How To Light Characters & Scenes | For Comic & Storyboard Artists

1. Introduction: Hey, hey do, and it's Clinton here and welcome to my brand new course on lighting characters and scenes. What we're going to be covering first and foremost is how to light very basic and simplified geometry that includes lighting spheres, boxes, cylinders, the building blocks that really almost everything you'll ever draw built upon. Then we're going to transition over into something slightly more complex. You might be very familiar with it. The human figure we're going to talk about how to light that from a range of different lighting directions. Then we'll move on to learning the human head, which is oddly enough, even more complex than the entirety of the human body itself. Just because of all the subtle forms that you're going to be dealing with around the facial features, the eyes, the nose, the mouth, et cetera. And then finally, we will talk about how to write scenes, both interior and exterior scenes. Also combining that with terrain. So we're going to be looking at manmade background scenes, then more organic terrain scenes. So I can't wait to get started. Let's jump straight into it. We got a lot to cover. 2. Primitive Shapes & Geometry Overview: Alright, so we're going to start things out simple by focusing our attention on how we might go about lighting simple, basic shapes. The fundamental building blocks that almost everything you'll ever need to draw is going to be built upon. It is the best way to ensure the success of your illustrations. And the best part is that when you can think in terms of these basic shapes, it really does help to simplify the process of lighting and shadowing everything you'll ever build with them. And then we're going to move on to slightly more complex geometry. So essentially how to break down even the most complex subject matter into planes, into primitive geometry once more, just as with the primitive shapes, those basic shapes that we're all familiar with, the cube, the sphere, and the cylinder. This slightly more complex geometry is going to help us think about our objects, our characters, and the scenes in which they inhabit in a simplified way that makes it very, very easy to like them. So let's just jump straight into it and begin right there. 3. Lighting Primitive Shapes: Hey, hey don't. It's Clayton here from how to draw comics.net and welcome to our very first comic art class. Thank you so much for being here. Essentially, what I want to give you here today is a wholesome look at what goes into the sinking behind a lighting, a figure and as seen. Because even though it seems like a very broad topic, because of course you can light anything in any number of ways. There is actually only a few things that you really need to think about in order to ensure that those figures and those scenes are lit accurately. So we're going to talk about primitive shapes now. Why a primitive shapes? Great when it comes to an introduction into thinking about how form might be lit. Well, if we can get our head around how we might go about lighting a cube or a sphere or a cylinder. Then we can associate all of those simplified shapes to the construction of the human figure itself. But let's start out with just a basic cube. So we'll draw that up here. Again. You can follow along. I'm just using my pen tool. Just quickly draw that in. And that's not a bad cube. That's pretty good. So we'll put that over there. And then we'll draw up a sphere. It's a bit of a squashed sphere, but it'll do for our example over to the side. And then finally we want a cylinder. Now as it turns out, a lot of the things that you're ever going to be drawing. And a foundational level consists of at least basic primitive shapes. And that includes the human figure, as well as the various backgrounds that you might construct for your scenes. Okay, cool. So we've got our primitive shapes here. If we wanted to light our cube, let's say from the top left. And he's a little arrow, a directional light source arrow that shows us from which direction the light is casting down upon our form. Now you may or may not know that light kind of works in Res, write directional light rays. Kinda like a torch. When you switch on a torch, you can point in any direction you like, and it'll be like a laser beam of light that projects down onto whatever is in front of it. And as the light hits that form, it's going to illuminate various planes around that form. So if the light is coming from this direction, then we know that this face on the far side of the cube, facing toward us is going to be cast in shadow. Simply because the light won't be able to get to this side of the cube. So we'll go ahead and shade that in. And believe it or not, when I'm shading a character or I'm shading an element within the background that I've included in my scene. I'll think about those things in very much the same way of thinking about where is the main light source within my scene and from what direction is it projecting down onto the figures, onto the props within it? And by thinking about it in that basic way, what it allows me to do in turn is light, pretty much anything, however I want it very dynamic away. I just have to know in relation to where I've placed my light source, what portions of the forms are going to be in darkness and what portions will be enlight. Probably an easier way to fill that in, but I like the long way around. That's the way I work. So I it takes me forever to draw anything. Now that's thick black, completely dark shadow. Right? Now. Of course, we can see that our light source is shining down from above onto the cube, which is going to fully illuminate the top face, right? So we're not even going to see any rendering on that top plane. However, around this side of the cube, we can see that just based on the 3D arrow that are placed in there, that this face might actually fall not into completely black thick shadow, but it may have somewhat of a tone to it. It might be slightly lighter shadow because there's a ton of different tones in between black and white. And so we could go ahead and just shave that in. And this really is the basics of hatching right here. You can see that by just adding in these parallel uniform lines that we are able to generate somewhat of a tone. And depending on how close we are placing those lines together and how thick they are, we can control the value of that tone, the terminal value. Okay, so that'd be just hatches. Now if we wanted to darken part or all of this tone up, what we could then do is place in some cross edges going in a 90 degree direction to the horizontal hatches that we've just placed in. And because we know that our light sources casting down onto the object from the top left, I know that this side of the face is going to be a little bit darker. Okay, so we get a completely bright face on top and we've got a shaded face, then we've got a completely black face. And that kind of helps us to describe the form of that cube. That mean let's what lighting allows us to do. That's what we're trying to achieve with it. Is. We're trying to take this from being a circle or an oval or a squashed circle and egg shape laying on the side. And we're trying to give it some three Dienes by lighting it. So let's say in this example that we wanted our light source to come from this side instead. And we'll have it projecting down from the front rather than from behind, which is what we had with the cube. Well then we would see the shadow form over here. This is a very, very simple representation of how you'd shade something. But really it doesn't have to get any more complicated than that inside your head while you're working. Right now, you might add in some hatches once more to create a blend between the pure black and the pure white values. And these great as well for describing the surface form of your object. Okay, so how curved it is. Add in some cross hatches as well. If you'd wanna make that blend even smoother. This example, we can jump back to a light projection from the top left. Okay, so this is our cylinder. Now of course, because we are projecting from above the top face of that cylinder or the top plane, if you prefer, will be fully lit. But we're going to see a shadow on the fast side of the body of the cylinder. I could go ahead and I could have a secondary light coming in over here, too. Illuminate this side of the object. That can look really cool, especially on characters to create somewhat of a cinematic aesthetic. But I think what we'll do is we'll just fill that in completely. Okay, so rather than a harsh transition, let's go for a softer transition with the hatches. So you can see that I'm drawing them out a little longer this time around. And this may seem really simple and basic entities. But you wanna make sure that you're at least able to get to the point. But you're not only able to copy what I'm seeing here, but you're actually able to understand it on a fundamental level. What is happening? How are these shapes being lit and why are they being lit in the way that they're being lit? Because if he can understand it on this level, you'll be able to have an easier time understanding it on the more complex levels that we are going to be talking about here in this lesson. I'm just going to show you why these shapes are amazing. You can kinda more often distort these shapes into any other version of them that you need in order to construct your scenes. So the cylinder, as an example, can be tapered at the top to turn it into a cone. And we can light that as well. Let's plays quick shadow in. A sphere. Can of course be squashed, flattened. However you like. Me can shade that to a cube. Will that just like the cylinder, can be tapered at the top to create a completely different form. And so you can see how various structures for your backgrounds could indeed be constructed using just these basic primitive forms. And not only that, but if you understand how to shade them, then you can start to shade things such as buildings, because a building is just a rectangular prism. That's a building in a nutshell. And if you've got a light casting down upon it, well, you know what, face to shade. Ok, so hopefully that all makes sense on this level, right? It's, it's pretty basic stuff. 4. Lighting Geometry: Let's go ahead now and talk about geometry and k, because this is the next level beyond lighting primitive forms a K and this is the background that I come from. I actually use to do a lot of 3D modelling for video games design. And so we were, rather than using a line and, and pencils the shade, we were actually using three-dimensional polygons to present form. I'm going to construct something very basic here. And you could think of this as an asset that you might include within a background. Same E could extrude portions of it. So we can cut into this. We can pull it out. This is known as an extrusion. Because we're extruding geometry off of another piece of geometry. He can really have fun with this. I don't have anything in mind. I don't know exactly what it is I'm trying to draw up here. So this is a really great exercise actually for just practicing form in perspective. So we can draw something out like that. It looks kinda weird. We can even build off of it. So we can pretend that it's some kind of building if we wanted to, by adding in these, these vertical lines. This is like creative 3D drawn modelling. Okay, now it's not perfectly drawn up in perspective. That's OK. We don't need it to be. That's all good. So that's one example we can do up another three-dimensional object over here, is going to start out with one side of it and then draw the rest out. Okay, so if you wanna get good at form and constructing things with form in mind, go ahead try this out. It's actually pretty fun. It's very creative. It's very freeing in a way it doesn't need to be anything in particular. And it's a little bit more exciting than just drawing a cube or a cylinder. We can draw something up over here. You know, don't, don't put any pressure on yourself when it comes to drawing things, these things up, they're supposed to be fun exercises, but they teach a valuable lesson. I sank. Casey can see that we're dealing with a lot more planes than we were dealing with the cube. As an example. These are much more complex in nature, but they follow the same rules. Once more, we could do an extrusion here if we wanted to. We could carve in a little box here, pull it out the top. And you can begin to kind of comprehend how a scene that hold the city within it, for example, might be constructed using this very same method. Whether it be a futuristic sci-fi city or just to a modern day regular city, whatever it is. Let's do something else over here. Let's do an actual building of some kind. So this looks like a triangular prism Rayleigh. But you can see has something like that. Even could easily be converted into a spaceship or something like that. And let's do that. Let's see what we can come up with. Let's get a little bit creative here. Have some little wings coming out the side. Again, this is by no means perfect, but it should get the point across. So we are just modelling here when modelling on the page. Okay, cool. So let's do one more. Down the bottom. This'll be the last one. We'll draw something quick up for this one. I'm just coming up with these Anna, my head too, so don't stress too much about it then these aren't perfect by any means. But I will tell you that I think about the anatomy of my characters in very much the same way in geometrical terms. And you'll see as we go throughout today's class, how that pays off big time when it comes to lighting characters. So we got a bit S3, dean is going on here. So let's light these objects. Let's say, for example, that we had a light coming from this direction. Well, what would that mean? That would mean that this face of the object is going to be in complete darkness. Ok, it'll be cast in shadow. So we'll go ahead and we'll just fill that in. And this is pretty easy stuff for a shading and object will all of a sudden doesn't really seem that complicated. We just have to logically think our way through the process. You know, what planes are actually going to be lit and what geometrical planes are going to be cast in shadow because the light simply can't get to them. All right, and this side of the object is also going to be cast in shadow. So let's go ahead and fill that in. Now you can draw this geometry up as needed as you like. The same thing is still going to apply. Either way. He could add windows onto this thing, make it into a proper building. And all but the shadows are still going to sit where they're going to sit. Okay, let's take a look at this example over here. Let's say that our main light source is projecting down from above. Well, that's going to mean that this top plane is definitely going to be in shadowed. No light will be able to get to it. But then what about the plane underneath it? Well, it's still going to have some shadow applied to it. But the shadow value won't be as dark, it won't be as thick. There'll be sunlight being captured by this plane. So what we can use in that case is our hatches. We can pull them out and we can add them in here. We'll keep him pretty rough. But you get the idea. Ok, so what about this plane? Well, it's going to also be getting that little bit more wired than the previous plane. So we can still use our hatches for this example, except they're not going to be as thick and they're going to be spread further apart. Right? So now we get some idea as to what the function of hatches actually is and how they can be controlled in order to arrive at a particular tone. Alright, cool. Now what about this plane? Well, you know, it's probably going to be getting a fair bit of light. Actually, these two planes will likely be getting the most light. But we can go ahead here and slightly shade this one. I would say. It's going to have very thin hatches, but there will be some shading still there. And then of course on this side, we are going to see yet again. Some slightly thicker, tighter hatches in order to create a darker tone. The phases of the object that are laying flat, receiving the most line. So they're not getting any shading whatsoever. Maybe in this example, we've got the light coming from this direction straight on from the side. That's going to mean that this face is going to be cast in shadow. So will this face down the bottom here? And this is really very much all I'm thinking about. What I'm shading, anything more complicated than this? And because I'm keeping it so simple in my head, it allows me to come up in terms of these crazy complex lighting conditions. So this piece of geometry right here is probably the most important one that we're going to take note of because it very much could be the surface planes on a muscle in the anatomy of your character. Simplifying those more complex elements down into something such as this really, really helps you out when it comes to lighting it. So let's just say we handled simple lighting conditions setup where we have the light coming from above, shining, projecting down onto the object. We would see that these two rows of planes would be completely illuminated. However, these ones might actually be slowly shifting into darkness. And in fact, let's make this even more interesting. Let's instead change our light direction to be still shouting from above, but slightly more from the left. Because then we can get a good look at how As the form turns away from the light, those hatches began to shift. Their characteristics, start change. They're drawn closer together and they're drawn sicker as well. So we've got three different times here essentially ranging in terms of value that we've created. Now the bottom, well, it's going to be almost completely black. Right now. Of course, when you're looking at the object is close, you're going to be seeing each one of those individual hatches. But if you squint your eyes, what you'll start to find is that those hatches Bullard together to create a times that we're looking for, which is the whole idea, the whole theory behind hatching in the first place. So let's light our final object here. So we get our 3D arrow out. Since it's coming from the left, this phase will be shaded with hatches. The plane is still facing upward slightly. But under here, it will be completely cast in shadow. On this side of the object, we're actually going to cover in hatches. Because it's not a plane that's facing, facing downward in direct opposition to the light source. But it's still not going to be getting that much light either. You can see that we've got some planes at the front here, which are angled downward as well, which means they're going to be cast in shadow just a little bit, maybe not as much. But we're still going to see a darker tone the same at this one down here. Okay, cool. So that's basic geometry, working with polygons in order to construct a more complex form. And then we've learned how to light those complex forms, at least more complex than the previous primitive forms that we covered. The cube, the cylinder, and the sphere. You know, I think that if you come from the background of a 3D modeller, this stuff really does help you out in a big way because you'll still 3D model, uh, when it comes to drawing comic book art, it's just that you've gotta do it all manually. You've gotta get out that pencil and paper. And instead of having those polygons ready to go into 3D application, you've gotta draw all out on your own. 5. Assignment Lighting Basic Forms: Okay, so hopefully that gave you a very quick and basic introduction into how you might go about lighting form in general, and really the form of any solid subject matter that you might want to illustrate. We've broken it down in a very basic way. In a way that I think is going to help the later lessons that we go through here when it comes to the human figure, when it comes to learning more complex and complicated scenes, make that just that little bit more sense. But first up, let's apply what we've learned thus far in an assignment. This assignment is going to involve you taking the primitive shape and geometry template that I have provided in this class and using them to execute essentially what we have just gone over in the previous two lessons. Now I want you to lie it, those basic shapes, that primitive geometry from a number of different lighting directions have fun with it. Experimental. Try putting the primary light source up to the top right, maybe up to the top left but facing forward or back. Maybe from below, maybe from the side, the right, the left. It really doesn't matter as long as you're able to interpret how those forms are going to be lit based on the given lighting direction. Alright, good luck with it. I'll see you in the next lesson. Once you're done. 6. Human Figure Overview: So now we're going to move on to the good stuff, are actually going to learn how to live full human figures. And my process for breaking it down in a very simple and easy to follow way that just makes it so much easier what this is essentially going to allow you to do if you really get it, if you really pay attention and apply what it is, I'm going to be imparting onto you in the next following lessons. It's going to allow you to be able to light your characters in any given context regardless of their pose, the point of perspective that you're looking at them on, and most importantly, the light scheme that you have chosen to put them under. Alright, let's jump straight into it here we got a lot to cover. 7. Figure Construction: Okay, so I'm gonna switch back to my pencil here. And we're going to draw up two figures, one male and one female. And this is going to be very basic and very rough to start out with. Because as you well know, that's how I like to approach the drawing process regardless of what it is that I'm actually drawing. So I start out with a head. This is going to be my male figure. And that I place in the chest. And we're going to be drawing him on a three-quarter angle and placing a center line down the chest. And then I leave that down into the pelvis and that gives me the full length of the torso. And then I'll lay in the legs. We're going to give this character nice wide stance. Place in just some very basic lines for the feet and up to show us what direction the feed will be tendon. And then we'll place in the leg on the opposite side of the body. Then I'll place in a horizontal guideline around the middle of the chest. I'll add in some vertical lines that run from the bottom of the chest down to the pelvis on either side of the body, closing up the torso. And then I'll place in the shoulders. And if we add some arm holes here, it's very easy to find the shoulders, right? We're just going to keep this really basic K. So the arm holes will be there, the shoulders. They basically spheres. But I like to shape them like a shoulder ever so slightly. And then we going to literally be using cylinders for the arm CIA. And K's. When I said before that the human body is made out of those basic primitive shapes on a fundamental level, I really did mean it. Okay, so you've got his hand there. This arm is going to come down to the sides. It's just going to be resting side of his body. And we've got the neck, which we'll draw in. And this is just a very simple method of construction that I use for all the figures that I draw. Alright, so that's our male figure. Let's go ahead and draw the female figure because I want to show you both examples, because we don't shade men in the same way that we shade women funnily enough, at least when it comes to comic book God. So the female character is going to be a little shorter. And the other thing you'll notice about the female figure is that there's a little bit more grace to the pose, a little bit more elegance. It's hard to explain, but this is one of the reasons that I really enjoy drawing women a lot. There's a certain amount of sleep next to them that you just don't get on. Men were still using very much the same approach that we use to draw out the male figure. Except you can see that the lines and placing in just, you know, you can tell without any anatomy really being placed in that we are drawing up a female character here. We're going to bring the mid section in a little bit to create that nice hourglass look. I'll add in the Yom halls, place in the shoulders. And the arms on either side of the body is keeping it very, very rough. There we have it. We can resize them a little bit to make them easier to see. 8. Basic Anatomy: So then what we can do is we can convert this to blue and go over the tub placing in the anatomy. And we're going to keep this super basic and by no means is this a finished. But it will provide a very nice example as to how we might shade them. Placing in the triceps, the elbow, forearm muscles and muscles. And then we've got the hands which we're just gonna fudge those for now. We don't need to worry about them too much for this example. Then we've got the front of the body. So we'll add in abdominal muscles really, really quickly. Starting with the first row. The second row, which kinda the longest set of abdominals. And then we've got the lateral muscles that are going to wrap around the side of the torso and the back. And then a very basic and fundamental level. This is kind of the primary anatomy, grapes of the male figure. Okay, so we've got this big long band like muscle that runs down the side of the leg, the inner leg. Then we've got the quads and the upper leg. And she going to run into the knees. And then we've got the lower leg muscles where we found the calves. Got one on the outside, one on the inside. The one on the n side is always going to be longer than the one on the inside. But the big long burn as well that runs down the middle of the lower leg. And that's going to join onto the ankles. Now to wrinkle sits lower than the inner angle. Something to take note of. Now, in a regular stance, usually the feed aren't going to be facing straightforward. That'll be a little bit too robotic. In real life, people usually have their feet tilted just a little bit to help them balance. Okay, so we'll tackle the next leg. Tend slightly outward at this angle. Place in the top quad. The outer quads below that. Then tackle the calves and the lower leg. Do some erasing here and there because very rarely do I ever get it right. I'm always constantly erasing. The only reason I'm gonna raising today is that I need to be a perfectionist. I just want to get the point across. And then we've got the arm on this side. And the reason that I'm actually taking the time to place in this anatomy is because we are going to want to break it up into planes, funnily enough. A K And then we've got the head as well. So just roughly going to draw that in. Something that looks halfway decent. But the key is on either side. Give him some hair, eyebrows, neck. Now I get the main trunk of the neg. Then we've got the traps. Come down and go behind the back. Okay, cool. So let's tackle the female figure to kind of start at the chest, which will lead down into the middle, the torso until we get to the hips. Women can have abs, usually I don't define them on my female characters. I mean, I don't chop them up into a six pack, put it that way. You may place in the ribs completely up to you. And when it comes to drawing women, I find that style really does come into it. And what exactly your preference is going to be in that regard. And I'm not just not going to be defining the muscles as much here because women tend not to have muscles that are defined. And there's a good reason for that is because they usually don't have as much testosterone as men. And so their muscles simply won't be as accentuated. The, you could take a male and female in real life of equal fitness. And the men would just have more defined anatomy just because they've got a little less body fat and many of them have deeper wrinkles and I kinda things so it doesn't always work out for us in the long run. We'll place in her place in the empathize. Keeping it really, really quick. Now usually a little comic book caught us, we'll draw their female characters standing on my tippy toes. Kinda lengthens the leg, makes them look more elegant. And then we'll place in the shoulders. Forearm muscles won't be as defined here. You might have a Hindu them that what ends up happening is if you end up defining the muscles on your female characters too much, we can do, but they will start to look a little more masculine. And if that's what you're looking for, then you should totally go for it. The other thing that can happen is older than what they actually say. That may not be a goal Elisa. And then we'll give her face. Pretty difficult drawing a face at this scale. And I'm not gonna lie. And what we'll do is we'll just size. And it's a little too small. And you can see that even the muscles I haven't defined there have kind of increased masculinity a little bit. Just to make sure she's in the proper proportions. We wanna make her head the same size as the duke's head, which means we got to shrink her entire body down somewhat. And there we have it. A male and female figure roughly drawn up. Yes. But that's the basic construction method I use without all the perfectionism. Okay, cool. So yeah, these are by no means my best characters that I've ever drawn. But they are enough for us to start talking about the Plains of the human body. 9. Planes of The Male Figure: So let's turn these two blue. I'm gonna get my red pen out here. And we are going to start to geometry arise these characters. So you've got the pegs here. And a simple way to turn this into geometry might be just to keep it as basic as this. You know, I think about how would I approach this character fires modelling the mountain 3D. And this would probably be what I'd come up with. Because you do have to think about that stuff. When you're doing 3D modelling. Where do I need to place those polygons in order to get the right form. Ok, so you can see that there's some actual dimension to use pegs. They announce that I've added in these cross contours. Let's talk about the lower portion of his torso because this is where things can get a little bit complicated, right? We've got this flat plane at the top here. Then we're going to build off of that down around the sides of the rest of this ribcage abdominal section, getting my polygon Giardia. And this is how I understand this general form. And the ABS kinda come in below that. They follow their own plane directions as well. And we've got this big abdominal Dionaea kinda comes out and goes back in. And we get this around the sides here. Dangerous thinking about it in terms of planes. Now if we take this away, it looks pretty complicated. But what ends up happening is when we start the shade this say we've got the light direction coming in from the top. Well, we can start to guess which planes are going to be in darkness. So we'll get into that a little bit more in a bit. But just to show you where we're going with this and how this is going to help you to shade your figures. Now usually with the deltoid, which is the shoulder muscles. They can be split up into three main portions. And it's those portions that I'm going to be turning into polygons here. Then we've got the bicep. It's got its own portions to Scott aside, it's gotta Fran, it's gotta back as far as its geometry is concerned. And the funny thing is, even though this looks complex on keeping a pretty damn simple K. And then we've got this major forearm muscle, which starts in the bicep and runs all the way down to the wrist. And it's really important to be able to understand muscles as having form because it just helps you to draw them better. It helps you to draw them in a three-dimensional way because that's how you're thinking about them. It's him. While you're keeping that in mind, why a conscious of that, it's impossible not to get a little bit more dimension added in to your drawings. Then we've got the hands, which we're not going to worry about too much here, but they are really just cubes in and of themselves. By going to keep them really simple though. Okay, so we've got our deltoid on this side of the body. We've got our bicep and got these middle arm muscles that joined the bicep onto the lower arm. Once more, we've got this arm, forearm muscle that starts in the bicep and runs all the way down to the wrist. We wanna give that some form. It's got a neighbor as well. So when I keep it in mind. And so we got the pelvis area right the crotch. And that's going to be a bunch of polygons as well. It comes outward there. Someone got this long band like muscle that runs all the way down. Give that some dimensions and sickness. We got the upper quad. So I'm going to just draw that out. And then I'm going to divide it in half. And then place in some cross contours to give it some dimension. Okay, and I'm going to do that with all the quad as well. Again, this doesn't look like anything fancy. I know. But if you want a good look at what the inside of my brain is thinking about what's going on in my head when I draw a character. This is it, this really is ID. And I can polish this up and I could spend ages drawing it out for you, but It's the same lessons that you're getting from it anyway would still apply. And K, So don't underestimate what we're talking about here. Apply it to your drawings and it's going to help you at significantly. Ok, cool. So you can see that we're getting this three-dimensional Look at the character now. So drew out the lower leg. Now, we've got this outer calf. The inner calf, this muscle that's kind of a part of the calf. And then we've got this long B9 hard edge that runs all the way down the middle of the lower leg. Ankles at either side. The foot. Once you understand anatomy on those basic level, becomes way easier to draw as well. Without this breakdown, without this understanding, it can feel very overwhelming, very, very complex inside your mind. So do yourself a favor and just do these studies. Like really start breaking down the anatomy of your fingers into 3D geometry. And you'll get a good idea as to how it fits together eventually. Not going to solve all your problems, but it will help out a lot. Okay, we've got the foot the Federal Way is difficult mode is difficult for me as hands though, funnily enough. And then we've got the head. Now again, we're going to go into that a little bit more detail in the following lesson. But for now, we really just want to focus on the neck muscles. And if I was to lay in the plains of the head on this level, I'd add in some forehead planes. The planes is the nose. Let me put the males and the chin. And then even the hair can be switched up, been converted into planes as well. So that's the male figure plane of five. 10. Planes of The Female Figure: Let's do the same thing with the female figure. Breast z going to be converted into planes. And we just keep it in this very basic, very, very simple. Hello buddy is pretty much going to be broken up in the same way. Got her abdominal region. You can see that there's some, some 3D ness applied to a noun, does exactly what we want. And then we've got the shoulder will divide them up in the same way we divided up the male figures shoulders, giving each one of those deltoid some form. Then we've got a biceps muscles on her arm. And now we've got this forum muscle. I'm not sure what you call head forearm muscle. You've probably heard the name before, but you don't really need to know the name. You just need to know that it's there and then had a drawer and then we've got her hand. It will keep very, very simple. And the shoulders, the bicep on this on the forearm muscles. And then we're going to tackle the legs. Place in the codon. This leg, placing in line down the middle. Cross contours that give it some place in the quad on the outer leg and do the same thing. On the inner leg, which usually hangs a little lower. And the quote on the ADA leg, the body isn't entirely symmetrical, at least on either side of the primary forms that make it up. And then we've got her lower leg, which we would divide up in very much the same way. We divided up the lower leg on the male character. So in terms of the actual anatomy and the muscle groups, there's not a whole lot of difference between the sexes. It's just the way that they're shaped in propulsion, I would say. That is going to give you the real distinction between the two. And we've got this, divide that up, give it some polygons, quote on this side of the body. So you can see each and every single muscle now looks like it's got some form applied to it, which is fantastic. That's exactly what we want to have come across. And once more, these are the geometrical fide versions of our characters that we're looking at here. And you can see that there's some similar characteristics to the geometry that we were working on before. Then we haven't. Then yes, we can tackle the face as well as some three dimensionality to it. Needs to be shaded just like anything else. So giving it some planes, neighborhoods. Then the eye is place those in polygons around the mouth. And that pretty much wraps up the plane divisions for human figures. 11. Lighting The Figure From The Top Left: Okay, cool. So let's convert this to blue. So it's a little less intense. And what we'll do is we'll just take this over here and then climb this one. And we'll have a afresh figures over here. We're going to use the planes is a reference though, as we, as we actually go ahead and start to shade them. Put these over here. So we went to shade these figures now, okay, we want to add shadow to them. How do we go about doing that? Well, if we think back to our previous example with the geometry, it actually becomes a very, very simple thing to do. So let's say, for example, that we had the lighting source shining down onto our characters from the top left. Well, just like with that simplified geometry we were talking about before, we can start to shade the areas of the human figure, the planes of the human figure that are facing away from that light source. We can figure out what areas will be rendered more than others. What portions of the figure, what planes at the figure will be facing away from that line. And we can kind of use this thinking to make sure that we have a semi accurate representation of the figure and how it's lit regardless of the lighting scheme, that way going with. So let's take that thinking and apply it to have figures over here. Let's say again that it's from the top left. This is a very typical angle that you're going to see the character being lit from. So I know that this peg, the underside of it is probably going to be in shadow. A fair bit of shadow actually, same on this side as well. And I know that the crease in between the pegs is also going to have some shadow applied to it. Now we've got this contour that runs above the abs. The torso is very interesting because you get this complex merging of muscle and barn. And I really am just thinking about it in terms of those planes and I'm using those planes to none necessarily shade it block-by-block polygon by polygon. Using the weather as polygons are going to be sitting, and how much likely going to be capturing to decide how much shadow I'm going to add in around the more complex anatomy that I'm defining here. So I know, for example, that this section of the body is going to be cast in a fair amount of shadow. So a lot of the muscles here are going to be receiving very little lie. So want to add some shadows in around them to show that to represent that. Same with the ABS. So I'm gonna start shading those. Again, thinking about the abs in terms of basic geometry and I can increase the complexity of that geometry. You know, I can divide it up into a grid, kinda like Spiderman costume if you want. All of this stuff really helps out in a lot of ways when it comes to thinking about not only lighting your character, but also for shortening your character in three-dimensional space and perspective accurately. And so when you start thinking about things in this way, it really takes all the guesswork out of it. You know, you get a pretty solid idea as to how things needed to look. We know that this arm is actually going to be causing a drop shadow onto the body since the light is shining down onto it from this direction. And this PEC, we'll even cast a shadow across the body as well. And around the sides of the abs. Going to see this section cast in shadow. And as always, this is just a guide. So there are going to be amendments that you may need to make later on. That's totally fine. That's always the case, right? No matter what you are drawing from the fundamental structure of the human figure to the plane, to the human figure. Those single take you so far, but then you've got to use your artistic intuition, which is developed over time through practice in order to judge how things need to look. Whether or not there's a portion of the figure that needs to be changed up in some way. This is a very easy lighting setup. So in a second we're actually going to change this up. I'm going to show you another lighting scheme that we could potentially use in order to shape the figure. Okay, so now we're going to shade those muscles using our understanding of the planes of the human body as a guide here to help us figure out how exactly those muscles need to be shaded and how much they need to be shaded. What muscles will need to be shaded here, and that's going to be shaded. The interior leg evenly angles. Okay, so that's the leg on that side of the body. A leg on the far side of the body. Lice in a shadow around the top and the lower quads. Then we'll start to shade the lower leg muscles as well. Then we can tackle the arms. Once that's done. On a nice thick shadow along Lee in a bicep. Then run the deltoid, we can add some shadows. Placing some shadows for the tricep. Going back down to the lower arm muscles, the forearm muscles. There's a complex system of muscles in this region of the arm. So they can be a little bit difficult to, not only shape but also to place. And then we'll jump over to the other and then we'll do the exact same thing. Starting out with the bicep, going in, shading the forearm muscles below that. And in fact that the body is actually going to be casting a shadow onto this arm. Sekhar shadows also serve to add a lot of dimension to your fingers to keep them in mind to okay, and as for the face, well, you're going to get this cheekbone over here that's going to have a shadow applied to it. Some shadows underneath the eyebrows, underneath the nose. And the head is actually going to cast a shadow as well across the neck. So that is the male figure shaded. Let's go ahead and shade the female figure. Now, I'm not going to be defining her muscles as much. We're going to be adding in some basic shadows of course, but we're not going to be cutting them up into refined muscle groups. Now as for the breasts, you know, this is really going to depend on how much shading you want them to have. This pretty harsh lighting conditions. This is SimCity style stuff. We're just dealing with black and white with very little times in between. But you can see that because we've got the figure turned an angled in a different direction to the male figure that we're going to be lining the other side of her body in a very different way. Pacer, this side of the male character's body is capturing a lot of live. But this side of the female figure is capturing a lot of shadow. And then more shadow that didn't get within a particular region of the body. The more details you're going to start to see. And as for her legs, I don't know that we're going to want to add too much shadow to these quads. We kinda want to group them together. Unless of course, when going for a very like ripped bodybuilder type female character. The knees are definitely going to have some shadows applied to them. On this side of the body will start shading out the leg here as well. We may indicate the tub quote emphasis slightly, but we wanna keep it subtle. And you can see that one small, we know that this side of the leg, this side of the body will be constant shadow. So the side closest to us in this example, rather than the far side, which we are dealing with in the first example with the male figure. And then we've got the hair, of course. Now specially on the face of a female character. You don't want to add crazy shadows. So we're just going to where they're going to leave her face, as is the only real areas of contrasts that we want around the eyes where you've got some eye shadow sometimes, and around the mouth where you might have some darker tones of lipstick there. But other than that, you really don't want to get too crazy. Alright, cool. So that is how I go about shading the female body. These are just like the main shadows, right? So you could go ENM, start rendering this stuff out, which I'll show you the process for right now. So you can start adding in hatches in order to begin blending the shadows into the pure white highlights. And it really is up to you depends what you're hatching style actually is that once you got those shadow is in there like a lot of the work is really done for you in order to get the hatches to look right. You just got to know, well, how sharp is the transition going to be from dark to light? What kinda former You actually dealing with? Is it a super soft curved form or is it a hard form? So thinking about that stuff is really going to help you to describe the forms that you're dealing with much more accurately. You can see how easy it is to add in that those hatches once the shadow is a down. There's some people don't bother adding any hatches at all. They don't bother blending the shadows into the highlights and that's totally fine a lot of the time. That's just their particular style that they like to work in. And it really is completely subjective in that way. And some matches over here. Going in or around each of the major muscle groups one-by-one and doing the same thing. So that's the dude. Let's do the lady add-in some rendering around her breasts. Yeah, this entire side of her torso MIP and rendering. Because rendering is really just the mid time between the black and white values. Placing in that hatching. This is an illustration of my mindset, my mental process that I go through when it comes to naming this stuff up. Like I never work this rough. Of course, this is not a finished artwork by any means. I do approach a finished artwork in the same way. I think about these very same things, depending on your style. I'm shorter, lot neater than this. If you are struggling with adding shadows and shading your characters in an accurate way, this is really going to help you out. So that's how I would go about shadowing and rendering the female and male figure from the top left lighting direction. 12. Lighting The Figure From Above: So let's say that our lighting condition was now coming directly from above. Now this is a very dramatic lighting condition that you might see your characters being placed under in a comic book. It's fantastic for that. Once more, I know that the pecks and going to be completely cast in shadow at the bottom. Not only that, but they will actually be projecting a shadow down onto the rest of the tour. So okay, because now we're dealing with a much harsher lie that's projecting down under the character from above. We'll add in some shadows around the ribs and an abdominal region. You can see here that they're going to be cast and a ton of shadow. And that they themselves will also be projecting shattered down onto the abdominals below them. Then we've got the lower abdominal muscle. It's a much longer abdominal. And then we've got the groin. Alright, and we're going to get a large shadow dropping down around the sides of the torso as well. So you can see now that it really does feel like the light is now coming from above. Next up, we'll shade the bicep. Thinking about those planes. Again. Which ones are going to be shaded? Which ones are going to fall into shadow? Which ones will be lit and illuminated? That's the question. And as long as I can logically think my way through that, I should be able to shade this figure pretty accurately without a reference. And that's really the key. That's the place that we're trying to get at here. Like if we can draw our comic books without necessarily depending on references, leaning on them as a crutch, than we should be able to have the freedom to draw nearly everything and anything that we want without having to track down the exact reference, we need to do it accurately. So we'll jump on to the next town on the far side of the body. Same deal. We going to get a nice big shadow being projected onto it from the torso. Then we've got the head. The head is going to be projecting a shadow down across the neck. Eye sockets, going to be cast in shadow as well. Zhe Ge binds some big shadows applied to them. And then we'll attend to the legs. So it's really the bottoms of these forms that are going to see the most shadow. We've got this muscle in here. Definitely want to add a shadow to that. Okay, so that's looking pretty good. Add shadows to the Cavs game, thinking about that downward direction of the light source as it projects down onto the character. And then we'll do the same on the opposite side of the body, on the far leg. And you can see that this is kind of a spooky lighting setup. It's intimidating. And depending on how you like your character, you are going to invoke a certain feeling where there are BY intimidation, whether it be confidence in safety. We can light a character and a very majestic way or a very horrifying way. And this does look kinda horrifying. And there we have it in very quick, very nasty. But you get the idea. Now, of course, on the female character, we're going to do the same lighting setup. Plays in a shadow around the bottom of her breasts. On either side of the body. They go into casts a shadow down onto the rest of her Tomasa. Then her abdominals will be cast in shadow as well as a tote away from the lion. The MOOC of this lower abdominal, which we're going to place a big dictionary and around the base of that at a nice thick shadow to shadow in around the lower courts as well. We might even group those together. Please send a shadow random bottom of a nice shadow isn't around calf muscles on the lower leg. And again, we kinda want to be subtle here like we don't want to add too much shadow in around these muscles across the female figure because it's going to make them look more defined. And as we've already talked about, we do not want that for our female characters, necessarily, especially that's not our intention. Okay, so we'll jump over to the other leg now. Placing in shadows around the top muscle groups and the bottom muscle groups. Particularly the calf muscle on the lower leg is a very prominent muscle. And we want to add some, a good amount of shape to that. Then we've got her arms. So we want to add a shadow to shoulders, biceps, triceps, and then to her lower arm muscles as well. Then her head will also project a nice big shadowed down the middle of her neck on the body. Some six shadow into her hair. And L before we're not going to add really any shadow to her face. Now we could go ahead and add in some rendering. So go ahead and do that real quick to show you how I would render this hat. The thing to keep in mind here is we're going to have some very stark transitions because it's a very dramatic lighting scheme that we're playing with here. Which means a hatches aren't going to be very long at all. That depends on the area or I guess we're shading of course. And again, you can always get away without adding any rendering in. It just depends on your style, really and how complex you wanna make it. But as I shade, I'm still thinking in terms of the basic planes and planes that I'm using right now in my mind, I'm thinking about them in order to shade these pigs have properly. Then we've got the quads. The upper legs will shade those in, blending the shadows into the light. And we'll do the same thing on female figure. Add in some hatches, ran her arms getting those forms to read nicely. And the rendering legs and all the muscle groups that we see within them. We've got the top-left lighting condition, we've got the top-down lighting condition. Let's do a bottom up lighting condition in the next example. 13. Lighting The Figure From Below: If the character is being lit from the bottom, we know that it's actually this plane under the peg that's going to be lit. And it's these upper planes that will actually then be placed in shadow. So I'm just going to lay a chateau in around the top of them here. And I'm not quite sure how this is going to look in the end, but I'm going with my theory here. And if I follow my theory, then it should work. So we've got the shoulders here as well. So we're going to go ahead and place as shatter around the top because that's where the shadows are going to collect. The light is projecting up from the bottom of the figure. And we've got our neck here. You might get a bit of a projected shadow are from the chest, but for the most part it's going to be completely illuminated. Going a bit of a shadow up here at the top of the bicep. So it looks a little bit weird. And it's the weirdness of this lighting setup that tends to make it look a little more terrifying scenario when holding a torch underneath our phase, for example, the reason it looks scary is because it's not a typical lighting setup that you'd see in the natural world. Usually, like in any given environment, is projecting down on us from above, not from below. So it's kind of unsettling actually and cause horror movies make great use of this lighting setup in order to live a character or an actor and a very terrifying y. Now this is where things get really interesting. We're going to now get the top of the ribcage falling into shatter just underneath the peg. We'll add in a shadow around the top of the abdominals now. So everything's in reverse. And fix up the shadows around my shoulders now, I'm starting to see how things need to be lit. On the top of the neck we will see the full into shadow. This plane. Lower abdominal wound full into shadow. And I go back through on his arms here, just going to fix the shadow is up on it. And you'll tend to find that with lighting conditions such as this that are a little bit unnatural that you don't tend to typically light your characters under that it is more difficult, but it's great exercise. And it really does help you to get your head around how the human body's geometry will fall into shadow, will fall into line. It helps you to stretch your comprehension of exactly how forms are lit. Because now rather than going from memory, you're going by a logic because you get good at what you repeat most, your brain record that more accurately. But this is really a mental exercise to rather than working and drawing upon all that practice and experience, just goes through the process and logically tackling it, even though you've never done it before or you don't have very, very little place in the shadows. And once you get the hang of it, it's pretty easy. Just do these very simple low key exercises as much as possible. If there's not a lot of pressure with something like this. And you've really only got to focus on making sure that the shadows are in the right place. It's not a bad, necessarily drawing a masterpiece here. You're just focusing on one facet of your drawing. So we're going to add some shadows in, around the forehead. On top of the cheeks. That's the dude face very crudely shaded. And now we'll tackle the female figure. Again. I'm thinking about what was the geometry of her chest before when we added in those planes. And then I'm making sure that the planes that are facing furthest away from that live so as I placed into shatter. So we've got that lower abdominal and the plane facing upward there will now be cast in shadow. We've got her hips, the top edge of those will be in shadow. Shoulders will be placed in the shadow around the top. Same with their arm muscles. Do the same thing on this side of her, on her body, on the opposite arm. And then we'll go ahead and we will now place in some shadows around her legs. So we'll play some VG thick shatter on that top quad. And now the shatter and the lower quads. To shade anatomy riot. Obviously you've got to have some understanding of anatomy. That's one thing that we're not necessarily covering he and a whole lot of detail. But in a later lesson, we'll talk about anatomy. We've touched on it a year though. So hopefully you've got a very general and basic understanding as to where those major muscle groups are going to see it. I'm just kinda fledging some lower leg muscles there and in the way in which they're shaded, generally a good them run as long as things read correctly. Focused lives on the details here and more on the broad brush strokes that help to read under the given loading condition that we're working with. Now we can go ahead and maybe shaded Fu ahead a little bit here. And go ahead, add some shadow into that. So we'll render this out to start out with the guy place in some hatches with dealing with a very harsh lighting setup here. So there's hatches are going to be long in some areas, but certainly in others is in some patches around the abdominal area. Lots of little tiny itty bitty strokes run parallel to one another down the direction of the form. Usually the larger the form to the larger the hatches will be. In fact, that applies to shadow is too large or the foam, the larger the shadow is on that form because it's a bigger form. So you see that form is going to have a bigger shadow. Do the same thing on our lady character, adding in some very small hatches just around the top there. Yeah, you gotta be careful with your hatches because they can muddy up the situation, so to speak. They can look less claim. And I am keeping my hatchet or rough so I'm not getting that very clean look that I like to see in my drawings. But if you've got a little extra time, you can really meet them up. Everything can appear so complicated when you start out down the path of a comic book artist. But one, she learns the few basic concepts such as lighting direction and had a split things up into geometry. All of a sudden that's when you have one of those moments where everything just clicks for you. And hopefully this lesson has helped to that to happen. We'll leave it there with the figures. This is my general approach to shading and lighting the human, male and female figure from a multitude of different lighting directions under various lighting schemes. 14. Assignment Lighting Figures: Alright, so we have just covered a turn of content of Dan alluded a lot of knowledge into your brain. So I think it's time to apply it in our next assignment for this task, what I'd like you to do is take the templates of the human figures that I have provided and goes through the lessons again just to refresh everything that we weren't over so that you can't now apply your own lighting schemes to those human figure templates. Now of course, we went over how to light the human figure from the top three quarter direction. We also talked about how to live the figure from above and below. Now what I'd like you to do is repeat that same process so that you know how to do it from those basic lighting angles. But then branch out a little bit, start to experiment again. What happens if you like the human figure from the bottom up three-quarter direction? Now I know that we haven't actually covered that. And it might seem kind of scary to jump into the deep end with this stuff. But because we now know how the planes of the human figure are constructed, you should be able to comprehend how the human figure is lit from any given lighting direction, regardless of whether or not you practiced it before, you are able to now go into this and tackle it in a logical manner that allows you to break down the human body into its most simplest and most basic form, and thus light it with a minimal amount of difficulty. Alright, have a crack at it. Good luck to you. And I'll see you in the next lesson. 15. Heads Overview: So next up we're going to talk about lighting the human head, both male and the female face by breaking it down into very simple geometry because as we have already come to know it, that makes the whole process of lighting something as complex as the human had. Very, very easy or at least a little easier than if we were thinking about it on a more complex level. So there's a lot that goes into this. We are going to be discussing the planes of the human head and how you would go about lighting it from the primary lighting directions that you're likely to see within a comic book or a storyboard or really any given illustration. They are classic lighting directions or you're going to see come up again and again. So I'm gonna teach you how to do it. We're going to have a lot of fun. Let's jump straight into it. 16. Head Construction: We're going to be doing a three-quarter representation of the male and female head. So I'm gonna start by penciling this out fairly loosely. And this is another bonus lesson. I would say this is my construction process for drawing ahead, I start out with a sphere. I figure out what tilt the head is going to be on by giving the sphere and axes. And this fear actually indicates the cranium of the head. We're going to divide that up into quarters, running a line straight down the middle from the top to the bottom, and then another line around the equator. And this right here is what tells us where the front of the head is going to be. We can also place in a line around the side as well, but I usually don't bother putting that in. Instead, I just chop up the sides of the head and this gives me that the temporal area of the skull. And we'll do that on either side. You can see this on your own head. In fact, the side of your skull are actually flat right around where your temple is. And then we're going to run a line straight down from that horizontal division on the sphere to the chin. And this will give us the full length of our head. Okay, so this is the brow line and then this portion is basically where we're going to find all of our facial features. So we want to divide that in half. Then once we've divided that in half, we're going to divide this bottom section into thirds as well. Place in a line for the hairline. And that gives us the basic proportions of the human head. And then we'll draw the jaw. Now because we are drawing a male character here. We're going to keep that draw fairly square. I am, I'm gonna shape the chin someone plays in the year. Bring the back of the head in a little bit. I'm drawing a neck. And then we'll lay in the neck muscles. Could these long band like muscles that run down from the bottom of the ear all the way down to the collarbone. And of course, we can't forget the iodine. And the iodine is going to sit and about the midway point of the overall length of the head. And then we're going to add in some facial planes, going to add a line in around either side, the ends of the brow. And then we'll add in another curved line that'll show us a division between the front of the face and the side of the face. And then we can start a sketch in our facial features. In fact, I'm just going to start laying those in really, really quick. I'm drawn a dude here, but I still like to add in a saddle amount of eyeliner to my male characters. It just makes their, their eyes a little more intense and draws more attention to them. Place in the eye on the opposite side of the head. Men tend to have a heavier brow. See you want to make sure you give them slightly thicker eyebrows and get rid of some of these construction lines as well. Just to clear things up a little bit, make it easier to see what's happening here for us. Alright, great. And then we'll draw in the nose. Now, the noise is going to sit on this line right here. These guidelines really are just that, just a guide and you don't have to follow them exactly. You can really depend on your own instinct after awhile. And we'll place in the mouse. Uses the opening of the mouth would sit right here. But again, I'm using my artistic instinct right now and I'm just going to place a little bit lower. Now what at the end of the day, it doesn't matter if you follow this. Got exactly what matters is that it everything looks correct, everything looks ride. So just keep that in mind. Adding the E is sketching them in a really, really roughly. Alright, so I'm not sure what kinda hair I'm gonna give this to. Something basic, something simple. We'll keep it fairly generic. That'll do. So that's how male head. Now let's draw up a female head. Gonna make her cranium just a little smaller, tend to have larger heads than women. Again, that's a big generalization, I know, but it tends to be the case. So we're going to divide her cranium up into quarters, chop off the sides just as we did before. My align in that runs from the brown down to the chin. And I'm going to keep her jaw line nice and curvaceous. Women tend to have nice soft forms. Can you can see there that with, even without facial features? Or we've gone ahead and suggested here is that yes, we are drawing a female head just through that the sweetness and the capaciousness of those contours place in EMEA. Place in the neck. Now, a lady's neck is going to be less thick within a man's neck usually. And I was thinking about that Actually. I was wondering why is a woman's neck sinner than a man's neck? There's a few reasons for that. I think. One is because the trapezius muscles, these muscles that run up the back of the neck and down the back tend to be a little less bulky, a little less blown up, which makes the overall neck and a woman looks enter. But then also there's the fact that a woman's head isn't quite as large as man's head, so there's not as much weight to carry and maybe that's why then neck isn't as as muscly isn't as thick. So now we're going to divide this in half. We're going to divide the bottom portion between deniers line and the chin line into Search. That'll give us the positioning of the mouse. We've got the brow line here. So then all we need is the line which will sit just underneath that and about the midway point of the overall length of the head. And then do some erasing here. And then I will draw in the facial features. I always like to start with the IRS because there's a windows into the soul. And the first thing that people are going to latch onto when they look at a human head. So I like to try and get the eyes right first, right off the bat. When I'm drawing a female, I, I'll tend to give it a little more. I shudder to make the eyes look bigger and bolder and more beautiful. That's really what eyeliner and I shadow allow you to do. In fact, all makeup tends to accentuate the features of the face and draw attention to them. They, it adds contrast. Adding the Irish and the pupils. And then we'll go ahead and place in the eyebrows. And they're going to be sinner than that of a man's. I'd like to point out these, these comparisons because it does help you to, you know, a lot of people, they, they have trouble when it comes to drawing men and women because either they're male phases of too feminine or the female faces looked masculine. Now I did forget to place in the plains of the face here, so we're going to add those in. And then I'll add in the nose and in the nostrils. And then we'll draw in the mouth. I'm gonna start with the opening of the mouth and I'll draw the ellipse around the opening of the mouth. And I'll add in some shading just for her lips. Cane adding a bit more contrast with the lipstick them. Now as far as the length of the mouse, usually you'll find that it's a little shorter than the width between the pupils. Let's draw in the ER anatomy. I've just drawn the EIA that many times that I know the anatomy of by heart, but you may very well want to get a reference up. Okay, and then I'm going to bring a neck and, and just a little bit more because I think that it is looking at 2-6 there at this point in time. And I'll bring her chin up as well. Because again, I'm a big chain is gonna make your female head look a little too masculine. Then we'll place in the hairline, which if you divide the distance between the hair line and the chin into thirds, usually what you're going to get a job rail line, then your nose line, you can place all the other facial features in between those points fairly accurately. And let's give her a cool hairstyle. But what hair style is the question. I'm just going to keep it simple here. We can have her head going in behind area. Think, hey, that looks pretty good. What we'll do next is I'm actually going to go over the top and into these out real quick. 17. Inking The Head: So we'll convert this ladder blue. I'll make a new layer above it. I don't get out my trusty pen tool and I'm just going to really quickly ink this up. I'm not going to be too precious about it. Don't want to give him too much mascara. Again, especially in a close up of a guy. You do want to have some darkness around the I sank. It just makes them a little bit more intense. Let's go ahead and ink and the other ion. Just going right in place in the eyebrows. Now, really quickly scribbling lazy. Now I'm going to leave the shading for just a moment and focus primarily on the contours. Then wanna forget his other eyebrow either of course. We'll add that in here. To find the cheekbone. They're always good to do that for a guy. Emphasizing those chiseled features. And I'll start inking the jaw line. These are very, very rough inks By the way, you usually I'd be taking away more time to neaten these up, but just trying to get across to the main lesson here. So we weren't Dealey Dalley too much on the details. He is the ER anatomy gain. It looks really, really complex until you practice a few times. And then you develop a shorthand way of dealing with it usually. And we'll draw in the mouth as i income adding in line weights here. And that really does help to create a nice dynamic, good-looking aesthetic for the line I think. And then we'll draw in the hair. I'm really just for the ham, just laying contours that describes the flow of the style that I've gone waste here. Nothing too fancy. We'll do the same thing over this side. So we're going to have a pot here. I sync. We'll keep it rough. I think that'll probably doing. This guy has a slightly large forehead, But that's fine. But I think we'll do is we'll just make these facial features up a little bit. That is the beauty of working digitally is you can make quick little nifty adjustments like that. Maybe it's mounts up a bit too that we go. And we'll lay in the neck. Single line will be enough to define this major muscle that we see here on the neck. Thanks, that will just about do it for now. And then we will ink out the female head once more, studying with her eyes. Placing in those beautiful bold eyelashes on the far side of a face plays in how people in her iris. Okay, that looks pretty good. Now I'll lay in the eyebrows and I don't want to be too heavy someone and bring it in just a bit. Rostral in her lips. Now really does depend on how you personally like to style your female characters and describe each of their facial features. So we're going to keep her chin nice and curved and pointed. Now we'll draw in the defining the anatomy. Again, I'm really try not to take it any further than just the contours of this point. And then the last thing that we'll add in here, of course, we'll draw that in again, I'm just kind of place in some lines that describe the general direction of the hair and how it's flowing. Nothing too fancy. Latin, the neck, KPN, niacin, slender. Especially on a lady you do not want to be defining neck anatomy to a huge amount. So that will just about do it. And once more I would say that facial features can be lifted up just a tad, overdrawn them a little lower than I should have. But if we take away that underlying line drawing now, you can see that what we're left with is just the inks and readjust the positioning of his eyes of it to fill in the gaps here. Move the eyes a little further apart, I sank. But that is a very rough example of, of how I go about drawing up my comic book character heads. 18. Planes of The Head: Let's talk about how I would go through the process of dividing these heads up into planes. Because as before when we were talking about the human body, in order to lie any given object effectively, and any number of different lighting schemes, we've gotta know how to think about it in geometrical terms. So I'm going to convert this to blue. Get my red marker pen out here again. And I'm going to start splitting everything up into geometry, beginning with the brow. What we end up getting is a little bit in the middle that actually faces downward. And again, I'm thinking about this as if I were modelling it. We would have some geometry around the eye sockets. A. Yeah, this doesn't just help you in terms of being able to affectively draw this stuff on any given lighting condition, but it helps you represent it in a 3D context. And that's what we're trying to do when it comes to drawing. Comics were trying to as much as we possibly can draw, are characters in a three-dimensional way to give the illusion of form on a 2D piece of paper. Then the sides of the nose we want to add in throughout the rest of the Brown now. Yeah, there's a lot going on with the human head. There really, really is. And so it's, it's not always easy to, to even divide it up into its proper geometry just because it is so complex. But give me your best shot. In fact, if you look up 3D had geometry, you'll see very much, well, you'll see a very similar thing to what I'm drawing up right now. You're kind of describing that the muscle structure of the face here, k, so the bands of muscle around the eyes. Okay, so we've got the muzzle of the mouth. The lips, which also have their own geometry as well. We've got the muscles around the lips, which just like the ISO goods, I have somewhat of a band type structure. Let me put the cheek bone that runs all the way up here and stops at about the signs of the jaw. Again, I know that this is kinda confusing to look at, but try to understand what's happening here, what I'm doing, you could very much creates something just as complex on the page in front of you right now, all we're doing is we're following the structure, the muscle structure, the face really. We've got this loop of muscle that runs around the mouth and down into the chin. And then we've got the nose that runs off of the brow. It's got the front, it's got the sides. And then we've got the cheekbones as well. And they're going to take up that area. And when you split those polygons out like that, it kind of makes it less complicated. So then what you're gonna get is another line of polygons above the brow. And those polygons are gonna get bigger and bigger as they make their way up the forehead and into the hair line. Okay, so think of it like a mosque, a polygonal mosque. We want to also make mention of the eye socket. Okay, this is an important area to take note of because when you start to shine the torch down onto the character from above, this section is going to get dark. You see a lot of shatter in this region. This side is a noise is gonna get dark under here. Who's going to get dark under the chin will get dark. And we can see how the head and start to be shaded in that fashion. All right, let's talk about the neck DO because the neck is also an important thing to consider. And so, so good a lot of geometry going on, whether it is long band like muscle is a tube. Tube of muscle runs down from behind the ear and into the middle of the collarbone at the center. Here we got the front of the neck. And then we've got this little bit drops off of the big band of muscle running down from behind the ear. And then of course we've got the trapezius muscles that run down here, some muscles that run through there. It looked very, very complex, but you do get a sense for the three-dimensional reality of everything. If we, we're shading these polygons and lighting the neck, you can see how easy it would then be to interpret where the shadows would lie and where the highlights will be placed. Ok, let's do the female had Next. We can start really anywhere. We can start with the eyes. We have the bottom eyelid and we can start building out from there too. Placing in the nose, we got the front of the nose, we got the signs of the nose. We get the base of the nose. And these are always great because it kinda helped me to understand the geometrical structure of the head when you're adding in polygons like this. And it's a good thing to understand. Because means that no matter what the situation is in your comic, you can go ahead and you can even draw that head from any given perspective in any given position, again, without necessarily having to rely on reference material. Okay, so we'll go ahead and we'll place in the muzzle of the mouth, starting with the loops, painting Guernica loops that run around the eyes and the mouth. Then we've got the cheekbone that runs up here into the side of the ear. And the other polygons that dropdown around the side of the face. Ok, so hopefully this is making sense. Hopefully it's helping you to understand how you would shade something as complex as the human head and also at the same time, why it is so tricky. You know, it is quite difficult to effectively shade the human head in a way that's accurate a lot of the time precisely because it is so much going on with it. So the more simplified you can make it, the easier it's going to be on you. And by the way, pentagonal structure of the same deal. We going in converting at all the polygons. And it's called a polygon because while the square, and if you divide them in half, they're tries. And polygons are really the 3D way in which we represent form. Ok, so same deal here. Go ahead and sum form to the ER anatomy. And then we'll place in the geometry of her neck, that long band like beta muscle that runs down from behind the ear into the base, the neck where they made at the collarbone. And we got the front of the neck and assigns it an egg. This little bit that is an offshoot from the main muscle, the trapezius muscle at the back, and then the neck anatomy in between those areas. I it looks kind of scary to look at, really, kinda creepy. But just as I did with the male head, what I'll do here is I'll highlight the main areas. I K. So we've got the eyes, we've got the nose, we've got the mouth. Let me get this area here. Cheekbone, cheeks. Now, we can do the same thing with the HER2, believe it or not. And this is something that you'll want to consider as well because hair, just like anything else, follows a particular form. So we can go ahead and we could break this up and it would take a little bit of time, but it's worth it just to try and understand what's happening here. How the geometry of the hair would twists and turns as it shapes itself into the style that we picked foreign. This is what's going on under the surface of every single drawing that you see that works well, right? The reason it works is because form has been taken into consideration. It's not just lines on a page anymore. This is what separates a line drawing from a contour drawing that still has three-dimensionality kept in mind. And like I said, if you can do this effectively, geometric arise everything. And you'll be able to shade it way easier because you'll understand why it's shaded in the way that it shaded, why you're making the decisions that you're making. Because otherwise it's just guesswork. You know, if you got nothing like this to depend on, everything you do is just lock, comes down to luck. You can't control it. And you don't want to be finding yourself in that place. It's a sucky place to be. And as an artist, that's when you're an artist who has as many bad days, if not more, as you have good days. And ideally you want every single day or at the drawing board to be a good day? So that's her hair. His hair would be something similar. I'm just doing it really, really fast, just so we can get on to the next segment. But you get the idea right? Everything has formed. The facial anatomy, the hair, the entire body, every single muscle has some level of form to it. That's it for our head demonstration and how we go about defining the planes of the head. So now it's time to actually start shading it under a number of different lighting conditions. 19. Lighting Heads From The Top Left: So let's go ahead here and actually start to light. These heads will go four are typical top-left lighting setup. So if we're thinking about our facial planes right, we'll get them up here just for a second. This is the nose and it's the one facial feature that protrudes foremost from the face other than the brown. And the brow actually has reassesses underneath it, which are going to capture but a shadow. So the far side of the nose, underneath the brow are going to see some shadow or at least some rendering. And also under the nose too, on top of that. Ok, so we're going to try to keep that stuff in mind as we work here. I'm gonna keep this rough and it won't be perfect by any means. Place and a bit of shadows. Definitely some shadow here. And you've got some very deep recesses in around the front of your eye. Depends how dramatic we want our lighting conditions to be as well. And want to think about where the top eyelid meets the brow. Might get a bit of shadow here on the bottom eyelid. I'm gonna give this to push your eyebrows. So I'm gonna do that. So we're going to have this shadow kinda occur underneath the middle of the bow here. This side of the nose is going to be in shadow. It's going to project a cast shadow. In fact, because the nose protrudes off for the face, Ryan will see a bit of a shadow under here as well. This side of the forehead is going to be cast in shadow. Then we've got the cheeks. So I add some shadows and around them. And the underside of the jaw there to around the bottom of the mouth. Now I'm being really dramatic with these shadows to get the point across, but it depends. It really does depend because it's not just the direction of the light that comes into play. It's also the intensity of the light as well. That could also determine how the shadows look and how intense they are. Going to add some shadow in around the bottom of the chin to being really rough with this. At a shadow in around the signs of the mouse. Maybe a little shadow there just to indicate the cheekbone. And then the head is going to cost a big shadow down onto the neck. So we'll add that in and add some shadows and around the neck now is to define the anatomies that we're seeing here. Now the top lip is going to because in a lot of shadow, because it's made up of one big plane that phases in a downward direction. Depending on how dramatic we want to get this side of the muscle is going to fall into shadow to then we've got the hair. So we'll start shading that out. I'm using a very big brush to do this. Thank you. Some very broad strokes here. And you can just see how much drama shadow can really add TO work. This. Some artists out there that don't use any shutter, they leave it as a contour and you know, the color is kinda makes up the rest, I guess, when it gets onto that stage. But I just think when you're dealing with black and white line work, shadow really does capture the, I add so much emotion and personality to your odd. So I do like incorporating it in there where I can get the sum and that is in there and the e is around the globe. I can go ahead here and I can render some of this stuff out. It really depends on how far you want to take this. And you know, it was all the different mid tones that you could add in here between the lights and the darks, you could really create a pretty detailed image. It really is up to you and it depends on your style a lot of the time as well. Joe, and add some rendering around the forehead there if we wanted to. But you get the idea. So let's turn that off for a minute and place in the shadows female head. In this example, we're still going to have the same lighting direction except the side of the head closest to us is going to be the one that's constant shadow. Now with the female characters, you really don't want to define their anatomy too much while you're shadowing them, but it doesn't mean that you can't add shadow to them. Okay, we're going to be dealing with a very dramatic lighting setup here as we work. And sometimes it doesn't quite make sense at first. You know, you start adding in a shadow and it doesn't quite look right. But I think if you just keep going, what you'll find is that it'll kinda comes together in the end. You just keep going with the process and eventually it works out. Is actually looking a little bit whack. Very difficult angle to light the head on if I'm being honest. Again, you can not just so much drama to your drawings. Shadow is like this. And I'm going to try to shape the shadow is an aesthetically pleasing way. This side of the head will probably have a shadow casting around it. In some lipstick. Again, it looks a little bit strange at first, but then eventually it comes together while her ear is going to be a lot of shadow naturally on this side of the head. So look, it takes some guts to light your, your heads from this angle. For sure. They'd be too discouraged if it doesn't come out the way. You wanted to write up the bed, it takes a few attempts sometimes. And with every strange or weird mistake you make, you do get better. So we've added an a shutter Hand Hygiene there and we'll shade her neck. Isn't a big thick shadow that's being projected down her head onto her neck. So you can see how dramatic that is now, which is crazy. And then we'll start to shade her hair as well. Some of the main forms might pick up some light on this side. Thinking about whether high points on the hair are going to be, and I'm making sure that I leave some highlights. The remembering that this area that I'm shading right now is supposed to be cast in impure thick shatter. Again, depending on the intensity of the lighting situation. And another context, you might find that the hair is actually illuminated somewhat by secondary line coming in from behind or maybe the light is less direct and more ambient. And in that case, again, what you're going to find is you're in a situation where the shadow is just aren't going to be as dark and may not require all seek black values there to describe them. So they came together well, in the end I was a little bit worried there for a second. Again, this isn't really a typical angle that I will live my characters on. Usually, it'll be from this angle, the top right illuminating the side of the face that's closest to us. But, you know what I did, I was in that and I just followed the process and it worked out well in the end. When you get stuck, just keep going through that process. Makes sure that you follow the theory and you'll find your way out of the woods. I'm a 100% confident about that. We added a little bit of rendering to this guy's face. We can go ahead and do that the same thing to a lovely lady phase here. I do feel like the shadow is look great on their own. It's kinda weird to say that, but sometimes rendering can, it doesn't always add as, as much as you think it's going to add. I think that the shadows are doing heaps on their own to describe what we're after here. But still, rendering can add to define those forms even more so to describe the ways in which the light is being cast upon them. So we've got the top down angled lighting scheme for both these heads. How would it look if we shown that spotlight down directly from above, just as we did with the full body. 20. Lighting Heads From Above: So our lighting condition this time is going to be coming directly from above and slightly from the front. What we're going to end up with is this nice big, thick shadow around the top of the eyes. But also, we have to keep in mind that the browser itself is going to cast a shadow as well. It's probably gonna cast a shadow over the entire I, if I'm being honest with you. So I'm actually going to black this out completely and place the shadow unlike so. We'll do the same thing on this I as well. Because remember that, that the brow comes outward and then the I recesses, which means since it's reassessed at the light's coming directly from above, this brow is going to drop a shadow down across that entire races. So we're gonna do the same thing on this side. And you can see them not completely filling it in with black. You know, I'm still describing some very subtle forms in there. I want to do that because otherwise it can look weird if it's just one blanket had been a black. In-between this point we see the ridge of the brow continue and going to add a shadow in here too. So we'll get a nice big shadow underneath the nose here. Down from the bottom of the noise, across the top lip and down onto the chin. And then we've got the cheeks on a dude in a lighting situation like this, we really want to accentuate the form of the cheeks. And they're going to be projecting a big shadow. And then around the bottom of the loop we're going to see some more nice big six shadows. Flip will be completely cast in shadow to go over here to the ear, by some shadow to the bottom of the ear will cast a shadow and the entire head will cause big shadow onto the neck. And these more dramatic lighting set-ups, you'll see much deeper recesses being described by the shadow within the anatomy because it's not subtle anymore. There's a very intense lighting setup. Let's go ahead here and place in the shadows for the hair. Now for sure the hair will be casting some shadow onto the forehead as well. So we'll keep that in mind. Again. This is nice like Nuwa type feel that you get when you shading your characters like this. I love it. Very dramatic, very cinematic. That we'll add in the shadows from the hair casting down onto the face. Let's do the female head now. Same deal. We're going to see that a shadow is cast down from the brow across the entire ie. So beautiful lies a hidden. Now, this is a very creepy lighting setup because the eyes are hidden when you're looking at somebody's eyes, it gives away a lot about them, how they're feeling, what they're thinking, or kind of emotional state, Erin. But when you hide all of that in shadow, it's really hard to get a read on a character. Now a female character isn't probably going to have super dark and brow here, like the dude, but will still place in a cast shadow, just won't be as thick. K. And then we get the lips going to add some shadows and fill them. And then underneath the lips as well, we'll get some shadow. Quite a lot of shadow. In fact, placing some shadow around her e is non-constant. Big shadow down from a head onto the neck below. I'm gonna go ahead and just get rid of that shadow at the bottom of the chin. So now let's go ahead and place in the shadows of her hair. Is something to be said about laying and big seek dramatic shadows like this. It's kind of fun. It's, it's very RD when you're working rough. And so there's some, some energy behind it, I would say. Just as a lighting study, this is definitely something to do as it just a practice exercise that I have no doubt in the world you're going to get a lot of enjoyment from. And if you ever want a more complex look at the planes of the human head, then I would certainly, Google had geometry for 3D modeling because it's really going to show you a lot of fantastic examples that 3D modelers use when it comes to structuring the geometry of the human head in 3D application, that stuff's really, really useful and I take a lot of my background in 3D into my comic book art all the time. It's helped me out immensely. I think that you want to be thinking as a 3D model would think as a comic book artist anyway. Because you're always trying to present things in, in three-dimensional form on, in your comic books. Depending on your style, you know, you may not have a realistic style. You might have a style like pepper pig, for example, or South Park. And in that case, none of this would apply. But if you want more of a classic comic book 90 style, then you'd want to pay attention to this stuff for sure. Let's go ahead and place in a cache shadow that's projected down onto the forehead from the hare here. Now we'll add in some, some very quick rendering here just to show you how I might approach that roughly. A lot of it is cast shadow and you really don't want to be rendering at cast shadow because it's a hard shadow that's being cast down from one form to another. You know, I usually like in these particular setups to hasten a better rendering around the mouth. I think the other good thing about these exercises is it helps you to overthink things too much. You know, there is such a thing as an analysis paralysis. And it's certainly an issue that I've had in the past where I overthink things so much and it really takes all the character out of my work, all that spontaneity that it would otherwise have place in some rendering around her chin. And I think that would just about wrap up this particular lighting scheme that we've been experimenting with. 21. Lighting Heads From Below: In this example, we're going to have our lighting coming up from the bottom. Okay, so this is going to be a really, really interesting one. And I can't promise you that it's going to turn out great, but we are going to have a crack at it. And again, what do I do whenever I'm in dad? I just follow the theory. I think about my planes. And I asked myself what planes are going to be in shadow in this particular lighting condition. So I'm going to start out with the eyes, the eye area or at least and I know that this underside ridge of the brow is going to be fully illuminated, which means the top of the brow is actually probably going to be in shadow. So I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to do exactly that. I'm going to place in a big shatter around this area. The other thing that is really interesting about this lighting setup is usually because the nose angles outward and this plane is usually facing up toward the light. In this situation, it's actually going to be placed in a shadow. Again, I'm trying to keep it rough like a I know that we've split the head up into planes, but that is just a guide. We still want to keep the shadows looking organic. If we look in our planes here, you can see that the side of the nose is divided up into two planes, right? And the top plane is going to be placed into shadow in this particular context. That's going to run up around the top of the cheek here too. So this is a pretty weird lighting situation that we're dealing with. It's an uncommon one, which is why you gotta practice it in order to get good at it. Now the cool thing is is that if you need a reference, even though our goal here is not to have to depend on reference. You can always shine a torch onto your face from below. And it'll, it'll show you this exact lighting setup that I'm trying to go for here. So then the, the upper area of the mouth, this top region is going to be completely in shadow. Because like the nose at angles outward, catalogs like he's got a big black mustache there. It does look a bit weird. But as you place in one chateau after the other, the entire image kind of comes together and it all starts to make sense. And then we're going to get a shadow around this area. And then the top plane of the chin is also going to be placed in darkness. Again, this is a very terrifying lighting set up. If I'm being honest. Adding a few more details around the eyes here. And I'm really trying to think where the shadow is going to end and where are they going to begin? What forms Am I really dealing with here? I'm trying not to get too caught up in what I'm seeing on the page, but rather how I'm understanding it. And fact, thinking this whole area might actually end up being cast in shadow. Again, it's a very difficult lighting setup, but we gotta be brave. We're going to have a go at it. I'll add some shadow to the hair here. Everything is in reverse now. It's a very uncomfortable lighting condition to have to draw, but the more you practice it, the more comfortable you get with it, that's the main thing. So you kinda, you just gotta get over that in order to get good at it. It's like when you jump into the pool, it's really scary to jump into a cold pool because it's phrasing and you don't wanna get cold. I don't wanna get web, but once you jump, once you make that leap, you start to acclimatized to the temperature of the pool and you start to warm up a little bit. And this is kind of the same way in which this works around the top of the head here, by the way, which is going to actually fall into shadow too. Now what we'll do is we'll add some shadows to the neck. Again, kind of a really, really creepy lighting setup for our character, but it has the desired effect. This is exactly the type of feel your going to, if you want to capture this feeling, this feeling of terror and horror for your character, then this is the lighting setup that you're going to want to go with. Tail. It did the same thing he afraid lady character. So we know that her brow is going to be cast in shadow. Nose down here. The top of the nose bridge is going to be shadowed, of course, just as with the male character. And then we're going to add some shadows in around the top of the cheekbone. And you really get a good sense for how the entire face is connected together when you do enough of these exercises. Now cause we're not going to add in is much shatter as we did with the male project. A little bit of a shadow, nostrils. And now you've got the top of her mouth. Let's cost a little shadow. The top plan of a gin is going to be down here somewhere. So we'll add some shadow to that. Actually might be a bit too much. Placing the shadow up there. We'll say. Again, sometimes you just got to wait to see how all of it comes together in the end, whether or not you've made the right call. I'm gonna start shadowing the ear anatomy. Since I'm shadows around the neck. And my going to follow the top plan of this cheekbone and all the way up toward because the cheekbone does join onto the side of the head and that way. Now let's add in the shadows on her hair, kinda help tie things together. I think quite well. Tangent adding in some very quick strokes here. As I shade the hair, I'm following the flow of the style. We go over to this side now, do the same thing. Probably the most difficult lighting scheme we've gone through today is this one. Just because it looks so strange. It's such a weird lighting setup. That's why it looks creepy. And the good thing is, is that because it's not a common lighting setup, if you make a few mistakes when he's going to notice that much, because they see very few people under this loading setup anyway. So if you can get a moderately looking right, you'll be good to go. Practice it a few times and you build your confidence practices and just good for getting a handle on what it is you're trying to acquire the ability of, but it's also going to get your confidence up rehearsal so that when you do get to create that next killer illustration, you're able to do so without hesitation, without worrying about it. I think that really perfectionism kinda stems from not just a lack of confidence sometimes. So we'll go ahead and do some rendering on this, which is really, really quickly. Again, this is a bit more of a dramatic lighting setup where we've got a direct light shining on the characters from the layer. So we went to see a lot of massive amounts of rendering necessarily, but we'll see a bit. I think we'll leave it at that. 22. Assignment Lighting Heads: Alright, so we've just covered a lot of information. What I like to do now is help you to put it into action so that it really sticks in the next assignment. Now, what I've done is I've provided for you in this class templates for both the male and the female head or you're going to be able to work with. I'd like you to go over the top of them, define the planes, the geometry of the head so that you really know how to break it down in the basic way so that you truly understand the form in order to be able to light up from any direction that you like. What we're trying to develop here in this course is the ability to white the human figure, like the human head dynamically, which means it doesn't really matter what direction you light up from what lighting setup you are given, you are able to interpret exactly how that object, the human head in this case, will be lit where the shadows will fall, where the highlights are going to reside across that subject. Alright, so go ahead now, goes back through this lesson, review it if you need to. And what I'd like you to do is copy the lighting schemes that we have already gone over. So lighting is a human head from the top three-quarter position, lighting it from directly above or writing it from below. Get a feel for how you might execute those basic lighting schemes and then branch out a little bit, experiment somewhat. Choose a variety of different lighting directions. At least three more that allow you to put into practice the skill of coming up with the lighting direction, projecting it onto the human head, breaking it down inside your mind, interpreting the human head with that basic geometry. And then figuring out, nailing down whether shadows and highlights are going to be, what planes are going to fall into shadow. Or planes will be lip, most importantly, have fun with it. Once you're done, I'll see you in the next lesson. 23. Scenes Overview: Alright, so now let's talk about lighting seems exterior, and interior is complete with characters and background prompts. Now what you're going to find here is that they're lit in very much the same way we lit primitive shapes. Mmm, geometry. You know why? Because they're made out of very much the same building blocks, usually cubes, cylinders, spheres, and really doesn't get any more complex than that unless you're dealing with organic terrain, which we will also be covering right here. But even that can be broken down into very basic geometry, as you'll see. So let's jump straight into it. We got a lot to cover. 24. Constructing Scenes: So next up, what I'd like to talk about is lighting scenes. So how would you like a background with character in it and a comic book panel? That's what we're going to focus on right now. And we're just going to sketch something really, really loose up. Say that we've got a character, give them a nice strong stance. I don't know what he's doing. We'll just have him look and strong and powerful and will have his buddy over here, which is going to be a female character. She'll be angled in the opposite direction just to keep things nice and dynamic. And will give her a sexy pose too strong, that sexy. Because she's further back. We want to make sure that her leg is slightly sitting high up. The deeds will have her hand sitting on the hips at the other, just resting down by her side. I think going to be in an indoor environment or an outdoor environment. And that's the question. Let's start with an outdoor environment where we can put some buildings in the background here. Make it Blake, futuristic looking. Thinking about our basic primitive exercises that we were going over the start of this lesson to come up with something semi interesting. We can have some buildings all the way back there in the background. And then we'll go ahead here and do a close-up shot of this character's head. Alright, I'll keep it rough. Sketch, some really loose anatomy in hand. Again, this is in no way perfected. You'll have to forgive me if it's looks a little odd. In the eyes, the nose, the mouth, place in his jaw line style. I mean, that could be fun. So that'll do. And then in the background will have some kind of spaceship. Again would just working with planar type shapes here, nothing organic. In the next panel will do maybe a landscape or something like that. That could be cool. Maybe with some space ships. So place in some mountains off into the distance there. And maybe we can go ahead and do a spaceship that's landed. Let's see, I'm just scribbling it out. Really, really rough here. Nothing too fancy or whatsoever. Give this sing some rocket boosters at the back just so that it's not too lame looking. And we went put any characters in this one. This is all going to be props. I think. Change up the shape of these background mountains to so that they're a bit more interesting to look at. Actually, I'm just gonna get rid of that spaceship. I think we're just going to leave this as a landscape. Might be interesting to try and shape the landscape actually. So that's looking fantastic. Let's add some anatomy to these characters. Really quick because I'm going to go straight in here and I'm just going to start dropping in shadows all over the place. Now that we've had a up, there's no excuses left. You've got his torso is, let's use ABS. Whoo. I make him a super beefy superhero. Maybe only about as beefy is Superman. And what I want to show you in this example is just how much shadow can really bring a drawing together without necessarily relying on the outline. His shoulder width is absolutely massive and we're just gonna lift his head up a little bit to balance things out. Start adding in these clubs, misled days on his feet. It's loosely sketching in this Anatomy trying to make sure I got enough information there to semi confidently going in and thinking things out. And we can give them some eyes, a nose, and maybe some ham. He's going to have a 98 on just like the other guy. Now we've got our lovely lady character over here. And I'll be going through the ages here. As far as hairstyles are concerned, she's going to have some cool eighties hair will draw in some breasts, the waste, the hips. And really when it comes to the anatomy of my grading characters, I'm just trying to capture a good shape. First and foremost. Good shape, the legs, v. So that is, that. 25. Lighting Characters In Exterior Scenes: Now this might turn out terribly, but we're going to have a go keeping in mind the previous theory that we've covered throughout this class. So we'll convert this to blue. And I'm going to figure out what lighting direction first and foremost, I'm going to be using for this panel over here. So I think I want it to come from this direction. So with that said, I'm going to start placing in the shadows of the muscles. And we'll keep the shadows pretty dramatic to like 01, nice big thick heavy shadows, especially after all that time and effort that we've put in today to, to learn how to do this stuff. So I think we've earned the right to get a bit crazy with the shadows, but we do still want to try to get them as right as we possibly can. Now, I don't know. We could give this guy belt and some underwear as well. He could be like a hearer of some kind, given maybe a gun holster or something. Gained it really sketching it in focusing on where there is major areas of shadow a going to B, first and foremost. He really didn't want to be making it any more complicated in your head at this point, then this is then we'll start outlining his. We know that there's going to be some shadow over here on this side of the shoulder. So add that in some shadow underneath the tricep, around the side of his bicep and underneath it. God is forearm muscles here. So now we're gonna get a cast shadow from this peck, I would say. So add that in there. Now if I think about the, the arm as being a cylinder, as simple as a cylinder then I know almost automatically where the largest clusters of shadow are going to be. Withdraw at a really rough face. You know, I know that on this side we're going to see a bit more shatter. These exercises are really great for just loosening up and having a bit of fun and not taking yourself too seriously. So depending on what facit of your drawing abilities you want to focus on improving. It's good to try and do these. Just as even a warm-up. Give him some gravy hair shading that according to the lighting setup. Now if I want to make a really nice thing is I would give him a mullet. So that's exactly what I'm gonna do, is we'll go ahead. He had tackled an arm on the opposite side of his body. Thinking about that bicep as just a block with different phases on it that are either facing alive or facing away from it. Now we've got he's growing down here. We'll shade that as best as we can. And you know what, let's make him interesting. And let's add in some pouches, grannies arm, it's, you know, we don't want to get too much into character design here. We'll save that for another time. But still, I can't help myself giving some big knee pads. As you can tell, I'm a huge fan of the image error of comic books, may sue these crazy superhero is coming out young blood and cyber force. So adding some shatter around that top quad, their random bottom quad muscles as well. Really trying to emphasize those forms. Make our way down to the lower leg. You know, one of the reasons they made superheroes too simplistic in their design was to be able to draw them quick. That's why when you see Superman, he's essentially just an anatomy drawing really with some, some color there to indicate tides. But it's really just a matter of making sure his muscles are all in the right place. So I'm trying to add in this kind of metallic texture to his Bhutan. All right, let's go ahead and tackle the other leg Now. I'm going to get a nice big shadow around this side of the quad that I'm shading. I'm also looking at the outer contour shape as well. I want to make certain that that's going to look good. We've heard about ease and iPad. Let's add that in. Well, fix that shape up for his leg. Wasn't looking quite right to me. So that's the dude done. Can see there that we've lit him fairly effectively based upon our chosen light source. So this is the same thing here for the Gao. Now I don't know what outfit we're going to give her, but I do know how her forms need to be shaded. So as we go in and start to define the breasts, we're going to add some shadows and around them, a shadow in underneath the rib game. I just keep in a really, really rough here, having some fun with it. And whether female arm, because you're not really messing around with the forms of the muscles too much. You really are thinking in simple terms like your thinking on the level of cylinders and spheres. Actually lets give her skirt. We can go ahead and add some shadow is in there as well. Give us an leggings and define her legs. Mostly just the outside of them. And hopefully because I'm keeping this super loose and try to make it as basic as possible. You're able to follow along and copy a little bit of what you're seeing here. I have a habit of sometimes over detailing things that I'm teaching a little bit too much at ease examples to the point where they just look intimidating. And so hopefully this is something that you feel is achievable for yourself that you can look at and replicate on the page in front of you if you're following along. Cool. So you can see like the woman, even though she appears as though she's part of the same same that she's lit under the same light. She does not have as much shatter. Just kinda works. It fits in for. Then we'll start adding shadows. So what about the background? How do we tackle that? Well, of course, this is really easy because it goes right back to when we were talking about the primitive shapes and the geometrical shapes, who we just figure out what is the dark side of the building going to be? And it's obviously going to be this side. So we can go ahead and just start drawing some of this stuff out. And we can keep it very, very rough too, just as we do with the characters. Try to make sure everything's lined up in the correct perspective. That'll help. A few details on a fundamental level. This is how you'd go about shading a sane. We just working with cubes and extrusions and very, very simple geometry when it comes to at least man-made backgrounds like the one that you're seeing here, psi phi backgrounds. Now your line weights really come into play in a big way here too. We can go in and actually add some widened to that if we wanted to make it all conceptual. And again, not getting too carried away with the details here, just trying to create some cool at this level of complexity. All right, awesome. So let's go ahead and tackle some of these other buildings in the background. Now I'm gonna go for a thinner brush size here, just using the G pan in manga studio five, if you're in doubt as to what tools I'm using, will go ahead and fill that one in. I'm trying to make it so that I'm leaving a bit of an outline around the characters, as you can see, when I shade these buildings, just to create a distinction between them, the characters in the background, that is. And it's not that I'm filling in the dark side of the building just solid black or anything like that. I am trying to indicate some detail in that. I'd some chimneys and let me go one more building over here that will tackle It's changing up my brush strokes, trying to come up with some interesting shapes for the shading. That's all very randomized. Maybe a little bit more similar to if you've ever seen the concept art for Metal Gear Solid kinda keep an a rough like that. Not that I would never compare myself to such genius, but in terms of conceptual style, this works well. So that's in a nutshell, had you about shading characters in a sane way. You've got a background. 26. Shading Characters In a Close Up Shot: So let's go ahead and move on to the next one. We could have light coming in from this direction. And then another line over here so that we get a nice rim light along the side of the face of this character. And I'm gonna go in and just start tackling his eyebrows. This is a very organic way of working. It's, it's interesting to work in this way. I think I am enjoying it. There is a lot more room for happy accidents when you keeping it loose. And you certainly want to give yourself the opportunity to have fun and get creative. So he put his nose. We're gonna get a shadow being projected down like so from both the tip of his nose and also the side of his nose as well. Thinking about the planes at the face, of course, as I add, the shadow is in and what plains, according to the lighting conditions, I have established a going to fall into shadow, which planes will be illuminated. Trying to capture really cool looking shape for his face here. That she needs to come down just a little bit lower if I'm being honest on this due to come across as a bit of a beef cake. He's, he's strong, but maybe not smart. K. So I know that this side of his face is going to have a lot of shadow on it. But also that a rim light is going to be coming in on that side as well. See a shadow on this cheekbone. We'll see shadow is collect around his bottom eyelid. We'll even see shadows Don to collect around this middle ridge bid joined his brow together, almost looks like a uni brow. But you can just see how much drama that adds days phase. Lad in a shadow on the bottom of his chin there. True in the rest of the head. And he's got short shaved head around the sides. Yeah. We'll start drawing out is hair. China at some shine t, his nineties head to tail should NIH, that's a great idea. Maybe a double reds towel. Let's do that. Who is this guy? Who's this guy think he is. So as I said before, we want another light coming in around the sides. So I'm gonna get my y and add here. And I'm going to add that in a place in the shadows where I feel the need to be placed in again, placing in some shadows around the corners of his mouth. And we could go ahead and maybe add some shadow into this section. Okay, great, so now let's go ahead and stop playing the shadow is for the rest of his body. Yeah. So place in some shadows around his neck muscles. Give him a singlet. That'll be pretty cool. Collarbone, shoulders here. Place a nice big xik shadow is in for those deltoid. So they're going to have some big shadow is clustered around the bottom of them as well. And he's kind of leaning over here too, so giddy than projected shadow is down onto the top of his ribcage. If we were so inclined. Going to add in some folds in his singlet just to show you how tightly clad it is around him. And this section, especially down here, is going to be black. And we will project a shadow from that Pick tool. I think he's head is actually going to project a shadow down across his neck. So we'll do that, except we'll do it in a crafty way where we're still able to see that rim light comes through the underside of his Columbine, then we'll add that in. So we've shaded him pretty well. I think we could go ahead and add in some rendering, but I didn't think we'll do that for this demonstration. We're gonna keep it rough and we've focused just on the lighting here. And the other thing that I want to add in is a rim light along the side of his shoulders, along the side of a shirt as well. Placed in some people's, it's gonna make them look even more intimidating. So the rest of this scene in the background, we're gonna keep that pretty conceptual as well, just as with the previous panel k. So we're going to have a sci-fi vibe to it. We'll try to keep this lined up in a semi consistent perspective. See that I've added a nice big line weight around he. It makes it look like there's an indentation in that wall panel. Also like to double up my lines a little bit sometimes just to add some texture and character to them will make decent events. And down the bottom we see the wall in the background behind this dude as it meets the flaw. Because the light's hitting this wall directly. It really is up to the line weights to kind of add in any details along the ridges or the trim, for example. I'll add in another deeper panel gain sticking out that line weight to make it appear as though it's pushed in even further. And then we'll just add in some sunlight paneling into that recess. Added a few notches holding those panels in place. And then the other thing I like to times is I'll just add in some scrapes and scratches. Thing I can fit in a few more details here on this one. So I'll go ahead and do that. Pushing shapes in, pulling shapes and just adding some visual interest to what would otherwise be a basic and flat looking wall. To cause senses light is coming from above. There's no reason why we can't start placing in some shadows around here. It might be a little bit too much, we'll see, but I think it works fine. We could add in some dangling cables as well. Just to really get that sci-fi vibe coming across. Okay, great, so that's our second panel. Again, we got a bit more of a look at how we would shade a character close up in a scene. 27. Lighting Landscapes: So we'll go ahead and move on to the final and last panel where we're looking at a landscape. So in this one, what if we did it from the top left? But we took the light source down as if it were a setting Sun. Now this is going to be really fun because we're dealing with organic stuff here that doesn't necessarily require any particular structure. As long as I'm able to work out generally where the dark side of the basic shape of the mountain is going to be, going to be able to shape this fairly quickly and still have a really, really cool. So I'm thinking about, you know, where am I big major shapes going to be. And those big major shapes are going to be the areas that receive the largest shadows because we want those larger areas to read. We want those main primary shapes within the form to read first and foremost. And then everything else is just kinda detail. Okay, so I want another major form over here. Dividing this mountain up someone we can always go in if we don't like what we've placed, we can rejig it as much as needed. Landscapes tend to be super, super fun for almost every comic book artist. Because of the reasons I mentioned before, you really didn't have to have a look in any specific way. So that's our first mountain. Let's go ahead here and shade the next one. Because this one's in the foreground, sometimes is cooled or haven't just that little bit more darker, having that little bit more shadow because it brings it forward. It causes the eye to pay more attention to it. And then we've got these mountains in the background. Now, we're not going to want as much detail in them whatsoever. In fact, we want to take our brush size down and make the outer contour is much thinner. And I going to really be thinking in broad shapes here. And you'll notice that the shadow is diminish as we pulled them down toward the bottom of the mountain. And the reason for that is because we're lightening the time here a little bit to separate the mountains, but also to describe the very natural environmental fog that would occur. And environmental fog is very, very handy, does allow us to separate the elements within our scene a little bit more, push them back or forth and create a greater sense of depth within the same. So here we can have a mountain where the dark side of it, it actually sneaking into the same. I have a bunch of shadow come in there and you can see just how much of a separation it creates between the foreground and the background. Here. We've got our river scene here. And rivers can quite often just be reflective of their surrounding environment. I might just erase it all together actually on second thought, you're always making calls, right? You're always decision-making. When it comes to drawing. If someone looks good, then it stays. If it doesn't look good, then you gotta take it out, right? You've got to make that call. And sometimes you're taking out things that you've actually spent quite a lot of time on, which is never a fun thing to do. Trying to make it look like this is some kind of bank that going into the river here. And I'm not spending enough time focusing on it. If I was really trying, I can probably get it done faster hand with less mistakes, but I'm Russian and a little bit. Cuz I'm just adding in these details to describe the texture of the mountains and the rock, the environmental elements that we're dealing with in this same. We can have another rock type form over here to write in the foreground. Pushing that depth even further is really what's shadow allows you to do really allows you to push that depth to the max. China had a bit of a reflection to that water. I'm still taken a stab at that hoping for the best. And I think we'll leave it at that. So that's how I would go about lighting a sane. And if you wanted to break up a more organic object, such as these mountains here into geometry. While you could do, you could do exactly that. You can do exactly the same thing. Again, I just kind of make decisions based on what looks good and what doesn't look good. So don't be too concerned with your organic environments. I would say really those, those planes serve to help you where you get stuck. If it's characters you find difficult to shade, try to geometric fire them, figure out how they're going to be constructed and what ones are going to fall into light-weight ones are going to fall into shadow. And that will help you to describe the forms of your characters much more accurately regardless of the lighting setup you choose for them. And as for backgrounds, you know, again, you're if you're doing a cityscape, all you are dealing with as far as forms, your IS, cubes and rectangles and rectangular prisms, It really doesn't get a whole lot more complex than that. You may have some planar shifts that detour away from that basic Kubler form. But for the most part, that's all you've got to worry about. And then, you know, it's how you dress up those primitive shapes that really make for an interesting looking back ground, you know how you design them architecturally. And for that you want to get referenced together. You want to get an entire reference board in order to make it look more interesting, to create kind of cultural relevance to the environment that you're trying to represent. That just about wraps up our comic art lesson for today. I hope that you've enjoyed it, that you've got a ton of value out of it. And if you've got any questions for me, please let me know because I'd love to answer them for you. If anything, that we've gone over today has been confusing or you haven't quite understood what it was I was trying to get across, let me know and also let me know if this stuff helped you out because I want to make more of these comic art classes. I think that in any way in which I can serve the comic artists community to help you a little bit closer to the epitome of what you can be as an artist, then that's really, really rewarding for me, believe it or not, I enjoy that passing my knowledge on it, it means more to me sometimes than just drawing up another illustration for the sake of it, just for myself, if I can pass his knowledge on to you guys and you can make better comics because of it. Then that's great for me because I love reading comics. I love reading your comics. Keep on creating, keep on drawing, and I'll see you in the next comic art class. 28. Assignment Lighting Scenes: Alright, so for this final assignment, what I'm gonna get you to do is like your own interior and exterior sands complete with characters and background objects. Now feel free to use the templates that are provided in this course. Or why not whip up your own scenes and that is totally fine. But what I'd like you to do first and foremost is review those previous lessons that we've just gone through. Copy the lighting schemes that we've covered, and then branch out and experiment with your own tries something that is going to challenge you a little bit, something that may feel slightly uncomfortable because that's exactly where you are going to learn the most when it comes to implementing that mechanic, where we break down whatever it is we're drawing in a very basic and simple interpretation to make it easier for us to figure out what planes within that scene, within the objects and the characters that we've included in them are going to fall into shadow, which one will be lit. And I think that you're going to find that this really does enable you to light essentially any panel, any scene that you set out to illustrate in a very dynamic way that's freeing, where you don't have to depend on reference material, where you can come up with something completely from your imagination and do a pretty damn good job of lighting it in an accurate way. Alright, that's it. 29. Outroduction: Congratulations, I'm glad you've made it to the end that you've completed this course. I really want to thank you for joining me on this journey. I truly do hope that you have gained an immense amount of value out of everything we have covered here in this volume of knowledge that are downloaded into your brain. Or hopefully, you know, I know that it can oftentimes be very, very overwhelming when it comes to shadowing and rendering characters, let alone entire scenes. Which is why I hope that the number one thing that you take away from this course is the understanding that no matter how complex your subject matter is, how complex your illustration is going to be, you can still break it down in a very basic and very simple way in order to represent it accurately on the page, whether that be the pose of your character and the angle at which all looking at that figure on the construction of the scene itself or the lighting rendering of the objects with in a I know that this was a big game changer for me. That when I was thinking about a character and all the complexities that go into it, the anatomy, the design, breaking it down into a very primitive manner, really did take all of the confusion out of how it should be lit. Again, practice it. It's not going to be something that you're fully going to grasp overnight on your first run. It's going to be a skill that requires repetition as any other does, in order to master it. So put the time in, put the hours in, and really try to fully take it in, process it, and then become a skilled pro at lighting your characters and your scenes purely from your imagination without the dependence of reference. Again, thank you so much for joining me today. I'll see you in the next course until next time, keep on creating and keep on drawing.