Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hi, there. To celebrate Women's History Month, which I think should be every month, I'm going to teach you how to draw something very close to my heart, iconic women in history. Come along and join me. I'm Ann Shen, and I'm an author and illustrator living in Los Angeles with my husband and our small menagerie of the animals. I've written and illustrated three bestselling books on iconic women, including Bad Girls Throughout History, Legendary Ladies, and Nevertheless, She Wore It. All published by Chronicle Books. I've literally done hundreds of iconic women. Their stories inspire me to create beautiful art to celebrate their legacies, and I love sharing them with the world through my work. In this class, I'll be teaching you how to create an iconic, original image of a woman who inspires you, that celebrates their power and authenticity. We'll go through a method of finding good reference images, doing research, doing sketch studies, creating an original drawing, and how to finish a painting in Photoshop. Now let's get started together. Join me in the next video.
2. Class Project: The project for today's class is to draw an iconic woman in history. I decided to create this class project because it's a great place for beginners and advanced artists who like to start paying tribute to the iconic women we love. I'll be demonstrating today's class in Photoshop using my [inaudible] tablet. But if you don't have one, feel free to use whatever materials you have on hand. The principles I teach in this class can be applied across the board to any medium and what I'm using is just a suggestion. Now let's get started.
3. Research & Reference: In this class, I'm going to go over how to search for reference photos and make a list of attributes that are important to the iconic image of a person. I'll go over researching some background on each woman so that we get some idea of their values and what they stood for in history, which is just as important as how they look. For my first drawing, I'm going to draw education activist, Malala Yousafzai. To start my research process, I open up a new document in Photoshop that's about 17 by 11 inches, and name it MalalaRef, for example, because I am going to be using this for my Malala reference. Then I go to know old Google to search for reference photos of the woman I'm drawing. Here, I'm going to start with googling Malala. Go to Images, and then I'm going to start pulling images that give me a really good picture of what she looks like and trapping them into my Photoshop file. I want to have a huge amount of images to reference because that gives me more information of what she looks like, and I'm not copying from a direct photograph. Sometimes it helps to go to the Tools, and look for large images so that you get better quality images or large images that have more information. Then you can also size them up by scaling them up in Photoshop. I'm arranging all my reference photos. You don't need it to be crystal clear. You just need to be able to see what's going on there. Then again, I like to have a huge variety of photos. See, this one's a little too low res, so I'm actually going to delete that one. That's not a great reference photo. To transform and scale the images, I just do Command-T on my Mac, and then drag it out with my mouse, and it'll proportionally drag out the size of the photo. I'm going to pull a couple more reference images. As you can see here, these photos are of her of all different ages, but she is overall a young adult. Sometimes you can also Right-click, select "Copy Image", and then paste into your doc, if for some reason it's not dragging into it. I feel like I have a really good variety of photos. I like to aim between 6-10 photos for reference. Let's see if there's anything else that I want to find that might be different than what I already have. I might select this one too. I like to have a variety of angles so I can see what her face looks like. Now, in addition to visual research, you'll also want to do some background research about the person and who they were, and what they stood for in history. A good place I always like to go to is good old Wikipedia. Wikipedia is great because it gives you a great overview, and especially for people who are pretty well-known, they have very tightly edited entries. It's always a great place to start and then you can always check their references to see where the information comes from. We know that Malala Yousafzai is a Pakistani activist for female education and the youngest Nobel Peace Prize laureate. She's known for her advocacy of women's education and girls' education throughout the world, and also for standing up for her education when she was shot in the head by the Taliban when she was 15. Because of her background, we know to portray here in a very noble and dignified manner. Also, because of her background, she is Sunni Muslim, we know that she will be wearing a hijab always, but she has a predilection for really beautiful jewel-toned hijabs of all different colors, as we know from our reference. Now that we know this, we can take that into consideration as we plan how we are going to draw her. Our next step is to do studies of her from these photographs so we can get familiar with how she looks. Now that we know her culture and her education are very important to her, we want to keep that in mind in how we present her. Join me in the next video for the next steps.
4. Sketching Studies: In this lesson, I'll show you how to sketch a bunch of studies based off of photographs to help you prepare for drawing your final image. These sketch studies will help you learn all the details and asynchronous of your subject's face, so you know what makes that image iconic. To start, you can go over your reference images and simplify the anatomy of the head to help yourself learn how to draw it when we're doing our studies. To do that, we're going to create a new layer. Take that animator pencil brush, and I'm going to use a really bright color that stands out against the rest of the photos. I'm going to use this bright fuchsia. I'm going to break down, here's the ball of the head, the axis that goes through the middle of her face, and the axis that goes through where her eyes are, and then the jawline, and then the neck and then shoulders. Then do that with every single photo. Just so I'm getting myself familiar with recognizing how to break down the structure. Now that you've broken down the structure for yourself, you have a good idea of what her face shape is, and how we're going to start the structures of our studies. We're going to turn that layer off. I make this smaller, and I'm going to create a new layer, still taking the animator pencil, but I'm going to switch to a gray to do my studies. I'm going to increase the size of my reference images, and I'm going to start with drawing a study of this reference. Now, doing a study again means drawing from a photo that you're studying, to understand your subject better. This is for practice in your sketchbook or in your photoshop documents only because the copyright of the image belongs to the photographer. I'm taking that breakdown that I had, and now I am taking the training wheels off and going off the photo to figure out how to draw her. I drew the basic structure of her head and her hair, draw her hijab in there. I'm just looking at the photo, very closely to show me how to draw it. Paying attention to what side of her scarf goes, over which side, and which side folds under. Just the details that are really important, especially that can be culturally important. We draw her neck, even though some of it is covered by her hair, we draw a hint of her ear. Now I'm going to go into the face, draw her eyebrows. Now her eyes, now her nose. This is all a rough sketch, and study you're doing. You can do this as many times as you need to, and this is the first lane I'm going to go in and do a second layer over this very shortly. I'm going to go in, I'm going to make this layer about 40 percent opacity to get way down. I'm also going to move it down a little bit more. Now I have a new layer, I'm going to name that the prelims sketch. This one just sketch. I'm going to go there and find all the places where things seem a little bit off. But, I'm going to still have this structure underneath to show me where placement was, based on this one. I draw in short sketchy pencil marks. Drawing her hairline again because I liked how that was, that looked good going in and drawing her eyebrows. Eyebrows are such an expressive part of a person's face. To learn more about drawing different features and drawing a face, take my painting portraits and where I Gouache class over more that in much more detail. Then take the Lasso tool and move the eye over because I don't like where I placed it. There you go. Switch back to the brush tool by pressing "B" and command D to deselect. Same to her nose in, with just the bridge of her nose, the side of her nostrils, and her nostrils, indicate it. Now we're moving on to her mouth, which is a little bit of a smile. She has a mole right there, and then draw her ear, which usually lines up with the bottom of the nose. This is all hair, we're drawing the details of her hijab again. For the purpose of the sketch, I'm going to color her hair, and then I turn off the preliminary layer sketch. Now I have just my sketch layer and see where I need to go back in, draw it in more of that. Again, this doesn't have to be perfect. This is for you only to study, you could do this as many times as you need to, to really understand, how to draw your beautiful subject. Now I'm going to go back and repeat this and do a study sketch on every single reference image I have so I can get to know my subject very well. I'm repeating the same steps for every sketch, and I'm going to go back to that prelim sketch, turn it all the way back up to 100 percent, and do a sketch of my next photo. Do a study for every single one of your photo references, you'll notice you get better the more you do. Now you can do these studies for every subject that you want to draw. It really helps you become a better draftsman. Now I'm going to go over in the next videos some details on how to draw a younger person, an adult, and older person. Join me in the next videos.
5. Drawing a Young Person: There's such a beautiful diversity of women who have made their mark in history. I want to go over ways to highlight that. In this class, I'm going to go over the details to focus on in drawing a younger person. I'm going to continue using Malala as an example. Now that we've done a bunch of sketch studies of Malala, we're going to move on to creating our original portrait of her. We can't draw directly from one photo because that image belongs to the photographer. Instead, we'll use a composite of a bunch of reference photos and what we learn from our studies to create a unique image. I'm starting with Malala because she's a young person and I want to go over details on how to draw women of all ages. Younger people tend to have larger foreheads and their nose is closer to their eyes. They haven't grown into their full face yet, so their eyes tend to be bigger, which gives them a more youthful look. We're also going to include some wardrobe choices that are characteristic for her. For example, she almost always wears a beautiful, colorful jewel-tone hijab. I'm going to start my original drawing by creating a new Photoshop document that is 8 by 10 inches and 300 DPI. I'm going to start by creating a new layer, I still I'm using that Animator Pencil and a gray brush. I'm also going to save this file as Malala Drawing. Looking at all these, but not a specific one in general, I'm going to draw the ball of the base of her head. I'm going to have her in three-quarter profile. I'm drawing the axis of her eyes and the axis of the middle of her face. I drew in her jawline based on what I studied here. I'm going to draw in her hair also going to draw in her hijab. I noticed from my studies that it always drapes over from her right over to the left side. Draw in this projection of her neck. I draw a little bit more because it felt too narrow. The neck always goes down like that and then her shoulders. We're drawing this as a guideline across for where her shoulders are going to be on each side. Moving it to the center. This is actually too high, the eyes now that I drew in the rest around it. I'm going to move the axis down. Like I said, while drawing younger people, their eyes tend to be lower down and larger while there is more forehead space because as we grow into our heads our face is stroked out some. I'm going to draw her eyebrows. A quick shortcut to get the brush tool is just to type B on your keyboard. See the eyebrows a little high so I'm going to lasso it down and move it down a little bit. This is the rough sketch, so we're going to redraw this and refine it. She has trade marking very dark statement eyebrows. I want to make sure to capture that. Then she has these lovely brown eyes that I've drawn tones of studies for her now so I know that one is a little bit larger than the other. Just things the little idiosyncrasies that make her who she is. That's why the studies can be so helpful. You're learning to draw her without the pressure of having to create it from scratch. Now, her hairline comes down pretty close on her forehead, so her forehead is not as large as say, a baby's would be. Draw her nose usually the eye line is here the nose is halfway between the eye line and the chin, the bottom of the nose. Trying to shape in the nose, then the nostrils, and then the sides of the nostrils which are very pronounced on her. Then her closed mouth smile because most of the time when she smiles, it is a closed mouth smile. Again, we're trying to capture the essence of her, who she is, very well educated, well-spoken, young woman. Now I step back and look at the whole picture. Overall it's pretty good, but I am inventing this, so I want to make sure that the elements still really reflect how she looks, even if it's not drawn directly from a photograph. Want to make sure her hair is indicated in the right places, get a little end of her jawline. Actually, she has a very nice, long elegant neck, so I'm going to draw the hijab down a little bit more so we can see that more of that. Let's see some of her hair tucked around her jawline, then of course over here on this side, and then the shadows. Then this doesn't feel high enough so I'm going to raise this like the top of her head looks too small and short. I'm going to raise the line of that and then also turn that into hair. You can see that the top of her head goes further. That's a pretty good rough sketch, I'm going to rough up some more let's see. This is the rough sketch where all these layered marks are. Now I'm going to make a new layer that's the refined sketch and turn the rough sketch down to about 33 percent. It doesn't need to be an exact number just. It's faded enough that you can see where you're drawing now. I'm going to go back to this drawing to refine where the lines are definitely going to be. These strokes are more purposeful now. They're not as sketchy and rough as the layer underneath. This is where you start to make decisions of where final strokes are going to lay. Again, I'm going into her eyebrows, her beautiful strong statement brows with small strokes like hairs. Draw her eye, draw her other eye now this is a smaller eye, and also it's off to the side and angled down a little bit further. I'm going to lasso tool it to move it down a little bit. I'm going to erase some of it. To switch to your eraser tool, just press E on your keyboard and then B to go back to your brush. Then go to her nose, her nostril. Drawing nostrils tend to line up with the inner corner of the eye, her's extends past a little bit. That's just characteristic of her face. Just a redefinition on the bridge of her nose, I added that there. Now I'm drawing her top lip for her smile, which she lifts the corner of the right side of her mouth most of the time when she smiles. But the mouth and the lip can I add her beauty marks that we can see from the side to find her chin a little bit more here and add little bottom lashes for definition. Define this here for myself, so I know where her part is when I'm painting it. There I have my rough sketch that would be ready to paint. Now when we're drawing a younger person, again I want to remind you that usually the eyes are bigger and a little bit closer to the center of the face. The nose is a little higher up and closer to the eyes. Then overall that gives you a younger face. Now that you learned the features of drawing a young person, let's move on to learning the features of drawing an adult. Join me in the next video.
6. Drawing an Adult: Now that you've learned the details of drawing a young person, I'm going to go over the hallmarks of drawing an adult. We're going to use Vice President Kamala Harris as an example. You'll go through all the steps that I taught you in the research video where you're going to pull a bunch of visual images of Kamala Harris and then do some research on her background. You'll do a bunch of sketch studies of the photo reference that you pulled, the same way we did with Malala. Then once you do that, we're going to create our original drawing of her. We're going to go with the standard eight by 10, 300 DPI. I'm going to pull it alongside my reference images just to have them on the side in case I need to reference exactly how her nose looks from a certain angle or how her eyes look or how her hair looks. I'm going to create a new layer that I'm going to name on the rough sketch, still taking that gray and that Kyle's Drawing Box animator pencil and then I'm going to think about how I want to present her. Because she is a politician and a strong leader in the community, we're going to present her in that light. She's often wearing a blazer and pearls, so I'm definitely going to put her in those, and then she usually has her hair down, so I'm also going to have her in that. With drawing an adult, the main difference is that the face is now going to be a little bit more stretched out because we've now grown into our heads. We still start with that ball structure that we build the axes off of. There's the ball of the head, now here's the axis for the face, here's where the eyes are, the eyeline is, and now I'm going to draw her face. Kamala has a longer face, whereas Malala had a rounder face, so this is great exercise in getting to draw different types of head shapes. Again, this is the rough sketch, so I'm constantly correcting as I'm drawing. I'm going to have a three-quarter angle on her too, she's going to be looking off to this side, and the center face is here. Now that I have her placed in, I'm going to start by drawing her hair. Her part is on her left side, which will be our right side when we're drawing. She has shoulder-length hair most of the time, so that's how I'm going to portray her, in her most iconic look and then I'm going to draw the other side of her hair. She has this great hair when it's done in this bouncy blowout, you can see it on both sides usually, when she's photographed. Let me share more about Kamala as I draw her. Kamala Harris is the first female, black, and Indian American Vice President of the United States of America. She was born and raised in Oakland, California, and has been a career politician. She went to HBCU, Howard University, and was a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority. She's still loves her colors pink and green and wears pearls a lot because of that. She studied Law at UC Hastings College of Law and then became Attorney General and then senator of California, before becoming the first female Vice President of the United States of America. I'm going to roughen the details of the blazer, just creating one based on the types of blazers she tends to wear. Her shirt begins here and her necklace line will be there. She usually wears pearls, like I said, as a nod to her sisters. We have her shoulders, back, head, chin up, like she always likes to say. Then we have our rough done sketch, let's see. Now I'm going to draw her eyebrows or indicate where her eyebrows are going to be, then her eyes. From your studies, you would have learned how to draw Kamala's eyes and then her nose. Usually, again, it's halfway between the eye line and the chin. Her nose is a little longer, it's a little further down, and then she usually has a little bit of an open mouth smile or a large smile, so we're going to portray that for Madam VP. She has such a great smile. At this point, it's very, very rough. She has a little bit of a more squared-off jaw, I was going to indicate that too. I'm going to probably drop her shoulders down a little bit more and I'll lasso to her whole body part. There we go. Now I'm going to turn this rough sketch down to about 33 percent and make a new layer, that I'm naming sketch. I'm still naming it sketch because the final product is going to be a painting, so this is the sketch that will be the foundation for your painting. Now we're going to go in and really refine these details so everything looks as it should. I'm going to draw her hair up a little bit more to give her more space up here because mine's looking a little too low on her head. She has this awesome wave. See her jawline, her cheeks, her forehead, cheekbone. Now I think this is a little too high, so I'm going to take it back down. There's more movement in volume in her hair, so I'm going to add some more. She just has such great hair. I'm pretty happy with that so now I'm going to go into drawing her eyebrows. I'm going to remind you again, I'm looking at all my reference photos so I know what her eyebrows look like, but I'm not trying directly from one, I know she has a thinner eyebrow. We're going to go in and draw her eyes. I'm going to go in on my reference so I know what her eyes look like, especially from that angle, it helps too. I think something like this or this, where I can see what it looks like from this angle. Remember it's B on the keyboard to toggle to your brush tool and E to toggle to your eraser tool. I think overall it's a little too high, so I'm going to lasso tool it and then move it down and then I'm going to draw her other eye, which from my studies I've noticed is a little bit bigger, just little nuances. The bottom eyelid turns up a little bit to indicate that cheek pushing up into it. I think overall everything's still a little high, so I'm going to move it all down. Just for her specifically, she has a bigger forehead. Now we're going to draw in that nose, again, that bridge over. The corner of her eye does line up with the edge of her nostril, she has a more narrow nose. The nose, I like to shade that in a little bit, just to indicate that term there from the tip of the nose to the nostril plane. Then I'm going to draw that winning smile. Start with the outline of the mouth to get the shape correct, then draw how that upper lip opens up over the teeth and that bottom lip lowers down. Then she has, I mean, everybody has these really, but some lines that move and not indicated on your face when you smile or move your mouth. I'm just going to indicate them really lightly here. But as an adult, those are always more pronounced than your cheek is. I'm going to pull up her jaw a little bit because she has a longer, narrower face, and indicate a little bit of where her ears, so I can see her earring, her pearl earrings. Then I'm going to draw the suit. Again, lower than where I had it before because it was too high. I felt was too high, making her neck look really short. I'm going to indicate where that suit is coming in, the collar of that suit. It's a composite of all the types of suits she tends to wear, and not a specific one. But she does do matching coordinate top and suit usually, so we're going to stick with that. I'm going to draw in where her pearl necklace is going to be and I'm going to turn off my rough sketch and then I'm going to go back to my sketch layer. I'm also going to draw some lines on her neck to indicate the direction too. Usually, there are two lines that indicate where the head is turning. There we have it, a original drawing of Kamala based on all of these reference images. It's not any of these photos, but it is informed by how she looks. Now that you've learned what to look out for when drawing the adult face, let's learn how to draw an older woman. Join me in the next video.
7. Drawing an Older Woman: With age comes wisdom and many iconic women were lucky enough to live very long life. In this video, I'm going to go over the details on how to draw an older woman, that is different than how we would approach a young or adult one. I'll use the incomparable Ruth Bader Ginsburg as an example for this class. Now we're going to start with our research the same way we had with our prior drawings. we're going to draw a bunch of studies from the images that we pulled for reference. I'm going to do that on the side on your own. Then after you do that, we're going to start our original drawing, again on an 8 by 10 inch, 300 DPI Photoshop document. I'm going to save that as RBG drawing. Then we're going to create a new layer that we're going to name rough sketch. It's the same process as before, but I'm going to go over specifically how to draw an older woman. For the iconic women who are lucky enough to live a long life, we want to make sure to honor them in all their glory. As we get older, a thing to note is that our face's scrunch back up, like when we were kids, except now we wear the fine lines of our lives on our face. We're going to start again with the ball, we always start with the ball. Then for Ruth, we're going to do a full frontal drawing because that's the feeling she gives me. Just always facing life full-on, staring you straight in the face. She has a more petite frame than our two prior icons. Then draw her jaw line that's a little more delicate to the axis of the middle of her face. Then we're going to draw the axis over her eyes are going to be. We usually can see her ears because her hairs, as we can see from all of these photos, usually pulled back. We'll just see her hair line with all the hair pulled back from it. I draw a little hairs to indicate that. Then some volume to indicate the rest of her skull, since our face is not our entire heads. Actually very small part of our heads. Now we're going to indicate her eyebrows. Now like I said, with older people, as we grow older our faces tend to sink back down into the middle. Her eyebrows are further down and our forehead is higher up. She has a very large expressive eyes. As we grow older, we tend to shrink a little bit, whether through losing collagen or weight. So our eyes appear bigger again, like when we were children. She has very large, expressive eyelid. Now you know all these very well now that you've done all the studies of her. Now her eyelid, even when she smiles because her eyes are so big, it doesn't really push up the cheeks like it does when you're younger and your cheeks are full of collagen. Now we have her big expressive eyes. We're going to indicate her nose, which again is usually about halfway between the eye line and the chin. Since it's a full frontal view, we'll usually just see the shadow of the under the nose and faint starkness of the nostrils and the sides of the nostrils. Now I drew that too big. So I'm going to take my lasso, hold Shift, so it's not proportionally shrinking down, shrink it down. De-select. It's a little bit more accurate. I like to indicate the bridge a little bit too. This all makes sense when we do our final sketch, and then we'll have her smile. As we get older, we lose collagen and volume in our lips as well. Our lips are usually a little thinner as we get older. Ruth has such an expressive face, that she doesn't actually have to push it very far, and you know she's smiling or scaling. She has a pointy little chain and draw in a little more. Usually the ears turn in the middle of the eye. Hers come out a little more and then she usually wears a big earing to love. We're going to draw her neck, her judicial robe, which is this up here. Did you know there's really nothing special about a judicial robe. There's not a huge difference between a judicial robe and say, a choir robe or a graduation robe. Can read more about that in my third book. Nevertheless, she wore it. Then I'm going to come in and draw her glasses. I think I'm going to draw these black framed ones because they tend to be the ones she wore later in her life. The key about drawing glasses to make them look like they're on her face, is usually to make them a little bigger than the face. You wanted to extend out a little bit from the face. So it looks like the wearer is wearing them on top of their face. Now we're also going to draw in the lines around her nose to her mouth because they're more pronounced on her. Her little chin. She has more hollow cheek. So I'm just shading that in. She actually has a remarkably smooth forehead. She must have moisturized and worn a lot of sunscreen. Now I've done my rough. Pretty happy with it. Actually, I'm going to make the road go up a little more because I can see here that it's how it wears. Her neck is not as long as say Kamala's, for example. Also I want to indicate the hollow of her neck here. As we get older, a lot of it shows in our neck. Then of course, we're going to do her lace collar, her lace triple. Just a rough version of it. So overall this is feeling good. I'm actually going to scale her down a little bit more. She's a very petite lady. Her shoulders are a little bit more straight back and pronounced than I originally had them. That's just adjusting a little bit as we go. That's my rough sketch. Now I'm going to move on to doing a more refined sketch. I'm going to move this down to about 33 percent, 34 percent and do my sketch layer. In this portrait, I'm again looking at my reference images of her, if I go in. Therefore I'm going to make sure I really get this really defined cheek bone, hollow of hers we usually see. Then of course, the folds around the mouth and nose. They're just really characteristic of how she looks and our lines that often appear in older people, because they're the areas that we move the most in our lines. Let me tell you more about Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She was a lifelong advocate of equal rights, especially for women. She's from Brooklyn, New York, and she loved wearing collars over her judicial robe to express herself. She put herself through law school with an infant daughter and a sick husband. She got her start with the ACLU fighting for civil rights. Ruth Bader Ginsburg was the second woman ever to be appointed to a judicial on the US Supreme Court. I think that I is a little high. So I'm going to lasso it and then move it down a little bit. That's the benefit of sketching in Photoshop and working digitally, is that you can move things around easily instead of having to redraw it over and over again. I'm going to zoom in on this reference specifically of RBG's eyes, so I can note her wrinkles more closely. I like how her eyebrows arch there. Maybe a little bit of a wrinkle action as a result of it. Then we have some more fine lines around the eyes. We embrace these. We don't hide from these. Then the nose comes down here. I'm going to place everything first before I go into drawing the glasses. So those lines come from the sides of the nose. That's where they connect. It's a little bit of the nose. Do a little bit of the bridge because it comes narrowed down. Comes in narrowly. Do more fine lines here. Now we're going to go back in and draw those glasses. See how they cover her eyebrows a little bit here. Let's see, here and here as well. Our region is often going to drawing ridges, such a distinct look. That's what makes her an icon right. Here is all icons have a distinct look. I'm going to narrow in her and draw a little bit more. Now I'm going to draw on her neck. Ratifying this a little bit too because she has very defined cheeks. A little bit more fine lines across her forehead. We love fine lines. It means you've truly lived. Also in the neck. Then we'll draw in that judicial robe. Those are just lines to indicate. Then we're going to add that collar in. Now I'll do this in more detail when I'm working on the painting. But this is just to indicate pretty much where it isn't how it looks. Like a pretty good sketch of it. So there we go. Again, when we're drawing an older person, the face comes down closer. All the features come closer together again. The forehead's a little more pronounced. We get all the beautiful lines that come with living a well-lived life. The hair is usually a little thinner. Ears actually grow throughout your life too. They also give a little bit bigger. A lot of the time it shows in the neck. We want to indicate lines in the neck to show that as well. We wear glasses or when you're drawing glasses on someone to make it really look like they're on a face. You actually want them to be bigger than a face because that's how they actually sit. Then we have to symbolize her life's work. We have her in her judicial robe. Then to symbolize her personal style what she was known for, we have giant earrings, her signature glasses, and of course, a expressive, beautiful jumbo. There you have it. That's how you draw an older woman that's respectful to their age. Join me in the next video for how I do a final digital painting from one of the sketches.
8. Finishing a Painting: Now that we've finished your original drawings of iconic women, I'm going to show you the next steps I would take in Photoshop to turn it into a full color painting. I'm going to use my Kamala drawing as an example. I'll start by looking at my reference collage. Let's talk about skin tone here. There's a tendency for white skin to be the default. So, so many people don't know how to paint the many different skin tones that exist. What I want to say here is to teach your eye to see all the different shades of color in the skin tones. It's not just shades of peach or brown. We're talking about pinks and blues and yellows and all sorts of colors that come up in someone's face. We don't get darker skin tones just by adding black or brown to peach. Let's look at Kamala's skin for example. It varies lot of the photos of her depending it was lit and how was edited in the photos. So I would look for live footage or live interviews with her. They give you a better idea of what her skin tone really looks like. To me. It looks like a light golden rosey brown. I see shades of reds and maroons and golden yellows in there. Can you see all those colors? Train yourself by looking at a lot of different pictures of different people. So now we'll start with creating a palette. Start with making a new layer on your art board that you're going to name Palette. And then I'm going to go and pick one of my favorite paint brushes, Kyle's paint box gouache round variable. And I'm going to eyedrop over from my reference images. Shades of her skin tone. Kind of a darker shade, lighter shade. And we'll adjust these as we paint them, because since it's a painting, they're going to need adjustment, It's not going to be as accurate from life. This darker brown, almost black and then a lighter brown. We're going to pull a navy, see how that navy almost looks black. I'm going to pull a lighter blue. Then I'm pull some golden tones and highlights in her hair, I'm going to pull her lip color. All right. We're going to start here. I'm actually gonna put these all, organize them a little bit. So I have my dark shades and the lighter tones and my navys. So to start, I'm going to keep this on a, actually wanna make this light blue background overall. Because then you'll see how color is actually affected by other colors. So I'm going to take the lighter tone and we're going to start, I take the sketch layer, I put it on multiply and created a new layer that's going to be the skin base. Put it under the sketch layer so I can still see it. I take my lasso tool and actually draw around where you can see her skin. And then I do Option Delete and it fills it with the color that's on top right there. Now I can see when we fill in that color that it's far too orange. So we're actually gonna do is desaturate it a bit. And to pull up the hue and saturation palette. You can go to, you can do Command U, or you can go to image adjustments, hue and saturation. So we're gonna desaturate it a bit. We're going to shift it. So when we're shifting the hue, you'll see it adjusted for all different colors. So I like the orangey golden range we're in. But overall, it's just too saturated and too light. So I'm going to also adjust it the lightness down. So now even though we picked it from this photo, you can see it doesn't work for the painting because it was just too unnatural looking. So now I've adjusted her to more of a golden neutral brown. Still very light. I'm going to tap that and add it to my palettes. So basically the swatches that I can eyedrop for color. So now for the next layer, I'm going to do her hair. I'm going to block in her hair. Do the same thing where I draw the general outside shape. And then I'm going to pick this brown color and do Option Delete to fill with the main color. And out there. Now at this point I'm going to go in with my brush and refine it a bit. Actually going to switch to Kyle's ink box Mr. Natural Brush. These are all brushes that come with Photoshop. If you have the CS subscription. And I like the Mr. Natural Brush because it has some texture to it and then a variety of width depending on the pressure that you put on the pencil. I'm just going in here to add more strands to make it look more like hair. When you're blocking in stuff, you're just doing the general shape, then you go in and refine all the edges to have more of your hand in it. All right, That feels good to me for right now. So then we're going to also block in her suit. The suit is actually going to go under the hair, but above the skin base. Because we want the hair to go over it. But we wanted to go over all this stuff here. Again, I'm just using the Lasso tool to do a quick block in. I use the eyedropper by pressing I on my keyboard to pick up that navy. It's very dark, but I like it. Using that same Mr. Natural Brush going back in here just to smooth out the edges of the suit. So it looks like how I would paint it. I'm actually going to erase here. Just so we have her portrait bust here. So there we have it. We've blocked in the main parts of our painting. Now we're gonna go in and refine all the pieces. So I can see that the hair is defining some of the face here. So I'm gonna go back to my Mr. Natural Brush. Just make sure her jaw line is well-defined. I'm using a gouache eraser, but you can use whatever eraser feels good to you. I like using a gouache eraser because it still has that painterly look even as I'm erasing away, which is what I'm always trying to achieve with my, with my illustrations, whether it's digital or not, I want them look very close to each other. So now we can see Kamala's skin is looking a little light now that we have the rest of her hair and suit locked-in. So that's the thing what I'm talking about, where color is relative, next, depending on what color it's next to. So I'm actually going to saturate her skin a little more, bring back in more of that golden color and decrease the lightness of it. Now I'm going to go in, create a new layer, and I'm going to name shadow. And then right-click over it and select Create Clipping Mask. That makes it so that whatever I draw only appears on the layer that it's a clipping mask to, I'm going to take a, let's see maybe, Gouache A Go Go, that feels good. Like a rough texture brush. I'm going to take the darker shadow of her skin that I had earlier. And you can see it's very orange. But I like that because her shadow is very warm. It's very golden, warm, and brown. So I'm gonna multiply that, which creates more of a shadow. Now you can see it's like standing out way too much because it's too saturated. But we're not going to worry about that right now. We're just putting in all these details. A little shadow under the nose. All right. Now I'm gonna do Command U to pull up hue saturation, Desaturate that shadow a bit. And maybe also lighten it a bit because it's not that extreme. That looks great to me. Okay. So now that we've done her shadow, we're going to go in and define around her eye sockets more because you can see more shadow definition because around there. So what I'm gonna do is change that layer style back to normal. Eye drop this color, change it back to multiply. And then we're in business. I'm taking that same shadow color and applying it around very lightly around her eye sockets so that you can see some definition there. Alright, now that we have the shadow and I'm gonna go to the sketch and start to lower the opacity. So you can see the painting more than we can see the guide of the sketch. From there. I'm going to add the face layer. I'm going to take the eye drop, the color of the hair. I'm going to go back to my Mr. Natural Brush where I have more of the direct control over the brush. It's more of a fine line brush then it is a Painting flat brush. And let's start painting in the details of the face following my sketch. Now remember her eyebrows are a little thinner on the tails. I'm going to go straight to white on my color palette to fill in the whites of the eyes. Then I'm going to pick a, gonna pick eye drop this shadow color, but I'm going to shift a little bit to a more purple-y version of it. And to do that, I'm actually going to leave the swatch where it is, but change the hue again. This is a different area where you can change the hue. It's the same value, but now it's purple-y. I'm going to decrease the opacity to about 62 percent, just so I can build it up now I can see that's way too purple, so I'm going to desaturate it a lot by moving it closer to this side of the spectrum. Go back. Yeah, there we go. Because adding some shadow, that's purple, like some purple-y eye shadow. Purple plum, that's kinda the color she tends to wear. She has these brown eyes, these beautiful golden brown eyes. So I'm gonna go back. Pick up that brown, make it golden. By moving it down a little bit more closer to the orange range. And we want to move the opacity back up to a 100, right? It can see this is way too light. So I'm actually going to go pick up her hair color, do that, and then we're going to bring it back to golden in a minute. And I'll show you my trick for that. We're going to finish drawing in her irises. Going to take her, gonna take that brown shadow color actually and come back in here and define the eyelid a little bit more. Okay, now we're gonna take that dark, dark brown, almost black color, but see how it black would be here. This is a nice black that's still has tones in it. So that's the important part. When you're drawing a darker skin person or a person of color, you want to make sure that you're still keeping color in their skin like beautiful color. Because no one is black or white. Like completely desaturated black or white by in terms of color. So I'm going to make this brush a little smaller so I can define the eyelashes better and have a little more control. When I go to this brown instead of the black, the darker black brown to define her lower lash line because the lower lash line tends not to be as dark. And that can be something that if you make it dark and outline it, it kind of draw too much attention to it. If that's what you want, that's a good thing, but most of the time it doesn't look like the way you intend it to look. And that might be why. Alright, so I'm actually going to go in with a little bit of a darker, the dark brown again to define the eyelid. More. Especially this one that's really prominent on her inner double crease is always really prominent on her. I'm just going until I define things that are really prominent and signature to her Look. We're also going to, at this point take this brown. It's the same color as the hair and eye shadow and come in and draw the line of her nose and also the nostrils. Other nostril which we see less of. Right? Now we're gonna go back. We're gonna go back and pick up actually this golden brown. Come in a little bit. The highlight on her iris, go to this white. That really brings her to life. Adding that reflected light in her eyes. They're going to take the shadow color again, this lighter brown. And this is where I'm going to use to draw in more of her. The lines on her face that are not going to be as defined as when she gets older. But they're definitely on her face now and I don't want to ignore them because again, our lines make us who we are right there, signs of our lives, well lived. And draw her neck. That's not dark enough because it's the same shade, so I'm going to darken it, but again, keeping that nice golden tone in there and make it a little bigger. Maybe too big. All right, Now I'm gonna go in and draw her mouth, which is this, she wears a nice pinky nude a lot. So I'm going to stick to that for her. This might work for it. So nude is a different color for everyone and for Kamala, let's see, let's test this one because I drew that. So that's obviously way to pink. So what I'm gonna do is actually I dropped her skin tone that we picked. And then I'm going to make it a little rosier by bringing them closer to red and start there. And this might be, I like the way this feels for her. It might be all to pink, but I'll show you an easy way we can adjust that after we draw in the mouth. Her beautiful smile. Okay, so we're going to actually do the magic wand and just make sure contiguous is selected. We're just going to select that color. Then we're going to do Command U to pull up hue and saturation to adjust it a bit. So overall, I think it's pretty good, but it might be a little too pink, so I'm going to desaturate in a bit and bring it down little darker. At this point, I'm going to turn off my sketch for a bit just to get, and zoom out, to get a good bird's eye view of how everything is looking. She's looking pretty good at this point. So I might go in and refine the mouth a little bit more. I take this line back down because it makes her look a little too worried. Usually when she smiles is not really there. So that's looking pretty good. I still feel like her lips might be a little dark, but let's fill in the rest and see how it goes. We're going to add a blush layer that gives more definition to the face. We're going to do the same thing where we created a new layer and then created, right-clicked and selected clipping mask and release it now. Select clipping mask to make sure that it only shows up on the skin base, to make sure it only shows up on skin base layer. Now I'm going to take a big brushy brush that kinda looks like that. So whatever brush you have that looks like that. I like the color of her lips for this. So I like it when make makeup kinda is just in the same family and it just looks more unified. And then take this and just lightly brush it over her cheeks. And then make my brush smaller and just lightly brush it over the nose. I might lower the opacity a bit on it, just so it's not super, super strong. And kinda go over the areas where I want it to be a little bit more pronounced. I'm going to – I'm constantly zooming in and out because I want to check how it looks overall. Before I get too granular with it. So right now I think it looks pretty darn good. I'm going to pick up the shadow color, or actually I'm gonna go the shadow, change the opacity Normal or the Layer Style Normal, and then change it back to Multiply so I can pick up the shadow color again. I'm also going to add a little shadow on her face. Just to define it a bit more. I can also use my round variable brush for this. Or maybe my Gouache A Go Go. Yeah, my Gouache A Go Go is a nice brushy brush for this. This is just a little more definition to the parts of her face that we're not necessarily drawing in or painting a lot into. This is maybe a little too much. So I'm actually just going to take that back and do more soft blend. You can also soften it by lowering the opacity and then you can just build, build up on it. All right, now we're gonna move on to the hair. So I'm going to refine it a little bit more, the edge of the hair. Because it defines the edge of her face so much. I want to make sure it's very precise. And switch back to my Mr. Natural Brush. There we go. Alright. To define the details of her hair. I'm going to add a new layer. And this is going to be the shadows, going to right-click over it and select "create clipping mask". And I'm going to still take the color of the hair. And I'm going to use the Gouache a Go Go. Switch the mode to multiply and then start hitting the hair. And the parts where I think there will be shadows like behind her long front bang and also the inside where it flips. And also underneath it. The parts that are turning inward towards your face and then also the parts that are curving back out. It's creating more depth. By creating that shadow or the hair would be next to the face on the side that her face is in front of her hair. Her face is casting that shadow. You're just creating more shadow there. Okay, so now I'm gonna go in, create a new layer. Name this one, Highlights right-click, select Clipping Mask. And now we're going to go in and add highlights to her hair. I'm going to select this because that's the hair color. And then I'm going to move in on my color palette over here. Up a little bit, so it's lighter, but still desaturated with color. Let's test that. Oh yeah, that feels good. You don't want it to stand out too much because we're gonna do a hot highlight on top of that. This is a good soft highlight. Highlight, just the back. She's a little more backlit here. I've decided because it's my original painting. Gonna highlight here. All right, Now I'm gonna do a new layer and create clipping mask, hot highlights. And that's going to be the lightest highlights. And I'm gonna go a little more desaturated, a little lighter but not again, still too light. And I'm actually going to use my Gouache round variable brush this time because it gives more of a line. And I'm just gonna do some light lines to indicate more of actually, I'm going to use my Mr. Natural Brush. So I could get these lines that indicate hair. Like now we're just kinda highlighting strands of hair. But it helps define the hair more. Not all parts need to have it. Just a couple of parts is good. You don't need to go too hard with it. Here we go. Now I'm actually going to go back to my shadows and do the same thing. But with picking up the hair color again, I'm just going to add some lines so that it looks like hair, even in the shadows too. These lines help to find the hair more and help it look more like hair, like a different texture than say skin or anything else. Or fabric. All right, I'm actually going to remove this highlight back here because I think it distracts too much. Let's see, let's make the palette a little smaller so it's not touching my painting. All right. I'm gonna go back in and define the shape of the hair a little more. And I'm adding a couple of loose strands so that it doesn't look like a helmet. So it looks like hair. Because even if we do want our strands totally smooth in real life, to make it look better, it actually is nice to look like soft, moving, flowing hair. So now that I have a great solution with her hair. I'm going to reassess how her skin tone looks overall, it's looking a little desaturated to me. And again, this is all relative right now that we've put the highlights and we can see the skin actually is looking a little too desaturated. So we're going to add some more color. Again, Command U to pull up this hue saturation box. Add a little more saturation. Okay, so now for the next one, I'm going to go back and finish off the lips. I'm magic wanding it so that I can pull up the hue and saturation again. I'm adding little more saturation, but desaturating in a bit. No. I think I'm just going to add a little bit more saturation. And then I'm actually going to take this color. I'm going to make it a little darker. I'm going to take something like my Gouache A Go Go. I'm going to alpha lock it, which is this little button right here. So I can just paint on the shape of the objects that are on this layer. So the top lip is always a little darker because it's facing down a little bit. In the 3D world, the plane of the upper lip is facing down a little bit, so it's always a little darker than the bottom lip. So I shaded it in a little more. Now she's looking really good. So with that all in, I'm going to go to the suit layer. And I'm actually going to add a new layer. I'm going to call this details, going to right-click over it to clipping mask. I'm actually going to, since her suit is so dark, I'm actually going to use this lighter blue as the, picking up my mr. Natural brush, the lines I like to do just like a simple line that suggests the suit instead of rendering the suit too much. Which means painting in great detail. Because I think it just feels doesn't distract from her face. So now that we did her suit line details, very simply, we're going to add in her accessories. So actually we're going to add in her earrings. I'm going to break up the accessories even more. So we're gonna do a pearl, but a warm toned pearl, I'm gonna go to kind of the yellowish goldenish area. So even with this, I'm not picking just a black or white, I'm picking a warm tone. Oh, you have to put it above the hair layer. A warm toned white. So it looks way in the context of this, color is all relative. So you can see her earring. And then I'm going to alpha lock it, going to slightly darker shade. And I go back in with that Gouache A Go Go to create a shadow. And then I'm actually going to go to white just to give it that hot highlight so that you can tell it's a pearl, a round pearl. Now we're gonna do a similar thing, new layer for her necklace. We're actually going to put the necklace between the, underneath the suit, but above this guy. So she wears a black, a black pearl necklace a lot, which is really beautiful. So I'm actually going to paint that because you can see that it's actually not black. It's like a dark blue black pearl. So I'm going to go to the blue range. It's very desaturated but still has that blue tone in it, just like skin tones, we're looking for the color in things because everything has a color. It's not just, again, we don't live in a black and white world. We live in a beautiful, multi-colored world. So we're going to do that necklace. It's looking a little big, so I'm going to scale it down by doing Command T to transform and then holding it with my mouse and draw all those pearls. It's a little lower, so I'm gonna move it down a little bit or a little longer. Alright. Now I'm going to do the same thing. Alpha lock it, select a darker blue. Go in with the Gouache A Go Go to do the shadows. I'm going to make it smaller, make my brush smaller by hitting the bracket key. Or you can adjust it up here, the size up here. Just to give it. We're doing the shadow because it indicates that it's a round shape. Roundness of the shadow indicates the roundness of this 3D object. And then we're going to go in and hit it with a light blue. I'm going to use the Mr. Natural Brush so it's more precise. As you can see, the highlights are really precise. And hit it everywhere you can see a highlight on that pearl, that pearl necklace. So actually I'm gonna go back to my skin base, my shadow tone. But I really, you really should just swatch this and I should have done that way earlier. The swatch layer, the palette layer. Do that. Come back to the shadow tone, put it on multiply. And then I'm actually going to use my Gouache A Go Go again in this color and do a little shadow underneath it so you can see that the necklace is sitting on her skin. All right, now I'm going to turn off my palette. I want to zoom out and see the overall color tone. I think that the blush needs to have a little more color in it, it feels a little too desaturated to me. And she tends to wear more of a peachy blush actually. So I'm going to go a little more. Peachy, orangey peachy, saturated up a little. So you can see it. Alright, I'm gonna take it down on the nose bridge because she doesn't tend to have it on there. All right. However, I am going to go in with the shadow, turn my palette back on so I can pick up the color, go back in with my shadow and give her, with the brush larger. Give her a little bit of a shadow there. So you can see that, where that nose bridge would be, alright, and that is how you make a painting out of your sketch. So there you have it. My process for doing a painting in Photoshop. I hope you learned a few new things. Now meet me in the next video to wrap this all up.
9. Conclusion: Congratulations, you made it. I hope you learned something new in every lesson in this class, and you'll take that forward with you as you draw more iconic women in history. You've learned how to gather, reference, and sketch studies so you familiarize yourself with your subject. You've learned how to create an original image, from the reference you gathered to the final art you create is wholly unique to you. You've learned the characteristics of how to draw women of all ages and backgrounds, and you learn how to paint all types of skin tones in full color in Photoshop. I hope you'll use the things you learned in this class to continue to make beautiful artistic tributes to women in history. One of the greatest things in life is that we never stop learning, and there's still so many hidden figures to uncover. Please share your creations in the class project section with me, or on Instagram by tagging me @anndanger. If you create a picture, add a little bit about the woman you draw and why you chose them, so we can all learn from each other. Thank you for joining me for another class. I'll see you next time.
