Illustration Improv: Loosen Up and Find Your Weirdest Ideas! | Tom Froese | Skillshare
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Illustration Improv: Loosen Up and Find Your Weirdest Ideas!

teacher avatar Tom Froese, Illustrator and Designer

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Trailer

      2:18

    • 2.

      About This Class

      3:41

    • 3.

      Creative Block and Self Doubt

      2:35

    • 4.

      Exercise 1: Simple Shapes (Warmup)

      8:03

    • 5.

      Exercise 2: Ideas in Shapes

      14:53

    • 6.

      Exercise 3: Ideas in Shapes Squared!

      16:33

    • 7.

      Project: Refining Sketches Set 1

      16:04

    • 8.

      Project: Refining Sketches Set 2

      31:00

    • 9.

      Project: Finalizing Illustration 1

      20:50

    • 10.

      Project: Finalizing Illustration 2

      18:25

    • 11.

      Project: Finalizing Illustration 3

      12:33

    • 12.

      Project: Finalizing Illustration 4

      9:49

    • 13.

      Project: Finishing Touches

      9:48

    • 14.

      Project: Putting it All Together

      7:55

    • 15.

      Completing the Class

      1:23

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About This Class

Learn how to create more creative, original, and downright weird illustrations in this fun project based class by Award-Winning Illustrator and Top Teacher, Mr. Tom Froese!

Along the way you'll learn how to overcome those two annoying pain points: creative block and self doubt! By using simple and (sometimes even awkward) shapes, it’s fun and easy to come up with some pretty strange but highly creative ideas. If you’ve ever wondered how (and why on earth!?) illustrators come up with their unexpected ideas, this class gives you some clues.

Who This Class is For

  • Anyone looking for new ways to come up with ideas and be more creative in their art!
  • It’s especially geared toward illustrators, but it’s fun and easy enough to do for everybody!

Tom loves helping people tap deeper into their creativity, no matter who they are or what they do for a living!

What You'll Learn

  • How to find MORE ORIGINAL IDEAS
  • How to LOOSEN UP with your drawing
  • How to BREAK FREE from REALISM
  • How to OVERCOME CREATIVE BLOCK and SELF DOUBT
  • Creating Illustrations from ROUGH to FINAL
  • DEEP INSIGHTS into Tom's illustration process!

Minimum Required Skills and Experience

  • No experience or special skills needed
  • Sketching/Plain Paper
  • Pencil and Eraser
  • Tracing Paper or Light Table 
  • Favourite illustration tools (physical or digital welcome!)

About Tom's Tools (Recommended)

  • iPad Pro with Apple Pencil
  • Procreate for Sketching
  • Photoshop on iMac for Final Illustration
  • Astropad to use iPad as graphics tablet for his Mac

You don’t need any experience to take this class, and you don’t need any fancy tools. While Tom will be using Procreate for sketches and Photoshop for finished illustrations, you can just as easily do this class using pencil and paper. Just bring whatever you love working with, or whatever you have on hand, and let the fun begin! Of course, you will get the most out of this class if you know your way around some illustration tools, but that’s certainly optional.

Meet Your Teacher

Teacher Profile Image

Tom Froese

Illustrator and Designer

Top Teacher

Tom Froese is an award winning illustrator, teacher, and speaker. He loves making images that make people happy. In his work, you will experience a flurry of joyful colours, spontaneous textures, and quirky shapes. Freelancing since 2013, Tom has worked for brands and businesses all over the world. Esteemed clients include Yahoo!, Airbnb, GQ France, and Abrams Publishing. His creative and diverse body of work includes maps, murals, picture books, packaging, editorial, and advertising. Tom graduated from the Nova Scotia College of Art & Design with a B.Des (honours) in 2009.

As a teacher, Tom loves to inspire fellow creatives to become better at what they do. He is dedicated to the Skillshare community, where he has taught tens of thousands of students his unique approache... See full profile

Level: Beginner

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Transcripts

1. Trailer: Have you ever looked at someone else's illustrations and wondered how they came up with such random or clever ideas. Have you ever wondered how or why an artist decided to use certain shapes, symbols, and their work as an illustrator it myself, I can tell you that one of the best ways to define a Ideas is by accident. But as someone whose job it is the come up with ideas on purpose. You might be asking, How can I count on such accidents to happen when need them to. My name is Mr. Tom Froese, Illustrator and Top Teacher here on Skillshare. And I'm excited to let you in on a little secret. I make accidents happen on purpose. One of my techniques do this is what I call responsive composition. It's actually a lot like Improv, a form of live theater where performances are made up more or less on this file in response to other things that are happening, other Use that are happening on the stage, hence the class name, illustration Improv. Basically we draw some shapes and then we're given a prompt and then we respond to this prompt by drawing what comes to mind, insider shapes. Join me as we explore the power of responsive compositions in three simple but satisfying Exercises, these will help you literally think outside the box. How will you make this? Find yourself thinking in other shapes instead? But that's entirely the point. For the final project will take some of our favourite compositions and turn them into finished illustrations. These are perfect for sharing with their friends and followers on social media. And you could even turn these into things like t-shirts, stickers, or Art Prints. In this class, you'll learn how to loosen up, break free from realism, blast through creative block and even learn how to develop an illustration from Sketching could finished. Or if you're looking for more ways to find creative ideas and compositions and Your Art. I made this class for you. Please join me. I look forward to seeing you in the Class 2. About This Class: This Class is For Anyone looking for new ways to come up with ideas and be more creative in there are, It's especially geared toward illustrators, but it's Fun and easy enough to do for everybody. I'm all about helping people tap deeper into their creativity no matter who they are or what they do for a living. In this class, you're going to learn how to find ideas you'd never have thought of before. You're going to learn how to loosen up with your drawing and how to break free from realism and come up with more joyfully weird ideas. A lot of the Exercises we're gonna do here, you're going to see some pretty weird stuff happen. He might even like it. You're also going to learn how to blast through creative block and self doubt, those really annoying enemies of creativity. This class is really designed to help you break free from those as much as possible. Along the way, you're also going to learn how to refine a looser idea and turn it into a more confident sketch and ultimately into a final illustration. I'm also going to give you helpful drawing and illustration tips along the way and even share some deeper insights into my own illustration style, tools and techniques. This class is divided into two parts. First, we're going to jump into the Exercises or sketcher sizes, where we're going to explore different ways of using shapes to seed new ideas and our Sketches. Next, in the final project, you'll have the opportunity to turn your favourite sketches into fully finished illustrations. Again, you don't need any experience to take this class and you don't need any fancy tools. Well, I will be using Procreate for my sketches and Photoshop for my finished illustrations. You can just as easily do this class using pencil and paper and maybe some colored pencils. Just bring whatever you love working with or whatever you have on hand. Him, let the fund begin. Of course, you're gonna get the most out of this class if you know your way around some illustration tools, but that's certainly not absolutely required. It's optional. Just one more note, if you're using physical media, it might be useful to have some tracing paper or Light Table. So you don't have to redraw some of the shapes will be working with in the class. But other than that, like I said, no fancy equipment is needed. If you've taken my classes before, you will find this one refreshingly short, we just get right into it with no additional lessons. So let's just get into it. Oh, but one last thing before we get, get on with the rest of the class. As you go through the exercises and the project, please share your work on the class projects page. Your projects or what makes Skillshare such an awesome creative community. This is where you're gonna get a chance to see and comment on one another's work. And of course, this is where I get to see your work myself. And also, please feel free to share what you're working on in this class on social media. You can use the hashtag illustration Improv class. And that's a great way to let more people Find Your work out there. It's a great way to grow your audience. And for me, it's a great way for me to just find your work out there in the wild. Alright, that's all I have to say. Let's get on with the Class 3. Creative Block and Self Doubt: Alright, I said there wouldn't be any lessons before we get into the exercise, but it wouldn't be one of my classes unless I gave you a bit of a primer to start. I just wanted to explain why I made this class and how it can help you in the real-world. There are two things that all creative people struggle with. And the first is coming up with ideas. And the second is getting stuck in self doubt and self-criticism. If you follow me on my podcast thoughts on illustration, you'll know how much I've tended to get stuck over the years, especially with self-doubt, where it comes to finding ideas. Often what happens is we get stuck in one way of thinking. For example, sometimes I just got one image in my head and I can't stop drawing that one thing over and over again. What I love about the techniques in this class is the hair truly among the best ways I know how to get myself out of idea rats and bulldoze over my self doubt. So before we begin, here's just a little rundown of how my responsive composition technique works. We'll go into more detail when we get to the actual Exercises. So first, we start by trying shapes. The more open and irregular the shapes, the better. Next, we started draw things based on a prompt or a theme. Inside the shapes. We're letting the shapes kinda tell us what to draw rather than trying to draw something more on purpose or from our minds. That's why I call it responsive composition, because we're responding to these shapes on the page in a more improvisational way. And that's where the magic of this technique is. Ideas need to come out fast and loose. Just like Improv is often full of embarrassing mistakes. The Sketches are just the starting point. And then later on we can transform them into finished illustrations. You know, maybe they'll even cause others to wonder, how did they think of that? The whole point here is to have fine and maybe even raised some eyebrows. So that's really all you need to know for now. We're gonna get into everything else as we go through the exercises. So get out your pencils and paper for your digital equivalents. And let's get into the Exercises 4. Exercise 1: Simple Shapes (Warmup): This exercise is called Simple Shapes. In this exercise, we're going to start by drawing just some basic shapes on our page. And then we're gonna do a quick little warm-up exercise using the shapes just to get us in the creative mood. So just a quick note about the tool that I'm using. I'm gonna be doing this exercise on Procreate. I might iPad Pro, and I'm using my Apple Pencil, and there'll be using the number six pencil brush that comes with procreate. If you want to find the same brush and I'm using, It's in the sketching brushes. And then you'll find that right down there toward the middle six B pencil. So to start, what I wanna do is draw a few basic shapes, fairly large on the screen here. Are fairly large filling out your page, I should say. So draw a square, draw a circle, and a triangle. And then below that, draw a nice big open cross shape. Now the key here is make sure that these are nice, big, open shapes. Don't do any of the parts too narrow or spindly. The next thing we're going to draw here, just one last big shape here is a more organic blob. Now, let's actually continue to fill in the spaces here. So there's some spaces and try to draw shapes that aren't super straightforward. Anything but circles or squares. All I would say to remember to do here is to make sure that the shapes are somewhat open. The more irregular these shapes are, though, the more interesting things will get later on. So once you have filled your page with a variety of these shapes, but most importantly, the square, the circle, the triangle, the cross, and the blob. It's time to move on to the second part of this exercise. If you're using a digital illustration tools like Procreate, what you can do is add a layer above this. Or if you're using physical media like paper and pencil, of course you can use Tracing Paper or Light Table to do the next part here. So I'm going to just choose a different color. I'll use the cyan color for this layer just so we can see it distinct from the other shapes. And actually what I'm going to do is just take the opacity of my shape layers beneath down a bit so that they're not so distracting. Once you've done that, be sure to select your, your the new layer that you just made. And we're going to start by writing our names in these shapes. You can do your FirstName, if you like, or your full name. And what You'll find is that the way you want to draw on your name? This is what I find any way is sort of based on the sheep. It's responding to the shape. And what you end up doing is arranging your letters in ways that perhaps you wouldn't have thought of without that Shapes help. In this case, here's my name with the cross is very natural that I'm going to try and make this work in a crossword way. And it just so happens that my, OH, in my first and last names works well in the center there. So just keep going and respond to those shapes as instinctually and intuitively as you can. Don't think about a two-minute too much. This is a warm-up exercise. We're not trying to be super clever here. If you want to get super bold, just write one of your letters really large and then figure out what to do next. Has in, I'm doing here and show that T really big. And now I just have to figure it out. And somehow I forgot the E, one of the ease and my name. So as you can see, once, once I have finished my main shapes, the square, the circle, the triangle, the cross, and the blob. I can start to move on to these other shapes and you can go on and do this right to the end. I encourage you to finish the whole thing. Just to really get warmed up. Have some FUN. Okay, so I finished drawing my name or writing up my name and all these shapes. Now let's just take a look and see what happens. See what we can learn from it. So what I found when I did this exercise is when I started with the box. My name is pretty regular like I just kinda spelt it left to right and top to bottom. Dislike I would if I was writing my name on a square piece of paper, kinda normal. But once I hit the circle and the triangle and the other shapes, I really did find myself responding to that shape. So of course we're not drawing yet, we're just writing with letters. But you can really get a sense of how, no matter what kind of marks you're making in these shapes, they just end up being influenced by the shape around it. And you just end up doing things that you're more critical and logical side would, wouldn't have thought to do. I particularly like what happened when I started getting these super irregular shapes, like the blob, for instance, things got pretty wacky there. And the way I write my m's and my ease and stuff, they really look the same and so they start to really mess with my head when I look at that. And I think that's good when you can do things that kinda mess with your head and confused even you as you're drawing them, that's a sign that you're doing something right in this exercise. I also just like how these steps made me just keep it real simple and just stick with my firstName, TOM, just to break my own rule so I don't get too caught up and following rules at all. I did just draw a happy face. They're broke a little rule and drew something that didn't even fit in the shape here with my initials and an arrow. Sometimes it's okay to break your own rules. Can be phon, and it can actually kick you into something more creative, or it can actually just keep you moving. So of course, this is just a Warmup. It's nice to loosen up without having to worry about what to draw. We all know how to spell our names. And so this is a great way to just start thinking responsively on the page. But this actually does have a more practical component to it or a more practical used to it. And that's if we're doing any kind of creative lettering or branding. Starting with a shape and learning how to respond to that with our lettering, with our writing. Without worrying about if it's correct, is a really good thing to practice. Now that we warmed up, Let's move onto the next exercise. 5. Exercise 2: Ideas in Shapes: This exercise is called Ideas in Shapes. It should be totally unsurprising that we're gonna be drawing stuff inside the shapes we just drew. But of course, it's probably going to help have some kind of prompt or idea to start with. So first, let's come up with a theme to draw from. For this exercise. Choose a theme based on your hobby, your favorite past-time, or your job. I'm a runner, so he use running as my theme. Now if you want, you can get more specific and it actually might help you come up with ideas faster. Like for instance, for me, running might just be too general. It might be too wide open as a theme. So to help I could narrow it down into a more specific experience like trail running or running on a hot day. If you need to just set your theme to something general than just choose a general theme and pick an object based on that theme like from you, it might be a running shoe. And then just try and fit that into each of your funny shapes. And as you go along, you'll probably think of other things and you're going to loosen up. And ideas will start flowing more easily just as you get warmed up. Now I want to remind you that there is no limit on how many of these things you get to do. It's your time and your project. You can do 1,000 of these if you want. So don't feel like you need to have the best idea or the perfect theme right away. I guarantee that even if you have the best theme right now, like right away, no matter what, you're going to think of something better as you go along. So of course, the first thing we wanna do before we get started is choose our theme. And your theme can be based on your job, or it can be based on your hobby or something that you're interested in. So I'll just quickly show you how I would brainstorm that if this will help you come up with something for yourself here. So of course, my hobby, one of my hobbies is running. My job is an illustrator. I could also just do a third category here, which is more of like things I'm interested in. And maybe one of those things is space. Another thing would be travel. So you can see there's lots of ways you can figure out what you want your, your theme to be on. I'm going to stick with running. And if I get stuck in the running thing, I might go more specific and make it about trail running. But the point here is to make it something that I'm interested in, something that I know a little bit about, that I don't have to struggle to think of Ideas for it as I go into the next part. So once you've chosen your theme, you can begin the more FUN part. So what I'm going to do, because I'm working in Procreate is just activate that layer again with my original shapes. I'm just gonna use those exact same shapes as my starting points. Again, I'm going to create a new layer and make sure that I'm drawing in a different color just so it stands out. And I'll go through these shapes and the same order that I did the first exercise in. So the point here is just to be as fast and intuitive as you can. Don't overthink things, don't be critical. Like for instance here, I'm already been critical of myself. Like I drew high tops because high tops aren't the correct shoe you would run in. But of course, I can say, well, it's not a high top. It's a running shoe with socks in it. And once you've drawn that, you can move on to the next shape for the circle. I am going to not overthink it. The first thing that I thought of here was a tree for some reason, even though it's not circle shape. But I can use that circle shape just to fit the tree. And then maybe there's a little trail marker on the tree there sometimes that's what I see, and then I'm going to move on. Now the triangle is also a tree shape. And that's really the first thing that I thought of. So I'm just going to draw a tree and for some reason I just thought of a running tree. So maybe what I'll do is I don't usually encourage editing while you're in this stage, but I want this to be running trees. I'll just remove that stem and put some eyes on here. There's my running tree. Moving on to the cross shape. Again, don't think too hard about oh, what could be. For me, it's like, Oh, what could be cross-shaped and running themed? Now, if I wanted, I could get, really, I could sit here a moment and think about it. But if I get stuck, I can just draw whatever the heck I want. And sometimes what I do is I just draw a mark that just gets me out of trying to do the perfect thing. And suddenly I see someone VB stretching. This definitely looks like Hat shape. So I'm gonna stick a hat in here. If you're a trail runner, you'll often see a lot of people wearing trucker hats. So that's a trucker hat. This one. And a draw candy. This one I'm going to draw shoes with no toes or with toes sticking out of it, I should say. Because maybe he ran so much that he wore off the end of his shoe. And for this one, it looks like a crown to me, which reminds me of King of the mountain, which is if you're a runner or a cyclist, and you record your runs on Strava and you are the fastest one on a segment or a root, then you get a crown icon, little badge thing that says you're the king of the mountain. So the mountain, this one will be, I keep seeing shoe shapes. And that's okay. I think of like at the start of a race, when the starting gun goes off. This one, I'm just starting a mark. I don't know what it's gonna be. Maybe it's an arrow marker, something you might see on the trail. You're trying to be trying to find your way around. I'm starting off with no idea what I'm drawing. Except for I have this notion that it's like a giant watch on a person runner, I guess. That does not make any sense. These two shapes I'm going to put together as a, someone really trying to go for it. This is an arm holding a water bottle. This will be a metal. You can see that I'm just drawing over my other doodles as I go along. And that's completely okay. Now here I see mountains and maybe like a weird landscape where you're running. And then there's a trail getting you to the mountains. And assign that disproportionately large. It's bigger than the mountains. And for some reason, pointing you that way. I'll figure out what to do with that later. You just have one more shape to fill in here. Maybe it's just a rock with some grass and dirt around it. Okay. So I am done this exercise now. Sometimes I come up with stuff the first time through this exercise and I love it. And there's lots of stuff for me to work with for some reason. I really struggled to get through this one for some reason. And so what I'm, what I'm gonna do is just say like try again and see if you can if you can go a second time. There's no limit to how many times you do this. I think the important thing is just to keep that momentum going and not to get frustrated yourself. This is just Sketches. This is supposed to be phon. And so what I'm gonna do is just to make this different this time around is I'm going to rotate my page 90 degrees. I'm going to use a different color. And I'm going to just try my running theme again and maybe trying just relax and draw it without thinking more. It's okay if you struggle to come up with ideas the first time. Because this is really just about free floating, free form, free association type ideas. A big thing about Improv is this idea, yes, and where, no matter what you're given, whatever prompt you're given, safe from your audience or from your fellow actors on stage, all participating in this improvised performances. You have to take what you get. You have to work with what you're given from the other people and try and make the best of it. And you're going to bomb. Things are going to work out. If you're if you're saying, oh, that's not good enough, I didn't get the right cue. I didn't get the right prompt. I didn't get the right setup for this or whatever. You can always blame the outside for why you didn't have the right conditions. Here is just about making the best of it and saying yes and yes. I'm gonna go with that. And how about this? Yes. I drew a weird propeller. And how about drawing some hands-on it? Figure out what to do it later. So I've filled out actually two pages worth of these improvised drawings in my shapes. And honestly as I was doing this, I was starting to get frustrated with myself. I was starting to feel like I wasn't coming up with good ideas. I was being critical of myself. And this is the exact thing that I'm trying to help Overcome in this class. But I'm going to leave what I've done here because I still have a lot of hope in the process. I trust the process enough that I know that I can come up with some good stuff, even from the things that a pardon me is just like I could have come up with better ideas. And well, I just want to quickly review what I've done. The first thing here was that I had my running theme and I went in and tried to fill in these shapes. My first attempt was in red. And I have this stretching guy. I have a hat, I have a shoe with my toes coming out, however running tree. And then for some reason I thought maybe I could do better and are or at least come up with some more ideas. And so I went again. And this is what you can see now in the cyan drawings. And I came up with a few more and I got, kinda got weirder. I got Boulder. I just was like, Why don't I try something that I totally haven't tried before. And so I did some lettering. I did shapes that just didn't make any sense at all like this. P with foot and stuff like that. So I'm just going to leave these behind and move on to the third exercise and see what I can make obese. But before we do, I just want to say a big takeaway here is that we're often given shapes to work within that seem restrictive. Now I'm talking about when we're actually doing assignments are jobs for clients. For example, if you're working on a kid's picture book and the layout of the tax is already in place from your Art Director. You can use the shape of the space that you've been given as the starting point for your Ideas. In other words, you can respond to the shape of the spaces that Your Art Director has left view. Another takeaway here is that this is an example of how constraints can make us more creative. Sometimes we encounter limits or less than ideal conditions in our projects. And we feel like these are getting in the way of our true creativity. But creativity doesn't happen in the absence limitations. It's how we can solve our visual problems in spite of them in sometimes because of them. What can be more ideal as a canvas shape to work with than a basic square or rectangle. It's not like they sell triangle or octagon canvases at the Art Supply Shop. But because we have to work within these more random shapes, as you can see, it's actually easier to find ideas because part of the Ideas starts in the shape itself. Maybe one of the problems with canvases, we have this blank canvas syndrome or this blank page syndrome. The problem with it is that they're squares and rectangles. At this point, of course, feel free to share your work on the class projects page. Cheer your chosen theme, your original shapes, and the Sketches you created. Other than that, we can get onto the next exercise. 6. Exercise 3: Ideas in Shapes Squared!: This final exercise is called Ideas in Shapes Squared. Now, don't be fooled by the name. I don't mean will be drawing squares at all are, I would hope not. Actually. What we're gonna be doing is taking some of the symbols and things we drew inside the shapes and the last exercise. And we're gonna be using them as the starting shapes this time. Now here's where the squared part comes in. We're going to add a second theme and mix it in with our first theme. So it's sort of like having our first idea or theme to the power of the second one. So just for phon, let's just go with the worst or least favorite job we ever had. That's gonna be our second theme, our worst, the worst job we ever had. Mine was definitely working at Burger King. If that doesn't work for you, you can choose another theme, maybe your favorite cuisine, or maybe even your worst fear. Now, because I had a little bit of trouble when I was doing my running thing, Thinking of things to draw in the shapes for whatever reason I was getting mentally blocked. This time what I'm gonna do is just seed my imagination a little bit before we get on with the rest of this exercise. So I just want to think of some images before I even start thinking about how they'll fit into shapes and stuff like that. What are some ideas or concepts related to working at Burger King? I remember that I hated wearing the uniform. I thought it was super dorky. I got fired. I'm thinking of putting burgers on the flame broiler. I'm thinking of obviously hamburgers, the smell of onions. I think of the furniture inside the restaurant, like the booths and stuff like that. I remember the particular location that I was at had and dingy basement where I had part of my interview. I think I remember garbage bags full of expired hamburgers. So I could go on with this imagery. There is some of the more obvious stuff like fountain soda and a cup. The containers that hamburgers used to come in back in the day. I remember rollerblading work. I remember the advisors that we had to wear. That's not a very good advisor, but basically like a baseball hat, but the top cutoff with the Burger King logo, which I proudly wore as a badge of dishonor after I got fired because I owned the uniform. Did you know that for a lot of these part-time jobs, you actually have to like it. Part of your first paycheck goes toward funding your own uniform for your job. That was a surprise to me. Another thing that I remember from this first job that ever had was that five-minutes early was on time. So in order to be considered on time for work, it was a surprise to 15 year old Tom that I had to show up five-minutes before my actual start time. Kinda makes sense now as an adult. But why don't they just say you start at five to four or whenever you have to be there, instead of seeing you start at four, just say you start at five to four small rant. We can get on with the actual exercise here. Now that I've just kind of font a little bit more about what it means, what, what Burger King, what my worst job meant to me, and why just to, just to get things going before I start this exercise in Procreate or wherever you happen to be drawing, you can create a new layer or open to a new page. And what we're gonna do instead of working with those shapes that we did for the first couple of Exercises, we're now going to make shapes based on our previous theme. So for me that was running. So I'm going to make a running shoe. It's more of a stocking shape and a tree. So these are just shapes that happened to come up that in some way or another I drew inside the more basic shapes the last time. What else did I have? I had a hat shape somewhere in there. I think I had a shoe with the toes poking out of it. And of course you want to draw these as big open shapes. You can take up more of the page for this one because we're not going to be filling in with all those extra shapes. What else did I have? I had something around a water bottle, I'm sure of it. And I had a watch shape. I can probably fit one more here. I had some kind of I know it wasn't wavy like this, but it was a trail to those mountains and that weird skinny one. So I'll just draw a wavy trail shape there. And I know I also had some arrows, so I'll just draw an arrow there. Now I have my big open shapes. And these are gonna be what I now fill in with my second theme. So the, the big open shapes that I just drew here unrelated to my first theme. Now, my things that I'm going to draw in here gonna be related to my worst job ever, which was Burger King. And just to mix things up, I'm going to go with a green color. Maybe that will make me more creative to have a totally different color. And you don't have to draw on these the right-side-up that you could do them upside down. And just see what happens. I'll start right-side-up just just to see what happens. So I did say that I remember rollerblading to work that feels like inappropriate use of this. And I remember what else? I don't know why, but this tree makes me think of a stacked hamburger, which I don't even know if they exist at Burger King, like a Big Mac kinda thing. But I'm going to just draw that. And it's got onions and lettuce and maybe a slice of melted cheese on a sesame been. This one is going to be cup of soda that someone's holding. So you can make these drawings loosely related to your theme or exactly about it. The point is just to have funding and get creative here. This, I'm going to try and make it into an angry boss because I came on time instead of five-minutes early. And my boss just happens to be the Burger King himself. What does the Burger King look like? I don't know yet. We're going to find out maybe he has long regal hair and a kingly beard. And he's mad, so he's crossing his arms. Now this also reminds me of a crown shape. Since we're thinking about Burger King and kings and crowns, maybe this is, I don't know, this is a hamburger, like the bottom of a hamburger bun and then Meet part with the Iranians. And then it just happens to have a crown. Just kinda weird. I'll leave that less. We be Trail shape reminds me of Bacon. Has nothing to do with the experience of my worst job ever. But, you know, bacon Always factors into fast-food somehow. This hat shape is obviously going to be my burger King visor. There's a young Tom with his visor. I lost my arrow shape. But maybe what I'll do just for PFK-1 is do it one more time. I'll go through and make a few more Burger King worst job ever themed drawings here. I remember there was a sort of like a machine that had it was basically the broiler and there was like a conveyor belt like this. And there was flames, like a barbecue. And we have to put the burgers on. And they would go into this thing and come out the other side and be cooked. And that was the flame broiler. Just one after the other frozen patty on the broiler thing, keep putting them on the conveyor belt and they cook. I also remember Thinking about garbage bags full of hamburgers that we had to throw out. So if the hamburgers sat in the warmers after being cooked for more than 15 min, we had to throw them out and we weren't allowed eating them. This one, I'm going to start with a face. It's a Burger King worker. They're making a burger. They're putting it together. It's probably me. There was a certain order that we had to put our condiments on. So there is mayonnaise on the crown. And then we had to put lettuce next. And then the tomatoes, and then the Iranians. Then we put the ketchup or whatever on the burger. So there's me trying to put it All Together in the right order. Now here's my resume that I handed to my future employer. And I had no prior experience. A very short essay. This arrow could say drive-through. This is one of the reasons I got fired was because I was too slow. I'm making the burgers. So here's me as a snail. Feeling bad about myself for not being fast enough. That my job, That's the hat. This is me with my burger King golf shirt. And I'm full because I've been snacking on the burgers from the garbage bag. That's the logo. And I'm kinda feeling sick. Got a little greedy. Got long hair at the time. Okay. What else can at here? This is just a stream of hamburgers on a conveyor belt. So what I'm finding I wasn't going along is that I'm loosening up. I'm warmed up now and now ideas are coming, they're freely flowing. And that's something you'll experience also, as you do these kinds of projects, they do require a bit of a Warmup. I imagine that if I was doing some actual Improv onstage in front of an audience, I wouldn't want to warm up before I did that. And I think also, the more you practice these things, the more you actually do Improv, the better you become at it, the more confident you become at it. One of the things that's hardest for me as an artist is actually performing my Art in front of people. I like to work alone and in secret and not be self-conscious. One of the things that I find super hard to do is to draw in public, like say, sit on a busy street, maybe sit down on a chair and just start drawing what I see. Because I know people are going to come up and they're gonna be watching me and they're going to say, Oh, who's the artist, what are they? What are the up to? And then I imagined them standing over my shoulder. Rather disappointed by the bad drawings that this so-called artists happens to be making. Now, that's not a good place to be when you're trying to come up with ideas. That's exactly the kind of mindset that's going to get you stuck. And you'll probably spend your tires for a long time and ultimately feel really bad. And you'll have no joy in the process. So I'm finding, just as I'm doing this more, I'm forgetting that I'm recording, I'm forgetting that I'm talking to you. And that's just helped me come up with some really FUN ideas that I'm actually really excited about. And so just an encouragement to you as you're going along. If you're not getting the hang of it right away, if you're finding these Exercises frustrating, It's very possible that you just need to let yourself Warmup more if you find yourself saying to yourself, okay, I'm all warmed up now. Now, I should be gumming up with better ideas. And you're still getting stuck. Take a break, walk away, go for a walk, how some water, and then come back into it and remind yourself, just to draw whatever comes to mind and don't get stuck. If you're things aren't really on point or they're not matching the shapes, they're off theme, keep drawing, keep drawing them anyway. Because in the next stage, when we actually start trying to turn these into final illustrations, I'm going to show you how you can still rescue your bad drawings. And hopefully you're seeing a lot of bad drawings here because ideas always start out bad. So once you've filled out your shapes, you can consider yourself ready for the final project. The power of this exercise is in how we can combine two totally different ideas together for a very unexpected result. Now, this one was kind of random running and working at Burger King in my case. But if you're working on an actual illustration job, you can take two different ideas or subjects from your brief and uses as a way to explore how to combine them. For example, maybe you're making an illustration for a magazine article about tips for traveling with toddlers. So maybe you make shapes that are travel-related, like the shape of different road signs, or maybe a full LDAP map, or maybe shaped like cars or an airplane. And then you can draw a toddler, unrelated symbols or objects or characters, or even words inside of these shapes. And from there, That's how you can start to generate some interesting, unique, and original ideas that you would never thought of work. Now of course, everything we've just done is just a starting point. I hope you had a lot of Fun with these exercises, but now it's time to get to the really satisfying part where we turn these into actual illustrations. Join me in the next lesson to see what's next. Now again, at this time, feel free to take a moment to share what you've done so far on the class projects page and on social media using the hashtag illustration Improv class. And be sure to tell us in the caption or project what your first and second themes are? 7. Project: Refining Sketches Set 1: For the final project, we're going to turn our favourite sketches into finished illustrations. We'll start by choosing our favourite sketches. Now I suggest maybe three to five, but you can start by doing just one if you want. Next, we'll refine our rougher sketches by tracing over them in a more careful and considered way. For those with loud inner critics such as myself, this part might be especially satisfying. This is what we're gonna do in this video. And then in the next one will turn each sketch into a finished illustration. For the end of this project, you'll have a FUN little Set illustrations to share on the class projects page and on social media. But not so fast. Before we get to the actual finalized illustrations, we still have to come up with our more Refined Sketches and that's what we're going to have done by the end of this video. What we want to do to start is just choose our favourite rough sketches. And what we're doing is we're choosing a few of them to refine and make more clear before we take them into the final illustration. So I gave myself quite a lot of options because I did two tries for both Exercises. So as you remember in exercise two, I did the trail running theme in these sort of basic shapes. And I did that once and then twice here. And then for exercise three, when I drew those more trail running based Shapes, I did another two tries. So this is exercise three, my first take, and then my second take here. The real problem I've given myself here is I have too many options. So let's just see if I can little things down. I think to start, I'm just going to choose a set to refine from Exercise two. And I'll just make this a little bit clear so we can all see what's going on. So if you remember from Exercise two, I wasn't sure that I liked any of these first ones. But now that I'm here, I'm seeing a few that I really actually do like I liked this triangle tree guy. I do like the King of mountain. I liked the shoe that has the toes sticking out. I'm going to pick two more on this page. So I'll do the discombobulated, stretchy guy here that's in the cross shape. And the, I like the arm holding the water bottle. That is my first set. I've chosen five and maybe I'll just choose however many I like from this one. I like this guy with the I don't know, there's something kind of cute about that. I like this tree guy. How about the bib? And why not do the beer as well? Okay, so I've chosen four out of this and five out of this. Just to be clear, I'll hide the original shape layers. Yeah, let's start refining the ones that I've chosen here to start. So we're going to trace over these with more confidence and this is gonna give us a chance to make any additions or changes to them. If we want, we can try and make them fit our Shapes better. Which is maybe a good reason to keep your original shapes that you drew kinda visible as well as your first rough sketches. So in Procreate, I just kinda take my layers down roughly 30%. And then over top those create a new layer. And just so we're a little bit organized, I'll rename this to something like Refined one. When I'm refining a sketch. If anything was really sketchy. Like if my lines were sort of tentative or something like this, if you're trying to build up a shape. I don't actually draw like that a whole lot. I usually do just kinda naturally Draw and bolder lines like this. But if there's anything kind of unsure or tentative or loose or shaky, I try and just go over them. In these bold contour lines. Because we're not being as impulsive here, we're not being as fast and loose. You can take a little bit more time here to be more considered. So I'm just noticing that the shoe shapes here are both different ones, more flat on the bottom and the other is round. And I want those to match. Thinking a little bit more about my composition here. This is his shorts here that he's wearing. Do I do the shorts so that the the cutoff ends up exactly where his torso ends there? Or does that create some confusion? Does it create a bit of a visual traffic jam where this these two lines come. I wanted to see maybe if I can make the shorts come a little lower and make it even more clearly like the cut-off shorts. So I've put this little I don't know what you call it, but it's a little triangular cut that some shorts have there. And the reason I'm thinking of doing that is to, again, just differentiate it from this line which is his torso. Obviously, this is a very unrealistic thing, but anything I can do to add clarity to the idea, to the concept is good. For this project. The shapes are just a starting point. So that original cross shape that I have under there, my discombobulated runner guide, he doesn't perfectly fit in there. But I'm not worried my goal wasn't to draw something. The shape of a cross. The cross was just what do you do with this shape when it's thrown at you? When you're trying to draw things within a given theme. He should have a shirt of some kind. So maybe he's wearing a tank top. And just to give a little bit of definition to his arm there, I'll add a wristwatch. Another thing I might want to add here is some kind of pattern to help set apart the torso part from the shorts. This is supposed to be that logo on a shoe. Leave it like that. Then I can move on. I'm just going to actually move this guy a little bit out of the way because I have another sketch that was just right below him and they were kind of crashing into each other. So this was the hand holding the water bottle. And actually I'm going to take this guy here and move them right out of the way. I'm being a little bit more careful here about how things are going. Not quite sure that's the right solution. What I did there. So I'm going to try and do this a little bit true or to my original sketch. I think I liked that better. By not having that little thumb part that I drew here. I can put this water bottle further back. It being somehow you're to look at. And because I want that to be a little bit more interesting, I'm thinking, what can I add to the arm to make it more interesting? Could it be a tattoo? Maybe sometimes when you're doing a triathlon or something, you get your bib number just tattooed on? Sometimes, I don't know. Is it a sleeve or maybe a message like hydrate? Sure. This is a good message. Stay hydrated. We'll move on to the damaged shoe. Playing a little bit with, you know, what, what is my visual language for a shoe? Here, I'd made no laces or anything because they were just part of a bigger composition. So I'm not too worried, but here the focus is on the shoes. So I'm thinking about what goes into illustrating a shoe up close. So we're going to go with that. Move on to the King of mountain badge here. So again, there's a social media app called Strava. And Strava is like Instagram for runners, but instead of sharing photos In videos, we share our roots. If you happen to run faster on a certain route or a segment, then you get a little badge that makes you the King of the mountain. For Mr. triangle tree. Think what I'll do is just make the undulations are the likes, the side profile of the tree shape go a little bit wider. I'm going to run into a little bit of congestion in here with the face details because I'm using such a fat pencil tip here. So if I find this too crowded, I can correct that later on. Slightly more dynamic leg Shapes there. And he's gotta be wearing a hat. Okay. I have my 12345. Okay, so I've just iterated and Refined on my first set of running themed illustrations. I'm just going to hide that layer. Hide my original rough sketches, go to my second set and see if I can refine these in the same way. Again, I'm just going to take the opacity of this layer down. And I might even take the opacity of my original shape layers down even more. Found those a little bit distracting last time I went in here. So gonna just add a new layer and trace over these. And I'm gonna make my pencil brush here just a slightly smaller so that I don't get that kinda congestion or crowding in these smaller shapes. It's still good to keep your pencil relatively bold because you don't want to get bogged down in details. If you have your pencil or your whatever brush you're using to trace over to find. First of all, it's just gonna be this spindly little line like this. And it's not as satisfying. It looks somehow less confident and I don't like that. And also, you can start seeing, oh, there's a lot of spacing here. So I want to add another detail there and maybe I'll do some zigzags. You'll want to just fill in all that space because there's room for it. And it won't look right until you fill it in. A way of tricking yourself into making things more simple. In bold is just work in a larger brush size, almost like the difference between Sketching with a pencil and Sketching with a Sharpie. This tree has his eyes higher up in his mouth low, which is the different feeling than the one that I just drew in the last set. If I want, I can experiment with, you know, where to put that mouth, for instance. I kinda like that. Now for the beer. Just want to make those shapes a little more regular. Again, we're not so worried about whether the original shape is intact. Want to add more detail. Maybe put a tab here so that the beer looks open. What else did I circle here? The bib. These are supposed to be safety pins. As you Refining These, just feel free to add new details just like I did in the last set there where I was adding the details of the shorts and stuff. This is not about being true to your rough sketch. It's about taking a rough sketch and taking it to the next step. And sometimes as you're Refining, you might actually come up with new ideas that you hadn't seen at first. Like for this arm. I know it's kinda gross but I see sort of like it's been cut off and I imagine like the bone coming out of the arm and then there's the flesh around it and I let super gross. I'm not going to do that. I like the face too much to edit that out. Let's see. Holding could just be like a barbell or a flag pole. Maybe it's a trophy. Because it's a trophy, it won't be super detailed. Maybe just one more for phon, I'll redraw. This funny character reminds me of the bookworm from Richard's Gary's illustrations. So maybe this is the bookworm. So, so far I've selected my favorite rough sketches from Exercise two, and I'm gonna go and do the same for exercise three. And again, my ultimate goal here is to end up just with 34, maybe five of these little funny sketches to take into my final Project. 8. Project: Refining Sketches Set 2: I'm hiding all my other layers and just looking at my second set here, the first round that I did, I'll turn on those original shapes just so I can see what the original shape I was going for. And I'm kinda just scale that back and visibility or opacity just like it did for the other ones. And the reason I'm leaving the original shapes visible is because maybe I want to be true to those Shapes. Maybe I want to see if I can make that hamburger, for instance, that I drew here more pine tree shape. If I wanted to do that as a creative exercise, that's something that could do. So I'm leaving those original shapes just so it reminds me of where I started. You could go either way. So I'm saying, on the one hand, you don't have to be perfectly true to your original shapes. But on the other hand, you can also use that as a challenge. If you think it's going to make your concept or something in your illustration, just more interesting. So I'm leaving it a bit ambiguous so that I can go either way. I'll start with the roller blade. Now one thing about this exercise that's different from a lot of the way that I teach Illustration. Actually, the way that I go about illustration is that I'm not doing any reference images. Usually what I do is I go through a process drawing things just from observations. So let's just say I wanted to know what a roller blade or inline skate looked like. I would first just go on Google image search and find such an image, an image of a roller blade. Draw that from exactly the way I see it, not with the intention of drawing it realistically later, but just so I know some of the moving parts. But for this exercise I haven't done that. And part of the reason is I I didn't know that I was going to be drawing a roller blade or a hamburger or my old Burger King uniform and Visor and stuff like that. So the ideas came before I knew what references to pull. However, if I wanted to, now that I know what I'm drawing, if I want to reference them a little bit more and see what they look like, I could just go onto Google Images and search them retroactively. So that's totally an option of what you wanna do if you get stuck about what details. But part of the font of this is that you really aren't drawing realistically it All this is really about getting away from realism and coming up with this just downright weird. Just drawing layers here I have to figure out which parts burger in which parts the button later. So there's the heel, the bottom part of the button. This is a burger. This is a burger, I guess. That's a burger. Oh, no. I got things mixed up. So that's nothing. Let's put a hand down there holding it. It just gets so weird. Little flag like there's a toothpick holding everything together. Now for the hand holding the fountain drink, I'll draw the fountain drink cup shape first. And the lymph straw. How can I make this relate more to the theme of my worst job ever? Maybe it's like I'm going to actually iterate over this again because I just had a thought about how that could be even more on my concept of worst job ever. And because it was such a bad job and it caused me anxiety, maybe the idea is actually the inversion of what I originally drew. So I originally had this shape like this, which was based on my watch shape from running. And then I drew this weird cop in hand thing. There's something bulgy about that original shape that in a way like you could think of it being like a cup that's About to explode like it's swelling in the middle. But maybe that swelling is inverted like this. So you have a cup that's being squeezed tight. Somebody you want to get that tight feeling and the cup here, some kind of creases. And challenge here is how to get that cup to look equally like a cup. And also something that's being scrunched and distorted. Sometimes when I'm drawing and iterating and refining, I go in there with my eraser and refine some of the lines to get it looking somehow more confident and finalized. Now, I wanted to just refer back to the original sketch here and keep myself on track. Think I might be overthinking things. Something closer to what I had is probably good. So I'm gonna go back and just try and do that crushed cup, but less over the top. Do a more suddenly. And I could still edit this later if I thought there was any use in doing so. Just need to make room for that straw. Maybe some pop is coming out. Yeah. I'm thinking of like if the cup gets crushed and the lids not going to fit anymore in some of the pop is going to spill. And you get a little bit more action and a little bit more story in that. Maybe I don't want to limps, draw the hair. Maybe it's more about there's more energy in a straight straw sticking out. And again, I can iterate over that later if I want. I wanted to also just play around with this guy here is something I like about it. Just in concept like that. It's kind of referencing me wearing my adviser when I was a teenager. But I want to make it clearer somehow. So what does Advisor look like? Adviser is basically a hat that's had its top cut off than the way I draw hats that split advisor would look like. I'm just trying to get a sense of will that look like a visor? I think it well, let's go with that. Do like the bubbly shape they are to. The question is, how do I draw this the way I draw? So usually I draw my shapes of hats just like that from the side. I don't ever Draw hat like this, but it's bubbly. Just as a rule. It's just not naturally how you do it, but, uh, kinda like that. I just like the way this was shaped like that. But I'm going to cut it off like that. No, that's not gonna work. Okay, so I kinda cheated and I went to Safari just to see what adviser looked like. Getting stuck on this. It was just trying to figure out what how do I represent a visor and a clear way that is also in my style. And my usual way of drawing hats, which is usually just like a, like a semicircle and a stick or a line like that. It wasn't really working for me. So I found this image of the Burger King visor that I would have worn back in the day. And I can see that it's really I like a headband that would sit on your head at a little bit of an angle. And then the visor would do something like this, kinda like a duck bill. But it kinda works just to actually come off of that with a circle. So that's what I'm gonna do. Pretend I'd never cheated there. But I like how this guy looks like now. Now, my hair back in the day would've sat over. I kind of a mushroom cut. You don't have to be literal. Though my hair, these little illustrations were making can actually be related to maybe a story about yourself. Or they can just be more random. And I think that's kinda where I'm going with this Again, there's still some things that we're going to have to figure out where it comes to Finalizing these illustrations anyway. So I'll just start with that and see if I can take it further later. It's kind of a logo, they're angry. Burger King. Just going to take that part of my original sketch and bring them out this way. I'm not worried about damaging that other sketch there because I'm not going to draw it. And just so it's clear what I'm iterating over all actually just hide some of these other layers. So it's clear. Here's my burger King man. This is my very disappointed manager. There you go. He looks grump here already. So for me at this stage, part of the thing I'm trying to figure as will the drawing actually work out? Will it make sense? Like will it make sense to have an ear floating between beard and hair? What does that mean? I can always revisit that later. So another question I have is do I draw his body also? Or is it enough that he has a grumpy face? Like I'm thinking of a boss being impatient and thinking, tom, you're too slow, hurry up and make some for hamburgers. We've got some hungry customers. Okay, So just like the last time, we're going to choose a few of these that we really like. I have this slow snail guy, the garbage bag full of burgers. And maybe we'll do this guy. Kate. And again, just like the last time we're going to take that back in opacity. I will take the original shapes that were in the background there down as well. So it's not as confusing, but leave him kind of visible on my screen so that if I want to reference that original shape that I drew them in, then I can, I'm going to start with the slow snail. I don't really know how a shell on a snail works and I'm not going to worry about it. Let's kinda thing that I get obsessive about, which I now am actually now that I'm thinking about it, I'm thinking how does a snail work? I think it's something like this. And again, you can cheat if you want. It's not actually cheating to go on Google Images and just look up a reference of whatever it is you're trying to draw at this stage because we've done this sort of more improvisational part. This is just about Refining and coming up with some actual Ideas. So maybe his visor is from the front. And this is weird like what's the point of advisor? If your eyeballs come up top and that does it even look like a visor anymore? Probably not. There's original goes pretty cute. I need to retain something of that cuteness. What I think I'm going to end up doing is keeping the original cute slug like this, put the visor on his shell. I think that's actually funnier. The question is, do I do a little bit of an opening there, get more of a shell shape. I like the contrast of this snail compared to the running theme that I did originally, which is more about being fast. And that we have this snail. Question is how do I draw that visor on the snail? These are definitely the details you want to work out during your sketches stage and not when you're trying to make a final illustration, because it's always easier to play around and Sketches than in a Final Illustration Style when you're introducing colour and technique and textures. And if you're working in physical media, that's gonna be even harder because everything you do is more or less permanent. As long as you're working in Pencil, either physical or digital, you're actually able to erase quite easily. Do I add some part of his Gastropod thing there. Yeah, that makes it more sneakily. Garbage bag full of burgers. So when I was illustrating this, I was thinking like how can I make it clear that there's burgers in here without it just being black garbage bag. Is there like a tear in it and burgers are falling out? Yeah. Maybe something like that. So there's like hamburgers kind of falling out of the wrong part of the bag. Because I want this part here to be maybe it's like a hand holding it. And just try this idea one more time. The most important shape in this concept here is the garbage bag. So it needs to, It needs to have that kind of bottom heavy, bulgy feeling of a garbage bag on the bottom. And then everything else has to work with that. My original sketch had that the right feeling to it. The question is, how do I make it a garbage bag full of hamburgers? When garbage bags are black, we don't know or see what's inside. This is a scenario where the Ideas clever or the Ideas gray, like a garbage bag full of hamburgers. But I would really need to break away from the shape in order to make it clear about what's happening. So I would maybe need to think of a different way of saying it's a garbage full of old hamburgers. So it's maybe it's like if you have, I'm just totally breaking away from my shape now. But maybe you have a garbage can shape. And then a whole bunch of hamburgers. Some with their buns still on, some of the patties. Kinda just thrown about. So maybe it's like you have a garbage cancel full of hamburgers that the lid won't fit on straight and that's not true to my memory. My memory is grabbing the garbage bag and it's full of burgers and it's hanging. And I'm thinking this is such a waste of food. And I'm hungry. But this more clearly communicates the idea of discarded hamburgers and a garbage and lots of them. So going to stick with that, I'm happy with that. I could take that into a Final Illustration if I wanted. Then I said I would draw this one last guy. So I'll just move this iterated refined sketch of the way. And then here we have guy holding hamburger. When you're thinking about using a shape to base a composition M. If the shape is well-known or has relevance to the brand that you might be referencing, for instance, then of course, that shape might be worth retaining. What if this guy, instead of being in the shape of water bottle, was in the shape of a Nike swoosh, right? And maybe just for instance, maybe I'm drawing some things for my client who happens to be a really big sneaker company. They probably want me to keep their logo intact. I would ask, how would I do that? Now, of course, this Bushi logo probably wouldn't have inspired me to draw a guy putting together hamburger. It might have made me think more of like a scoop of mayonnaise or something like that. But my point here is that there are some shapes that are worth retaining for your final composition in this kind of scenario where we're working with responsive compositions were drawing in Shapes. But if that shape ultimately has no meaning to most people like that, or it's too ambiguous, then it's not necessarily worth saving. So in this case, I'm just going to stay true to the proportions that I made without being too worried about that original shape coming through. Maybe because it was about assembling burgers in the right way. Could be more like the actual ingredients float. He's would be the onions. I liked that idea. Okay. Just gonna make this a little bit smaller, so all my things can float. I have my burger, I have my ketchup, smear, and my onion layer here, then a tomato and then some lettuce, mayonnaise. And then the button on the bottom. This is definitely a case where I'm not going to be true to the shape. Just want that led us to look more legacy. I think tomatoes have five sections in them. Doesn't really matter. I'm just thinking about how to make it look more like a tomato doesn't matter if it's the correct number of segments inside. And I'm thinking about if I'm holding the bottom of a burger and the top of a burger, what do my hands look like? So I'm thinking if I'm holding a burger that's suspended in zero gravity, like I'm drawing here, but I'm holding the button and I'm holding her, I'm holding the crown and I'm holding the heel of it would have my hands look like from that angle, I have my thumbs closest to my face and my fingers away from my face. So sometimes I need to actually do the action to see what it would look like to draw it. I can have FUN with proportion here. It is possible to overthink these things. But what I don't like about this as a shape is starting to become boring. It's kind of just two regularized, whereas there's something more dynamic about the shape. So I'll kinda make this look more dynamic. His hands will be smaller, top and bottom like this. Doesn't need to be realistic. When I do want to just get us a sense that he's holding it. One thing I could do as an option is actually not even have his arms behind their will that work? Or should I do? It's something where it goes behind. Like that. I like that. Something kinda charming about that. I like that guy. Okay, So I have given myself more than enough to choose from for these Refined Sketches. Now I just need to choose three to five to take into the finished illustration part. So I'm actually just going to get my red color here and start by putting a little dot on the ones that I'm going to take to final. I actually really like these three, unfortunately, so I just need to choose two more. And you know, since I have a little bit of a theme going here, which is all about me and Burger King. I'm going to just roll with that for the remainder of my selections here. I like all of these, but I think I'm going to keep this one with the advisor. Angry Burger King man. And I liked the roller blade because it's like a little bit more cryptic. The only reason a roller blade makes any sense in this set is that I remember rollerblading on a hot day to my job and then getting fired. So that's what I'm sticking with. If I wanted, I could always go and finish all of these, but I'm actually going to just leave all of my original set behind, all those running themed doodles. Because I've decided that for this project they're all going to be based on my worst job ever. And hopefully, you can see how much possibility there is in this exercise. One hand, you could be using those just to come up with FUN random ideas. Like what happens when I have a theme like running and I try and fit it into a triangle or a cross or a blob shape. That just helps you come up with more random looking illustrations and you would have thought up. But then for me, I'm imagining that I'm illustrating for a story about my worst job. And so I could start with my usual process which is like Think about, oh, what was really bad about working at Burger King? Oh yeah, I remember getting fired or whatever it was and I couldn't just think more on the literal level of like me getting fired. And so I might go to Google image, search and look for someone getting fired, maybe with some pointing or like an angry boss or something like that. But because I started with the shapes like the tree shape, a shoe shape, these were all based on running, which had nothing to do with Burger King. By introducing those. It got me thinking about totally different ideas, just stuff that's just like related but more kind of In off kind of way. And that's just one way of using this method of improvised illustrations are responsive compositions to just get your mind out of its typical boxes. So again, you have, on the one hand, you could use this as an exercise just to come up with random ideas for their own sake. Or it could use the randomness of this process of starting with one kind of shape and drawing something in there and then changing your theme and drawing in new shapes. You can use this as a way of just getting so outside of what you would have thought otherwise to come up with actual concepts for a real project, where you actually have to have concepts that make sense. So I just have one more step that I'd like to do before I take these into the final illustration stage. And that's just to get my final selections all up on the same page so it's clean. I don't have all the other massive my process. And so what I can do is I can actually just go to my procreate gallery here, duplicate it, because I might want to keep some of that process for another time. I can just open my duplicated file and then basically delete anything that's not part of my selections. So just a quick little Procreate tip here. I'm going to take everything from this layer 23 all the way to layer one down here at the bottom. And what I'm doing is I'm using my fingers to pinch all these layers together. Now we'll just make them easier to delete. Now I just have my first and second selects. And for these, I'm going to flatten this layer, and I'm going to flatten the layer above it. So now I just want to remove the outtakes here, the ones without the red dots, That's the stacked burger and the squishy cup. Just want to select those. Cut them out. Then of course, arrange these so that they're all visible together. I'll, it's a bit of a mess here, but okay, I now have my sixth final selections ready to bring into the final illustrations. It was a hard choice I liked. So many of these other things will be PFK-1 to illustrate, maybe at some other time. But let's just go in with these. I have a nice variety. I have the more simple snail and the roller blade. And then I have the more complex guy with the floating burger stuff. Okay, so you should now at least one, but maybe even more Refined Sketches. Now it's time to turn them into Final Illustration. But before we do, I just want to say a main takeaway from this step isn't how we can move a super rough and random-looking first sketch toward something that looks more confident and intentional. When you look at someone else's illustrations and wonder how they came up with certain shapes or Ideas. Maybe they used a process, something like this. They may have started very loose and uncertain like I did in the previous step. But then they made it look like they did it on purpose and the more confident refine drawing. And of course, that's what I hope you find yourself moving toward as we go through this project that things do start to look more confident and they do start to look more refined. And ultimately in the final illustration, I want you to be able to say, I can't believe I did that. Anyway. I think it's time to take these bad boys to the finish line. So I'll see you in the next video. 9. Project: Finalizing Illustration 1: Now it's time to create some final illustrations. I'll be finishing mind and Photoshop, but you can use any tools or techniques you want. In this video, I'll show you how I take my sketches and build on them in Photoshop, including creating a new file and deciding on things like size and resolution. Dropping my sketches into the final file, choosing colors and brushes, building up the illustration using layers. And finally, getting the Illustration ready to share on social media and of course on the class project gallery. So just before we get started, quick note about the tools that I'm using in case you are curious for whatever reason. So I will be illustrating using Photoshop on my Mac, and I will be using my iPad Pro and my Apple Pencil as a graphics tablet. And the way I do that is through Astropad studio. In terms of the brushes I'll be using, all of them can be found in the woodland wonderland brush set by Retro Supply Company. Retro Supply Company makes all kinds of amazing brushes, brush packs, and other kinds of assets for illustrators. The Woodland Wonderland, the brush that is particularly made for Procreate and Adobe Photoshop. So if you have either of those and you want to use the brushes I'll be using today. That's what I'll be using. Of course, I'll leave links to both Astropad and Retro Supply Company in the project description for this class. So now just turning to Photoshop, I'm going to create a new file. I know that the final illustrations I'm making are going to be to share on Instagram, that's their final destination. And the minimum dimensions of an Instagram post as of this recording is 1080 pixels squared. So I could make each of my files here just 1080 pixels by 1080 pixels. But I wanted to give it a little bit more room, just so I have the option using these for other things. Maybe I want to make a sticker set or some temporary tattoos and these would need to be printed. So I want to have just a little bit more resolution in these, just in case. I think what I'll do is make these at least double that 2,200 pixels by 2,200 pixels. Because I'm making this file in pixel measurements, it really doesn't matter what my resolution is. However, if I was thinking more in terms of inches, like let's just say I wanted to make this 8 " by 8 " for print. Then I would want to make sure that the resolution is 300 DPI. So eight by 8 " at 300 DPI will probably, or will definitely be higher in pixel count. Here we have 2,400 by 2,400 pixels. That works great for me. I'm going to just make sure that the color mode is RGB. And if you want to learn more about why I'm working in RGB, learn more in my class called the one pallet illustrator. Here on Skillshare. I'm gonna hit okay, of course the next thing that I want to do is get one of these sketches that I created in the previous step in Refined into the file. So let's start with something easy. Just to Warmup. We'll do the roller blade. I'm just going to select that, copy it and then head over to here in my new file. Paste that down. And because I want it to fill the space, I'm going to make that bigger using the transform tool. Now, don't worry about little things like, in my case, I have this red dot that was used to mark this one is one of my selections. I can ignore that. It's there, it doesn't matter and you'll see why as we go along. The next thing I'm wanna do is prepare this sketch so that I can actually illustrate over it without it being so dark and my way. What I'm gonna do is just rename this to sketch, just to be organized down in the Layers panel. And I will take the opacity down to 20 pixels. And now it can just build all my final artwork on top of that. There is a way that I like to do this and I'll quickly show you how I do this and why. So of course, I want to make a new layer in the Layers panel over my sketch. And this is gonna be where I start making my artwork. But before I do that, I actually am going to make a new layer group. So while this layer one here is selected, I'm going to hit Command G on iMac. And this creates a new layer group with that layer inside of it. I'm going to rename that layer group to Art Then I'm going to set the opacity of that entire layer group to multiply. What that does is lets everything that I draw or illustrate inside of this be transparent to the sketch below. If I didn't set the blending mode of that layer group to multiply. If I left it normal or pass through, then I wouldn't be able to see that sketch underneath any of the Final Illustration. Textures and colors and stuff that I build within that. I set that to multiply. And then everything with in that layer group will be transparent. And I will see the sketch come through that later on. When I'm done the illustration, I won't need that sketch anymore. I can toggle the visibility, hide it. You won't see the sketch anymore. And then that illustration will be all UC, you'll see what I mean. Let's just get into it. So I can really just start turning this into a color illustrations. So what's the first thing that I do? I like to choose a brush that has a little bit of a texture to it. And looking at my woodland wonderland brush set here, I think rough builder might work. Let's give that a try. So this is rough builder. Brush number nine. I'll start by black or this dark blue that I use and see how that goes. So now I'm just using my Apple Pencil to actually draw in the shape of this roller blade boot. And then I just use the bucket fill here, the paint bucket tool to fill in that shape completely. Now what You'll notice if you do it this way is that you get this faint white outline between the filled-in area and the original outline. And so what I do is I just go and use my brush tool again to draw in over that. Does get a little bit tedious when we have to do that. But it does make a difference. Of course, I want some more color in this piece. I'm going to add the kind of the we'll hold her part on the bottom of the boot here as a different color. And every time I make a new color, when I'm working in Photoshop, I create a new layer and that makes every single element editable. Later on, if I change my mind Or I need to make an adjustment. So maybe for the, the bottom part of the roller blade, I'm going to use blue, this cyan blue, and then just do exactly what I did last time. Why don't remember to do it up here as well? A closed shape because that means I can just use my paint bucket tool to fill that in. Now I want this bottom part to sit under the boot, so I'm going to just drag it under the layer like that in the Layers panel. And going to continue adding more of this same color. So the top part of the boot, I'll also make in the same color. Though you can't see it. It's kinda going under the darker boot area. I am completing the shapes so that I can do a quick fill there and then go over with my brush, making sure that faint white line goes away. The next thing I wanna do is some of the details of this gate itself. So I'm gonna click on the boot here in a new layer. Now I need to think about what sort of color and line I want to use for those details. I'm a little bit of a minimalist where it comes to using brushes in Photoshop, I tried to use as few as possible and I tried to be consistent. So while I'm doing the details of this gate here, I'll be using some kind of line to fill in these details. I want to use that same line quality in similar areas in the rest of the set. So I'm thinking about that now. And I'm just going to try some different brushes here and see, see how they look. I can use the broken micron pen and I'll try it in white. And let's just see what it looks like if I use that right out of the box. To me that's a little bit thin. I don't think that we'll look strong. So I'm going to just undo that. Another thing that I could do is just try my rough builder, the same brush that I used for the Shapes themselves. Maybe not so thick though. I'm going to try maybe something like 3-5 pixels. And see you see how that feels. Now as I'm doing this, I'm also feeling like the overall vibe of this, of these lines is just a little bit two. Wobbly, feels just two out of control for me. Sometimes what I like to do is change the smoothing of the brush. So while you have your brush tool selected in Photoshop, you can actually just adjust the smoothing at this top bar area here. Something higher like maybe we can try 80 per cent. And what that does is it makes your line quality a lot smoother. It smooths out your natural shake of hand. And that can be nice to give your lines just a little bit more confidence. It's still has an organic quality to it. It's just a little bit more controlled and professional looking. Now another thing that I'm aware of is at the top here, the lines are poking up over the boot shape. Now quick way to make sure that linework that you're putting over top and other shape stays within that shape is to make what's called a clipping mask. So with the layer that you're making these details on selected, you can actually just right-click on it and the Layers panel and go create clipping mask. I shortcut for that is Command Option G if you're using a Mac. And that sort of makes it so that whatever your drawing at the top only stays within the bounds of the shape that you drew beneath. Now before I move on to the lace detail, I'm going to create the wheels now. So I'm going to create a new layer and I'll make it over the blue shapes so I can see what I'm drawing to start. And I'll make these wheels just to add a little bit of variety. I'm going to make them this red color. And maybe what I'll do is just use one circle and copy and paste it for a little bit more regularity. Now, when I look at this circle this way it does look a little bit diagonal. So I need to make sure it's a little bit more regular. And a good way of doing that is just by using the transform tool and rotating it say 90 degrees. And then for me, this helps me see the angle a little bit more clearly because my actual perception of things that I draw, it happens to be on an angle. There must be some distortion either in my eyeballs or in my Perception like in my brain somewhere. I don't know how to explain it, but I draw diagonally. And what I can do is using the transform tool and holding down my command key is just sort of adjust the edges a little bit rounder. And then if I rotate it again 90 degrees, I can see where I might need to make further adjustments that I didn't catch in its previous position. So I'm going to just fill that in as we've been doing. Use my brush tool to fill in that white line. What I'm gonna do is just hit Option and drag to duplicate these. Then in my Layers panel, I'm just going to select all three of them, make sure that they're positioned right. And another thing I can do is actually make sure that they're spaced evenly. If that was something that was important. Right up here in this top toolbar thing, I can hit this distribute horizontally button. And it looks like they were pretty good already. Now of course, I want these wheels to be beneath the blue part there. And now that I look at them, they feel a little bit too close to the edges so I can just move these independently in. And again, this is another good reason to keep everything on separate layers so you can make adjustments as you need without having to redraw. The last thing I can do is add in the leasing detail. I'm just going to hit new layer above that boot shape and maybe it'll make those lease holds a different color than white, and going to use blue as well. Now I have smoothing on still. When I'm working at a smaller size, I find that smoothing can actually be annoying. So I'm going to just set that all the way back down to zero. I could draw each one of these on its own if I wanted or, or it could just copy and paste each one of those. Now this time I'm using the selection tool and copying pasting within the same layer. And with little details like this, I don't want on a separate layer for absolutely every little eyelet here. So it's okay to use the selection tool and copy and paste in that way. I can make adjustments By using the selection last Sue tool here, my keystroke is L to select and then V to move. Now I can add the lace over top those islands, so a new layer. And you can see that every time I create a new layer, if it's under a clipping mask, this new layer will also become a clipping mask layer. Just by default. I'm going to use yellow for the laces. And I'll stay with this rough builder at 3-5 pixels and then just draw those in. For the shorter lines. It's pretty easy to make them straight without needing the smoothing tool. One thing I like to do with my brushes is makes sure that the ends have a more controlled look to them. Sometimes, I don't like how the ends of the brushes go down by default. And so I'll actually just use the eraser tool. And a good eraser to use here would be hard, round pressure size, which is just the general brush that comes with Photoshop. And set that to maybe ten pixels, just something small. And then using the Eraser tool, I can just cut these back a bit. In. This just gives, In my case, it gives my brushstrokes a look that I'm, I'm very consistently using, which is this like cutoff hard end of my brushstrokes. And for me that just gives my brushes a little bit more control. And you'll see more of how and why I do that as we go along through the SAT. Now, at this point, I want to just take a look at my entire illustration without the sketch, even though I'm not quite done, I'm just going to hide the sketch by clicking the little eyeball there just to see how this is looking. There's something about this that I'm not completely satisfied with yet, but I'm going to have to see how the rest of the Set builds out. Before I get to critical about this, I'll just add the lease on this boot before moving on to the next Illustration. And again, we'll figure out how I want the style to actually look with the, some of these details as I go along with the rest of the set. So I'm going to go to the topmost layer here, which is the white detailing on the boot. And I just wanted to create a layer above that. That's not a clipping mask so that when I draw it in, it will actually go beyond that boot shape. And I just want to add the last shape here. And I'm not quite sure I want the street parts of the lease to look like that. There's something a little bit Genki, so I'm going to turn my sketch layer on just to see what I drew. Maybe just go, go with a Sketches simple kind of bow shape here. Then we can come back to this if needs be. After I've done a few more illustrations. Now having gone through all this part with the first illustration, maybe a question you have is, how did I decide on which colors to use? Now this is something you can also learn more about in my class, the one pallet Illustrator. But real quickly, I have a color palette that I consistently use with every job as much as I can. And that includes all of the colors at the top of my swatch panel here. So this cyan blue, the pinks, yellow, the dark navy green, orange, red, and purple. For the most part. These are the colors that I use and then all the other ones below are just variations that I can add in that relate to these colors just based on the same kind of quality of color. And again, if you want to learn more about how I generate a palette like this and how you can create a minimal palette yourself. You can find all of that in my class. The one pallet Illustrator 10. Project: Finalizing Illustration 2: Now it's time to create our second illustration from our chosen Sketches. I'm going to just quickly save this file as something else. I'm going to maybe move on to the guy wearing the visor. And so I'll just call this Pfizer guy and save that. And having saved this as a new file, I can delete the Illustration layers here on the board blade and also the sketch. I can delete that. And I now have a file, a blank file. I can start again way. I'm gonna go back to my sketches here and Find the visor guy. And use my last Sue tool to select, Copy and then paste that into my artwork, my Final Art File here and again, using the transform tool to make it large and centered in here doesn't matter if it doesn't fill the entire square. And just like the last time, I want to take the opacity down to 20, 30% in the Art layer group that I kept from the last time, which is set to multiply. In the blending mode, I'm going to create a new layer. That layer should end up within that Art layer. If for whatever reason you make a layer that's ending up outside of the Art layer group, just make sure you grab that in the Layers panel, drag it and put it into the Art layer group. And you'll know that it's in the Art layer group by the fact that it looks kind of inset compared to other layers side of that group. So let's go to actually create the final Art here. So I'm going to create a light pink here, which is kinda like a skin color for me. And I'm going to use my rough builder just like I did the last time, keeping everything consistent to draw this shape. I can see here that that shape of my face is going to be hidden beneath advisors. So I'm just closing the shape and then going to fill that in. And then use my brush to just fill in that faint line. Just like the last time. I'm going to make a new layer over top for the visor. I'm going to make that dark blue because that's the color that my advisor was when I worked there. Now quick shortcut to draw straight lines and Photoshop is if you use your mouse or your stylus to make a mark just one, then you hit Shift and hit somewhere else. Then you get these straight lines like that. I'm just holding Shift and tapping at a distance here. From the last point. It's going to undo all that. And the reason I'm showing you that is because I'm about to use that as a quick way of filling in these faint lines in here. And I'm going to use my eraser tool just to make some of these little corners a little bit more customized. Unless default. If I wanted to have a little sharp corner here as well, I could just add a little bit more of my brush and then chisel it off. Like that, feels a bit too sharp. But for now, I'm not going to worry too much about those details. And in fact, I'm going to just not worry about that at all. Go back to how that was. And I'll just draw on my advisor part of the hat sunshade. Now, I'm having trouble getting that shape the way I want it. I could turn on smoothing if I wanted to have that a little bit more controlled. So if I go to smoothing and hit that up to like 75, 80%, that should give me a little bit more control or a lot more control. Meaning that consistent, what I'm trying to do is have a straight line curved around the straight line back. That's not hundred percent straight, but straighter than I can draw with my free hand. Then of course, fill that in and then use my brush to fill in those faint white lines. I'm going to want that ear to come in over this as well. And I could use my eraser tool to cut that out. But I also want that ear shape at the top to have the same texture. So how am I gonna do that? One thing that I could do is use what's called a layer mask. So if I have my current layer selected and then I hit layer mask, it creates this mask that's indicated by this white square here in the Layers panel Now, using my brush, I want to draw out or cut away so that the skin color beneath it shows. So what I need to do is just make sure that my foreground color is black and my background color right now is set to black. And what I can do is just hit X and that switches them up. Now making sure that my layer mask is selected, I can just draw in, in almost erase away that part of the ear. And the nice thing about layer masks is that they are non-destructive. I can hit Shift and click on that layer mask. And it shows you that the layer that is masking still exists in its entirety. So it allows me to change that up later if I want. Another thing I want to add here, of course, is the hair. So I'm gonna just hit the layer beneath where I started the face. I'm going to create a layer above it, but beneath the visor. And I'm blonde, so I'm going to use the yellow for blonde. And of course this guy represents me working at Burger King, which was my worst job ever. I am going to just experiment with brushes within the set here to see what works best for hair. Does it work good to use this squash brush. I find that a little bit disappointing for some reason, for this particular use. Maybe the broken micron is the way to go. I do want these strands of hair to be thick in like spaghetti noodle like because I'm not interested in representing here realistically is like fine strands. This is more stylized. There's movement to these. So I'm going to try the fine micron, but really boost the size to like 30 pixels and see how that works. It's still too thin. What if I made that 60 twice the size? Then what if I sat the smoothing to around somewhere around 50%? Will that give me a nice flowy strand of hair? I like that. I feel like there's something missing down here. Not quite clear to me what I need to do yet. So I'm going to leave these as is, except for the fact that going to edit out using the Eraser tool, these ends where I lifted my stylist because I don't like how default those luck. I'm going to leave that. Now move on to some of the details of the face. So going back to the skin face shape, I'm going to get another layer over top that. This time I'm going to create a clipping mask, just like I've done before. And I'm going to select my darker color here. In Draw. I'm still using the micron, the broken micron pen. And I'm going to use that as my linework details. Now, for the details that I made with a rollerskate, actually use the different brush. I use the rough builder nine. And just to get a sense of what that might have looked like if I did that. It is more consistent, isn't it? It has me wondering if I should make everything including the hair as consistent as that. I'm going to compare them. So I have this one which is based on the rough builder. And then I have this one which is a totally different thing. I think what I like about the broken micron is it's just a little bit different, adds a little bit of variety to this style that I'm working in right now. I'm going to just try to keep working with a micron. And that means when I go back to the roller blade, I want to try this same brush at around the same size as well. Another thing that I want to do is not keep it fully black or dark like that. I want it to be more like a shader colors. So maybe set the opacity to 50%. Then if I hit Multiply, it will help it just pick up some of the color of the skin beneath. And if I just hide my sketch for a moment, I think I like how that looks. Let's continue to finish. This guy. Wanna do the ER detail. And I could probably do it with the same, on the same layer group. So going back to my 60 pixel micron pen, I'm just going to do that little squiggly ear-shaped that I originally do. And I'm gonna just draw it within the shape of that year where it's cutaway, not all the way to the top. If I did draw that all the way that the top, I think that would just Wouldn't look right to me for some reason. I wanna do one more detail here on the face, which is adding some shading or blushing. So I'm going to hit that face shape one more time, create a new layer. And then I want to find some kind of texture that will make this fleshy cheek here. So what if I used swamp crown? Know that might be too small but about waxy roller. And then made the size smaller. That looks really big for me to 400 pixels. I use this darker pinky color. And then if I set the layer to multiply and the opacity down to around 20 or 30%. That creates a nice shady kinda feeling. And I can just apply that also on the tip of the nose for extra cuteness. And hiding that layer. That looks pretty good. I just want to work out some of the details of the visor itself. And I may want to revisit the hair strands, but let's see, reactivate the sketch. Make sure I'm now working on or above the adviser. I want to create a little logo on the front and a detail for where the headband part meets the visor. Here I'm using the 3D pixel broken micron pen because this is a smaller detail and I can do that clipping mask trick. And then the bottom part of the button is here using my eraser tool just to open that up a little bit. The key here is just not accepting brushes, default qualities, just as they are. It's good to edit them out and make sure you have all the control over your digital brushes. Okay, so finally, I want to suggest the idea of a hamburger in the middle. I know that in the logo there's the words Burger King, but I'm just gonna put a red and a hamburger shape in here. Do the clipping mask. And I could just actually move that around if I want, by selecting all of it. Maybe make it a tad smaller. And then I'm going to re-select the visor shape here. Create another layer over it for the detail of this connection here. And for this detail, I'm going to stick with a smaller micron pen size here. So I had been using 60 pixels for all the other details with this brush that's called the broken micron. The default size of broken micron is 15, but I want to make it 30. So it's thin enough to not be distracting, but thick enough that it's not totally invisible either. I feel like that line might be too solid. So what I can do is select that line that I just made. I can create a layer mask on it. And making sure that my foreground color is black. I can just draw it in over top of that sort of a dashed line. The reason I do that is it adds a little bit of texture and variety to the overall drawing. It looks like I'm pretty much done. I'm going to hide the underlying sketch and just see how things look. It's not bad, It's a little bit plane, but I have to keep in mind, these are pretty simple illustrations. One thing I could do if I feel like the hair is just too loosey-goosey and there's not enough like a head shape under that is I can maybe just going to that hair layer and adding a layer just under it in the Layers panel. I could choose maybe even that same waxy roller that I use for the blushing. I can use that for the hair under there as well. Well, that's kinda funny. But that's not my hair. So that doesn't work. Maybe I'll try the rough builder just like the same brush that I used for the head shape itself. Do I want to rethink what that here it looks like. Technically speaking, back in those days, I think I had a Backstreet Boys haircut. It was like kinda shaped like a mushroom cup apart it in the middle. So if there's a way I can draw here like that, then great. That's not bad. I kinda liked that better. It's more full than the wavy lines that I drew in my original sketch. Even though those wavy lines were kinda interesting, I kinda like how much fuller this is. I feel like the burger here, the lines between them, the negative spaces are a bit tight. So I'm just going to give a little bit more space between them. Let me get a little bit smaller. That feels better to me. Now I was asking myself, do I need to make the expression on his face a little bit more like this guy does not like this job. I'm going to use the last few tool here just to isolate the eye and the mouth. I'm gonna go to Layer, New Layer via cut. And that takes this detail and sets that on a new layer. I'm just going to hide that and then create a new layer. And if you'll remember, I used the broken micron brush at 60 pixels, and I did that using the dark blue color. What I'll also need to do is make sure that's over the right layer. I need to put that over the face shape. There it is. And another thing that I did there was I set that layer to multiply and cut it down to 50%. And it's also a clipping mask on that shape. All these things. But I'm not doing a smile. I'm doing maybe more of a Charlie Brown mouth. I might create an AI. Does it work to create an I sort of like a Smiley shape? Or maybe I do a more open I, I've created a new layer and I have white as my color. I'll just fill that in real quick. And then over top that I'm going to create a pupil. And I'll draw the pupil. If I draw that people and set that also as a clipping mask over my oval eyeball shape. Again, it creates a nice clipping mask which keeps the pupil kind of contained. Maybe I'm rolling my eyes about how boring and frustratingly bad this job is. I think that works in one thing that I'm wondering is, should I make that blue just to add a bit of character to the piece and add a little bit more variety. And I kinda like that. Okay, So this is the second illustration down. I'm now going to move on to complete the set 11. Project: Finalizing Illustration 3: So I've started to illustrate my snail now or finalize the illustration of this. Now I have the shell shaped down and the slug itself down. And I just wanted to point out a few decisions that I've made already and also maybe giving you a few more pointers if you are using Photoshop. You can see that in the drawing, originally I had these kind of more spindly stick shapes that led up to the eyeball antenna things at the top. And I decided to make those more kinda like pointed horns almost rather than straight lines to the little ball parts. And I feel like that we'll just create a more satisfying shape overall. So I'm gonna just go with that intuition and see if it, if it works out. The other thing that I wanted to show is that I've made the shell shape and it was originally drawn in yellow. And then I thought, I don't know if I want the shell to be yellow. What about green? So I quickly double-clicked on this shape and activated this little layer style here called Color Overlay. And that allows you to just change the color very quickly to anything you want. Now of course, I have disabled the effect, so I'll just re-enable the effect. And you can see that whatever color I set that color overlay to, it will take on. Now I also want to draw this spiral shape over the shell using a clipping mask. Now one thing you'll notice when you're using a clipping mask over a color that has this layer effect applied to it is it won't show up. So I'm going to use this dark blue and I'm going to get my broken micron pen, set that to 30 pixels, just like I did last time. I'm going to start drawing over that now if I tried to create a clipping mask from that, it disappears. And that's because it's taking on the layer effect of the color below and that's not good, I don't want that. So what I'm going to do before I draw anything over topping, try and do a clipping mask is I'm actually going to flatten out or kind of mega solo. This layer effect isn't an effect at all anymore. And let me show you what I mean. I need to make a new layer over top and then select that layer and the layer beneath holding Shift. And then I hit Command E or I go Layer, Merge Layers. And by merging the layers, just that blank layer and the snail shell shaped that had that layer effect applied to it, it just makes that layer of fact disappear as though I had originally drawn the shell in green in the first place. Now it can make a new layer over top that have that clipping mask work. Just do this just to show you. You can see that it Now clips in the way that you would expect. Now as I'm doing this, I actually think that that's too small. Let me try going back up to 60 pixels. And I'm going to set my smoothing to the same around 80% or so. And of course, customize it a bit with my eraser tool. Do that clipping mask by hitting Command Option G. Now it's not quite aligning to the shapes beneath, but I can change the shape or I can change the location of the spiral pretty easily. Let's do that. I just use the transform tool to do that. The next thing maybe I can do is add the visor. And what it'll do is just create a new layer over top the snail shell business. Actually, before I do that, I want to make sure that that snail shells spiral kind of blends more into the color of the green. I'm going to multiply that. And that's pretty dark and intense. So just like I did for other details on the previous illustration, I'm going to take the opacity down to 50%. And that makes it more like a shader color. So I like that. Now I can move on to the visor that I cited drawing up here. I'm going to use my rough builder and use the same color that I used for the visor the last time. So what I'm gonna do is actually just trace the shape of the hat as I sketched it. And then I'll make sure that it sits over that shell. The right way. Next, make some subtle adjustments to the corner there. Now, I can move this whole thing up above. I wanted to kinda sit on a shell in a way that Visually feels right. I liked the way the visor is pointing back down to the eyes of the snail. So compositionally, it creates a little bit of movement where you have this spiral inside the shell, kinda leading you up to the visor at the top and then the visor brim is now pointing at the eyes and they point back down into the slug shape. So you get this nice flow inside the illustration. You can make these kinds of changes in the final, even though they're not exactly how they looked in the sketch. Sometimes you get new insights once you start working with actual shapes and brushes and colors. So let's now get onto the rest of the slug. Now because this sluggish guy is a representation of me being a slow worker. Maybe it makes sense to make the eye color, the iris color here, in this case, the same as it was with the visor guy illustration. For a very subtle sense of this being the same character, can add the details of the slug here. For the mouth. Again, 60 pixel broken micron in the dark blue. Do that, multiply, Set it to 50%. I want to think about what's gonna happen with the squiggly part under his belly? I don't think I want a hard line there. I don't think that would look right. So what I want to do is maybe introduce some texture. This is something we haven't done yet in this series. And so I'm gonna try one of these green brushes that's included in the woodland wonderland Set. It might just be a matter of testing these just to see which one I liked the best. Sometimes they're all the same and it doesn't really matter. Or the differences are two subtle, but you can see like the standard grain is very subtle and it's not very chunky. Whereas the other ones are chunkier. I kinda like these three chunkier ones more than the subtle one. What am I try is this one here. It's a nice balance of being chunky but not as dense as the other ones. So I'll just clear those out and try this as my shader. On the slides belly. I'm gonna do a little clipping mask action on that. I'm going to do the whole deal or I multiply and take back the opacity. And just keep trying again and again to see if that works. And I might actually end up wanting to create a bit of a line their back with my micron pen. But maybe being a little bit more selective about it not going all the way. Now I have to ask, is it enough just to have that line, can I remove the texture? Something not quite resolved there? I don't know how to solve it. I'm trying to balance simplicity with interestingness. I think this is the best solution so far. So I'm going to just stick with that and figure out how I can incorporate that texture later. Because I think I will want to incorporate it. I just haven't figured it out just yet. Now, I'm gonna go to the visor up here and add some details. Just create a clipping mask type layer over top. Go with my 30 pixel broken micron. For the dash here, I don't want to go thinner than that. Then finally, create that kind of abstract Burger King logo here. If you look in here, there are definitely some strange things happening. I think what I'm gonna do is just draw a general blog that's kind of like a hamburger shape. And then use Eraser tool to cut out in that just gives a shape. A little bit more unity. It's more gathered. And then I'm going to add that hamburger shape in the middle. Its own layer so I can adjust it as a need. Have it here. It feels too much like its own element. So I'm going to just move the burger level is slightly so it bleeds off the edge and it feels like it just as less distracting. I also think that this dotted line is very distracting, so I'm going to remove that. And try again with the same brush, but just Tad thinner. The question is, do I want to keep this solid or break it up a little? Maybe that's not working. Maybe I can do this for the detail. Maybe that's not working. Maybe enough not to have any detail at all. What if I make it 60? That actually works better because the line thickness agrees. Assault agrees with all the other line thicknesses that I've used here. I think that's what was distracting me before. Here's a weird thought. What if I have my hairstyle coming out of the visor? This would work well if it referenced the way I did hair on the visor guy Illustration, but that really means I would have to go back and do this specific thing. So I've gotten about as far as I can with the snails so far. And I'm gonna go and create one more illustration in front of you here. I'm gonna go back to my sketches and maybe I'll do a more complex one. I'll do the guy holding the burger. And as I do this one, I'll probably figure out, hello, I'm gonna do all the details including shading and stuff like that. And then come back to the snail and the visor guy, the roller blade, and see how everything can look more consistent and how the exact same kind of texture brushes, the same kind of linework and stuff like that. And yeah, we'll see how that works out by approaching this more complex illustration here. 12. Project: Finalizing Illustration 4: Okay, I've gotten this more detailed illustration to the point where I can start talking about some of the decisions I'm starting to have to make that I think will apply to all the other illustrations in the set. So some of these shouldn't be too surprising. Like just for the blushing part of this guy's face, I used the same waxy roller brush, but I just made it smaller instead of 400 pixels, I made it 200 pixels. And that's still worked out quite nicely. Now for the condiments. And we have mustard and catch up here down at the bottom. It didn't make sense to illustrate those as we're me shapes I found. And so I created more of a dollop shape. I made the ketchup kind of blocked over the mustard here and the, the ketchup just as little pointy part. It doesn't really matter. I don't think people are gonna be questioning whether it looks like realistic catch-up in this case. The harder parts that I'm trying to figure out right now are, how do I draw things that are white? Like onions are white, but there's a white background, so those aren't going to show up with the mayonnaise at the top here. The mayo has to be a different color than way otherwise it's just not going to show up. How do I show the Mayo? I can choose not to show it at all. Or I can do something a little bit like in-between. So over top of created a layer with a clipping mask. I can now go to the waxy roller brush again. Then set that same size down to 200, just like I did for the blushing on the face. And just kind of rough in so that there's just a little bit about yellow coming through. So that's one way of just suggesting some things. They're getting closer to the idea of it being white. Now, as for the Ionians themselves, There's such thing as red anions which are more purple red. Just use a purple color to represent those Ionians kinda flying over the ketchup. So when I remove the sketch, I can see that I still have some details to add to add definition. So I'll need to make sure that I can separate the arm from the visor divisors over top the arm. And I need to show that somehow. I'll actually go and do that right now. Before I move on to the other things, I'll go to the arm in the back there. I'm going to make a new layer over top of that and just make it a clipping mask. I'm just actually like filling it in with white grainy texture. I can actually go crazy with that and just kinda move it around because it's a clipping mask. Just something subtle to separate that from the foreground without it being a line shape. I could have used just a simple line, but that might have been too flat using the texture to separate that back part from the head and the visor. A tiny little bit of depth, which is nice in this flat style. The other thing I wanna do is out a bit of blushing color to the HRM behind there. So I'm gonna do that using the same technique as before. I'm using the 200 pixel waxy ruler multiplied and about 30% opacity. And that just helps. This standard part might be a little bit overkill for the texture of the arm, but I'm not going to worry about it. I'm not going to move on to creating, adding some details on the hand above here. Same deal, waxy ruler and pink. Clip it, multiply it. Take it back. I'm now going to just add some details for the hands. Going back to my broken micron, which I used for the face details, I use that same idea for these Now that's too thin coating to my 3D pixel version. I am going to multiply it and I'm going to set the opacity down to around 50%. Then instead of using a clipping mask to get this perfectly to the Hand shapes below here, I can just use the eraser, kind of cut it back a little bit manually. Now I am finding this mayonnaise just I don't know what's going on here and I don't think other people would really know what's going on there. And I'm actually going to just abort the whole Manet's effort. I don't have to be literal about this. And then I'm going to make some room for a very important condiment that's missing here that would go right between the tomato and the Ionians, I believe, and that would be pickles. So I'm gonna go and use my rough builder. The default size should work this time around. I'm just going to draw in pickles. And they are interfering with the Ionians a little bit. To figure out what's happening there. I think I just need to have more stacking. My fat am going to erase my audience. And i'll, I'll actually draw them back in in a different way off to figure that out in a second. Everything is very simple here, so I'm not too precious about losing it and having to draw it again. I just want to get that nice feeling of flowing down. Things are spaced apart. Actually going to take away the ketchup now and the mustard. Figure those out next. Maybe I'll just do more of a smear down there. They will use white to draw and pickle flesh here. And I can set the opacity back to maybe 30%. Do you think the lettuce details a bit too chunky though? So I'm going to go back in with a smaller kinda detail. Maybe using 11 micron following the contours of the leaf. That makes sense. If I can just carry that exact level of detail on pixels even to the same level of opacity on this layer. I think that will create more cohesiveness with this piece. Not what, that is, what you're looking for when you're trying to figure out a style of something, you got to look at the piece as a whole. How are all the parts relating? And how can you make it more unified without it being too same, same. For me, I'm finding that I need to vary the width of my brushes a little bit more than I thought it first came by very, I mean, contrasts like have more thins and thicks. I'm finding this tomato particular challenge for some reason. And that might just do the trick. Give it a bit of a hard edge that erasing it. Now I think I do want a bit of mustard down here for extra color, since we lost the Ionians. Going to draw some texture on that button. Seeds, perhaps. That's better. But now that I'm here, I want to change the quality of this as well. Something a little bit thicker. I like how the burger and the condiments are kinda sitting altogether to get that sense of gravity down at the bottom and the other things that are still floating and on their way down. And that creates a nice contrast between already settled down and still falling or floating. Now this would be a good time to take a look at all of the Illustrations we've done so far. 13. Project: Finishing Touches: So what we can do is open all of them at once here and Photoshop. And then we could go window, arrange and do for up. That way we can see them all at once. We'll just create one that's kind of in full view in the window. And we'll make all of them the same Zoom rotation locations. So match all. You go to Window and match all it makes. All the windows look the same. And now we can actually start to say what's working, what's not, what needs to be more of the same across the whole set. So what you're going to see me do here is just do a little bit of a balancing act between all the different parts. My least favorite illustration here is the role of laid for some reason. I think that it looks just a little bit too loosey-goosey for me right now. And I also find the details on it too chunky. But it's also because it's the only piece here that isn't character-based. Which may mean that there's more pressure for this particular piece to have lots of character in it without being a character. I think what I'm gonna do is just take back some of these details. Might even just start again. This was my first attempt in the sets. So sometimes the first attempt is the worst attempts. There's this saying, actually in parenting that the first pancake always goes wrong, which is kinda sad, but it's also true you make all your mistakes on the first of your Set, whether that's the first of your set of children or the first of your set of Illustration children. So now that I have a little bit more wisdom having gone through for these now, I can apply that wisdom to my first one. I'm going to actually turn smoothing on because I had that on. And make this a little bit more of a regular feeling shape, which I think will contribute to this feeling more solid as an illustration. I also think I'm going to make that bottom part the same. And then I'll work on some of the details here. Now, remember, I'm cutting and pasting things. I want to vary each copy a little bit so it doesn't look totally obvious that I just copied and pasted, especially if each one has the exact same quirks to it. When you copy and paste the quirk, you start to see the cork more. And it's very obvious that a cut and paste happened. Anyway, I'm gonna just put these all on one layer by merging them and filling them in with the bucket tool. Just so they're easier to manage as layers. Just looking at the others here. Yeah, so this is my best example of how I want to go about this. I still don't really like what's going on behind his hat there. I'm going to figure that out later because I'm focused right now on this skate. I think what I wanna do is just add more color overall and not rely just on lines alone. Liking it better already. It's adding a few more FUN details. Here. I'm just making sure that the holes and the wheels are actually centered to the wheels. And I can go ahead and reuse this as an islet shape. I don't have to be exactly true to my sketch. If I don't want, can add my lace in. Just like I did before, maybe what I'll do, I don't know if I want to include that top part that I had before. I'm going to try something else. Having a tongue. If I have a tongue, here, ends, I have to do the laces over the tongue. No big deal. Let's do that again. I think I want that lace just to be a little bit thicker coming out. Because I want the end to have that little thin part bit by bit. We figured things out. Now taking a look in comparison with all the other things, I think that roller blade has way more character than it did before without it being over-the-top. Next thing I wanna do is maybe correct this visor guy. I think the visor line is too visible. I'm just going to turn that off for now. Focus on the hair for a second. Maybe instead of that wavy hair, I actually go back to what I had in the sketch originally. Which is like, it's just a more interesting shape and phon, and expressive. And it's not exactly autobiographical, but it works. It works for me. I like this better. Now that I've done all this, I'm thinking what if I just went right back to the original idea which had a lot of character Right into it. There's something nice and organic about the wafers drew them, which is often the case with first sketches versus when you were work something there. I think I like that. There's something more can add so that it's more Burger King, maybe a color of a shirt. I think that's good for now. We'll see how things look together. Now I'm going to address, going back to this guy, maybe I actually end up going with the white line. I think that works the best. Start adding more texture across the board. Now, this gives you that char broiled feeling. Again, it's about how do you add details without being too detailed. Given the style you're working with, is this becoming to three-dimensional? I don't want it to be three-dimensional. I wanted to stay looking flat. So I'll do the char bro lines here. Like that. Adding a slight texture only where needed, just to keep things interesting. Try not to be too literal. So I spent another few minutes trying to resolve everything in this set. This is sometimes where I get extra fussy. I overthink things. I see things that I didn't see it first. So it's kinda push and pull and give-and-take. Looking at one Illustration up close and then looking at the whole set together, and then zooming back into a single illustration and working out what details work, both in the individual pieces. And then as a set more universally. Ultimately the Set becomes more and more refined and more and more cohesive. Okay, I'm taking one Final look at this set. And I'm trying to get a sense of where do I need to add texture? Where's there too much texture? My overall goal is to have this kind of flat, bold style that's not looking over thought. So I am a little bit torn at this point between what I see happening with the Burger Guy because this particular illustration likes having all this texture. But when I started bringing all that texture in the simpler pieces like the roller blade, it starts to look too much like an effect that I'm just putting on it for the sake of having this effect. And I don't like that, it doesn't seem to make sense. It makes a lot of sense when I put it on the food and the BUN because food things have lots of texture. Whereas I just, in my mind, see the rollerskate more as having no texture. I think also need to introduce more colors like the snail itself has yellow and green and the dark blue. And that's pretty consistent with the visor guy as well. So let me just open up the snail. I think what we're gonna do is change the color of the shell. To do that, I'm just going to use my Layer Style and do a color over. And it's going to have to be a different color, but I haven't used that. Could be peripheral. It can be read. I think the red will work. Now the other thing that might work for the snail is having a different color for the slack. Is that green? Pink, who I like that we're going or fat? 14. Project: Putting it All Together: So now that I've found the perfect color combination for the snail, I get to fuss with all the other little details that suddenly mattered to me now, like the direction of the hair, so it flows toward the highs and creates a nice composition. Getting the texture just right, getting the body of the snails lashes, slug. Just write all those little details that I couldn't focus on before. And of course, with the roller blade, how much texture should I add to this thing before it's too much? And I also just want to add a little human detail to this. And I do that by adding the suggestion of a leg or SOC that's in the boot. And that just gives it just that little bit of human character that it needs. And now I think I'm ready to bring this thing. Okay, so I have done just four of my skipped six illustrations as final illustrations in that's enough for me. I'm satisfied for now, especially for the purposes of our class today. So what I'm gonna do is put them altogether in a single composition, because that's really satisfying for me when I make a set of illustrations. Especially like these little sticker like illustrations, when you put them together as a set, I think it looks really FUN. And I'm gonna show you how to do that. So just like we did when we created our four other illustrations, we're going to start in Photoshop. We're going to create a new file. We're going to make that 2,400 pixels, the exact same way we did last time. We'll hit Okay. Now what we can do is just place. By going File Place Linked each of our illustrations that we've done. We can do this one at a time. I'll start with Burger Guy. And then I will place roller blade, snail and visor guy. And so right now you can see in the Layers panel that they're all there. Burger Guy roles or her blade, snail and visor guy. I'm going to select them all by clicking on the top layer here, which is visor guy and holding Shift, and then clicking on the bottom layer except for the background. In my case, it's Burger Guy. I'm just going to size all those down by hitting Command T to get the transform tool and then sizing down maybe to about quarter size. I'm going to hit Enter to commit that change. And now what I'm gonna do is just pull them apart one-by-one so we can see them all at the same time. So what you can see though, is there's an edge to all these, and we can easily fix that just by opening each of these linked files from the layers panel, you just double-click on the thumbnail and then go right down to the bottom layer, the background layer in the Layers panel, and toggle the visibility of that background layer off and do that for each of the files, each of the illustration files that you created, so that all of the other parts of the illustration will be visible except the background. That's exactly what we like. And I'm just going to put them in and in a pleasing arrangement. For me. It's like how do they fit best together as a puzzle piece. And the idea here is this is a nice illustration you can share on your Instagram feed. But I often like to do is share the set together and then have a sort of carousel where you can swipe to see each one larger. You could also just choose to show one posted day or share each illustration as you complete them. If you do each one individually, I'm feeling like there's a little bit too much green and yellow happening on this side. So I'm thinking about the composition in that sense, house colour working. Maybe I can just flip one of these way to make the composition fit better. And right away I'm getting a much better match. Here we go. I'm going to save this altogether. I'm going to call it Burger Together, dot PSD, save it. And I will enjoy posting this on my Instagram feed. A little bit of PFK-1. And don't be afraid to put some of these on angles if you want. I think the roller blade especially lends itself well to being positioned like that. If you want to add any final details at this point, you can go ahead and do that. When I look at these, I still, I don't know why, but I am having a hard time with the texture on the rollerskate. I think what I'm going to do is just remove it and try and live with the fact that it's just very simple. I think that works well for me and that means I'm gonna go down here to visor guy and do the same. I'll just deactivate that and take this funny color that I made for him. I'm going to make it a different color because I need a little bit of variety in the Set system matter of balancing everything out. Now that I'm looking at everything together. And I would like to use a color that I've already used before. So while I have purple, has a color there. When I put it in with a set, there's no purple anywhere here. I have a choice now, do I want to add purple somewhere else? Just to balance the set out? I can do that. Why don't I do that? I liked the style, I like the roller blade. Maybe we'll add a bit of purple onto the Burger Guy illustration. You'll recall that I had some purple anions. They're at first I'm going now to bring them back in. And I feel like they have a purpose. And I can be bold and illustrate them in large. Anions are transparent, so I don't mind making that kind of transparent. And it picks up on the purple here of the color this snail. I want to just add a tiny bit of contrast between the shell, if I remember correctly, is brown. Now that we're wrapped up, it's time to conclude the project and finished the class. Now you're ready to share your mini masterpieces on the class projects gallery and on Instagram or wherever else you'd like to be sharing. Be sure to use the hashtag, illustration Improv class, wherever you share and when you share, I'd love to see if you can find more imaginative ways of using your illustrations. Like maybe you found a way of using it as a T-Shirt graphic or even as a temporary tattoo. Now please meet me one more time in the next and final video for a recap. And what you can do next. 15. Completing the Class: Okay, so that's a wrap congrats on completing illustration Improv. In this class, we learned how to use responsive composition techniques to blast through creative block and help us loosen up. As we begin the process of coming up with ideas, we learned how to set aside our self-doubts by allowing ourselves to be messy and random and our first Sketches, knowing that we can fix them up later on if we want it. By having to fit our drawings inside these train shapes, we've got a chance to see how constraints can help us be more creative. We also learned how to build up more interesting and unexpected ideas by drawing ideas from one theme inside shapes that were based on another. Of course, we learned how to select and refine our favourite shape we sketches and take them into Final Illustration. Thank you so much for taking the class. I'm always grateful that you chose to spend your time with me. If you enjoy the class, please be sure to leave a review right here in Skillshare. Other than that, we're done, class is dismissed