How to Use Visual Storytelling to Improve Your Art

1. Introduction: Hi, In this class, I'm going to explain how I use storytelling to transform my paintings from something that looks nice to something that's intriguing. I want to show how it can make a difference in your artwork. I'll provide you with some examples and exercises to push your imagination for when you're conceptualizing are starting to do. And as we progress through the lessons, I'll share with you my perspective on what storytelling is. Shortlist of golden keys that you can use your own artwork and do some live demonstrations on how to use keys. And lastly, I'll give you some art exercises that are meant to challenge your imagination. My name is James Rosa. I'm an illustrator and a brand designer. I've been drawing for the longest time. I loved drawing and painting. I love teaching other people how to improve their own skills, being inspiring artists and there's a lot to learn. And if I can share anything that I've acquired over my years, I'd love to share storytelling, I think, is one of my favorite topics, so I'm happy to be able to share it with you today. 2. What is Storytelling: Overviewing: I think the best way to introduce a topic like this is by referencing somebody who was a master of artistic storytelling. If you don't know this name, you need to stop this video. Go to Google. Look him up. He's name is Norman Rockwell. Norman Rockwell was an American artist who was probably one of the radius storytelling artists of all time. What he did was he took the everyday and he transformed it into something that was profoundly curious. Take a look at this quote. I think it summarizes his style perfectly. It says, commonplaces never become tiresome. It's we who become tired when we cease to be curious and to be appreciative. And an example might be, if you just take a scene, go with me in your imagination. But imagine standing in a grocery store. You're a few people back in a lineup. And you notice that the lady at the front is standing. Maybe she's a grandmother, a little bit of an older lady standing here with what looks like a grandchild. And you notice how the grandchild is looking up. You notice the facial expression. There's a mild embarrassment. Maybe the child is actually the tips of his or her ears are turning a little bright shade of pink. You also noticed that grandma is holding a coin purse and flipping through the coin person looking for whatever changes required to make a purchase. It's such a rare thing to see nowadays, somebody who would be going through a coin purse. But that's the kind of thing that happens around us, these moments where there's a story being told. Because now you'd be watching with humor perhaps, or maybe you would feel annoyed that this lady is delaying the lineup. And maybe you would notice that the men standing directly behind is thoroughly annoyed. You can see him with his back arched a little bit. You can see the scale on his face. Maybe his arms are crossed, maybe he's looking at his watch regularly trying to encourage the situation to go forward. And these situations, they play out around us. We don't tend to be curious or appreciative of them unfolding. Quite often we don't even notice them. And when we fail to notice, those moments are lost in our creativity as well. So that when we're sitting in front of a blank canvas, we no longer think of those little details that could be injected into a painting that would add personality and character in a way that we need for that story to become interesting. That's the art of storytelling. That's the thing that Norman Rockwell was phenomenal at doing. And it's something that if you want to be an artist who creates very interesting artwork, that makes people pause. That's a key. Really what storytelling is. It is an invitation into a piece of art. It's not just the pigment that's on the brush. If not the quality of the art strokes. It's not just the subject that you're painting or maybe an object. It can be so much more than that. In any piece of artwork. You can convey a message. So what are the details that create the dynamic that makes somebody lean into your arms? A great piece of artwork should pique their interests and then hold the attention and then activate the imagination to run with it beyond stillness of the painting, saying a children's book, if you see a character on a page, does your mind then animate that character because they can see what's unfolding and transpiring by the expression on her face, by the tension created in the background. Can you do that in artwork? Great artwork can tell that story and activate the imagination. 3. Storytelling Case Study / Examples: So what I'm gonna do now is to take you into an illustrated case study. It's something that I was working on just a week ago. And it's what actually inspired me to cover this subject as a lesson. I'll walk you through the process of my painting. And it started here. I always look for a great reference photos, something that just makes me pause and think, Hey, I can do something with that. And so I started with this. It's just this girl sitting on a couch. In particular, I think the thing that I liked most was the way her hands wrapped around her face. She was conveying. Not very much with her expression is she has a very neutral expression. There was very little that you can take from this to know how she's feeling. But you could infer that maybe she's bored, maybe she's disinterested. I don't know. And that's the role of the Illustrator is to take something like this and turn it into something a little more interesting. From here, I went into my first sketch and I had an idea of where I want it to go. So I added some color. It really was nothing more than a painting exercise at this point. There was no story yet to be told. And to be honest, I hadn't created a story in my mind prior to me starting this. I hadn't plotted or thought this through at all. And so when I got into background, I didn't really have anywhere I was going. I just added a sunset color behind her in the sky. She was sitting in a field. What was she doing in the field? I had no idea. The grass didn't add anything to it. It was just again, a painting exercise at this point. And often I think when we do a painting, we find ourselves at that stalemate of looking at it and thinking, it's got a little bit lifeless, it's a little bit boring. What can I do to now bring some life to it? And so there's questions that you should begin to ask. Ishi. Why is she sitting here? What's going through her mind, what she's thinking? She's looking down, what she looking at. Is she sad? What's the emotion you see? Board Ishi disinterested? Is she tired? What's going on in her mind? Those are questions that I should have asked at the beginning, but now he's beginning to ask these questions as I was developing the painting. And that is where the storytelling comes in because to answer those questions is storytelling. So the next step was me just beginning to imagine that a little bit of what could be happening. And so I put her on a rock sitting in the middle of a pond. Again, the same sky was behind her. It was a warm glow. Looked it looked like maybe a nice summer night. I still didn't have any more real direction for story. But what this does is it adds a layer of interests. Because now, why did she jump onto a rock? She maybe had to leap over the water, standing on the bank to get there. Why would she choose this place where she running from something? Was she looking at something in the water? There's questions that begin to arise from this piece of work so far. It invites more storytelling. I really went for this. I thought I want to develop the story on this because I like the direction it's going. But if I'm going to really tell a story, then I'm going to have to create some detail. I'm going to have to add some things to really transform this. And so this is where I went. You can see there's so much more detail. There's so much more interests in this painting. The detail is what brings it to life. I'm going to take you into the Photoshop. I'm going to let you see that detail more closely. Let's jump over to Photoshop. From the original that you saw. One thing that I did here was I completely transformed the mood. Maybe it's something inside her imagination, but she's a dreamer. And she sees the fantastical around her. And here you can see there's something that she's looking at that I created. I wanted her to be looking at something. The eye goes down to the corner and now we can see there's little fairy that's sitting in the corner that adds something entirely issue if she's seeing a figment of her imagination. Is this actually a fairy that's there? And what is this magical place? Is it her secret place? Does anyone else know it's here. Are there more fairies? You can see the dragonflies dancing in the background. Those little details add to the mystique of the environment. You see the glow behind her is that the Sun? Is that the moon? Is it something else That's mystical in the area? All of these things add to the atmosphere and the intrigue and these details matter. They are the storytelling element of this piece. You can transform it completely by changing the color, by adding other details. You notice that her expression, I left it in that very neutral position. You still can't really know what she's feeling emotionally. But I can completely modify that. If I did want to make her sad, I could transform eyebrows. I can change the shape of her mouth. I can make her eyes a little bit watery if I want. There's a lot of things you can do, but I'm going to show you in detail how transforming it even just a little bit, can make a difference. Take a look at this. Now, all I did was change the color. By changing the color, it changed the mood enormously. Now we see her sitting in a warm environment. It's a different time of day. It's a different quality of atmosphere. I changed the expression on her mouth just quickly. I made her smile. I mean, her eyes come to life. She's now looking up rather than down. Is there something else beyond the scope of what we can see here that's capturing her imagination. Or they're more fairies. It's a whole different story just by changing that, or it's just a different chapter of the story. But I'm controlling that narrative. I'm controlling what it is that maybe you're feeling by changing the color, the facial expression. All of those things are tools in the toolbox of storytelling. And you can manipulate so much. So to tell a little bit of a different story just by changing the environment around her. Notice, I'm not going to change the expression. Let's take a look. So this is the exact same position, the exact same posture. She hasn't changed at all. The exact same facial expression. All I did was change the color and I changed the environment. And by doing that, we now have a whole different feeling. It's a whole different story. Your imagination can dictate that story. I put her now sitting on the roof of maybe her house. Maybe you can see her at the nighttime crawling out onto the roof. Maybe she goes through a window. Maybe there's a trash can. She stands on the leap up and pull herself up onto the roof. Here she has a little furry companion. Maybe that's her friend that follows her everywhere on every little adventure she takes. Did she come up here to get her cat? These are all things that you can begin to tell the story. There's more things that I'm sure that could be added to. Change it up just a little bit. Her expression, the placement of the cat, the quality of the sky, the color evokes emotion. It tells story, and it makes your painting interesting. These are just simple little things that I've done. You can go into way more detail and you maybe should just compare the two. There are actually sitting in the exact same position in the painting. I didn't move them at all. They're identical. Environment was the only thing that I revised. And that just goes to show the power of the environment and the atmosphere you create around your characters. 4. The Golden Keys of Storytelling: This leads us into what I am going to call the golden keys. And the golden keys are the very specific things that you can do. Let's take a look at what some of those things are. First of all, like in the example that I gave, I started my drawing without any idea of where I want to go with it. I was just painting something. But what you do need to do at some point, probably better to do it before you start, is to make an intentional decision to tell a story. Because you should be planning what that is. You might have a very specific message that you want to deliver. You need to plan those details. You might really need to work for your thumbnailing and plotting out where the things in the composition are going to be, whatever those details are. It's way better to make a decision early. And if you're going to tell a story, make it very deliberate and intentional what the story is that you're going to tell. Even as I was talking about the girl that I drew, there was questions I was asking. I was asking, well, maybe she's feeling this or maybe she's feeling bad, or maybe she's doing this, or maybe she's doing that. Those are things you shouldn't necessarily have. Maybe questions for. You should be able to say, this is who she is and this is why she's there. And this is what she's thinking. Because when you're painting, you'll very deliberately be creating those things as you paint the expression on the face. As you draw the environment to round, as you create all the little details surrounding the character. Those are things that you're interjecting. 5. Golden Key: Character Driven Artwork: This is a great tip in that the best stories are character-driven. In fact, pretty much all stories are character-driven. Go back to the scene where I have the girl sitting on the rock. Imagine the girl wasn't there and that ferry wasn't there. And it was just a rock. And you saw the grass and the dragon flies flying around. Imagine all I did was put a pair of shoes on the rock. A pair of shoes. Nothing else, no person, nothing else. Immediately, immediately you have a story. The suggestion of character will evoke intriguing. A pair of shoes sitting on a rock tells you somebody was there. Where did the person go? Why did the shoes get left there? Did she go swimming? Like Did she take off our shoes and jump in the water, wading through the water. But what I do know is that the suggestion of character evokes intrigue. You can do that in multitudes of ways. You can have a beautiful landscape way off in the distance. Just the silhouette, just the teeny little silhouette of a person will create a question and intrigue. There's a narrative. What's the person doing? If that little person is standing off in the distance and you see them holding a staff. Well, that creates a question. You might not even see any detail other than a silhouette and a staff. Is it a mystical, sorcerer, wizard-like character? Is it an old man leaning on his staff? Is it a traveler voyaging across him? That's his walking stick. All of those little tiny details. And the suggestion of character creates a story. You could see a mountain scene, and on this side of the mountain is a little house. The house, just the presence of a house creates a story or an intrigue of who's in that house. That's where story comes into the composition. We look to include ourselves in stories, in, in the journey. So all of those things, you can imagine seeing the house on the side of the hill. Now your imagination thinks about walking up to that place on the hill, because there's so many questions that are invited by the presence of that. And it makes us want to go in to the story to find out what's in that house. And that's what character-driven stories do. They make us think somebody has been there? And there's a reason for it being there, and I want to take the journey. So let me go deeper into this picture because no matter what we connect to that human element, it draws us in. Every time. It'll draw us in. 6. Golden Key: Point of View & Perspective: Another really fantastic golden key that you want to know about is to use points of view and creative composition. Your eye is a camera lens. If you're the one directing the story, you are the one behind the lens. You can decide how the viewer steps into you're painting. How do you do that? Well, consider perspective. Who is the central figure in the scene? Who's the one that's guiding the narrative? Who is the one that you want to be the focal point, who's delivering the emotional impact. So ways to create a focal narrative is isolation or cropping or color contrast. You're basically trying to find a way to draw all the attention to an area of figure, an object. And that's where the story is being told. To give you some examples, take a look at this. We have a scene where it's kind of a classic third-person view. You're looking at all the details. Everybody is kind of equal. There's no real focal point. But what if we want to tell the story from a particular perspective? Maybe there's somebody in this scene who you're wanting to draw all the focal attention to. So that's where we go back to the list of things of drawing focus. We could do this. We just cropped. We went into that same picture. We zoomed into a certain area. We eliminated faces. We shifted all the attention by drawing everybody out of the frame towards one particular figure. They became central by positioning, by cropping. We didn't have to change the picture. We just needed to change the cropping. And even though they're still within that same crowd, we achieved isolation. By doing this. I changed up the scene a little bit just to show how by scaling things in a different way, by taking a different perspective. We've now achieved isolation again, brown people to the foreground and we push people to the background. We change the coloration of the people in the foreground and background. So there are a little bit muted. And so the intensity of color now is drawn to a particular area. It's a way, again of achieving isolation. And now there's a story being told right there in the middle of the frame. 7. Golden Key: Proximity & Scale: Another golden key. Consider proximity and scale. We saw a little bit of that in the previous lesson, where we saw that father and that child in the middle of the crowd dancing. We adjusted the scale of foreground background and put them in that suite middle spot, where everything was kinda pushed away forward and backward. And that achieved a focal point. Proximity and scale creates distance. Distance between objects creates narrative because there's a question of why is something distant in relation to the central figure? Why is something more foreground? What scale and perspective does really? It's, it adjusts the emphasis. It's a tool where you are asked to adjust your focus. And it draws attention where you want the attention to be going. Again, you're the director. You can choose by using proximity and scale, things further or closer, bigger or smaller. You're achieving this. And I'm gonna give you a few examples. I'm going to use the painting that I did before of the girl on the roof. Here's the original drawing that I did. You see the characters in relation to each other. They're very close. And something to note when you're up and close, like you are there very close to the forefront of the image. That means we, as the audience, are rate with them. It makes us part of that moment. You're relating to it as a viewer, that means we're being positioned almost in a first-person proximity. You might even expect to be part of the conversation. That's an intimacy that we've been granted just by virtue of them being right forefront with us. But what if we change it up a little bit using proximity and scale? Here we're going to push her way back and we're going to leave the cat much closer. Now there's a distance that's been created and it will, without question, create an emotional response by proximity. Now, we're more in a second person position. We're now sitting where we're close to the cat, so we're still part of the scene. But the girl is now way off in the distance. And now it creates questions of why there's a gap. Why is that distance? There were kind of like the cat. We're wondering if we're going to get an invitation to come into that scene closer to where she is. So we might ask, is the cat seeking to offer comfort, maybe the cats in anticipating going forward and creeping into the scene further. Maybe that's what we wanna do as the audience. Maybe she wants to be alone and the cats reading the situation, waiting to be invited, would it be okay to approach? Does the cat have a sense that maybe she needs time alone? There's a scenario and emotional scenario that's created by, by increasing the distance so that proximity changed and then the scale change, She's further away. That means she's less personal to us. Let's take a look at another little change here. So we've pushed the perspective just a little bit more. We've pulled the cat in a little bit closer again, that makes us a little bit more intimate, a little bit more first-person in the sense that we're now more related to the cat, we probably feel what the cat's feeling a little bit more by being closer. Can we do it even more? Can we get a little bit closer? See, we've drawn the cat closer to us again. Again, draws us even more intimate to this picture. Again, people I think sometimes are afraid of scale. They think it's weird that you're so close to something in the foreground. And there's something in the distance, and we don't play with scale enough. Everything becomes a little bit more flat and neutral. When you play with scale, you change the emotional value of what's going on. The emotional gap increases. We're closer to the cat. She is further away now, so we're intimate. And yet far. So now, let's change this up again. We've now taken ourselves as the viewer out of the picture. So if this is the way that you painted it, the characters are now together in the distance. We've been left out. We're now very much a third party observer were not part of the scene. There's much less visual volume for us. We can't hear what they're talking about. If they're having a conversation, we're not a part of that conversation, so we can now infer what's going on. And that's the best we can do. Are we observing a private, intimate moment of bonding and friendship? Is there a reconciliation going on between them? Maybe as the viewer, we're wondering if we're going to get invited in there, but it's pulling on us to wonder what's what's going on over there between them. It's a different relationship between us and the composition and the characters. Just by changing the proximity and the scale and where we are in relation to it. It changes the emotional value of the picture. The story changes. 8. Golden Key: Mind the Details: Another golden key is to mine the details. Details will offer so much to a composition. And what it really will do is add nuance to the characters and to the storyline. When you want your audience to take a journey through the picture, those details matter because they're going to look at the focal thing that you've presented to them. But then they're going to try and fill in the blanks by looking at the detail. If you offer details, you're offering clues into the personality of the character's facial expression of the characters in the background matter just as much because you're going to begin to read the room, so to speak. If there's other characters in the room, you're going to have to look around just to see what other people are doing, to have a sense of what you should be feeling. Hence, little details like hands, are they closed or they open? Open hands imply something. Closed hands imply something. Clothing in style, the choice of clothing that your main characters have. It's setting up a storyline just by looking at those little touches of detail. They add personality to every character in the scene. Environmental details. We'll add clues about the characters and the circumstances as well. I'm currently working on a painting where you have a boy and a dog sitting in a bedroom. We're looking up their window. So what are the things in the boy's bedroom that add to the story? Well, you look on the floor, you might see some toys. Look on his dresser next to his bed. There's something in the drawer. On the dresser, something on the surface, dressing room. He's got a poster on the wall of his favorite hero. All of these little environmental things or adding to the storyline, you're learning something about the boy, it's becoming more interesting. Every scene provides an opportunity to add to the story just by considering the details. 9. Golden Key: Pause in the "In-Between" Moments: This is a very useful and for composition, It's just the pause in-between the moments. Maybe there's an object in the painting. And the idea is that the character is there to get that object. You can have the character with their hand holding the object. That'd be one way of doing it. But if you did the in-between, you're creating an anticipation. So the character is now reaching for the object and you've suspended that moment between their idea to reach it and then actually taking it, its movement, its action. It's implied that something is about to take place and you've cut them in the act of doing that. Think about something like a character mid fall, the moment just before the trip doesn't make sense to depict that doesn't make sense to have them on the ground. I mean, you could show them on the ground, but way more effective would be the in-between where they're in midair, where they're reaching to catch their balance or their facial expression changes to one of surprise. See the moments between the cause and the effect tree, an anticipation, like the punch before it lands or the trip before the fall or the mid air leap, the character is leaping from something hasn't landed. Don't know where they're going to lend. Don't know if they're going to land, but they're in midair. Those moments of the in-between create tension, create interests, provide opportunity for storytelling. And here's the depiction of that, that in-between that moment of loss of balance. There's a lot of story to this, there's a lot of action and emotion, and movement and momentum. All of those things draw you in because now you're anticipating the fall. Is she going to get hurt? She gonna be okay. Is somebody going to catch her? Storytelling? 10. Imagination Exercise: Coming to the end of this course, I always like to leave an exercise that can help you on your journey forward. In this case, we've been looking at storytelling, which really is all about the imagination. It's something that I learned in art school and have continued to do throughout my career. Whenever you're in the mode of creating something, often the very first things that we create aren't the best. We often go into cliches. We go to the most obvious conclusion. And so to push our minds, we're, we're now thinking outside of the box. I had to conceive a way of doing this that would be playful or interesting to you. If you have a dice by all means, pull out a dice. But I'm going to list six things. These would be kind of emotional points. I tried to just come up with a variety. You can make your own list of words similar to this, but I picked urgency, disgust, confusion, excitement, disappointment, rage. These are all very volatile, very extreme emotions. And so the idea is to depict this in very ordinary situations. Here's an additional list. Things like a cell phone, an alarm clock, a pet. Magic, workplace, music, very ordinary or abstract things. And so what I want you to do is when you take your dice, you roll your dice. Do it twice. The first one, whatever your role, one through six, That's your emotional action word. The idea is to narrate the emotion. It's not really about the thing. It's not about the cell phone or the alarm clock, or the pet, or the magic, or the workplace, or the music. That's just the environment. But you're trying to depict the emotion because this story comes from the emotion. So as an example, if I rolled disgust number two, and then I rolled pet. So now what about a pet would evoke the emotion of disgust. Maybe they made a mess on the floor. Maybe they're licking your face and you don't like to be liked. Whatever the thing is, you're trying to depict, what it does is it forces you to come up with a way of telling the story, be as creative as you can. You don't have to do this as a masterpiece of art. Just sketch it out really fast if you want to take it as far as going into painting, do that. Use all the things that we've talked about from Color Perspective, scaling. You're trying to tell a story with this. So use all the tools that you can depict a story like this. These exercises are things that I remember doing in college. I remember one particular in college that I had to do where I was given the topic of urgency. At the time. There was no such thing as cell phones. So it was just a telephone. So what I did was I took a telephone and I had to somehow create urgency with a telephone. Using perspective. I had it right in the foreground. So it was like sitting on a table. How do you create urgency with a telephone? Well, by having it close up in perspective. And then I had in the distance, I had a man and a woman standing in their bathroom brushing their teeth. And as they were brushing their teeth in the background, they turned and they were both looking towards the phone. Now I can't create the sound of a phone ringing, but I created a sense of urgency by having the phone right here. So we knew were talking about a phone. Both people are looking out of the bathroom towards the phone as though the phone had just ranked. It's a way of visually expressing an emotional moment. I told the story and that was the goal of the exercise. This is very similar to what I did in college back then. It's a great exercise. These kinds of exercises you can do anytime all the time. You can change up the words that I put here. Put yourself through a little bit of a grinder, put a timer on if you want to force yourself to try and come up with something creative and fast, but don't use your first idea. Thumbnail, about five or six of these, just thumbnail them out. Do five or six of them. By the time you get to your fifth or sixth one, you probably are coming up with something a little bit more accurate. 11. Conclusion & Thank You: I want to thank you for taking this course with me, please. By all means, if you do participate in the project, I'd love to see your work. It'll be my pleasure to answer any questions you might have. I hope this is helpful for you in your artistic journey. Storytelling is amazing. It's one of the funniest things about creating new compositions and artwork. Every time you sit down to a canvas, you have an opportunity to tell an amazing story. Thank you so much for joining me. Take good care.