous examples. In this case, I went with something humanoid combined with crab features. This is going to always be fun to see how many different creatures you can incorporate. There's really no set rule, you could do just a couple, or you could do obviously just a number of creature concepts into one. I think that typically if you just do a couple, you're going to get more recognizable set of traits, obviously and it's going to be a little bit more identifiable, so the more you start to incorporate, the more you might use something more eerie are grotesque. But it's also just because it's going to be less recognizable as to where all those features are coming from. But generally, things like insects are going to be scarier. We tend to think that insects looks so alien. A lot of them do because we're just now used to looking at them up close. There's tons of great ideas there. Aquatic life has just tons and tons of great ideas. You really just have to study those and then figure out where you can combine them into these character concepts and make something unique and fun. You see what this character that he's not even very functional. In fact, with those little pointed legs, it's probably hard to imagine he could even walk around and stay upright. But sometimes it's fun to do that where you just basically throw caution to the wind and functionality become secondary to the imaginative process. But I will admit that a lot of times it's better if you can make the creature look functional, especially if there's something that isn't some sort of like fighting characteristic or something like that. It has a pure functional and that silly or they're not going to peer imposing are dangerous. With this one, I go with the almost like a dog, like body in the way of its squatting down the back and posturing up in the front. I quickly turn this into a dragon. The best thing I could say for getting better at practicing wings is, always remember they're just another set of hands coming off the back. With dragons, the reason why I want to make sure that at least there's a couple of these in here, is they're just a great way to really experiment, incorporate a multitude of ideas. Dragons, you can obviously look them up and find ones that have resemblances to every creature out there. I don't know if there's a type of dragon that hasn't been done. Some resemble sea life and all of the above and all of them combined wings of a bird. It's really fun to incorporate things like that and then make your own version of them. In this case, I will have to almost looking a tiny bit more friendly than I would normally draw a dragon and it almost looks a bit cartoon, but it's just fun. It's fun to figure out where you put the scales, how you trim out the face with horns and things like that. It's just a lot of creative expression that you can do with creatures like this. I want to talk to you a little bit about the sketching process as I go through this. You notice in this one I did refine the line work a bit more in ongoing through and tightening up the ideas. But there are already pretty much in place. If you notice in the first sketch, it was very loose and less refinement involved to the point where I come up to the finish line work. Now, the reason why I want to stress that is because I know a lot of artists struggle to get their sketches right. I think that a lot of that sometimes can come from, the first and foremost is studying lots of different concepts so that you're armed with a lot of ideas. That's filling up your sketch books with a variety of ideas comes into play so that you basically pull from that information when you start redrawing a new concept your memory kicks in different ideas present themselves. But the other thing is to really play around with the concept of sketching in different ways; sketching lightly and then leaving almost no information on the page, except for basic structure and then trying to draw ideas over that or refining it multiple times. When I say refine it, I mean soft erase the concept, redraw over top, step and repeat as many times as you need to. But really explore different things, even sketching at different speed intervals. That's one of the reasons why thumb nailing versus finished sketch work comes out so different. A lot of times in your rough sketches, you'll tend to have more expressive ideas. I just want you to understand that it's not just sketching, there's lots of ways to explore the sketching opportunities. In this case, a goal is something more insect-like obviously. Insects to me are just one of the greatest things to utilize in your work because again, they look so strange. In fact, I could probably draw an insect that exists, and you wouldn't know it. You might even think it was alien in nature or creature design. Again, because we're not so used to looking at all of them, in fact, whenever you do your research, you'll find some pretty scary-looking insects that are out there, even microscopic life forms. Some of them just tend to look very scary. We're just not used to seeing them. Lots of great ideas in there and lots of things to perform, one of the things I really recommend studying about insects is the segmentation. Segmentation offers lots of neat things. It's actually great for conceptual design when it comes to vehicles and space ships and just a number of things. Really pay attention to the way that things segment. It's a really neat feature on these creatures. Then also think of it in terms of an exoskeleton. When you study like bone structures from a variety of animals, think of ways to incorporate those on the outside as an exoskeleton, not just putting everything on the inside where you see it. Thinking of in terms of what if I brought things that were muscle like and put those on the inside or mix those with an exoskeleton from an insect and crab or whatever, just lots of ways to do that and have fun with it. The other thing that's real neat about creature design is not being bound by the rules of two legs,two arms,two eyes, things like that, just like with insects, you can have lots of legs, lots of eyes. That's the other thing about your creature design. Try it out with an extra set of legs, with an extra set of arms, multiple eyes, multiple mouths. Again, no rules there and you're immediately going to get something that looks very creature like and very strange. It's pretty easy to do simply by changing the rules that we're so used to seeing in most life forms. The same thing can be said for proportions. A lot of times that's one of the reasons the creature to lower. Look so strange. It's really just exaggerated proportions and then the backward bends of the legs and things like that. I guess the creepy look and had everything really. The idea is that if you just maneuver some of the proportions around, you can really explore a lot of opportunities that way with your sketches as well. We're going to do one more creature design. For this last one, I want to do something that's very friendly and almost innocent-looking reason being,I really want to push the variation that you see from one character to next. This is another great exercise for exploring ideas and to get yourself to not think in the same confinements. If you maybe spend all day drawing creepy, scary insects, then you're going to get almost stuck in that concept and everything will start coming out that way. But for this one, I wanted something that looked almost not quite entirely innocent. Small spiked fingers and feed their and small spikes on the top. But the big doe eyes and very cartoon and animated.I think this is a really good exercise. I think this is something that you almost need to do even if you're not looking to be a cartoon type illustrator, there's certain techniques that you learn by doing this type of stuff. It's one of the reasons why I always stress the artists to do character, because when you stretch out those proportions, it's another way to get you to feel comfortable with making some pretty dramatic changes to your work. Sometimes stretching those proportions can really add a unique spin on a certain design. It just gives you a little bit more creative feel to the work and expressiveness, so it's very important to do, so just wrapping this up and I'll make some final adjustments to a few of the concepts before I save out the file. When go ahead and give this exercise will try to create a nice variety from concept to concept and utilize different animals to aid you in that process.With that, let's move on to the next lesson.
6. Animal Leg Studies: Now in this exercise I want to show you how to create some basic studies of realistic animal legs, and then how to slowly migrate it to something more imaginative. We're not going to take it very far. But the reason why I think this is important is because if I just draw things that are just way into the realm of imagination then maybe some more beginner artists can't really bridge the gap. This is how you bridge that gap. You want to first start with your real life studies. These are very important to do, they help you to commit things to your visual memory. Any animal that you're not used to drawing, and even certain parts, you want to really take the time to study those areas. Creating these studies gives you so much food for thought later on. It also just helps you on those days when you're not drawing as well, you can pull back your sketchbooks, your studies, and you can reference it, and really help yourself through that mental barrier. What I'd like to do here is just make a copy of it. Remember if you're working traditionally, you're just going to use a light table or some vellum or whatever you got. But essentially you're making a copy of it and then drawing over top, and just changing one or two little things. Nothing too dramatic, so that it's a slow transformation. Now, obviously, we could take the upper leg and make it more like human anatomy. We could change the proportions, it's pretty dramatic, and do some fun things with that as well. But again, you need to first really focus on making small intermittent changes, and then building up the confidence level to doing that. But these types of studies are just extremely valuable and will teach you so much. I know a lot of artists don't like to hear it. You need to get down to the fundamentals, the basics, but it really does build confidence and help you to draw the more advanced stop. Even like that little bit of light structure that I did at the end, that's just a quick little circle online effect that we use, but it allows us to see the immediate proportions of what we're drawing. Here I'll start with that as I do this crab leg. Again, it's that basic boring stuff that so many people will pass over and they go, "Well, I don't need that. I'm more advanced than that." That can be a really dangerous way of thinking when it comes to drawing. I always feel like the fundamentals will help us on the days that we're not as inspired to draw, and the days that we're not drawing as well. We've all had them, we all have those bad days. Those fundamentals really will get us through that. Likewise, these types of studies. Again, this is a crab leg. Now, obviously, there's lots of different crabs and the various legs to them. This is just one particular type, but something very basic. Again, just getting the really simplistic forms in place and taking special note of things. One in particular is how the leg segments get thinner and then they widen out to each next connecting point. I always like to take note of little things like that. The way it curves over, and notice there that I took the curve over and I made it into a sharper point. Again, just making very subtle changes, nothing too overly dramatic, but using that initial form to give me confidence to draw over top and express my ideas and be creative. You'll just notice a really a lot of what I'm doing here is just tiny little design choices. There's not a whole lot of intricacies, there's little points, there's little segmentation, but nothing too advanced, nothing too crazy. But already it's having a pretty dramatic difference from the one above it. That's why I wanted to show this, like just the small changes sometimes can have pretty significant effects on the drawing. That's where you really want to focus on because I think oftentimes to many artists are worried about, they immediately want to draw amazing stuff and go just wild with it. But it's a step. The steps that you take will get you there confidently. It's a little small incremental steps. That's really what I wanted to push the perspective on here, just with the simple studies, you can learn so much and it will help you. When you go to do that really wild fantasy art, these things will come into play and they'll help you succeed in that area. But just don't go too far too fast. Just think you've got to crawl before you walk and you got to walk before you run. That's the whole process here. Now with this one, we're going to do a reptile foot. Reptiles are just chock full of great information. A lot of [inaudible] , you really got to study them more because they all offer very unique things. But what I love about reptiles is just the scales, their claws and their hands are just so need to look at. They just have so much detail and great information. It's one of the reasons why so many fantasy art basis start with a reptile look like. Dragons, obviously they have a lot of different influences, but they're predominantly reptile looking. They just look vicious. That's really where you're able to get all that from a reptile, and just, there's all neat wants to study obviously. But in this case, we start with the very basic one. We get it in some of the scales. We get the cool hands that almost look backwards bent to the way the arms are which I think is, and notice to what the reptile arm that it's not very defined. They're very like thick skin, so they don't have the definition of the muscle underneath and things like that. Now, when you go to draw that with your imaginative concept, there's no reason you can't put that in there oftentimes do. But just be aware of that and realistic depiction of it. Their skin does not really allow for that. Some of your creature concepts, you want to make sure to leave some of that in there that, again, it's not overly defined in the anatomy. Here getting in and doing the imaginative work to it, I'm going to elongate the fingers. I'm going to show more definition in things like the knuckles, extend those out further. When I do this, I try to add in a bit more of the scale definition. Like on the elbow I had these different larger scales. I'm pretty much thinking, what would I do if I was drawing the arm of a dragon? That's how the mental gears start turning, and then you make these imaginative choices. I'd think you'd look cool of the fingers were stretched out. What if I added another little claw at the back of the hand? Or a few more claws? Just all those things come into play. Then obviously I added a thicker line to showcase a little bit more of the forum muscle, that you really again wouldn't see at a more realistic depiction. Then as it comes to the scales I tend to over illustrate those and make those a bit more defined, and then add more shadows tombs. All of this is just rendering choices to make it look a bit more detailed and a bit more imaginative or fantasy art or whatever. That's really it, essentially, when you create these studies, don't just do what we've done here, obviously, venture out, do a lot of different animals, do different parts. Go for the ones that you don't understand first and then work from there. Then eventually do entire representations. But sometimes just segmenting the work and doing bits and pieces can really help you. With that, let's move on to the next lesson.
7. Merging Concepts Together: In this lesson, we're going to focus on combining different characteristics together to create new concepts. In this one, I wanted to start off with a reptile-like leg, but then give it some human characteristics. Just by combining the human type anatomy with the reptile elongated foot and longer nails, and some of the markings, you get something that looks very creature designed and very eerie. Again, stretching proportions like making the foot overly large or the length of the lower leg longer, these are all things we want to experiment with and try, and then when you incorporate some of the details from a few different creature concepts or animals or human, combine all those together, you're going to get a very unique spin on it, and that's what's going to make it look more fantasy-based and science fiction. This is the part where you put the reference away and you're just going off memory, and that's where building up from the reference first and gaining some perception, and some knowledge on is great. But then it comes at part where you want to put that away, you want to get it out of your visualization process, and you just want to draw from memory and what's going to happen is naturally is you're going to try to bridge the gap, and you're going to make some imaginative choices. You're not going to make it look nearly as realistic as the studies that you create. This is a very important part of it. This is actually the part I enjoy the most. But they both go hand in hand, so you need to put them both into effect, and just finishing this one up. The next one is going to be based off a crab. I wanted to do something with the big large crab arm, the brachyura, and pass that. I really didn't think too much into the other part of the anatomy other than I was thinking more fleshy anatomy working up to the exoskeleton of the crab arm. Again, this is another thing we're just thinking. I'm also just contrasting elements or trying things differently based upon texturing and effects. All this little scribbling, you see over top, adding extra spikes, that's obviously more imaginative than just a regular crab arm. But then when I get into detailing the skin over here, I tried to make it look a bit more fleshy, so it could be considered more human anatomy, but really just anything that has more muscle than exoskeleton. Again, just thinking about contrasting elements, and then when I got to the crab hand here, I started to texturize more and add just these little obscure details that you wouldn't normally see there that I think still feel a little bit aquatic or crustacean-like, but just different than what you would normally see with a crab. Again, that coupled with a huge proportion change or maybe not even so huge in this one. But along with the design that you add in with the proportion change can just all give the variables that you need to make something look more fantasy-based, and then obviously the way that this would connect to a character, and what type of character that is, that would give you the other variable to say, "Okay, this is definitely something more imaginative and having a very distinct look to it," so not some creature that's already out there. I'll just rendering and going over top and adding in little bits of drop shadows, little bits of line weights, shading, just anything to get a better feel for the look of what I've established with the initial sketch. I love adding little texture lines in little details like that. It just helps paint the picture. If no, we're just working with sketches here. The better visual guides you can give yourself to the work-up whether or not you decide to paint this later, whatever. All that little bit of texture's good food for thought. You have to remember the more of this you get early on, especially before you do your soft erase and redraw, it all gives you ideas. Just be really open to scribbling in little details. For this next one, we're going to do a crab and insect combination. These are actually two of my favorites to work with and concept, and really because they have some similarities in structure, but a lot of differences and overall design obviously, and proportions and the relationship of the way that their legs work and things like that. But it's just great to combine things like this. I think with these two, you get a very alien ask type vibe to the work. Then obviously, I'm trying to overly stylize it and add in different things that I think would just look cool. Again, I don't constrict myself if I'm looking at reference or not, this particular one, I wasn't. But, if you're studying the reference, don't constrict yourself with exactly what you see. That can be a tricky part to get past, you have to just pull a certain element from it, and then quickly go to imagine it's a drawing or quickly go to either another reference and pull just another singular element from it. If you do that, you get something very unique and very different. But, if you study too wholeheartedly from the reference, you can find yourself just recreating what you see, which isn't a bad thing for studying. But for imaginative work, you might want to be just aware of that and try different intervals of looking at the work and then not looking at the work or reference. Here, I tried to do a lot of little texture lines, a little wrinkles, and obviously, the way the wrinkles look, they look a little bit more organic or fleshy, and then I do a lot of those little markings on the ridge lines, and where you get a lot of that from is studying skeletal structure. Get lots of good photo reference for a variety of skeletons and see the way the formations happened and the textures within those, lots of great information there to work from. That's really something that you want to apply in a lot of different areas. When you see a really cool texture, whether it be, again, a rock formation, an animal trait, anything around you, just really pay attention to it. Do a study of it and then figure out a way to incorporate that into your work. If you learn to do that, you'll effectively never run out of ideas. For this next one, I want to do something that again was very crab-like, but with a combination of two other things, and that's actually crustacean or like coral I guess, and then like a human-like arm. Essentially, here there's pretty much three strong elements that I'm trying to use, and again, there's no set rule on to how many you try to incorporate. It could be as little as two, as many as 20, I mean, just whatever you can fathom. But, I do like when there's a strong connection between a major two or three. I think that it just looks very recognizable and identifiable for the viewer, so that's why I think you see that a lot when you see characters rendered in movies and different things. They go with a pretty distinct few characteristics, not saying there won't be smaller individual parts of a lot of other things, but generally, you can almost bring it down to a couple of two or three. Here just trying to add in some shadows, and notice, I'm just lightly sketching this information, keeping it very rough in the beginning. After erasing it down, and then trying to find details. This can be a lot of fun and you really just want to experiment on the way that you do this. You don't want to just trace over everything that's there. I think I've already said this, but I just want to reiterate it. You want to really allow yourself to see past the work through the work, and just sketch and find ideas. Whenever people say, ''I just don't have good ideas, I can't think of stuff.'' There's always the idea that you need to look at reference and study it a bit more. But then you need to work through your sketch a little bit longer. You need to allow yourself to find good ideas in your own sketch. It's very important. Sometimes soft erasing and redrawing even three times can be helpful. Now this one will be a human arm, so you see I structure it very much like a hadron arm and just working up almost the anatomy and everything. I almost wanted to detail the entire arm just to show you before I overlay the fur, this is going to be more of like a werewolf arm. Obviously, we know that werewolf concepts are just two things, just humans and wolves. Again, very identifiable, very popular, it's huge folklore, very popular. It makes sense that just those two combined make a very distinct and really unique effect. I don't even know about unique because it's been done so many times now, but it's very identifiable, very well-liked diversity. Here, just rough sketching fur and I pretty much just scribble there, and then I start to pick at it and add in areas of more shadow and thicker line weight. Nothing too fancy there, but it's just really the same build-up process to anything. But at least with this, it's just a large bulk of fur area. I tend to show a little bit more than anatomy. That's why you can see the brake in the fur to see the arms and stuff like that or the arm muscles. A lot of people will just ignore that and draw a large furry arm and that would probably make more sense. This is more of a style choice, is the way that I like to do it. After I've got all that information in place, I come back through and I start to redraw. I use a little bit thicker lines to build in shadows and to pick apart areas that I want to look more in focus I guess or more detailed I should say, and then I just keep scribbling around that until I find the right design, the right pattern, and there's a lot of times when I do stuff like this and I'm not really seeing it right away, and then again, that's when I go back to the soft erase, and I do it again. If I ultimately can't get it, then I pull from reference, but I've drawn furry beast quite a bit so I was able to work through this. Then the hand, it's obviously just a humanoid hand. But then I give it the pointed fingers. I over detail the veins on the back of the hand and the bones in the back of the hand, so that's more just trying to make it look a bit more eerie by overly detailing and overly shading the area of the work. That's really it. Take this opportunity to now practice doing some of these studies and combine a few different elements into your concepts and see what you come up with, and let's move on to the next lesson.
8. Adjusting the Proportions: Now in this lesson we're going to focus on proportions. What I want to do is first illustrate a creature concept. Then we're going to change the proportions dramatically, and see how we can create a very different looking creature just from making these adjustments. Again, this is working by comparison and a very useful technique for getting lots of various ideas within your concepts, and just seeing how much you can really stretch a particular idea. With this one, it's basically a hammerhead shark with human-like arms, obviously really exaggerated in the proportions, and a fish body. Then also, there'll be some crab or crustacean-like textures throughout and over the forms of the creatures. A lot of times it's really fun to obviously throw in multiple ideas and then just really skew the proportions to make it more creepy and different. The beauty of this kind of design is there's no question that it's not a realistic character of any kind or creature of any kind. It's very imaginative and very different. That's the other neat thing about proportions is you can really stretch those and make it easily definable that it's not realistic, just simply by changing proportions. What we'll do at this point is we'll take this and shift it away from the look that it has now by changing these proportions dramatically but keeping everything in place. Here I'm adding the kind of overlapping shell formations to the forearms. Then here I make a change to the hands to make them look a little bit more amphibian-like or reptile-ish. Just adding in little details. just notice that, again, I think I've already said this, but I'll reiterate it. I'm using the rough sketch as a foundation, but I'm not adhering entirely to it. I'm still adding conceptual bits of information. I'm changing shapes. I'm nudging lines around them, adding little bits of texture. All of it's very much a work up and a work through process. Not so much just cleaning up the lines, and a lot of ways still sculpting the concept. Then here, obviously, another soft erase. Then at this point, I feel there's enough information in there to go to a line refinement. I'm not saying I still won't add in little tiny bits of texture or design changes, again, if the idea presents itself. But I'm pretty confirmed in the concept now. I'm just really thinking about cleaning up the line, adding more line weight to enhance the areas that I want to bring out. It's just refinement and rendering at this stage but all the essential information in my mind is in place, and I'm just fine tuning it essentially. To me this part really requires a lot less thinking. In the beginning, I think I have to focus a bit more on design and proportions and what I really want to see in the overall look of a character. But then once I get to this point, I feel like it's a little bit more fun and just relaxing. I just tend to not really think, and just react and draw. I'll just sketch and clean up. All the heavy lifting has been done, and I'm basically just having fun and rendering out the lines. I always consider this part kind of like the icing on the cake when I do this. Again, not entirely against change in something if need be, but most of the information is in place. One thing that I will recommend when doing this is that you have a little bit bigger of a brush at this point. Or at least if you are using a smaller brush or pen, you're open to adding in the heavier lines when you need them. What happens is generally if you use a little bit more range in your brush strokes, and you can apply a thick area or a thin area side-by-side. You're able to get that nice variation in line work that makes it a stand off the page more. Hopefully you can see if I'm doing it correctly that hardly any of the lines are the same weight throughout this. Very open to adding in thicker bits of lines and small amounts of shadow with the lines to enhance that effect. In fact, if you notice there how I make line breaks in the shapes as I go around those parts of the form, I'm intentionally doing that to make those appear thicker in some areas and lighter in other areas. There's a lot of control that you can get from the line work, and you have to really experiment with that as well. Using a little bit larger brush or pen type brush that you can at least redraw over a certain area. Like a lot of people will get really good at technical pens and they'll just redraw the lines over and over in certain areas to give the appearance of almost a brush-like effect. Again, really experiment with that. You just want good variation in your line work to enhance the depth. Again, we're just working with black and white here, so you've got to take advantage of all that. A little bit of water on the ground just to show that this creature has pulled itself out of the water, and is obviously sitting on land. I guess without that, you don't really know. It could be sitting on the bottom of the ocean floor or something. Little things like this go long ways in helping to tell the story. Ultimately settled against not putting all those little render lines in there because I felt it was a little bit distracting. That's pretty much concept one, and really it's just going to be a variation of the same concept. This is actually a good technique to practice what we're about to do here because there's times when a client is going to tell you what they want, but they still don't know exactly what they want. So you're going to have to give him variations of the same concept. Even utilizing this type of technique will really help you in that area. Now what I'm going to do is draw the same character, pretty much the same features, but in very different proportions to show how different it can really make a character looks. Now the head is going to be a lot larger by comparison. Made the arms really tiny especially compared to those overly large arms on the first illustration. It's going to naturally make the head appear even larger. The body is actually bigger, but it really just looks the same in comparison to the other areas like the head. I made the teeth larger so to give the character, hopefully, a little bit more presence of the mouth so it looks a little bit more intimidating. Whenever you increase the size of something, you're saying that that creature relies on that more. If it's got more teeth, it's more of a biter obviously. It's kind of neat how you can adjust a concept pretty heavily with that. For instance, if you give it very large eyes by comparison, then chances are it relies very heavily on those eyes. There's a certain functionality that goes with it. You're changing the narrative. You're explaining a lot more by just simply changing the proportions or the influence of something within the design like that. You can notice here I'm making the scales larger by comparison. That doesn't really suit anything particularly. I just want to make as many changes to the size relationship within this design to see what I could explore. But generally, if I'm going for more expression, I might change the skills altogether. I didn't want to do that in this particular lesson because I'm trying to just show the variation of proportion. But if you are trying to experiment and get more concepts going, making small changes in the textures like that can have a huge impact as well. Obviously the fin on the top of the head is larger, which would be more functional for fish, would give it another kind of mode of shifting its trajectory. From this point it's really just, again, rendering because I've got all the rough line work in place to work from, and I can just clean it up. I also didn't need to clean it up as much as the first sketch because the information I have on the left is guiding me to draw over top of the light sketch on the right. That's another benefit as you do these types of studies and progression shots. You get a bit faster naturally like anything else when you warm up, but then also you're armed with more information. It's just like if you're trying to get better at drawing a character through a sequential storytelling, the best thing to do is just draw the character more and more because you're going to get faster at drawing that character. Especially once you draw from all these different angles, you're going to gain a certain understanding of the forms, and you're just going to pick up speed as you go. That's always the best way to improve on anything. It's just sheer repetition really, but it's getting these shapes in your mind's eye and it just comes out more naturally. Then through that, you become more expressive because I think that some people overlook. Like once you get the confidence of doing the basic stuff or doing the same thing over and over again, it opens up a doorway to being more creative and expressive because you're no longer having to think about it. You're just allowing yourself to create and stay in that creative moment. That's another really important thing to note. Again, just rendering and adding in some different line weight, trying to detail it a bit further, and just finish off the artworks. Little bubbles there so I know he's underwater. Hopefully you see that just by changing the proportions, we're able to get two very different, almost different creatures altogether. It's definitely a fun exercise, something you should try out. You can either draw this creature or try one of your own. But again, try to give yourself something where you've got a nice range of things that you can change the proportions too effectively. There does have to be a certain amount of characteristics that you can grab and change of proportions for it to work. But practice this, see what you come up with, and hopefully you learned a lot in this process. In like anything, remember not to expect greatness in the first couple tries. It is going to take a few experiments to get something that you like. Be ready for that. With that, let's press on to the next lesson.
9. Thumbnailing Our Character: Now what we're going to do is implement what you've learned. We went through a series of exercises and different things to know about Creature Design. But then it comes to a part where client gives you a script or something to work from, and you've got to make something happen. It's all great when we're drawing from our own imagination, but we've got to be able to take what somebody else gives us and make something of it. This will be our project file. Essentially here, we're just going to read the script real quick, and forgive me if there's any hard-to-read areas or anything like that to understand. I'll also be supplying this so that if you can't make it out as well, I'm here. But essentially, ogre barbarian holding a large club with spikes. It's wearing some tribal clothing ripped from lots of battle. One of the arms should be slightly larger than the other, the other one holding the weapon, or the one holding the weapon. Two arms, two legs. Legs should be shorter and have more upper body. A lot of this is traditional of an ogre obviously, but I just want to give you an idea of how a client might want it, I've had better descriptions in this and I've had definitely a lot worse and you just have to make sense of it. Muscular build but with a large gut or belly. Deformed head with one eye. Ears should be pointed, but with a downward turn to them. Forgive if you can't read my own script here. Some fur in spots around the neck and waist, clothing not grown. Unlike an area like that, I just want to point out, that's a power if you're like, "Well, what does that mean clothing not grow?" I find that to be pretty informative or understandable. But if you don't, that's when you call the client. I really want to stress that there's been a lot of projects where you can really save yourself a lot of heartache if you just pick up the phone, or e-mail, or whatever you use for correspondence, but never hesitate there, always clear it up in the very beginning. Just want to get that across. Spots of hair on the chest and forearms. Lots of scars from battle wounds. Use your own style. We've seen your portfolio and really like your work, just make sure it looks formidable. Now, that bottom part also want to point out, you got to be really careful with that as well. I'm purposely doing that because I've had that said to me and it's okay. But you really want to nail down if you can direct them to a certain peace in your portfolio, it gives you a lot better understanding of what they mean. You really want to clear up any misconceptions in the script, and the ideas, and correspondence, they can really save you a bunch of time. Now the other part is that thumbnailing will save you and that's why we talked about that earlier in this course. Essentially, if you take this and you say, "Okay, what does this mean to me?" I'll just start scribbling what kind of visualization I'm getting from this. Kind of a lumpy head, I'll start there. I drop in some forms, ogres to me are always this hunchback kind of presence, and it really depends. You can go a lot of different ways with ogres, obviously they're very broad spectrum in the way that you could create them. Like I said, a very large arm, one holding the club. I'll just make one arm immediately larger, maybe the left and I may switch it, and being and how I figure out I want the club to be held. Then a big belly, but obviously muscular in the other areas. One eye, so I'll just kind of throw something in there. It doesn't mean it needs to be the way that it is right here by any means, so just playing with ideas. They usually have a pretty stout little nose and the script downward turn ears, something like this. I didn't say anything about the teeth, but I like to always throw these in there. You're going to make some choices. Again, that's where you rely on the part at the bottom [inaudible] as well. "I like your style, I like what you do," so then you're going to have a little, that means you got a little bit of creative freedom in there. You're going to implement some of the things that you think just look good, but if you thumbnail it, if you don't spend too much time in this portion of it, then you can eliminate any other guesswork. You can do the back and forth with the client, and then figure out, "Okay, I want my ideas on point, did they have a lot different idea going into this thing? What needs to be changed?" What I'm going to do here is, get into some of these larger forms. Now keep in mind with thumbnails, I would typically be working on them about like this in the very beginning. That's why they're called thumbnails, are generally very small. Now the whole reason I'm not doing that right here is, I want to make sure you can really see what's going on. For the videos purpose, I work on them larger, but I'm still making sure I'll pick some middle of the rope, because I think you should be able to see it right about here. But I'm still picking something that's loose in description and very rough. I'm not refining yet. In fact, I'm still trying to figure out how I want him to holding that club. Let's add the bottom part of the legs. I'm going to do a little bit where they slope back, and he's got these bigger feet, and I feel like the legs are still too tall. Again, by scribbling this information in, I can make these changes and not waste and absorb an amount of time. That's really the power of thumbnailing. There's lots of things, there's the fact that you get, and I'm probably going to be redundant here, but you get more expressive line work when you thumbnail, just like when you do a gesture to a figure drawing study, that's where all the power and the energy is. Now this one looks pretty plain jean, so I'm going to at least do one or two more, and pick from those and maybe combine ideas. The other neat thing is, you're able to really maximize your efforts and say, "Okay, I really like what I did here with the head, but then I like in this other one how," and we'll see what presents itself, but you're able to pick different ideas from those. As I said, a little bit of fur here and there, a little bit of torn clothing, still trying to figure out where to apply that, but something that could just be a bit of a caveman overlap. It doesn't have to be anything too dramatic. In fact, I always tend to, whenever I do get a script from somebody, I tend to err on the side of less as more, and let them direct me. If not, I might throw in a bunch of confusing bits of information, and may just slow down the entire process anyways, but your thumbnails can convey a lot of information. I've seen really great thumbnails from other artists and had people love the rough sketches that I've sent them and in my mind I'm thinking, wow, I just really didn't spend a whole lot of time there. But it's really starts at creative function and that process, and people are just enthralled with that. I mean, us as artists we love the creative process. When you bring other people into that with you, they're inspired and it's fun for them as well, so it all starts here. We'll do bigger feet, bigger toes, I want to bring those knees up and put more band to legs. I still feel like they're too big, so I'll just keep nudging those around and I might just fix it in the next sketch. I'll do this offset stance or whatever. Then I still need to get that big arm end and paws, so I think I'm going to do it over here. Let's try something like this and bring that in front of them, or maybe, we can try, just try one more here, just kind of dragging it behind him. That should be more fun anyways. Let's try something like that. You see I just used a really big nasty brush, and just throw that in there, some spikes. Again, nothing too descriptive, just loosen, pretty much already on the realm of where I need to hurry up and finish this. Let's see if I'm missing anything. Check in the script and as we often have to do, the one-arm needs to be smaller. This will be the smaller arm now. I'm going to change this, and I'll probably do something to it like, add in a different detail to this arm in some way, but I'm just going to throw something in loosely. Then we'll bring the forearm way up, so it'll be shoulder, show a little stubby biceps, and a big old forearm, bigger hands. Again, this is just representational. Small spikes on the head, I don't know there, but let's try something like that. All right, now let's hurry up and jump over to the next sketch and see if we can make some improvements. The neat one about this is just, again, working comparatively. Now we've got something as a concept. We've got an idea going. I'm going to create a little bit more room over here. Let's jump into the next one. Now the next one we're going to try to make it a little bit of variation. We also want to make sure that we did incorporate everything, so let's add a few more little tribal elements, real quick. Maybe he's wearing some little bits here and there on them. Then the hair-like it's spoke about, so hairy arms and forearms. Even though it's just a very rough thumbnail, we still want to get those elements in there. Even if they're just scribbles, it's very important that we take note of all the details. Something like that or that sash or fur down here. Now let's jump over to the next one. We're going to speed it up a bit. I'm probably already going over what I would consider timing for a thumbnail. But now let's try to make sure that we have a little bit of variation here. One thing I do like to do is change the paws altogether just so I don't recreate exactly what I've done. I've got to study from this, pull from this, but also create a good amount of variation, at least something that shows as being a bit different to give me more ideas to work from. What I'm going to do is immediately widen the shoulders. I could do this a couple of ways. I could really just make the head smaller. Again, just defining things by proportion. I'm also going to change the paws a bit, which isn't a big deal. I guess you could probably do away with that, but I just want, again, I don't want to recreate what I've already done. I'm going to have them holding this big club over the side like this and won't even play around with the design of this a bit more. It's got one eye still, that's going to remain the same. I'm going to bring the jaw down really far. Let's try to really widen out the jaw and change it and give him a over pointed, more beard, and smaller ears by comparison. What I want to show there is that just proportions alone. Again, like we've already talked about, they play a huge role in shifting the look of a character, especially something like this, because an ogre is really, in a lot of ways humanoid obviously, but it's just got some very dramatic proportion differences that you have to be aware of. Bringing this other arm down here, having just to hold on to the base of it almost like a, up for bad thing. My bat, let's go and bring this up. I do want to shrink this down a little bit more. Now after we do this one, will go and do a third, but then I'll do away with the script, we'll probably do it. We'll see what the time is, but we might do it in the next lesson and put it all together, start refining it or combining the thumbnails to make our concept. What I want to do here is, again, these stumpy little legs like that, one forward, we'll bring this one forward. Again, trying to eliminate that asymmetry behavior or symmetrical behavior, I just want to always play around with not doing that too much because it's just a bad habit to fall into his home. The thing is, it's really not hard to do things out of symmetry. It's just practice like anything else. You just have to get in there and do it. If you notice, I'm just scribbling, I'm just throwing this stuff and they're very loosely and non-descript and that could be a lot better obviously, but that's really not the purpose of thumbnailing, it's just to get the information in there, but even these rough sketches, I like to have all the things that need to be in play as far as all these techniques that go into the work. You want to still get that in there. Just because you're rough sketching, doesn't mean you don't use all the same fundamental techniques. It just doesn't look as pretty and the more that you get used to that, the better. Now the only thing I'm realizing with this particular paws now that goes against the script, is that we don't get the belly there. What I'm going to do is, I'm going to shrink these legs up so too big by comparison anyways, it's changing the overall effect of the characters. What I'm going to do is bring these down. I may have to adjust them entirely because still I think what I need is larger lower legs and less upper leg and this is on this side. But then I'm going to draw in this larger belly right here because since that's part of the script, we can't just, his arms are blocking it. It needs to be evident or we need to change the paws. You get that big belly in there like this, we'll throw in some of that fur. We don't want to recreate exactly what we did there. Let's try the fur coming right off the back and coming down the chest a little bit. Try something like that and there's probably a good argument that we made where the paws would probably make more sense being more upright in everything out to the side for design at this point. But again, this is a little bit for the client, a little bit for us to experiment and see into the work a bit more. I'm just really trying to different variation of this character which is still, is looking the same. Then what I want to do to is let's just take this head and make it even smaller by comparison, so really explore the proportion differences and you can probably notice that by shrinking the hedge, you just generally make the body look very massive. Let's see the same thing with the legs here are still fine, so just, they need to look really stumpy. Probably increase the size of the foot. Bring these big old over feet. Alright, now let's go and shrink that down and see if that does any good. None of different to really see anything from here, so let's go ahead and do another one. Let's go ahead and get rid of the script now, we know the information there and let's go and draw another one off to the side and see if we can come up with something a little bit better. Now what we're going to do, we're going to actually wrap up this lesson here. What I want to do is I'm going to make these a little bit larger, place them off to the side like this, and we're going to do the next lesson and we're going to draw one more version right in the middle, at least one more version. You just keep drawing these until you get it right. If we don't get it right in the next one, we'll do another and another, but essentially, that's why you want to keep them really fast so that you can explore these ideas and really get something out of them. You should probably never settle on the very first one unless you draw 10 or 20, I guess and the very first one is the best and then maybe it makes the most sense. But you'll show them to the client and get the feedback and then keep progressing. Let's move on to the next lesson and give another thumbnail a try.
10. Cleaning up Our Concept: On this one I want to add another thumbnail to this and try to explore some more opportunities for this. Let's go and draw again just another pose. I'm actually going to have this over a little bit to the side. Let's try this, may or may not work. But again, if we draw it fast, we can see what happens. As long as we can get all the same information in here, that's the main thing. We get the one eye with the big lumpy head going there. I want to shrink this down a bit. Again, try work in small on these see if you can work effectively that way. Let's do the big lumbering arm, just going to have the arm coming down like this. Again, dragging the club. I like that better and I think he'll be looking over his shoulder at us, we'd better. I do like the larger lower jaw sitting and resting into the upper chest. I think that's neat. Just going to do nostril holes for now. Downward pointed ears, and for this arm it's going to be noticeably smaller. We're going to really make this one look massive again and the script at one, at really large form, tiny upper arm, pretty muscular, but then with a big old belly will get that and that should be the largest form. You put them like that and it was little arm to the side maybe, still not little but just notice will be smaller than the other one. I'll probably have to change the position. Knows I'm not really even worrying about a hand. Just because hands take awhile. It should just be something that resembles a hand. It's almost embarrassing, but it's just the way that you do it from the thumbnail stage. Here, you could pretty much as get away and go. There's some fingers and here's some knuckles and that's about it. Doesn't have to be, if you're worried too early on about trying to perfect the hand you can spend way too much time. Then we're going to give them the little stumpy legs again. Make a feet and some of the fur off to the side. Here we'll just try a shoulder piece, and this particular one and then we'll have that come down as a strap like this. Maybe some teeth on the strap, ogres like to keep teeth of their victims, I guess. Their bellybutton, and probably a little bit of fur down here. We've got the club, we need some spikes and make it look more dangerous obviously, we could probably wrap some cloth around it, something like that just to give it more characteristic or more detail. We want the hairy forms and we'll probably put this everywhere like forms and knuckles right here. Center bid on the chest, down the belly and again, just scribbling. I know this looks bad but, I'm drawn at larger, I should probably shrink goes down so it looks like more like a thumbnail. But I'm still able to discern what's going on in here, and you still go back and clean these thumbnails up. If you're really worried too much about presentation, but I will warn you that can be a double-edged sword as well. Because if you worry too much about the initial sketch, you can even eliminate some of the creative vibe that you get out of it. You really want to find that happy medium where it's presentable, but it's quick and it's effective. Don't worry too much they will tell you. You can always tell your client it was just a rough sketch to get things going. I've been known to say that, but really a lot of them are aware of that. They're in the business of producing this type of work and they can see it through and generally spot good or bad creations pretty early on. Lets say, I'll tell you the truth and make sure like in this one the most. I mean, it's still very clunky. It still needs a lot of refinement, but that's what we're going to do on the next few sessions, we are going to refine this. What I can see here, let's just look at these objectively now, and actually let's make the same size, and see if we can pick apart anything that we want to bring in from the other ones and that's really the benefit. If you do 10 of these or 20 or whatever you feel comfortable with and you want to accomplish, but it's ultimately what gives you the best overall ideas. If we take this, I just liked the expression of this character. I don't know if it's just set aside stance. It almost gives them this little bit of a more harmless field, but he's obviously still very imposing, very formidable, he's large, muscular, he's got the big arm with the club, you probably won't mess with this guy. I do like a little bit more of the detail work on the first one. Unfortunately, I'm not liking the the second, I guess. This would have been number 2 right here. I'm not liking that at all. I would say it's out of these first one and three, and I still like the pose on number 3. I like the expression. I'm looking over the big belly. That's more, it's larger by comparison. We could obviously don't mess around with things like the proportions of the head by comparison. I think it's overall pretty good. Obviously, the smaller we make the head, the larger the character is going to look, and I guess I could see into these and say okay. Once we add in a lot of the detail on the refinement, this one's going to look the best. I think we're going to go with that. I think the only thing I'm going to pull from the first one is that we're going to add more bits to the detail. Like there's just a little bit more going on, like the the necklace with the teeth here, we can make that where the teeth are like that, and this could just be more of a strap with some other details there. Make sure to get that more rounded and the finished illustrations are really pushes the depth of the gut and the muscles and things like that maybe bring this out make it more furs. What will change things obviously as we refine this, but I think we're going to go with the number 3. Basically, we just played the role of the client. Essentially, we looked at the work no, I don't like number 2, let's get rid of that one. Number 1 is okay, but really leaning towards the number 3, let's change this. Let's add more spikes. Let's give them more fur on the shoulder, whatever decisions we make and then we come down to this one. Let me go ahead and increase the size of this now. Let's get rid of these little number values here, and now we're going to take this and we're just going to clean it up. Start with a soft arrays and we're going to change some things. This is again just very rough, but it still gives us the foundation we need to start adding in some details, and you'll see a dramatic difference from obviously, this rough sketch to the finished result you showed anyways. Like I said in previous parts, I'm still very open to making some pretty significant changes if ideas present themselves as I start to draw through this. Now at this stage I'll just start to. Get in here and draw some things out. Obviously, this is still very crude there's not a lot of correct information there, so I have to start drawing in, where would this thumb go? The funny thing is that when you do this, if you do start off and you tend to put a lot of bad sketch on in there or something, it can sway you to redrawing over top of those bad lines. So you got to really be aware of that and get those out early. Immediately start to change the shapes and figure out what's distracting you or what's pulling you in the wrong direction, but it's generally not that bad. It's just I still lean towards the idea of more sketch lines are better than lasts so just more food for thought. Never discount a rough sketch line never ever think that it's just bad information because even if it's a bad line, it's still telling you what not to do, which is still a big part of getting into the right decision. I want to really push these legs back when I have the foot immediately come out. Think we're going to just going to go with regular human-looking feet, that's probably something that should have been detailed a little bit more in that thumbnail just so it's apparent. Because this could be an opportunity where, if you're showing it to a client and, oh, wow, we thought you had pointed toes on that. You might have to go back and change something. You do have to make sure that even though they're very rough thumbnails, that they do make sense, they do read. They don't have to read extremely well and some of that can be taken care of in the verbal communication. But you do have to be aware of it because you don't want it to hinder you and slow the process down, they are meant to speed things up not slow them down. I want to really get that muscular turn here and that anatomy and make that arm look very strong and imposing. Again, larger by comparison. Some wrinkles in there. Here, I still want to scribble, are still want to keep lines loose and fluid. You really want to fight tensing up until the very, very end. After all the decisions are made, all the conceptual information's in place and say, okay, it's all there. I understand what I'm doing now, I've made my decisions, and then you tense up in putting your hard lines because if not, you'll just get rid of that creative vibe too early on in the work I think. I do have to still figure out the shape of this hand and the relationship to the weapon here. You got to bring these down. Forgive me as I get quiet and concentrate here. The really big spikes and I have these going on all different directions and they don't need to be all pointed so it can be bent down, probably make a little more sense. Just going to play around with the shapes there and try to get something that look a bit more dimensional. Something like that looks pretty dangerous. Now, let's see, he's got the thumb probably coming over to this side. Yeah, so here we just want to add in lots little details, make it more interesting-looking, more wrinkles. But again, I'm still scribbling to get a lot of this information in place and make some decisions here, figure some things out. Let's come up here and work on the head. I'm going to bring out this lumpy head thing that I think is always pretty cool about ogres. One single brow over this big eye. Downward turn ears. I think with these characters is just lots and lots of little wrinkles is what really is neat about them. You want almost think about the, this is going to sound silly, but the life they've lived, it's barbaric and rough and so you've got to think wrinkles, scars, imperfections. Definitely wouldn't want a very clean and polished ogre, probably wouldn't make a whole lot of sense, but the more you can get that roughness and that grittiness in there, it's probably going to transpose well to the character concept. I don't know if we'd seen the ribs, so I'll probably not do any ribs right there but maybe against some wrinkles right there, belly button. What do we say? This is more hair down the center. Just going to scribble that in. I'll probably do at least one more level of refinement to this. Again, this is that stage where the client's approved it and maybe they want to see one more clean up that happens at times two. Then, they will fine it or they give you the go ahead for the final rendering. I'm going to go with three toes, three fingers, and a thumb, I guess, but just to make it a little bit different. Now, we've got some pretty good choices made in there. We still need to bring this to more detail, more clarity. I don't even want to clear that. I think it all reads well, it's so understandable but we obviously want to refine it more and make it look more like a polished illustration, finished drawing. What I'll do here in the next lesson, we're going to take this a step further. I don't know whether we might add some more details, but we're going to definitely clean up the existing information that we have here and get it ready for display so with that, let's move on.
11. Refining the Drawing: We are going to clean this up a bit further. We're going to make some additional changes here and there. I might make the hand larger by comparison right here just little changes like that. I may bring the forearm out and then back in like that to give the forearm more presence in that upper arm. Probably I'd like a little shoulder plate of some kind. There's some other tiny little detail. Actually we'll just add a circular shoulder piece over here, then come in with a strap or something like that. Make that a little bit bigger. Let's keep detailing this. We're going to do a level of clean up here. I also want to eliminate one of these fingers. The more I look at it's got to match. If there's three toes, there's got to be three fingers and the thumb would be one of them. We'll eliminate a knuckle like this make them bigger, and then a separation right down in the middle. Two big knuckles like this, it's got two big fingers like that, I think it'll make more sense. I'm going to bring in this bicep and tricep a little bit. I want that forearm texture look larger and more imposing than the upper arm by comparison. That should be enough of our changes. You'll never know until it's done. Let's go ahead and start to refine this. I'm going to do another soft erase, a little bit of detail here, and do some wood grain to the club here. Now let's soft erase this again. I'm going to do a little spike or something like that. It's soft erases down so you can see the one arms a lot larger, it is coming out towards the cameras. Foreshortening tends to do that as well. But I think it's pretty evident that that's a lot larger by comparison. We're going to push a lot of this information back. I must soft erase it down quite a bit so that it's not as distracting and still allows me to make some creative choices, always with the line work and the way that I'm cleaning it up. There's that, pretty light. But now I can get in there and probably even size the brush down or you grab a smaller brush and just get in there and pick out these lines that you like. Forget about the ones you don't and that's what refinements all about, making last minute decisions to what looks cool and what works well and what doesn't. That's why I always say allow the bad sketches to happen. Don't worry too much about a rough sketch. Maybe it looks like it's not working, something like that, it's fine. It will still give you some kind of clarity in the process. Oftentimes what not to do is just as important as what to do. We would probably take this fur piece and give it some trim so it doesn't look like it's floating there. That trim can be mounted to that strap right here. We will just give it some kind of container to the edge. Then this strap will come down where we want to try to run this out and look like it's gone around that big old guard it is. You get a bit of a drop shadow and from that on to the chest and belly. A lot of times whenever you add these details, they really help in a lot of ways. They just offer more dynamics to work with. At this stage you really want to get line weight in place, shadows can come later. I've always hint towards shadows as I draw this part in, but that's going to also be determined on what your comfort level is with drawing in shadows. I always start there and add little bits and pieces. You can always connect them. You can always add a little bit more and a little bit more and work up to it. With the wrinkles here, make sure to show that separation there. I think a character like this the wrinkles are going to be pretty effective and important to put in there. I'm not really liking this fur area too much. I think I need to shift the connection point over, change the shape a little bit. It almost looks too clean and precise or perfect or something. I think for this type of character it has to look more rough and beat up and all over the place. Again, I'm going to scribble this in and see if I can make some different choices there. Now another thing I will say when doing this type of drawing is if something's not making sense here and you're working on it and you're like I keep having a revisit, I keep having to redraw it. You're better off really moving to something else. In the illustration work on that for a bit and then come on back. Sometimes it will help you to see something in different light and no sense of wasting bunch of time if you're not really giving it, you definitely want to try a couple times. Not just getting in the habit of giving up and walking away from a part of your illustration either. But there's definitely times where by working on something else and then coming back, it'll make more sense. I want to get some of those fatty tissue, I always struggle with trying to get the handle look like it was right around the object. I want to get that in place to define the edges first and then figure out the shape of the knuckles as they go around it. Again, this where rough sketching comes into play. I'm just going sketch it, check it, refine it those cube are been there until I get it. My thumb over there and soft erase it back. I think I want to bring the wrinkles up on the hand right through here, pretty evident. That will look more impressive and bring this knuckles up higher. A lot of times, I'm just moving things around and checking it and seeing, does it look better over here? Does this shape need to go over here? I think I've already mentioned this, but I don't always know exactly where to place everything, but I will move things around until I see it, until I figure it out. It's a lot of experimentation, a lot of tests and repeat kind of things. It's different when we have a picture to look at and say, okay, this is what it looks like, but when we do something fantasy-based, we have to make a lot of choices. Now, you can study from life and still figure this out even though this is a character- creature design with two fingers and a thumb, but you can still take pictures of your own hand, and figure out the overall dynamics of it and that's really just something you have to get better and better at, creating those types of studies and bridging the gap essentially, because it's always going to look more impressive if you understand the way things work. If you can get more and more of that into your sketches and your finished work, people are going to take note of that, and they're going to be impressed by it, and that's where it comes from so, it does take that studying from real life and then making it work in a fantasy scenario. It's starting to get there, still a bit clunky, but I'll just keep picking at it. The shape of those someplace, I the look of the spikes being bent, I think it even look cool to have some that where the tips are broken off or bent right at the end. Just little details like that to add character. This stuff is always fun because it's just very much whatever choice you make, its not too much, so you have to be accurate of when it comes to parts like this. Here are wood grants or something so wood grant I'll just usually swirl some lines around and then try to throw in areas where it looks like a knot, and then just spread the lines off from there. It's pretty easy. Now let's get over here, and again, I think the wrinkles are going to play a big role in whether or not this looks cool, so I'm going to put in lots of these little fat buildups or thick skin wrinkles, it's big form there, some bigger overly defined knuckles and a huge thumb. You could probably even put a bigger hefty thumbnail, big thick thumbnail, and then you have it all broken up and uneven, probably better than this clipped edged look. Bring this knuckle down, make it pretty large by comparison. This is going to be in shadow because he's got this big old belly so we got to think about that as we start to fill this in. Even the strap should be really weathered-looking, I don't even know that, it should be even on the edges, but if we at least rough it up and make it look pretty tattered by the end of what we're doing here and I think I'm going to give this a bigger base or something on this material because it'll add another detail in there, and we'll see probably need to be a little bit careful about adding in details after a client approve something. Again, that's going to be really how good you get at the combination of your thumbnails to your next sketch and how many revisions do you want to send them and things like that, but after they've approved it just make sure if you make any significant changes, you verbalize it so that you don't waste a bunch of their time or yours, generally yours because you're going to submit something and they going to go, nope, that's not what we're looking for, go back to the drawing board. That's not always fun to hear. Less straps here for this. What am I going to do now because this is all going to be repetitive, I'm just going to essentially do everything we've already talked about and just keep refining this and try to get it ready for presentation. Let me time-lapse this next part, and I'll narrate over top as we clean this up a bit more. Now I'll just soft erasing and redrawn over top once again, and sometimes I'll do this process two, three, four times, there's really no set limit. I generally can do this in two or three and be pretty satisfied with the drawing, but if I'm really trying to push the depth and really figure something out, I really make the artwork look as clean and refined as I can. I may even do a soft tracing and redraw up to four times. It's just one of those things where you figure out what you're after in your style, you figure out how long it'll take you to do certain things. Then there are certain instances where redrawing it doesn't really improve it. If you get to a certain level and you're trying to redraw it, I really suggest just keeping track of your work because sometimes you over render or over detail the work, and you can take it too far. Now generally, through soft tracing redrawing, you are generally going to get a better version each time, but there are times when you just have to walk away from it and accept where it's at. That's really it, just going through, detailing the work, getting in some shadows, some more line work. Again, thinking about line variation quite a bit as I do this, little bits of texture, trying to just make it look as good as I can for just being in line work, but it's oftentimes just really style choices at this point, so those little bits of details that we talked about in the script, making sure a lot of that's in there, the hair, the little scars and marks on the scan and that's about it. With that, It'll bring this part to a close. There you have it, that's the finished ogre sketch. Try to implement this stuff, try to work off the script, or draw your own character whatever you prefer, but the main thing is to try nice variations in your style. I get lots of those concepts put together to make all sorts of neat creature designs, and if got any questions, I'm here to answer them, so let me know, and as always, keep drawing, keep having fun and I will talk to you soon.
Robert Marzullo, Online instructor of Figure Drawing and Comic Art
