Inking: Textures & Techniques

1. Introduction to Inking Textures: Hey, I'm Alyssa, a graphic designer and illustrator. In this class, I'm going to cover some of the most common yet tricky textures to render an ink. We'll tackle things like hair, skin, scales, clothing, and feathers. Using a single sketch, we'll cover as many topics as possible so that you walk away with some new tips and techniques and you can apply to your own work. I'll be working in Photoshop, but you can use any digital program that you'd like. You can even use Pen ink, because the techniques that we're learning will apply to a medium, not just digital. For the class project, we'll be creating a character that has at least three different textures incorporated somewhere in or on their body. I provide you with the exact same sketch that I use throughout the class. This way, you can follow along as we practice textures together. As a final note, this class is beginner friendly and I don't expect you to have any prior knowledge about inking coming into this. Having said that, I think we're probably just ready to get started. 2. Hair: flowy hair, beards and stubble: The first thing that I did was drop the sketch that I had created into a new Photoshop document. My document is 8.5 By 11 inches at 300 DPI, and I'm going to be working in the RGB color space. Before we actually start inking, what we're going to do first is we're going to find a brush that we're happy with. If you're like me and you're working with Adobe's Creative Cloud subscription, then you're going to have access to a ton of different brushes. In case you don't know how to get to them, you're going to hit "B" for your brush tool and then you're going to go up to the properties, hit the gear icon, just go down to where it says get more brushes and this will automatically open up a web page where you can pick from a bunch of different brush packs. I'm going to go ahead and just pick the megapack and hit "Download". I already downloaded this to save some time. This gives me a ABR file and all I need to do is click on it and Photoshop will do the rest. The next time I go to this drop down menu, I'm going to have a folder sitting here that says megapack. Open that up and I'm going to go to the ink box since we're inking. My choice here is going to be a brush called Mr. Natural 2017 B. For procreate I can provide you with a couple of different links where you can access free brushes and also paid for brushes. As for some of the other digital programs, unfortunately, I can't help you, but what I can say is the only thing that you're looking for in this inking brush is that you just want one that's going to respond well to your hand. When you're drawing a line using light pressure, you want the brush to create a very thin stroke with no change in opacity and the harder you press, the thicker your line is going to get. But again, no change in capacity and that's literally all you're looking for in a brush. Now we can actually move on and I'm just going to turn the opacity of my sketch down just so it doesn't really get in the way while I actually start inking. Now, the first thing I like to do when I'm tackling hair is I like to figure out where the part in the character's hair is. It's easy if you visualize, let's say, someone with long hair. The part in your hair is exactly where basically you have these two different sections going in opposite direction. The reason I'm looking for that part is because that is actually going to tell me what direction the hair is going. All I'm doing in blue is figuring out the direction that the hair is flowing. For hair, direction is very important. Now, my sketch roughly shows it gives me an indication of where his head is moving, but I'm just going to refresh my memory and improvise here a little bit. Once I'm happy with my blue lines, I'm going to go ahead and actually start inking. Again, first thing I go for is that part. Now, my character's hair here he has got really thick dense hair, so the part is actually going to be quite dark in there where there's a lot of shadow. If you have a part in your hair where you can actually see the skin, now typically you wouldn't use such a dark line for that. You're going to treat that more like the area that's near his forehead. How we have these little thin baby hairs and we use lighter strokes. If you've got a part in your hair where you're seeing some skin, you're going to want to use some lighter lines. Again, I'm just going in and creating these small strokes where I want the hair to connect to the face, to connect to the skin. I'm using a variation in lines where I want to emphasize the direction that the hair is going in, I'll use a thicker line. If I want to separate sections of his hair, I'll use a thick line and basically I'm using the thinner, smaller strokes when I want to indicate that there's some softness. A lot of the areas like the end of his hair, I'm going to use these small strokes. I think the more strokes that I put in, the more the texture becomes obvious. Now, here is, I don't want to say subjective, but it's up to you, like how much patience do you really have? I don't have a lot of patience when it comes to inking. I typically don't spend all day long drawing in tons of hair but if this is an area that you just enjoy and you like making these kinds of marks, go ahead. I've definitely seen lots of artwork where the hair is completely filled in and it looks great and then I've also seen other artwork where it's much more simplified and there are only a few strokes to indicate the hair, and those also look great. So it's really your choice how far you want to push this, how many lines you want to use. Now we're going to move onto his facial hair. I'm going to go ahead and create a beard. What you want to keep in mind now I'm going to give him like a short cropped beard, it's not a very long one but basically what I want to keep in mind is the beard hair needs to conform to the form of his face because the hair is actually coming out of his face. It's coming out of the skin so it needs to look connected and flow in a certain way. The hair, as you can see, I've done it in such a way that it follows the contour of the jaw line and even around the chin. The hair's round and meets in the middle. Then I go in and I add a lot of smaller stroke. I'm using really short quick strokes here to show that the hair itself is short and every now and then I'll pop a mark in that's going in the opposite direction because I want the beard to appear not perfectly groomed. I find a lot with hair, even hair on the head and facial hair sometimes if you put a single strand that's random, like going in the wrong direction it just looks more realistic because in real life our hair is being affected by the environment, by movement and you've got random stray hairs probably that you don't want flying all over the place. But every now and then I like to add just of a hair that's doing its own thing. Now we're going to wipe out all the work that we just did and we're going to come at this again, but this time I am going to give him stubble instead. Extremely short hairs. Basically, you're going to see his jaw line, you're going to see is chin. It's like skin and then we're going to add tons of tiny little marks all over the place. Typically, even if a guy has curly hair, stubble itself tends to be really short and straight and quite coarse typically. Keeping that in mind, I'm creating the same marks that are really short and quick and straight. Now, these are a little bit more random, but I'm still trying to remember that the hairstyle needs to wrap around the front. Even around his chin, the hair on the right side is pointing to the right and the hair on the left side is pointing to the left because that shows that his chin is a little bit round and a little stubble marks near his jaw line are also going in the same direction as his jaw line is moving. That's it for those two, so we can see the difference here between a longer beard and a stubbled face, well, a short beard and a stubbled face. Let's move up a little bit and deal with the eyebrows. Eyebrows aren't just straight and easy little patches of hair. With eyebrows, the area that's near the bridge of your nose typically has these small really delicate baby hairs again, and the hair near the top portion of your brow actually points downward. The direction that the hair is growing is typically downward and then the here are near the bottom of your brow is actually going to grow in an upward position so that they create this criss-cross effect. Now, sometimes you can get away with removing the bottom part. Personally, I have really thick eyebrows so I tweeze them a lot and I've removed the bottom section, so I no longer have the bottom hairs that are growing in an upward direction. This little sketch that I am making over to the right is actually a little bit more true to how my eyebrows are. They really the hair goes in one direction now. When you create that crisscross effect or you use these short little lines, it looks so much more realistic than if you were to just draw straight eyebrows like this, or draw the shape and then fill it in. Again, it depends on the type of drawing that you're doing. If your drawing is really stylized than you can totally get away with eyebrows like that, but the drawing that I'm doing right here, I want it to look a little bit more realistic so I'm going to follow the same principle that I just explained to you and create that criss-cross effect. I typically also like to add a couple of strays near the ends of the eyebrows because I just find that it makes it look a little bit more natural. Now, we're almost done with hair, but now we're going to wipe out the other piece of work that we did, the hair on his head. We're going to completely demolish it and we are going to approach it in a different way. For the second method of filling in the hair, we're actually going to completely block it out. I'm using my pen to create the outline that I want, and then I'm going to fill this entire thing with black. When you're ready to fill, you can hit "L" for your Lasso Tool and you can just quickly draw little shape there and hit "G" to fill it in with the paint bucket. For me, I had to clean up a little bit of the edges here with my brush and now I have this perfectly black mass, which is exactly what I want. What I'm going to do next is just turn down the opacity so again I have my sketch showing through to help me out here and I'm going to go back in with white. What I'm doing here first is putting those baby hairs back in. I don't want the area between his hair and his face, like his forehead, to be this really solid edge, so I'm just softening it up by adding these little strokes in again for baby hair. I just go through and recreate some of the lines that we had when we were just using black, but this time we're cutting it out in white. Really important to zoom out and occasionally turn the sketch off so you can see what you've actually created. For me, I'm not entirely happy with the job that I have done here with white. I think that because I'm using white, I want to show that his hair is quite shiny, so I'm going to go in and create more of a light effect. Now it looks like light is actually hitting his hair and creating a shine mark. We'll zoom back out and that's basically it for hair, at least for now. Next, we're going to move on to skin. 3. Skin: freckles, scars and scales: If you take a look at our drawing here, we don't really have that much exposed skin, basically just his head and neck, and then these two little tiny patches of arm. Regardless, we're going to do a couple different things in here. We're going to try a couple different techniques. First things first, we're going to drop in the facial features. There's not really too much to talk about here. What I'm doing is, I'm using lines that aren't really tapered. I'm using some pretty solid lines here. I don't want his skin to look as soft as his hair. So I'm avoiding using the same kind of line. I'm also avoiding putting in lots of different almost like texture lines like I did with the stubble and near the baby hairs in his forehead. Again, make sure to turn off your sketch underneath. I thought the nose looked plain, so I dropped in the bridge just to help kind of define it a little bit more. Now for this neck area, I'm going to turn up 'Smoothing', which is actually just going to help me draw more of a straight line. I find that photoshop is really picking up on a lot of the little shakes and and little twitches that I have. Every now and then I'm going to turn up 'Smoothing', just to help soften the lines. Now around this area, even though his skin is touching the shirt and touching the coat area, I'm not going to draw anything here for now. These outlines are going to be more important to define the texture of the cotton shirt than they are for the skin, so I'm just going to leave it pretty much bare for now. Another thing to keep in mind, just in general when you're inking, is that wherever you have more detail, wherever you have more lines, more almost clutter is going to draw your viewer's eye. There's a lot of different detail that we could put into that ear. But I'm going to keep it really simple with just a couple of different shapes and a lighter line, because I don't want his ear to become the focal point, and I don't want people looking at it so much. I'm pretty happy with this base layer. I'm just going to call it the base layer because I'm not really going to do that much with it. On top of it, now we're going to have a little bit more fun. The first thing we're going to do is we're going to age this guy a little bit. What happens when you age is that your skin loses its elasticity, which means that you have a lot of sagging going on and lots of wrinkles. I'm going to drop in the pretty stereotypical crows feet and bags under the eyes because there're these stereotypes for reason. As soon as people see it, they're like, "Oh, that's an older person." Sometimes when we're creating characters, these stereotypes actually work to our advantage, because it helps get across right away the kind of character that we're creating. As I defined the cheekbones little bit here and little bit of a furrow as well. Again, the lines that I'm creating, they're not really feathered the same way as the lines in his hair. I'm going to put a couple of different lines in his lips like a little bit wrinkles in his lips, and then wrinkles in the forehead as well. That's basically it for the aging. So you take a look, you've got the young face versus the old face that we just created. Now we'll move on. Basically what we're going to do is we're going to set the stage for some other textures that we're going to drop in. We're going to deal with freckles, scars and scales next. Now, the things to keep in mind with all of these are that, these all need to conform to the forms of the face. So very much like how we were dealing with the hair and figuring out the directions that the hair is going to move in, we need to figure out the directions of the forms that are underneath the skin. For example, the cheekbones. We know that the cheekbones are always coming around, they're higher, the bridge of the nose also protrudes off the face, so it's going to be raised in comparison to the part of the cheek of that's right beside it. We're just dropping in these blue lines that are going to serve as guides for when we actually start adding the other texture. We've got the lines for the lips, how the lips are nice and round, both upper and lower. Then even the chin, how the chin is typically nice and round as well. Now this area in here, the brow bone. Typically for men, the brow bone tends to be more defined or more exaggerated. Especially because this guy got a little bit of a frown going on, I want to make sure that, that I don't just give him a flat forehead. I'm just going to continue dropping these lines in, now in the opposite direction, vertically instead of horizontally. Just to help myself a little bit more, I'm actually just going to color in this other side part of the bridge of the nose, as well as the bottom part, it just helps me visualize it a little bit better. Now we're going to move on to freckles. We're going to switch back to black and I'm working on a new layer again. Freckles are part of the skin. If the skin is wrapping around the nose, then the freckles are also wrapping around the nose. We're really going to simplify this. Basically, if you want to think about a single freckle as a circle, that's a perfect circle, where it is on the bridge of the nose, where it's facing us, it's going to be nice and round, and quite circular. In comparison to that side panel of the nose, that's going to be in perspective. We're going to have more of an oval shape there. Now that's a general rule because freckles aren't perfect circles, but that imagining of it will help us create something a little bit more realistic. Following these blue contour lines that I created, I am just going ahead and dropping in lots of different little freckle shapes, and trying to create this rounded form around the cheekbones, and then create that pattern across the nose so It looks like it has some dirt. You turn off the contours to see what it looks like. It's quite subtle, but the shape is still generally there. It works a lot better than if we were to just randomly put spots on his face. Now, the same thing happens with the scar. I'm going to go for the classic scar over the eye. Same thing, just follow those contour lines that we had already created. Follow the shape instead of just a straight line up and down. When we turn off the contour lines, we see that the scar on his face now actually has some form. I think we will move onto scales and we're going to drop them in on the right-hand side of his face. Let's just talk a little bit about scales first. Scales are, you can think of them like brickwork. They're staggered, alternating in pattern. Wherever you have the very tip of the scale, I'll mark it in blue on all of these. That's where the bottom of your scale is going to be on the next row. You're drawing from point to point, and that's how you alternate scales. Let's for comparison, draw scales that aren't alternating, they just go one after the other. This looks strange and to me it looks more like curtains, it doesn't really communicate in the same way because scales aren't typically like that. We're not going to draw them like that, we're going to stagger them or alter the rows. The other thing about scales is that they overlap themselves. You got one row of scales that's overlapping the next, that's overlapping the next, that's overlapping the next. I'm using a very light hand and I'm just scribbling in a little bit of shadow in there. Doing this throughout helps the viewer see that the scales are actually overlapping because now we're adding a little bit of dimension. Scales can be a little bit tricky because of all of these different things that we have to take into consideration. They're alternating, they're overlapping, and they're also conforming to the shape of the face, to the form of whatever they're sitting on top of. When it comes to this little area over here, the cheek is coming out a little bit, which means the scales are going to be in perspective. They're going to come out a little bit. The further down the face they go, the more they're going to change in shape. Now we're really using the guides that we had created previously as we go ahead and draw those in. Again, do your best to alternate them. I find with scales, especially with the lizard scales, they're uneven in shape. I find you can definitely get away with having some smaller, some larger and also if you forget to stagger one, you can also get away with it. It doesn't have to be exactly perfect, like robotically perfect. I find it's a lot more fun when it isn't anyway. Scales can be quite enjoyable. Again, it's also one of those patience things. If you enjoy like I enjoy making scales a lot more than I do hair, so I could spend all day with these tiny little circles. It's really up to you how far you want to take it. As you can see on the left-hand side, we just go ahead and we draw some flat scales here and ignore our contour. Looks pretty crappy in comparison. That's what I mean when I'm talking about making sure that the scales wrap around the form underneath. Now we're going to use a little bit of a thicker line to create the outline around the face. Our scales are quite bumpy, and so that line itself is going to be quite rough and quite bumpy. I add tiny little marks in to blend the scales into the rest of the skin so it's not such a hard edge. Trying to make it look like the patch belongs there. I'm going to go in and add a couple lines for the lips. Lips, they tend to be quite wrinkly. They've got a couple little lines in there. I'm not going to overdo it, but these lines are actually going to help when I take my sketch in my contour lines away and it's just the black remaining, they're going to help define the form of the lips. I've gone in and I've add a little bit of shine as well. I think we can add a couple more scars in. We only did one, we'll try along the cheek area. We've already got these blue contour lines so they're easy to follow. There's not too much thinking going on right now, I think we've already done most of the thinking so we can just happily ink away. I'm going to add that little mustache back in. Again, stubble, little bits of stubble so short, little quick line. The scales I think look a little bit plain. I'm going to go back in and add a little bit of shadow. I'm also just going to add little lines here and there for a little bit of texture, they were looking really flat to me. That's what we've done with the face. Before we wrap up this skin video, we're actually going to go in and deal with the arms. I almost forgot about the arms to be honest. I think what I'm going to do here is I'm going to give him a tattoo. I'm turning smoothing backup again as I draw the outline of his arm. I'm using again the thick non-tapered line to define his arm. From here, I'm going to drop in the contour lines again. The arm is a little bit tricky because it is round and it is flat at the same time. Your forearm typically isn't all that round, but I don't want it to look completely flat at the same time. I want to give it a little bit of shape. Going to give it a subtle roundness. Once I'm happy with the contour lines that I've drawn in, I'm going to go ahead and start sketching in his tattoo. I didn't do this in the original sketch, so I'm just going to have to make it up now. Basically I'm going to go for some vines, some leaves in some flowers. The thing about vines are that, these vines can actually help us describe the roundness of his arm. We're going to use his tattoo to help define the form of his arm. Once I'm happy with my little green sketch, I can come back in and actually start inking it. What I'm doing with the tattoo is making sure that the lines that I draw for the tattoo are not the same thickness as the lines that are describing his arm. I want to make sure that these two things aren't confused. Because the tattoo itself is quite small, I can use a lot of these little scratchy lines, and it's not really a big deal in this case. Also, as I'm drawing the flower, I still want to remember that it's turning a little bit in space because of the dimension of his arm. But the change in perspective isn't that drastic, so I don't have to worry about it too much. But you can see the petals on the bottom of the flower squished a little bit to help make it look like it's going around the arm. Just finishing this tattoo. Something that I like to do personally is just actually turn down the opacity of the tattoo, I find it just helps it look more like a tattoo. I think that that about wraps it up for skin, and next up we're going to be tackling in his actual clothing. 4. Clothes: jeans, leather and patches: Now, with this clothing, I have a couple different ideas for the types of materials that I want to use. I figure that he's going to be wearing a denim jacket with leather arms, and his t-shirt is going to be made out of a much softer, lighter material, so something like a cotton or a linen shirt. Because these materials are different, they're going to behave differently and I'm going to ink them a little bit differently as well. Now, one of the first things you want to think about when you're starting to ink clothes and even when you're starting to draw clothes, you're looking for where the points of tension are. Typically around your joints, like your knees and your elbows. Wherever your clothes has to stretch on one side, it's going to buckle on the other. His arms or outright now, which means that his elbow is pushing against the material. We're stretched on one side. You've got all these wrinkles happening on the other side. Maybe it'll help you if you think about this like a pumpkin, like a crushed pumpkin, where if you squished, it comes out on one end and then on the other side it has to buckle inward and you get all these creases and you get all of these little lines. It's the same thing with wrinkling. Anywhere there's tension, the clothe is going to react to that tension. Now, aside from his elbows, he's got his hands in his pocket and he pushing up and toward us. He's not really just resting his hands in his pocket. He's actively scrunching up his coat. This is also going to cause a little bit of wrinkling. It may also affect the t-shirt underneath. Very suddenly. Now, because our t-shirt underneath is made of a lighter material, it's typically going to respond a lot to its environment. If there's a gust of wind, it's going to blow in the wind. If there is a heavy coat on top of it that's moving around, it's going to react to that movement. Because it's very light, it's very flowy, is not as rigid, so it won't hold its shape as much as the thick denim coat. Also because his t-shirt is bluey, I'm going to use much more curved lines, rounder lines to describe its form as opposed to all of the angles that I've already drawn in in the coat sketch. I think having defined all of this, I can actually start inking. Basically right now all I'm doing is paying attention to the outline strokes. I'm not going to worry about any detail on the inside of the code yet. I just want to create these thick lines to separate the color from the rest of the coat to separate the cuffs on the arms from the rest of the coat, define the pocket, and I'll come back in later with more detail. Around this cuff area, a great way to show the thickness or thinness of your material is right where it wraps around the form. So I've got the cuff of his jacket wrapping around his arm. You'll see the difference here. If I want to say his coat is a thin material, I'll just color that in. If I want the material to appear thick, I'm going to leave a little gap here so that you can see that the material is actually very thick when it wraps around the arm. There's less of a shaded area there. I'll just go ahead and define the rest of the cuff. I already have an idea of how I want to tackle the leather arms. I'm going to be blocking those in the exact same way that we blocked in his hair earlier. For now, I'm ignoring the arms completely because those are just going to be solid masses of black. I'm going to throw a couple more wrinkles right in here right near the arm, and then I'll continue with my defining lines. Now going back to the arms, I'm just going to grab the lasso tool, that's L on your keyboard, and I'm going to fill it in. G is the paint bucket. Notice this time I'm not really bothering to sketch around the out line, I'm just getting go right ahead and just fill it in. I don't really care if the leather coat is super J good. I'm going to ink around the shapes a little bit to make sure that the texture of the brush is also incorporated into this leaves a little bit, because right now these black masses that I have created looks so crisp because I use the lasso tool that they look a little bit different from the rest of the image. We're going to go in and just in little areas, serves to fill it in a little bit with my brush. Unlike we did last time with the hair, now I can go back in with weight and define some of the wrinkles. This time I'm not really focusing on lighting with his hair, I wanted it to look shiny and like the light was being cast on it. But with the sleeves honestly, I don't really care too much to do the same effect. Now, that we've gone ahead and basically done most of the coat, I'm going to go back in with all details. Now, I know that denim in general has, I would say, a lot of seems, a lot of stitching, it's quite texturized, it's quite tough. Mostly what I'm going to focus on is just coming back in here, putting it a couple of little lines here in their first add wrinkles. Mostly I'm just going to focus on adding in a lot of stitching and a lot of buckling around the stitched areas. Around the cuff area, I want to make sure that the cuffs look the same. At this point, a little bit concerned that the arm on the left hand side, because it push back in perspective can look a little bit weird. I don't want the viewer to be confused and to wonder like what exactly is that. On his right arm, I'm establishing a pattern that I haven't really used anywhere else. Just that solid seems followed by a couple of solid lines of stitching. I'm going to use that exact same pattern on the other cuff. It's subtle, but when you look at the image, you notice the two black masses of the arm and then you notice the cuffs and that should be enough to tell the person that's looking at the image that these are the same thing because of the repetition. Now think also denim can sometimes have that zigzag stitching. I'm going to go ahead and drop that in. I think it's going to be a little bit fun. I'm going to add that to the pocket. I don't really care about staying inside the lines. I think it's more fun if it's bit more wonky. Remember to zoom out and take a look at the picture as a whole altogether and see how we're doing. Now, on his coat we've got like this big empty spaces or at least right underneath his arm, it looks a little bit empty. Let's make his jacket a little bit roughed up. We're going to add some holes, some tears. All I'm doing is I'm adding just all these short little squiggly lines. Just going in any direction. Then I'm going to use a mask just to take away a little bit of that outline. I'm not deleting anything, I'm just masking it, essentially hiding it. I'm going to create a little hole here. Using these short little lines to communicate that we've got as tear. I think jeans work really well with patches. So we'll just create silly little patch at some stitches. I think that does it, adds a little bit more visual interest. I think the last part here for close we're going to work on we're just going to put a pattern or a logo or something like that on his shirt and his t-shirt underneath. Basically clothe is like our second skin. Just like in the skin video, I think I said it a lot of times, hopefully not too many times. But you want to make sure the clothe conforms to whatever form is underneath it. In this case, because t-shirt is on his chest and his chest isn't just completely flat. It's got a little bit of roundness to it. When we're placing a pattern on top of that or a logo on top of that, we have to take it into consideration. Quick example, I'm just going to draw the letter F. It's a nice, easy letter. Nice and geometric. I'm just going to draw it flat on his chest. You can see that it looks out of place. It's a bit strange and it's because it's not conforming to his body. Here we go again with a second f. This time we're just going to try to curb some of the lines so that they match the lines that are around at the lines of his coat, lines of his color already looks better, but you can see the difference. It's a subtle change. We didn't make the letter to round in any way. It's a subtle change. Think the placement could be a little bit better. I'm just going to tweak it. Now remember, if you're doing a full pattern on the shirt, let's say you go for stripes or you go for plad, you're also going to have to take into consideration the wrinkles. Let's tackle this F again. But this time we're going to put a random wrinkle into shirt. It's close, but it could be better. Basically, the wrinkle is going to obstruct the letter now and it's going to distort it. Again, a very slight change, but it does make it look a little bit more realistic. I'm just going to change this, pull it down a little bit more. There you go. Like I said, just a little bit more distorted, but it does make it look like the F is actually reacting to the wrinkle in the clothing as opposed to just completely ignoring it. It makes it look more like it's suited to its environment. 5. Other: braids, feathers and chains: We're almost done here. We're just at the tail end. This is the image that we've created so far and it's basically complete but I think we can do some more work. I think that we can introduce a couple more textures in here and challenge ourselves a bit. What I did was I sketched in blue, just some random ideas. We're going to give him a braid. We're going to give him a necklace, give him some pants, some wings and then we're going to change the image on his shirt. So we got a lot of work to do here, we better get started. First things first, we're going to tackle his braid. Now, we're dealing with hair so we're going to remember to taper our lines. We're going to use the thicker lines to define the different sections of hair. With a braid, you've got three different strands of hair, or three different chunks that are being weaved into themselves. Basically it creates a different sections that are interlocking. If you struggle with braids, there's absolutely no shame in looking up reference photos. I do it all the time. Actually, anytime you're struggling, there's absolutely no shame. Just go and either look in a mirror if you're struggling with figuring out where the wrinkles in your clothing are or if you're struggling with a certain hairstyle, just do a quick Google search, look for images on Pinterest, ask a friend to take a photo, anything really. Back to this braid, all I'm doing is I'm drawing these interlocking shapes and I'm using the thick lines to define the different sections. Then I'm going to come back in later and draw more of the little wispy, I want to call them decorative lines, but the ones that actually make it look more like hair. In the last video, I mentioned masking but I didn't really cover it too much. I may as well here. Basically a mask is just that. It's something that you put on top of your layers so that you don't destroy the work that you've already done. In my Layers Panel you can see I've just hit that little icon here at the bottom. That's a mask. You're painting with two colors. When you're painting on your mask here using black and you're using white. Black conceals and white reveals. As long as your coloring with the black color, you're going to hide everything. Then as soon as you switch back to white, which you can do by pressing the keyboard shortcut "X", you're going to start to reveal the lines that you just covered up. This way you don't actually make any hard edits. You don't actually erase anything for good. If you try something, you change your mind, you say, "It doesn't work," you can always go back to the way that it was before. Having hid a lot of the sections of hair here, I'm going to go back in and I'm going to start redefining the direction that his hair is moving in because basically I want it to look like his hair is being pulled into a tight ponytail. So the direction of the hair changes now, whereas before it was like loose and flowy and going wherever it wanted to. Now, it's got to conform to the shape of his skull because it's being pulled to the back of his head. Now we're going to tackle the wings, which means drawing feathers. Feathers are basically like hair and scales combined. You're going to have these little feathers that are overlapping each other. It's also a very soft and flowy and lightweight texture. So you're going to be using the same soft, wispy lines. Now, I sped this section up here because I drew quite a bit before I realized, wait a second, this isn't really working. So right now, I'm going back in with the contour lines. I think I've messed it up. So I'm just trying to rough out what direction these feathers are going in. So I'm going to erase a lot of the work that I did in black so that I can redo it, make an adjustment. Near the base of the wing, typically there are these tiny little feathers, small little feathers that overlap themselves, overlap each other a lot. As you get further down the wing, the feathers tend to get larger and longer. So I'm making sure that I do that. I create that pattern when I'm drawing the wing. Now, we're also going to give him some pants. I don't know why I didn't do that originally in the sketch. Here is just a floating body. For the pants, I'm going to block it out. This is just choice. I just feel like where the arms are black and they're the only blackout area, I think that the image would balance out nicely if the pants area was also black and it's also a small area there, so it's not going to draw too much attention. Now I'm going back up to the hair and just adding in those light little strokes showing the direction that the sections are weaving into each other. Moving back to the feathers, I'm going to do the exact same thing. Now especially we're thinking about scale. So how I said the scales overlap each other. There's a little bit of a shadow going on where I'm starting to draw the texture of the feathers. I'm starting near the base where they tuck under the feather that's coming before them. Like scales just creating texture and shadow at the same time. It gives it a little bit of dimension and also shows that these feathers are a little bit softer. Without these wispy lines, if you take a look at some of the feathers that are pointing downward on the right-hand side, this just look like they could be solid blades. So I think that it's quite important to add these wispy lines in here for texture. Now jumping over to the necklace, I've decided that we're going to go for a chain. We're going to give him a little gemstone as a pendent. I'm just roughing in some little oval shapes which are going to be my guide for when I actually create the chain. With a chain, you've got these interlocking oval shapes which means you're going to want to make sure that the top of one oval is overlapping the bottom of another. Hopefully that makes sense. I highly recommend with chains sketching out in some other color, a guide for yourself as to where you want the chain to go. Not necessarily the ovals, you don't have to sketch those out if you want. But I highly recommend having at least a very loose guide as to where you want the chain to go, because all this little chain links are connected. If one of them is off, if the angle is a little bit off, it's really easy to continue that small little error you made and it becomes more and more visible as the chain link progresses. Now we go for the gemstone. I'm just going to give it a little bit of shine marks, maybe a little bit of lines there. It's hanging off of the chain. Because I've got these blackout areas now, I think I need to go back in with white. Defining the pendant area and then also defining the wrinkles that are happening around that crotch area. Like I said, wrinkles happen anywhere there are joints, anywhere where there's tension. Typically around the crotch area, like where your legs actually go into your pelvis, there tends to be a lot of wrinkling and close happening there. We'll give him a shirt color. Then we're going to jump down to the logo and his shirt is supposed to say "Texture." I think maybe I should have picked a better word because you can't really see that much of it. But I'm going to fill it in any way. Then lastly, I'm just going to add the indications, like a hint of a wing in the background. I don't want to add that much detail as I did on the right wing because his head is right there. Because his face has a lot of detail, because his hair has a lot of detail, I don't want to crowd that space. It'll just become very busy looking. I'm just going to hint another wing being in the background. Last thing I'm going to do is actually just lower the opacity of the design that we made on the shirt. That's it. That brings us to the end of our picture. It's fully inked now. 6. Conclusion: So that's it guys, we are all done and I hope that you've enjoyed this class. I hope that you learned at least one or two new things that you can incorporate into your own drawings. I've actually really enjoyed making this class for you and I'm curious to know if there are any textures that I haven't covered in this class that you're eager to learn about. If there are, please drop a little note in the class discussion area. That way I actually know what you want to learn in the future. Don't forget to post your class project. I would like to take a peek at the hard work that you've done and it also helps your classmates to see how you approached something and how you dealt with the topics that we covered. So lastly, if you have any questions or comments, you can find me here on Skillshare. Otherwise, I'm also on Instagram, so please never hesitate to reach out and I guess that's it. I'll hopefully see you in the next class, bye.