Transcripts
1. Class Trailer: Hi, I'm Tom Froese. I'm an illustrator and designer in Vancouver, British Columbia and I'm also a teacher here on Skillshare where I have a few popular classes including Inky Maps, and Inky illustrations. As an experienced illustrator, one of the things I get asked a lot about is how I developed my unique and expressive way of drawing people. Believe it or not, I used to avoid illustrating people at all costs. One of the biggest problems for me was having a consistent and fast style that translated well from sketch to finish. I also wanted to have a style that moved away from realistic, literal people toward something more expressive, unique, and iconic. As illustrators we are going to be asked to draw people in our work. At a certain point, I couldn't avoid it any longer and I just had to figure it out. Now, I'm happy to share a few of the things I've picked up along the way that will hopefully give you guys the leg up I wish I had at the time. If you're an illustrator who's hoping to break free from realism in a more literal way of drawing people. I made this class for you. It's not a character design class, and it's not a classical figure drawing class. It's about learning to have more fun and expression and playfulness in our people. Join me as I guide you through a series of fine exercises that will help you break out of realism and liberalism. Along the way, you'll learn some important principles that go into stylizing people, including drawing more intuitively from heart, relying less on reference photos, starting a drawing without fear of screwing it up, refining a sketch gradually through iteration, and of course, bridging the gap between that really rough first sketch and the refined final illustration. Teaching style is a really tricky thing and to be honest, I wasn't sure I could pull it off, but I think I figured out a few things for you guys. I call this class odd bodies, and I hope you'll join me in drawing some of the oddest bodies in town. Are you ready to draw some odd bodies? Great, so am I. Let's do this.
2. Project and Tools: For the class project, I'm going to guide you through six really fun exercises that really help us practice different approaches to stylizing the human figure. If after you've done the exercises, you want to really level up your people illustration game. Then join me as I complete bonus project, taking a sketch from one of the exercises we've done and turning it into a fully realized finished illustration. For this part, you are more than welcome to use your own tools and techniques, or you can follow along with me and learn step-by-step how I go about finishing an illustration for the exercises. The equipment is pretty simple. Just have a pencil, some plain paper, tracing paper, and pair scissors handy. No specific drawing skills are necessary, although a little bit of experience drawing people in a more realistic way wouldn't hurt. For the bonus project. You'll need to have Photoshop on your computer and then of course a mouse or a tablet, whatever you're comfortable with, and a scanner for scanning in your inky textures as you make them, for the inking marks themselves, I use black India Ink, a Speedball Nib Pen, an assortment of paintbrushes and of course I'll have some water on hand to wet and rinse my brushes as I go along. When you've done the exercises and when you're done the bonus project, post them on the class page. This is your best opportunity to get feedback from the class and of course feedback from me. I love seeing what you guys do. I'm always amazed in my other classes when i see what people create using the skills I have taught them and it brings me so much joy. Just one final note before we get going, I am going to be showing you how I do things in my style. This is my tool that I can use to show you how I do these things. But what I want you to take home are the concepts and skills. The actual way I draw is just one of thousands of ways of doing that. The world does not need more of me, it needs more you, I want you to be able to take these skills and overtime, integrate them in a much more personalized way. That being said, if you need to copy what I'm doing for this class, for the projects, that's what they're there for. I have no problem if you guys want to just emulate what I'm doing as a way of learning. I just encourage you to take what you've learned in this and bring it to the next level, develop it over time. Have patience with yourself because it's going to be a long journey. It has been and still is for me. Let's just get on with the rest of the class.
3. Lesson 1: About Stylized People: We talked a lot about stylizing people. I just wanted to touch a little bit on what I mean by stylized people. Stylization is a way of interpreting something, not realistically or literally, but more expressively or with some aesthetic intent, maybe you want to make it look more interesting, for instance. In other words, stylization means how we express something in a more abstract or a personal way, a more subjective way, rather than something more objective or scientific even. I could talk about this all day, but I figured I'd show you 10 different illustrations from 10 illustrators I admire. They're all very different, and they just show different approaches to stylizing the human figure. This first image is by Malika Favre, and she uses realistic proportions and precise composition, but minimal details, flattened shapes, and limited color palettes. These work perfectly in her peer vector style. This next image is by Lauren Nassef. She uses a lot of realism and proportionality in her drawings, but she applies flattened color or expressive patterns and masterfully emits entire details in surprising ways. This image is from Keith Negley and he uses distorted, almost cubist representations of the full figure. He uses texture and brushstrokes expressively, but still maintains a graphic flatness to the overall composition, and this allows the concepts to shine through. He often includes just enough of the facial details to evoke emotion. This next image is by French illustrator Blexbolex. He uses flattened shapes and solid colors that are conducive to screen printing. Because of his strictly limited color palettes, he relies on the use of negative space to suggest form. His shapes have a uniform round quality to them. Facial details are almost always absent, adding to a sense of mystery, but also allowing the overall concept of his images to shine through. Deliberate use of overprints are telltale signs of his preferred printing technique. This image is by Italian illustrator Olimpia Zagnoli, and of all the illustrators I follow, Olympia is one of the strictest where it comes to using a consistent minimal visual language. Her images are always flat, have round edges, and play with bright bold contrast in colors. With these same tools, she could easily end up with more realistic images like Malika Favre, but hers are decidedly more simple in form, and clearer in concept. She is not bound to reality and can freely distort proportion and anatomy in ways that are surprising in concept, but not in style. This next image is by Satoshi Hashimoto, and Hashimoto's work varies between more cartoony and more realistic, but it always has a line quality and feeling of being really light and good - humored. His work demonstrates a solid foundational understanding of the human figure, and also a disciplined cartoonist's approach. He has a higher sense of realism and proportionality with his bodies, but he takes liberties with a faces, hands, and feet. He sticks to a dynamic black pen stroke to define his forms, and two or three flat colors to make them pop. This next image is by my all - time favorite illustrator Miroslav Sasek. Of all the examples, Sasek is the most complex in terms of his style, he clearly has a painter's background, but his figures are always playful and take a liberal approach to proportion and anatomy as the image requires. He expresses his figures of large flat areas that he fills them with a flat glossy color. Simple lines express folds, creases, and details of the body. His faces are always a feature rather than an aside in his people, and are loaded with personality and good humor. This next image by artist Geoff McFetridge. He adheres to a strict visual language comprising of simple rounded shapes and flat solid colors, like Olimpia Zagnoli, all against a plain background. In his work, he uses the human figure to express vignettes of human experience in various succinct and sometimes surreal ways. He'll often use a single piece of clothing and a very bold graphic way as the central conceptual element. These images are from a very underappreciated illustrator in my opinion, her name's Lora Lamm. I think her work can be compared to Geoff McFetridge for how she uses clothing and hair to define her forms, and I would also relate her to Miroslav Sasek for the whimsy and the style of her images, which makes sense given that she's from the same era as Miroslav. Her figures seem to borrow from the fashion world, which are highly feminine, elongated, and elegant. Finally, we come to Marcus Oakley. I love Marcus Oakley's illustrations because they're so playful and naive looking. His forms are always flat, childlike, and almost collage or cut out, even when drawn with a black line. He seems to favor straight lines almost as though he started a straight line, but couldn't stop when he wanted to. He'll use some roundness for the head or the odd elbow bend or finger, but otherwise seems to have a disdain for soft contours. What I love is that he pretty much does away with any semblance of natural posture, and this makes his images very approachable and charming. These are just a few examples of unlimited ways of stylizing people. These are illustrators who float my boat. Everybody has their favorite illustrators, and I encourage you to look at the illustrators that really charge you up and get you excited about illustrating and illustrating people.
4. Lesson 2: Some Guiding Principles: Before we get into the exercises, I first wanted to share with you some principles that guide me as I approached stylizing people in my illustration. Conveniently, if you were to take the first letter of my principles and put them together, they spell the word faces. That's a nice little acronym to remember as you work through these exercises and develop your own style into the future. F is for flattening, A is for abstraction, C is for clarity, E is for exaggeration, and S is for simplification or simplicity. You're going to hear me talk a lot about flattening. I'm going to say it over and over again through these exercises. That's because my final illustration show is very flat. I use the pen tool, I use basically vector shapes to define and describe my forms in my illustration. When I'm doing my sketches, I try to make sure that what I'm drawing will translate well into that flat style. I do add a tiny bit of shading in my finished work sometimes. But for the most part, I'm describing forms as flat two-dimensional things rather than three-dimensional realistic things. Abstraction is moving from realism toward something more symbolic. Rather than depicting what we see as we see it in a very realistic and scientific way, we're expressing it in a more subjective way. Here's an example of abstraction. Imagine you want to draw a pine tree or a Christmas tree. Instead of drawing the trunk in every possible little needle and branch, you could just draw a triangle. That shape would be an abstract version of the Christmas tree. Clarity is of utmost importance when stylizing, because stylizing is all about communicating ideas. We want our images to be clear. We're trying to make whatever we're seeing as easy to understand as possible. If the information someone gets is mumbling and static, they may not receive that message clearly. But if it's crystal clear on the best possible channel or signal, you're going to convey what you're trying to say and there's not going to be any misinterpretation of it. That's partly what I mean by clarity. If we're clear on our sketch, what our idea is and how the forums fit together, then it will be a lot easier to execute in the finished illustration. This is both for digital illustration where we're using vectors or even more analog illustration such as painting. Exaggeration is another principle I use a ton in my work. An exaggeration is just a way of adding drama and energy to an otherwise normal situation. An example I like to use is, if you're in a crowded room maybe at a party, you see someone across the room that you want to get their attention. Well, you could put your hand up and hope they make eye contact with you, or you could waive hands like I'm over here, I'm over here. They're more likely to see you in that case, and that's the idea in illustration. When we're exaggerating, we're making people notice more because of the way the person is doing something or interacting in a certain way that's above and beyond what we would consider normal in real life. Exaggeration can be in proportion in terms of big and small. Make something big that's small, or it make something small that's big. Exaggeration can be in the expression of the face, it can also be in the way they're holding their body. Perhaps someone running down the street, actually doesn't look that interesting to us because it's very normal for people to run. But if you exaggerate how that run looks in your illustration, is going to just add a lot more to the story and people will pay more attention to it. Last one is simplification. Simplification is just looking at ways to take any extra information away from our illustration. This is the idea of minimalism. I'm not talking about Swiss minimalism where it's just totally austere, but in any given illustration or any type of communication, there is such thing as too much information. When there's too much information, it gets in the way of the clarity of the main point of the concept that we're trying to convey. Remove any extra information to the point where our image is clear, but we don't want to remove much information so that our image doesn't make sense anymore. There's this nice sweet spot between too much information and too little information. You want to inhabit that place right in the middle where the image is clear, it's easy to read at a glance. You get it right away, and you see what you're supposed to see without distraction. These five principles I talk about a lot throughout the exercises and are what I use when I'm illustrating people, and I hope these really help you moving forward.
5. Lesson 3: The 5 Pain Points: When stylizing people, there are certain pitfalls or what I call pain points that we can fall into that will prevent us from really getting to the essence of what we're trying to communicate. In other words, these are areas that we're going to be very tempted to overwork. While doing them and not quite getting them right, we'll feel discouraged and maybe even give up and we don't want to go there. I've identified five pain points to watch out for when illustrating. At each of these pain points we have some crucial decisions to make and we should always be erring on the side of simplicity and clarity, and of course, keeping in mind some of the principles of stylization that we talked about. The first pain point is the face. Our temptation is to overwork the face, especially with the eyes. The eyes, we're very drawn to, they're the first thing that we look at when we see a person or even an illustration of a person. Here's the thing to remember, the parts of the face. I'm talking about the eyes and nose and mouth, particularly, you don't need much to have expression. You'll see in my work that I just used dots or lines for eyes, a little pointy nose, and a mouth made out of just a curvy line. Then maybe sometimes I'll add rosy cheeks to suggest femininity or friendliness or warmth. I might add a bit of blush to the face to emote anger or embarrassment. How you draw your facial figures is up to you. But while you're developing your people style, practice using the most minimal kinds of marks and just see how much you need to have the kind of personality you want in your illustration. For some it's going to be more and others it's going to be less. The next pain point is the ears. Do you really want to go and draw a realistic ear? If you're drawing a stylized person, a realistic ear obviously is just going to be very distracting. For me, I just draw a couple of bumps and some squiggles. If the person has long hair, sometimes I just don't even show the ears or I'll just show a little lobe poking through. You can place ears anywhere you want on the head. Some people, just as a stylistic choice, will just place ears really low or really high. I admittedly place my ears on a more literal position on the head, which is basically that the ear generally aligns with the eye area and the lobe, the bottom aligns with the bottom of the nose. One of the major pain points for me is still, how does the head connect the body? Drawing necks and attaching a head naturally to the body is tricky. It's trickier than you think. I think we underestimate what goes into a natural-looking setting of the head on the neck. That's because if you look at actual human skeleton, the head has a plane that goes like this, and then the neck comes at it like this. Then the spine kind of curves back in and around. Our head is hanging on an angle on our neck which is on an angle. Depends on how bad your posture is. But the way our head is hung on our bodies is very complex when you really start to analyze it. For a simplified stylized people, sometimes I just don't even draw much of a neck at all. I mean that the head just goes right into the body and it's done. This is something you'll find in other illustrators' stylized people, there's not much in the way of necks. Usually the head is just plunked right onto the body. For men, I can get away with that head thick neck right to the body. For women, sometimes I like to do it a little bit more nuanced where the head curves in and tapers into a neck and comes back out and connects to the body. For side views sometimes it's the same thing. I just plunk the head on the body, but other times I'll draw a chin. It all depends on what works for the illustration and how much realism I need or want to bring to it. The next pain point is the hands, the hands and the fingers. Now, these are a complex system and in on of themselves, they can have so much of a gesture and expression. We could spend a lot of time just going through how our hands look in different moods or situations. But generally speaking, if we're drawing overall figures as part of an illustration, neutral hands that are drawn very simply will usually do. A few bumps for your fingers. You can draw them together and just draw lines to show the separation of the fingers with a thumb jutting out or you can draw the fingers splayed. I often actually only do four fingers because five fingers, for some reason five fingers just looks off to me. I often do four unless I need the fifth, I'm very flexible with that and no one has ever called me out on it. If you do need to have extra gesture in the hand, try and simplify that gesture as much as possible. Some classic hand poses are A, okay, thumbs up and maybe like holding something with your pinky up, like a cup of tea or something like that. There's lots of fun you can have with the hands but keep it simple and don't overwork it. At the end of the day, keep it simple and don't fuss over the hands too much. The next pain point is of course, the feet and toes and it's very similar to hands. It's really just like if you're drawing bare feet, you just need to draw a few little bumps or nubbins, and if you need them some lines to show the separation. You probably want to start thinking about, what is your default go-to foot style? For me, it's the pointy toed high-heeled boot. Everybody gets it and it just works in my illustration that's a little bit cheeky and funny. It just adds a lot of personality. You could choose a certain kind of simple sneaker style that everyone wears. Maybe the foot shape is just super simple. Find something that works that feels natural for you to draw and also adds a little bit of personality to your drawings. These are all the pain points, the face, the ears, the head and neck, the hands and the feet. Each one of these, you can dial up or dial down how complex you do them in a given job. But generally speaking, have a very simplified way that you do this. Work toward using very simplified expressions or abstractions of these things rather than more realistic things. Once you've done this a few times, you'll start finding ways that speak to you more, ways that you like more, ways that feel better to you and more natural to you. Lean into those and keep doing them. The more you do them and the more you see them and the more other people see them, you get used to it and then you own it, and then it becomes your own. You can't imagine doing it any other way.
6. Exercise 1: Action Figures!: This exercise is called Action Figures because we're going to be drawing people in action. The purpose of this exercise is to translate or interpret a realistic photo into a more flattened, stylized contour sketch. A flatter contour sketch translates much more easily into a finished illustration if you're trying to work in a more stylized way. To do this exercise, first, find a photo of someone doing a sports activity such as, skiing, bowling, dancing, golf. Next, using the photo as a reference, draw the subject. Use bold, confident lines rather than tentative shading and more sketchy lines to define the form and avoid using values of light and dark to make it look more three-dimensional. It's always tempting to fill in and shade and try to make it look more realistic. But we're trying to move our drawings toward being more flat. If drawing in this more confident contour style is really difficult and unnatural for you at first, don't worry about it because we're going to be iterating this. Our first sketch might be really rough, and then we're going to trace over it and refine it, and we can keep doing that until we're happy with the final sketch. By the end of this exercise, you'll have a more stylized contour-based drawing of your action figure. So for my action figure, I want to do a downhill skier. If you look at downhill skiers, they are so great to draw. There's so much energy in their body poses. I'm going to make this a little more interesting for myself. I want to move away from these more modern Olympic type alpine skiers and go into something more from the 1980s. I'm looking for something with a lot of movement in it and a good outfit. I have my reference image up on my screen and I have a pencil and some plain paper. When drawing, this may be one of the hardest parts. It's just knowing where to start. I look for a part, that my eye is drawn to and I start from there. My eye is drawn to the headband on this guy. I can draw a simple rectangle shape. The point here is, I'm looking for ways of flattening this as I'm styling it. So not trying to define three-dimensional forms, I'm not trying to get a feeling of volume as much as I am looking for. Almost like jigsaw puzzle pieces that fit together in that bad effectively is a contour drawing. I'm not going to be too precious because I know that I can go back over this again to perfect some of the lines. Not being super scientific about the hands, just getting the idea of gloves and then trying to get them in at least the position that I see them in. In the reference image of this guy, he's got a ballooned autumn of his jacket, and some good wrinkles happening on his jacket as well, which makes nice contour lines to draw. Now here's where it gets interesting. We have his legs and they're foreshortened. His thighs and knees are kind of coming out into the foreground and then it go back. Of course since we are drawing this flat, we're just drawing the contours representing everything as flat as possible. Now his boot comes like this, and his other boot meets it here. Then of course, his skis will follow, where his boots are pointing. Now if you're looking at my reference image, you will notice that his skis aren't exactly in this formation in the original image. I'm allowing that to happen. I didn't mean for it to happen, but because I'm not trying to copy or mimic this image, I'm okay with letting some inconsistencies happen. I'm interpreting this image, not copying it. We're not in the business of copying. We're in the business of interpreting. You can already see there's some pain points emerging here. How does his head and neck work here? His hands look a little bit awkward, his feet are fine because they're just boots anyway. If anything, it's more about how the knee, comes out and then goes back, and how I define that. The nice thing is once you have your first sketch, you can use that as a structure to trace over with tracing paper. Teeth that guy down there. Back there. You'll notice that as I'm going along, if you look again at the reference image, I'm very much simplifying the contours, ignoring most bumps and wrinkles and adding a few choice ones, to add a little bit of interest, but otherwise, letting my lines go more or less straight or at least smooth. Of course I'm drawing using confident strokes. I'm able to do even more confident strokes as I trace over. That's the goal. The purpose of having these straight, smooth, confident contour lines is that they are going to work really well when you try doing the same to final artwork. You'll see this when I develop one of my drawings in my final project. How important it was that I had these clear old lines. If I had these sketchy lines and try to define everything using shading in my sketches, it's going to be less clear about how I trace over that using the pen tool. That's why these bold confident lines matter now in the sketch. I'm just going to add a few details to his ski suit just to add a bit of sense of dimensionality. More-so, adding a few details that aren't in the reference image that can add a bit more interest to the image. Patterns and designs on the cloths themselves can be really helpful in helping to find form. If I were to be finishing this in my style, I would probably include some snow debris here with some texture of some kind. I'm going to trace over this one more time just to get a little bit more confidence. But I can put my original sketch away. You can see how I've really resolved some of the things that I didn't resolve in the first sketch. You can also see why it wasn't important to get this first sketch super right, right away. Your first sketch may be great, but in all likelihood, it will need a few tricks to get it more in the zone of where you want it to be. Now again, I'm going to trace over this for more confidence in the drawing itself. Now for his hair, I'll likely try to find a way of using texture to really bring out the waviness of it. In this contour drawing, I can only hint at it at what will be in the final illustration. I want to make sure the edge of the skis continue in alignment, and that helps for making the image look tighter. Now in the original image look cuts under the other ski now adds a little bit of interest. The bindings basically is triangle bits. I'm abstracting them a little bit, so here's my sketch. What will make this a successful action figure for me is that it has movement and it's expressed in contour drawing only. All the awkward bits have been resolved to some degree. It may not be super perfect at this point. There may be more improvement to be done, which I can then take care of in final art if need be. Looking at my original reference photo and then comparing it to my drawing, you can see that the one is clearly derived from the other. But some interesting things have happened as I've interpreted this real-life scenario into my more fictional stylized drawing. The first thing I notice is the X formation of the skis and how it's been really dramatized or exaggerated. I didn't mean to do that but I naturally tended to just turn that into a almost perfect X. That kind of exaggeration is great when stylizing the human figure because it just adds more energy and like I said, more drama. Other than that, I've manipulated the proportions of the arms and the different body parts. I've ultimately avoided drawing realistically. A point of interpreting an image versus copying it, is to add something of yourself or of your creative style to it so that it becomes something new.
7. Exercise 2: Action Figures From Memory: This next exercise is called action figures from memory, because we're going to be drawing our action figure that we just drew in exercise 1 from memory. Now, the purpose of this exercise is to see what happens when we've just drawn something from a reference photo, and then we put that reference photo away and then try and draw it again from memory. What we did in exercise 1 was effectively download information about our reference photo, about our model, and now it's in our head and there's going to be some gaps in what we remember. It's really interesting just to see how well we can remember what we're drawing, but also what we do to fill in the gaps in our memory. To do this exercise, just start drawing whatever you can remember about your subject. Try and reproduce what you drew in exercise 1 without looking at your reference photo. No peeking guys. I know it's going to be hard, but close that window, put your reference photo away, and just have fun. This is an experiment. So if you can't remember anything, just draw the best thing that you can. That's what this exercise is about, is what happens when you try to draw something that you just recently drew from a photo. The results may surprise you. They certainly did for me when I did this exercise. Again, just as with the first exercise, try to draw using bold, confident strokes rather than tentative sketching. But of course, you can refine and make them more and more confident as you iterate, as you trace over your sketch. When we drew our action figure, we hopefully in some way downloaded information to our brains, to our memories about that figure, and this experiment is about seeing what information was downloaded and how can we use that information to draw something from memory. But I do remember starting with the headband and the guy had crazy hair, hood at this point, I'm forgetting exactly how his arms were, but I think this arm was up and he his holding his pull like that. There's different ways I could go about this. I know his skis were in an exclamation here. So I could draw the skis and fill in the blank, or I could just keep adding to the lines and of letting each line prompt me to the next line. Let's just go with this. I know he had his foreshortened thighs here, and I know his other ski was in an x. If I remember correctly, this top of the ski didn't go pass his arm, but it is in my memory drawing here, and that's totally okay. You fill in the gaps with guesses and that can make for an interesting image. Now his boot would have to go this way, which means there would probably be some kind of his cap jetting down that way, add in a design on his jacket. The point here isn't to remember perfectly, it's just to use whatever information, remember. I use this very often in my drawing to move away from the reference image and draw something that's totally original. Having drawn from my memory, this image is totally my own and it includes even more of my creative tendencies then copying a reference image could ever allow me to do. Now, I'm just going to trace over this now and try and resolve and refine some of the awkward parts. Here's my finished skier drawn from memory. I'm going to compare him now to my originals skier from the action figures exercise we did before. On the left is the original skier that I drew from a reference image, and on the right is my new drawing from memory. I'm actually pretty pleased with the result. I think it's pretty amazing how much I remembered given how complex the image was. But I attributed mostly to how many times I drew and redrew the original image. I committed it to memory in that way. But I really like about the new drawing is the feeling in the arms, the knot is tight, more long and fun, and the head is sitting better on the body. I really simplified that connection where his neck and jaw line sit, and instead of the V- neck, I just have a little zipper line. I like his hood too, it's a lot more whimsical and it feels a lot more confident. Everything about this image that I drew from memory feels a lot more spontaneous and fresh and free. That is ultimately the goal. If we're drawing from a reference image, we keep referencing it. We're going to keep looking up, looking down, and there will be interruptions in the flow and there will be an overall tendency to try and get an image right versus draw it from heart. Once we're drawing from memory and truly drawing from heart, we start to get much more flowy lines, everything is coming together organically and feels like it all was made at one time. This is the energy we want to give all our figure drawings.
8. Exercise 3: Page of Poses!: This exercise is called page of poses and it's really fun. We're going to draw a handful of people in the same page doing the same activity. The purpose of this activity is to practice drawing a set of related people within the same space. It's also helpful in getting a sense of the different movements related to the same activity. One of the great things about this exercise is when we're done, we're able to see clues of our style emerge, because as we look through the different characters we drew, we can see our creative tendencies applied to each. To start this exercise, find five or six photos of people doing a sports activity, same as we did in action figures, the first exercise. Next, going one by one through each photo,draw what you see into a more flattened, stylized figure. Make sure to leave room for all of them on the same page. They should be roughly the same size, but don't fuss too much about this. I'll show you what I do when I accidentally run out of room on the page. As always, we'll be drawing in flattened contour lines, and iteratively refining, and making our sketches more confident. Let's change the subject a little bit. Last time I did some [inaudible] This time let's try people playing tennis in the 1980s. These are fantastic. I just want to get five or six full body poses like this guy, I can make up his shoes. Is this guy perfect? I've collected my reference photos for the tennis players, and now I have them loaded in Bridge and I can just look at one image at a time conveniently to draw each. If you have Adobe Creative Cloud, you probably have Adobe Bridge. It's super useful for visually searching through images on your computer, and I like using it as a way of referencing photos when I have lots of references to draw, so just click on an image and hit Spacebar puts out one into full view. Now I'm just going to go through my tennis poses one-by-one, and just draw them wherever they seem to land on the page. I'm going to try and draw them roughly the same size, but things may vary as I'm going along and that's okay. As usual, I'm just starting wherever my eye looks first. In this case it's this tennis players arm flattening the shapes. Sometimes when you're looking at a reference image, you actually can't see part of the body. In this case, her right arm is behind the rest of her body. I can see a bit of her elbow poking through underneath her her left arm there, and I've exaggerated it in my my drawing, and I might have to correct that once I start tracing over these in the next phase. Now at the skirt, there is a bit of a contour line of her backside there, and then the part of her flies out of there. This can be a clue to the contours of her actual figure, and then it can continue that to her. Like shoes pointing forward can be very abstract, and most of us don't have a symbol in our minds that we know how to draw in this position, so I'm drawing mostly what I see, which is basically a four-sided shape. This is the front. Her toe here, her laces will be here now, and some nice details on this tennis players skirt. This pleats. Great opportunity to define some of the shape there. The striped shirts, they're great for adding interest to the figure, and I often try, and use the line direction to define either some sense of dimensionality or to actually in a surprising way flatten a sense of dimensionality. Moving on. Got the leg warmers here. This woman is wearing just a [inaudible] inexplicably very low cut knack that I'm exaggerating since its distinctive as part of her uniform. Now these reference images are very low resolution, so I'm just using them generally as a clue to form, but otherwise, I'm just filling in the gaps with my imagination. A string on her racket obviously is almost invisible. I probably don't need to draw it quite as heavy as I did in both of these instances, and again, this is a foreshortened shoe, just an abstract four-sided sheet will do for her foot. She's got a nice headband hair going over top and then some folds where she's bending, Moving on. Sometimes all of the gesture is contained in the hand, and in this case, the player has her fingers splayed out in such a way that you can just feel her emotion, her tension in her hand, and in those cases I'll draw the hand like it is, as I see it, rather than a more stylized version with just lumps, and lines drawn to imply the fingers. Now also, I have someone here in my way. I can choose to just draw over her or find a different way of having her arm. Her arm was going here with her racket down here. She's now bringing it up in my version so that she fits on the page. I'm responding to the shape that I have to work with them. Pretty rough, and we're going to go back over each one of them, and turn them into more refined, and more resolve sketches. I've got my sketch here and I'm going to tape it down and start. For this, I'm going to just continue the head right into that traumatic neckline of her unit target and then just have a soft chin there, and then her shoulders can come around that way. Maybe just to give it a bit more drama up top here, I'll give her head band and then give some hair coming out the bottom rather than the top. Just have some lines for the hair texture, and I'll leave just hair on this side to give the overall figure some direction actually definitely looking that way. For this exercise, you are able to look at your original reference images if you want. I'm doing mostly from intuition and memory here versus looking at the reference images this time around. For now I'm not even going to draw the string of the racket. You can just take a quick peek. That's definitely feeling fresh, my pencil already got a little bit dull, her facial details, especially at the smaller size, are getting lost I can go back and fix those in another iteration. I really like the feeling of that nice and simple and you get a sense of what's going on. Let's move on to this one here. This is one of the least familiar poses that I've done for basically, her face comes here and covers part of her arm that's holding a tennis racket who's just a small peekaboo or elbow under there. I'm going to go back to what I remember seeing instead of a more elongated, exaggerated elbow, their spirit seems okay. Now her legs are doing something funny. What should be happening is these two legs are butted right up against each other. It's just this one looks like it's behind it because I drew it thinner. What I'll do is I'll just redraw that, I'm not going to go into as much detail of her shoe this time just make that by a little thicker there. She's way increased standards socks and going to just go with the stripes going right across in a more abstract way. This guy, lanky man, because he was lanky, I really ended up naturally and intuitively making him even length here. Exaggerating his leakiness and put a slight curve in the shoot down there because he's bending over and this curve goes intensities bending over a bit. He's wristbands are great to define, whereas hands and arms connect. For this shoe, It's at a funny, foreshortened angle and I'm doing my best to make it reference that foreshortening worrying too much about all the details that would make it look more dimensional. I think the fact that he's posed in this way that you have a little bit of a point at the tip shows that he's pointing is forward. As far as this guy's head band and heads thing go I want to exaggerate his beard situation and his hair. This part is something that I would have to deal with, with textures as well as shapes and a final but it sort of the feeling of his beard and he's very uncomfortable looking for our tennis player. That I think is part of what's interesting about him. Using the stripes on his shirt to define the direction I was arms and then his upper body. Those street lines versus very tentative, sketchy lines really add drama and movement and verticality to him. I wouldn't underestimate the power of this ball in adding movement and direction and energy to the drawing. The fact that it's in suspense just near where he's about to hit. It does add more to the story and may or may not add back that here on his legs and arms. Simplifying some of the contours, drew in the first iteration there will make a clearer, more iconic figure. I really want to preserve a hand gesture, really exaggerating her hair and tucked in behind her arm, Twitter logo there. When you're drawing people engaged in physical activity, you'll probably notice there faces often with very serious and that's something that you can choose to play up or ignore altogether. In this woman's case, I just gave her a more typical tom froze smiley face, whereas these others have a bit more concentration or even a frown involved. Showing when shoes are more foreshortened or on the tippy toes, I use curved line like that, sort of a smile to show the line at the ankle, the sort of where the opening of the shoe basically and that gives it a sense of you're looking down on it rather than directly at it and I did it also with this guy's shoe and this woman shoe. Well, let's see what we've got. I just wanted to take this into procreate, just quickly show you what I might do with this image in a next iteration. I have them all on the same page, but maybe I can play around a bit with where they are and just move them around a bit and do a little bit more refinement, i.e another iteration of the sketch. You could do this in Photo-shop if you're using a tablet. I'm just going to turn that layer down and then make a new layer and on top and this is effectively like using sketch paper. The first thing I'm going to do is just go back and refine these guys. Typically I use an iPad for sketching because it's a little bit faster. I need to go through less paper and I don't have to scan things in, which is nice. It's also easier to edit and I sing about paper on the other hand, is that you don't feel as compelled to make edits and you don't spend as much time as a result fessing with details. This guy I might do away altogether with his chin is a bit elongated there and it may do is better. Ever find all these guys and I'm pretty happy with them, maybe I'll give this guy bid it was chin back. I'm pretty happy with them and now it's time to maybe just arranged them on the page a little more evenly. Here we have a page of poses. We have six tennis players doing the same activity, occupying the same space. But it's a nice about people doing the same activity is that you get a nice consistency to it. There's almost a pattern, here we have racket's in various positions and it leads your nicely around the page. I didn't even try to have this effect for the most part I was able to just use the pose as I saw in the record images, except for the woman on the right. In her case, I had to move her arm in racket to respond to the space I had for her. I didn't cover over the tennis player beside her, I was able to take each rough sketch and refine it with each iteration. My first sketches were pretty unresolved but they gave me a structure that give me more confidence each time I went to trace over it. My final iteration, I took it into procreate so that I was able to play around a little bit with position and scale but this is certainly not necessary and you could have done all this on a piece of paper.
9. Exercise 4: People in Shapes!: This exercise is called people in shapes, because well, we're going to be drawing people in shapes. So far the other exercises have been pretty straightforward. Just drawing someone from a reference photo and changing how it looks a little bit. This one is going to be totally from our imagination. We're not using reference images. This time we're basically drawing a shape and then intuitively trying to draw someone inside that shape, filling the space as much as possible. The purpose of this exercise is to learn and practice how to draw responsively to a space. In some scenarios, as illustrators, we're going to have jobs where we only have this certain space. Sometimes it's a funny shape and we're going to need to fill that space with our artwork. In other cases, we might want to actually fill a person inside a shape say, a bottle or a car shape or something like that. For this exercise, draw an open shape. Anything that has enough space that you could conceivably draw a person in it. Your shape can be a regular polygon, like a square, a circle, a hexagon, or it can be a more abstract shape with somewhere between four and 10 sides. Don't overthink it, just draw the shape and then try and draw the person in it. If we try and pre-plan our envision how a shape might fit a person. It might defeat the purpose of this exercise. This is really about responding intuitively and improvising our drawing as we encounter different contours and edges in our shape. As always, this is an iterative exercise, meaning we're refining as we go along. We're going to have our first sketch and we're probably going to want to refine it a little bit, trace over it and so on and so forth. I think you guys know the drill by now. The first thing we want to do is choose our shape. You could use a standard polygon, like a square, a triangle, that's an octagon actually, and a hexagon. These are basic polygon shapes. You could do something a little bit more abstract. I suggest having no more than 10 sides to your shape and no fewer than four. A triangle is actually a very tough shape to draw a person in, but it's worth a try if you're up for the challenge. Other things you could draw are bottle shapes or maybe a funny car shape, UFO, a teacup. It's really up to you. Try a few different things. If one thing doesn't really work, then move on to the next. Try to draw a shape that you're not even sure when you're drawing it, how you're going to fit someone in. I'm tempted to draw a shape that I've drawn before for this exercise. But I'm going to avoid it because I don't want to know what the answer is to this problem. In my case, I'm just drawing a very abstract shape. It has 12 sides, so I broke my rule. But let's just see how it goes. What we're doing is just letting the form of the shape prompt us for the next body part. All those same principles that we've been applying in the other exercises apply here too. Flat shapes, confident lines, simplification. The thing I'm going to try and figure out what to do in this little part right here. Actually is okay, because the hand here will cover over what I need to draw there. Using the color as a nice flat shape to divide the arm from the head and part of the neck there. Over all, this is a very interesting shape, and a very interesting position for a body to be in. I'm not a 100 percent satisfied with this part right here because it feels very sharp. Let's see what happens if we take this to one more level, maybe taking the outside shape away. On your second iteration, if you do one don't feel like you need to stick to exactly what you did the first time. Maybe you can try something new. I'm aiming to make things as natural as fit as possible. Now nothing is really natural about what's going on here. But what I want to do is fill that space nice and precisely without having weird, awkward angles. There's this big space here, what do I do with that? I could throw in some object that fills that space, whatever it might be. That's always an option. I might try and just go over this one more time. It's a little bit of a visual puzzle and requires maybe a little bit of contemplation, but you don't want to overthink it. I could do a round head here. I'm going to just go ahead and do it. It's weird and I like it. There are some spaces that I didn't use, like in here and here, little bit in there and a bit of stuff here. But if I were trying to fill a space like this in actual illustration, this might satisfy enough and even just give it a little bit of breathing room. I'm going to call that good to go, and I'm just going to refine it one more time. Remove the underlying shape now that I've solved that problem, and just add maybe a few choice details. I'm not going to deviate from the shape or the overall pose at this point. I'm just going to play around now a bit with the personality of the character. That's pretty weird. That guy's pretty cool. I think I like this one, but this looks just so weird. But what I like about the first one is that he's just chill, and their lines are very confident and it looks very fresh. For this guy, there's is just a lot more going on that I wasn't prepared for. I'm going to say that it was a good try, but I like this guy better. This is my person in a shape with the shape taken away. What I love about this exercise is, I would never have imagined drawing a person in this configuration. Why on earth would I have ever contorted someone this much? But the result is so original and unexpected, but it's easy to see how this can be used to really help you make people that breaks the mold of reality and literalism, and take your work into much more interesting places.
10. Exercise 5: Cutouts: This exercise is called cutouts. In this exercise, we're going to be putting away our pencils and using scissors instead to draw our figures. The purpose of this exercise is to practice embracing imperfection and embracing a sense of playfulness on our work. We're really not able to do anything realistic here, so everything we do is just going to have a really stylized quality to it automatically. To do this exercise, find a piece of paper, it can just plain paper or colored paper, construction paper, get some scissors, and then just cut out shapes of people. The trick here is to cut them out in one piece. You don't want to cut individual pieces like the arm, the head, the body, and then assemble them later, that would be too easy. What you really want to do is just draw from a single piece of paper, each of your figures. I would say, do about five figures in this way. Then you can arrange them by gluing or taping them down on a page. When you're doing your shapes, try and have fun with the poses. You could do really neutral shapes, maybe you can try things a little bit more crazy and exaggerated.Try to make them all the same size and have all the same quality. If they have a certain shape of head, do that shape of head for all of them. If they have a certain kind of shoe style, use that shoe style for all of them, and of course, as always, these are outlines only. I have my scissors, I have my paper. You can use plain white paper. I'm just using some colored paper that I have on hand here. If you're cutting all the shapes at a one piece of paper, that will make fitting them all on the same page at the end of the project a lot easier because you know they'll fit, but doing that is optional anyway. I'm just going to start cutting my figure. I'm not drawing first, I'm not putting on any outlines down, I'm not planning this, I'm just going into this with the hope that it will work out. If it doesn't work out, just keep trying. What I just did there was, I'm planning this to be the back of the leg and this is the backside of a figure and I'm just going from there. In this case, I'm not actually going to do the details of the hands. This is much more about the gesture. Here's my first character. Now I'm looking at the qualities of this, and I'm going to try and make the others in the set look like this one, give or take. I'm also going to try and do them all around this size now that I've started at this size. Maybe this time I'll start with the head. Notice how I am just using what I have on the page and responding to it. The page ended here and I thought this outside edge of the page will do for the outside edge of the arm. I'm noticing that this guy is a lot bigger than my first one, so I'm going to maybe rein it in a little bit with the legs and keep the legs smaller. I'll just keep going, this one's a bit random. I'm setting this one back with the feet, and they might have a better grasp of scale if I always start at the same place. Let's go through them. I'm going to keep this guy here as my reference so that I'm making all my images, all my figures the same size. It sounds weird, but I like it. I wasn't going to keep it, but I think I like this guy. With these cutouts, you can change them back and forth if you want. I'm going to do one more in the blue. I'm trying really hard not to think too much before I go in to determine what it's going to look like. You can see a theme emerging here. I think starting from the legs is probably my default, is probably how I like to enter into this, and it gives me a sense of how they'll grow from the feet up to the top in terms of size and fit. Just really have fun. If you want to save trees, you can use any paper. You could use newspaper, old magazines, vintage wallpaper. As I'm cutting, I'm also just trying to see like what after I draw this pose, like what is the guy doing? How could his head be? Maybe a bit of a burn in the back here and if that doesn't work, I'll just cut it off. It looks like Napoleon or something. Because I cut these guys out of multiple pieces of paper, they ended up being bigger together than they could fit on any single piece of the same paper, but that's okay. You can see, automatically just by cutting these out of paper, they are set. This one has a jaggy quality. If you want to evaluate your figures as a set and maybe refine it a little bit, that's okay. I wouldn't overthink it, but this one, I didn't cut her hand off there. I think this gap adds more to it rather than going all the way. Then I think this guy out of all of them is the least like the sat. Like all these guys have a certain bendy quality about their legs. Then this guy, even though I could have still cut him out, sprinting like this, or leaping or whatever he is doing, the legs themselves have a jaggy quality. I going to just cut one more person and try and make the legs look a little bit more in the family. I like the directionality of the tiptoe there. Is that one better? This one still had more feeling to it. Maybe if I just round out the knee it had, it's in family. This is where you risk overworking a piece. I just rounded the knee and it brings him into the family a little bit. I didn't need to make a whole new one, I just needed to add something to this that brought it more into the family. Now if I over rounded it here, if I rounded this corner, I think it would be too much and too overthought and it would lose some spontaneity. I'm just going to leave these as they are and call that done. I love this exercise because it forces me not to be perfectionistic. I don't have the precision of a pencil or even an exact knife. The scissors is a pretty crude instrument in terms of getting details. I just have to embrace limitations of the scissors and go with it. In this case, I'm able to make these broad contours of the figures and they have these jaggedy edges and imperfect lines and curves and there's just a nice freedom in the end result. I think people are really drawn towards this spontaneity. It almost looks naive, it looks unskilled, but I feel like more importantly, there's a confidence in it, there's a feeling of, I'm just cutting this out and having fun and to help with perfectionism. Cutouts can be a great exercise, as a warm up. It can be something you can do if you're feeling stuck creatively and perhaps you can even use it as a key part of your illustration style. Another great thing about this exercise is that it really teaches you to be responsive. You make one cut and then you make another, and then you look at it and see what your next cut will be based on the cut before. Being able to respond to cuts or marks and this way is key to making expressive, stylized people. This is definitely one of the strengths of this exercise.
11. Exercise 6: Exaggeration: This exercise is called exaggeration. Now we're going to really play around with the proportion of the figure. The purpose of this exercise is to encourage us to really take a lot of liberties when drawing the human figure, especially in terms of proportions of different body parts to one another and of the person to an outside object. For this exercise, choose to draw any simple object and make it really big or really small relative to the size of your page. Next, draw your figure interacting with this object. Because it's so tiny or so big, you're going to have to be very creative in how you make those two interact. This is a great opportunity to draw not what we know or what we think is the right way of drawing something but to draw more intuitively and from a more creative place. In this exercise, we're going to use our intuition and respond to the marks on the page as they appear and let each mark inform the next. There's no plan here. You just start with any object and then make your character work around it. To start this exercise, we're going to just draw a simple object. That object needs to be really big or really small relative to the page. Choose an object that you can imagine someone interacting with in an interesting way. Really, it can be anything but try and keep it simple. Maybe, for me I'm going to try a telescope. Maybe it's like a telescope, very foreshortened. This is the end lens and then it goes way back. Then there's like a tiny tripod. It may not read properly as a telescope, but maybe we can use our figure to help to that end. I might have to flip the view of this to be honest but let's give it a try. There's my telescope. Sometimes telescopes have these little eye pieces that poke out the side. Obviously, there's a guy. I guess he would be blowing on that little piece there. I would be more like this. There is a little rubber eyepiece there. This is getting weird but, maybe [inaudible] I'll be on a tiny stool. I'm going to set this aside and try either a different object or a different view of the object. First let's try a different view of the object. A really long telescope. It's very big relative to the page. It's taking up most of the space or a large significant portion anyway. Then we have down at the end the person looking in it. I could draw a giant phase looking at this, which would make this a very tiny telescope. Just the face or I could draw the person interacting with this telescope in an interesting way that plays around with the scale. I think the first thing we want to do is probably give it a tripod. It's to determine how this thing sits and what the ground or the ground is, and then go from there. Telescopes usually have an eyepiece and that eye would be about here. I'm going to worry about his expression just yet. Arms are going to be way over here. I can figure out how that overlaps work later. The other leg. What's happening at the other leg? Maybe just coming up this way. Maybe a hat. Hat's not to scientists looking, maybe instead of a hat, he's got more just a haircut. For this, he's concentrating so I could have no mouth, which would just keep a lot of the focus on the rest of the illustration. But I could just do this like the tiniest little mark. It's ] a frown, sits downward and it gives him a sense that he's really concentrating, he's really into that. I'm going to trace over this and see what I can do to it to help refine it. The first thing I want to try and resolve is the overlaps of some of the parts here and later I can add some more clothing and stuff. I think his leg on this side comes here, little bit of a burst there for the crease, ends nicely. The next thing I'll probably do is draw the telescope. I'm deciding not to show the glass part of the telescope in any perspective. That might be interesting if what he was looking at was important but the only thing that's important in this image is that there's a guy looking at a telescope. We don't know what he's looking at. This could be a metaphor. It could be more literal, like he's actually trying to see something far away and that's a nice thing about emitting certain details that don't really play into the story. This is not about what he's looking at as much as it is about the fact that he's trying to see something far away. Doesn't matter what that something is. There's something funny about where his hand is there. I'm going to just leave that for now. The thumb is holding on the bottom. Sometimes you have the edge of the index finger and then the thumb tucking behind. You just get the knuckle showing behind. Whether you taper in to the rest or just goes straight. That's a stylistic decision. Now here, is where arm meets. I feel like there would be some kind of crease. There and then this would continue round to his back. This little eyepiece is a little bit bigger than it would probably be, but this big exaggerated triangle shape is good because it exaggerates, its a caricature of an eyepiece and really it's a substitute for his eye. If I make it too small, then I have to draw his eye. Sometimes just having something big and symbolic can substitute for what it's covering. Now, he didn't have a hat. It's got weird spock hair. I think his back leg here, his other leg is going to go behind everything else. These are his top three fingers over the telescope and then his thumb is coming under here. The world's tiniest stool. Not adding more detail. I want to get in there and add extra details, but this it's a stool already. You don't need to add more details. Just make sure I haven't missed anything. I've missed a line here. Is there anything else I can add to this? Well, is he out in the field doing field research? Is he wearing a flannel shirt and jeans or is he a scientist in a lab wearing a lab coat? I'm going to just make him wearing a flannel shirt. In this case, I could just continue the top of his thigh, basically two here. That could be his pants and this could be his shirt but I think it's funny if his pants come all the way up and I'm exaggerating further, just like the image by having him hike up his pants high and it really accentuates the middle part of the image. It makes it a little bit more playful. If his shirt ended down here, that would be fine but this just adds just one more element of surprise and fun. Then the old cuff. This case, cuff might be covered by his leg. Could just do a little bit there, too I draw his collar here. Sure. I'm just continuing basically, the front of his face down to make a collar shape there. That's an net bit of continuity. Then he's wearing a belt. It's got a buckle there. Then there are few belt loops here. We are always drawing in confident contour lines, not sheeting to define volume, but a little bit of light and dark is fine to differentiate the different parts of the image. For this guy, I probably want to give him a plaid shirt. I always give my guys plaid shirts for some reason and I'm just going to sketch it in here. Actually, I like the stripes to be hilarious. Anyway, however I do this texture, I can play around with that if I were to take this into a final image and play around with what exact texture I would actually use to make that pattern. Here is my guy taking him off of the under sketch, and we'll just take a look here. To start this project, I just picked an object and then started drawing it. My first instinct was to show the telescope from the end where you're looking into the lens and then the person would be far off in the distance at the end, really small and I quickly ran into a few challenges with it. It was hard for me to intuitively place my character there and feel good about it. I just set that aside and tried the telescope from the side position. This turned out well for me because the length of the telescope and the sideways orientation of the page that I was working on worked well with each other. It also enabled me to draw a figure that filled the length of the page in an interesting way. In my first iteration, I was really concerned only with getting the composition right, figuring out how the figure and the object relate to one another, how he's interacting with it, stuff like that. It was in the second iteration, that I was able to make all my lines more confident, workout which way things were overlapping and of course, I was able to go in and refine and create some of the nice details including the clothing details, the waistline, the hairstyle, his mouth, and other little things like that. The exaggeration exercise is really helpful because we're not just stuck drawing a person as a person, we have an object to interact with and that gives us lots of new prompts that we can use to have even more creative license with our figure. Just by having that object there, we suddenly have new ideas for how the person should be posed and even what they look like. The object really prompts us to do things that we would not have been able to plan if we were just trying to draw a person alone. As illustrators, we'll often get projects that require us to fit the illustration within a very specific space and doing an exercise like this really helps us practice fitting an idea into any space.
12. Bonus Project: Intro: Alright guys, welcome to the Bonus project. This is where we're going to take one of the sketches that we made in the exercises and transform it into a fully finished illustration by adding color and crisper, more defined forms and textures. This is how our concepts really come to life. Now I'm going to show you my own tools and techniques that I use and of course, how I apply all the principles we've been talking about along the way. But you are more than welcome to use your own tools, techniques, and processes if you want, and just apply some of the principles and techniques that we've talked about throughout this class. If you're following along with me, by the end of this project, you're going to have a fully finished digital illustration that you made in Photoshop. I'll be using a lot of the techniques that I've already taught in Inky Illustrations and Pen Tool Wizard. If there's anything I kind of gloss over in this class, it's probably because I've already taught it in another class. I encourage you to go and check those classes out too. The different steps I follow in my process are first taking that sketch and turning it into an illustration file, then I add a basal illustration where I just use the Pen Tool to make vector shapes and add a little bit of color at first, and then I go and add Inky Marks and Textures over top. And that's where it really starts to come to the life. The final step is just finessing the details, cleaning up the file, and of course saving it in a JPEG format that I can share on the class project page.
13. Bonus Project: Create Illustration File: Just start the final illustration. Of course, the first thing you want to do is pick a sketch to turn into your finished illustration. I chose my exaggeration exercise because I thought it was a really fun and interesting result. I also like how the illustration fills the page. I've scanned in my pencil drawing and now it's here in Photoshop. The next thing I want to do is create an illustration file and get this sketch in there then I'm going to illustrate over top this sketch. The drawing is on an 8.5 by 11 page with some rooms on either side. I think that will fit in an eight inches by 10 inches file. I making it 600 DPI just to have a lot of extra resolution just in case. The minimum I would go for is 300 because that's the minimum you would use to print. 600 just makes you able to have it even bigger if you wanted to enlarge it for a poster or something. I am now back in my scanned file of my sketch, I'm just going to copy that by selecting all and hitting Command C and then coming back to my illustration file and just paste that in there. Because I scanned this at 600 DPI which is a little bit excessive for a sketch, it's just a little bit too big for the page and I'm just using the transform tool to get that to fit, he fits now nicely in that space. The next thing I want to do is just clean this sketch up a bit. Get rid of all dirtiness and darken the pencil line a bit. If you hit Command L, you get your Levels Adjustment. If you pull the right little node here in toward the middle, you get rid of the noise until you're left with just pure white. You can just see that adjustment there. When I hit option on my keyboard, it gives me this view that allows me to really see once all the noise is gone. Once there is no more blues or blacks, that's when I have pure white. Once I do that, my pencil line fades a bit. The black slider here on the left, if I just pull that in toward the center, the pencil line gets darker, this will work perfectly. Now, one of the first things I do when I setup a file, is I set up the layers in a really organized way and this just sets me up for the rest of the illustration. Of course I'm going to just name my sketch layer sketch. I'm going to take the opacity down to about 20 percent. That just helps ensure that the sketch is dark enough to see but not so dark that it over bears all the illustration that I'm trying to do over top. Next thing I do is I create a new layer group and name it Art. I set the blend mode of that entire layer group to multiply. This ensures that the sketch can show through everything I make in that layer group. Now's a good time to save the file, I have two folders here from my project folder. One is called scans, this is where all my scans for textures and lines and stuff like that are going to go then I have another folder called illustration and that's where my illustration file's going to go. If I were to create multiple versions of the file, this is where they'd end up. Maybe I start with a V1 and then I make a few changes, but I want to keep some of the things I did in the first version just in case. Then I would make a V2 and so on and so forth then they all can live in one folder. I'm going to just call this telescope guy and continue.
14. Bonus Project: Start the Base Illustration: So the first thing I do after making the illustration file, is I'll create a layer group within the art layer group and choose part of the illustration to start tracing with my pen tool. Starting at the corners always nice, it's just a nice definite starting point. I'm just going to rough in the shape and I can go back and refine it later. What I'm doing is I'm finding an overall shape of the illustration that I know will fit seamlessly together and which also exists on the same plane. So this leg is going to go in front of the leg behind it. Obviously, I want to illustrate each part separately so that I can get a slightly different color on the backleg to differentiate the two. I'm just going to take my past panel here and I just want to show you that this path I just made is a work path. It doesn't actually exist anywhere, but the paths panel as a work-path, and what I want to do is cut that. So I'm just going to hit Command X and then making sure that group is selected, the group one that I have here and my Layers panel, I'm going to just paste that. That creates what's called the Layer Mask and having that applied to this layer group means that any layers within this group are masked out by that shape. So if he's wearing blue pants or something like that, if I were to take this fill out word and what I can toggle it by hitting Shift A until I get the white arrow, which is the direct select tool. Now when I click on these little nodes, I can move them around. The nodes themselves are placed but I want to just make sure I'm following my sketch a little more closely. I think the most tricky part is here on his backside. There's also something funny going on here on his shoulder, I'm using the low control points here to widen where comes up around the top of the shoulder there. I try to place this few points as possible and the best places to put points are on the extrema of the shape. I talk a little bit about extrema in the Pen tool wizard class. But we have a shape like this, this is a parabola shape, at the very top of it this is the extrema. So the most basic formats, if you have a circle, the four extrema of the circle are these points at the furthest possible points in the North, East, Southwest positions. Then if you're using the pen tool, you're going to get these little control nodes here and you want those to be exactly perpendicular, like this. Of course, when you have your circle or parabola a little bit on the side, because of the way our hand draws and the way Photoshop draws with math using the pen tool, how the pen tool traces your sketch won't always perfectly aligned. So what you want to try and find is the most natural way of using the digital pen tool to follow your analog hand sketches. You don't want to follow your hand sketch to closely otherwise you're going to get very awkward looking vector shapes. Now here I want to make sure that the bottom contour of this front leg is matching with the contour or the trajectory of the leg behind. So I may have to just do a few refinements here, just so that matches up and we can revisit that later. Now you might notice that I just picked a random blue to show you this principle, but I'm going to actually change this color to something a little darker, yellow, I guess. We'll just go with the yellow for now. You really can start with any color. I have a color palette and mind, but now might be a good time to just pick a few colors that you want to work in. Sometimes if I can't decide, I'll just work in black and white. But I'm going to just choose six colors that I can work in. So I want a dark blue, a yellow, pink, more red, maybe something a bit darker and a tanh, that's five.Then just not too light just something that's a little darker than white. I can even use that as a shading color. So these are going to be my colors. See if might work and continuing. So I've done his leg and torso, I've done his shirt, it's nested inside. Maybe the next part to do will be the telescope, and that is going to be beneath the leg and torso. So I'm going to create a new layer group and just drag that under, make sure that's under the leg and torso group and not in it. I call this telescope. I'm just going to use the pen tool by hitting p and start to trace this shape. Now I'm in the work path here, I just want to make sure the whole thing is selected by using the selection tool. I'm going to cut it and then paste it on my telescope group. Note that the path disappeared from the past panel, and once I've cut it from there, it should have disappeared, there should be nothing else there. Now I can paste it onto the telescope. It now shows up in the past panel as the vector mask for that layer group. I create a solid color, and looks like I missed the end of the telescope here. So I'll just add something on there and just adding to the shape. If I want to go in and fill those in with different colors later, that's always a possibility of setup the layer group and things can all fit within there if I want. The next thing I'm going to do is create the backleg, another layer group, and I'm going to just drag that down beneath the telescope, and call it backleg and again, starting my pen tool. So in this case, for some reason I've drawn my boot and my leg. More or less seamlessly, there's no cuff of the pant hanging over the boot as it is in the front leg. So I'm just going to roll with that in my vector shape and create a seamless path. Then at this point there's nothing else to see. So I can just cut it off and come back down here, it's close to the bottom of the rhombus possible. So I can continue up and the underside of his thigh and keep going. I want the underside of his thigh to align with the front shapes as much as possible. I'm going to have to come back to that in a second. Then I've completed the shape and I'm going to just zoom in really tight here and now I'm using option and just dragging that little bit. I want to just bring that right on the edge now because I can't see the other side of that shape. I'm not too worried about this weird thing that's happening in the other side. But if I were, I could hit option and just grab the far end of this our control point, and use that to determine the direction of this other point here. But now I'm using direct selection tool and trying to make sure that this is smooth. So important thing is that the transition here feels seamless once I fill this in with a color. So let's just give that a try, I'm going to make that backlight color just a little less intense because in general, things that are closer are more intense, they're brighter or darker, and then something in the background is going to fade somehow. It will lower in intensity in some way or another. So I'm just going to lower the intensity of that just by a little bit, just barely perceptible. It's enough just to give a bit of dimensionality to the piece. We're still working flat, but we're using color just to help make a bit of depth. I'm not as concerned about depth as I am about differentiating the two legs from one another. Making that path shape, I'm going to copy it or cut it, I should say, and then paste it onto this group. Will rename that group front boot. Then let's fill it out with one of our colors. Now in terms of the logic I'm using, when applying these different colors, I'm just looking for contrasts. So I want the boots to stand out from the pants, the pants, the standout from the shirt. So each one of those should be a different color just to create some contrasts between the different sections. I'm going to go back to the backleg, I'm going to create that color area that I want to turn red as the boot and then going to create a solid color. But I don't want this work past still here. I'm just going to delete that work path. Because now I've made this color fill and that's the tricky part about Photoshop that is not exactly intuitive and I talk about this in all my classes because it comes up every time and it's one of the things that throws off students the most is just how Photoshop handles cutting and pasting of the past. The way I try to avoid that from even happening is once I create the shape, no matter what, I just hit Command X while it's still selected so that there's no work path and then I paste it. By doing that, the Work path is removed and I only have the vector mask for the layer. I'm just going to add the color in there. Next thing to do will be the arm here which comes behind the leg and torso section but in front of the back leg. Now, I could do one straight line like that from his shoulder to the wrist, but that will be a very precise straight line that would look a little bit off in my illustration. I'd just add just the slightest of variation which is imperceptible to the mind, but the eye picks it up and feels good about it. This arm is going to go into the hand shape. Because it's behind the telescope, I can just take it over to where the rest of the back of the hand comes and then take it back. Just one extra point there just to add some tapering to the arm. I can always adjust this later if it feels a little weird. Sometimes maybe I do want that more regularity. It's always a balance. But if in doubt, go with the feeling of the sketch. Okay, cutting and pasting, you're going to fill that in with color and maybe how it should go become more apparent. This is of course the color of the shirt. I can turn off the sketch of this fine just to get a feeling and arms fine. If it were to straight, it would look if these lines were to perfect and perpendicular or parallel, they would look a little bit weird to me. Now, I'm going to just add some hand color where his cuff meets his hand. I'm going to finish his thumb on the top of his hand in a minute and his skin can be this pinky color, may be just a tad lighter, so that contrasts nicely with the yellow. I've picked my color palette, but I'm tweaking it as I go along to make sure that the colors work with one another. I liked the overall color combination, but sometimes color against another doesn't quite work, so I have to tweak it a tiny bit because this is digital I can do that. If this were silk screening or letterpress printing I would have to stick to the six colors only and just deal with that. Now it's time to get this thumb here. Just like I did at the bottom, at his bottom, whereas two legs converge. I'm going to do this here. I want to make sure there's a seamless line up from the blade of his hand or the back of his hand or whatever, up to around his thumb in backed down. Here I want to be over the telescope. I'm just going to create a little layer group called thumb and add that thumb hitting option because I'm clicking these last two nodes and cut it, paste it on thumb, fill it with the same pink by just selecting the color and I can just zoom in to see how that works. Not bad, but it can be a little more precise. Okay, because the thumb and these fingers are all going to be over the telescope, I can make them all part of the same shape so I'm on the thumb layer group with the sheet mask, and I'm using the pen tool to just start he fingers. Now, when doing the fingers, I could just jump from this corner to here. But what you end up getting sometimes is very sharp cusp sprayed in here. They lead your eye in there into the cusp and then your eyes get stuck in there and it feels very sharp and jarring. These also like very defaulting to me. What I do for the tips of the fingers is when I create them I actually try to make sure I add a point before I do the curve, before I do the little top of the finger. Come here, do a little point just before I come around to the extreme of the finger and then seam as it comes back down. By doing this the fingers, I get a little bit more control over how round or sharp that the fingertip is. I get a little more control over how around or sharp the fingertip is. I have closed the shape and I have the fingers coming over the telescope. Now, I have these little trapped spaces in behind which aren't good. I don't want that so I just want to add a bit of pink behind there. What I could do is just go back to the thumb and use a path selection tool and direct select and just shorten these little crevices of the fingers so that no blue is coming through. That just resolves that feeling of trapped color space there. If you were to turn off the sketch, you can see if the shapes are smooth or not, or if they need a little bit more smoothing. I'm going to just smooth these a little bit. It doesn't have to be this precise. I'm going for a little bit of extra precision in this particular illustration. Sometimes I'm a little bit more loose and other times a more tight. But overall, I aim for things to look like I'm meant to do it. Just to review, the thumb and the fingers are a separate piece over the telescope and I've just been very precise by lining these up here. It's not perfect, but as long as it looks intentional. Again, just like with the fingertips, I could start here and come right up to the top of the head and down to the nose. But then you'd get a very default looking arch. Whereas I want it to take on a little bit more of the qualities of the underlying sketch. I'm going to give my head a hair. Now, I'm going to, sometimes I want to add texture in just the hair parts. I'm going to turn this one into a layer group as well and do the path shaped mask, cutting and pasting on the group and I call that hair. This hair could be goldie brown, could be a red, which is awesome. I like how his head counterbalances the shoes. They compliment each other in a great way. Now, we are going to get his front arm. His front arm actually comes above the torso and start in his armpit, I'm going to figure out what to do with that when I come back to it from the other side. In this case, the fingers are much less prominent. I don't want to spend too much detail on them. Because they're just little knob ins. I'm going to come up around and I think it should be enough if I'm being careful to just stop the arm there and I'll come back to that if I need it. I may need to once I start applying the texture of the shirt, the pattern, and any shading. I could do, a little brown or white might cut it in an interesting way go with that for now. The corners all come together. You want to be very precise. There's no awkward little something like that happening, which doesn't look pro. Now, here we have a completed base illustration. A base illustration is where we define all the shapes and fill them in with colors. Once we start getting colors over our sketch, we can really see our illustration come to life. It starts to feel real. It feels joyful. Once we start adding details in fingers and the face and textures and stuff like that. This feeling of the illustration coming alive just gets better and better. In the next video, we're going to start making marks using analog media. But you could just as easily make these marks using Photoshop Brushes and stuff like that if that's what you're more comfortable.
15. Bonus Project: Make Inky Marks!: We're going to shift modes now from being in Photoshop and setting down all the base illustration. Basically you've made a bunch of shapes with colors in it, and now we just have to fill in the details of the illustration, including some of the details of the face and hands, the tripod of the telescope, and the pattern or texture in the shirt itself and some texture for the hair. These are the things that I'm going to be looking at making line work for. Our tools are very basic, you just need some paper. I have my black India ink here, and I have some water, of course, and just a few mark making tools here. Of course you have a pencil, this is my go to nib pen that I use with the black ink, and this is a speed ball 512 nib and a standard or basic speed ball nib holder. Then I have just a handful of simple brushes. I like using a flat quarter inch brush, sables good or something equivalent like a synthetic sable, and then just a few other brushes that I may play around with. It really doesn't matter what brushes you have, I do like flat brushes because they allow me to make broad even strokes of black that are useful for areas of shading and I also use this a lot for the laddering. For the details of a line work, this is going to be what I use, the nib pen. Because it creates a nice crisp thin line. Now, I often use sketchbook paper. This is my go-to brand of sketch paper. I like Canson sketch paper because it's pretty cheap, and this particular kind doesn't have the coils. When you rip out your pages to scan, there's none of that business that you get, those holes you get when you have coiled notebook paper or sketchbook paper, that for me is huge. There's just a scan flatter, the store flatter all around, more enjoyable for me. Canson acts off, this is 9 by 12. I'm going to do stuff on plain paper because I want to show you that you don't need special paper to do the inking. But if you do it on the sketch book paper, it does add a little bit more of a finer quality to some of your marks, especially for your broader strokes. I might actually use this for my broad strokes and then use this for some of my thin strokes. The main difference is how the ink bleeds into the paper, this isn't meant to hold wet inkets. This is printer paper, it's meant to take toner from a laser printer. Anyway, let's just try different things and if I have to switch between papers, then so be it. The first thing I want to do is, I'm going to do some straight lines and I can use straight lines for all kinds of parts of the illustration for instance, the tripod, the lines of the telescope itself, those things. I don't have to draw those individually, I could just make a few straight lines and reassemble those in Photoshop later. I'm just going to wet my nib here a bit, try a few straight lines. Free handing these is always going to give a much more wobbly line, and when I scan these, you're going to see how this ink really bleeds into the page and creates an interesting blotted edge These could all be used as different lines throughout the illustration. I might also want to try some more exact straight lines, I would just find any kind of ruler, or this is the top of an old pencil case that I have and just use that edge to create a straighter line. Now I feel like that line is a bit too thick, I want to create a much thinner line. I'm just going to get an actual ruler, you'll still get the inky quality. I'm just going to dab off a bit of my excessing. This line goes down a lot thicker when I use the ruler for some reason. I'm going to try something a little bit using a little bit lighter pressure and on more of an angle. That's bad. If you get lines that are too thick, they'll look really bulky in the final illustration. I want an overall straight line, but not a perfect line. It's nice to have a little bit of variation in this and when I scan these and you'll see what I mean. Always make sure you rinse off your ink in water when you're done so the ink doesn't dry and clog up your nib. For the details of the face, including the little ear and the mouth, those are going to need special treatment here. Ear, I might just make it a little bit bigger, I make this bigger when I scan it in and place it in my final illustration, the line thickness will be thinner. If I do a small ear, I might have to blow that up, meaning the thickness of the line itself will be blown up too. I'll make a few different simple things, not overthinking it and see which one works. Now, similarly for the mouth, I'll just make a few random lines and see which one works the best in the final illustration. The other thing we're going to need to do is the bottom of the stool, and I'm going to just make a couple two different sizes, maybe three, and see which one of those works best. For the stripes on the shirt, I want to do a little bit of a thicker texture. I'm going to put my plain paper away, I'm actually going to bring in my sketch book paper here. Like I said, this is just a little bit better with wetter media and that's because of what's going on with the brush, it will be a little bit wetter. Just wet my brush a little bit, get an ink on there, don't want to go in too thick. For stripes on the shirt, I'm going to just do a series of strokes evenly spaced in, and when I scan this, you'll see the subtleties of this paper coming through in the ink. Then you also get these nice dried spaces in ink once the brush starts running out of ink. That's going to be good for the texture on the shirt itself. I also want to make some texture for the hair and for that, I could just use the same brush with a bit of ink. Make a few things, experiment, it's okay not to have too much of a plan in mind. See which one of these works, and I'm also going to try my more random brush. I'm not even going to wet it first so the ink stays a bit drier, not stuck on the too dark. This may or may not work. But I like how some of the crystals make those strikes like that. I'll let that dry before scanning it. Now there's one last mark that I would like to make and this is going to be for the shading, shading of the overall figure. These are going to be made with a broad stroke, and they're going to help give a tiny bit of dimensionality and let each shape stand apart from one another, and also add just a tad element of a sense of lighting. This is totally optional and it may sometimes be overwhelming illustrating may not always need shading like this, but I find it just adds a tiny bit of extra personality. Do you want us to get a wash? It might actually help if you put a little bit of ink in separate little dish to make a wash. A wash is just a mixture of ink and water. I find ashtrays to be useful for my inking, evidently. Do a little bit of water in there. Just test this, I think that'll work. I've made a wash with my ink, it's not too thick. Now here I was going to try an eyeball where the inky textures would go in relation to the legs. But I realize partway through that, I could just use the sketch that I had on my tracing paper as my guide and get it more precise. Again, getting my flat half-inch here, it's just about the right size for the kind of shading I want to do, I have my wash and I'm going to make as continuous as stroke as possible to the other leg, make sure I can see my path that I need to do. Just use that for this, for that arm, and I did overlook doing this arm here. Make sure you really rinse off your brushes and don't let that ink dry in your nice brushes.
16. Bonus Project: Add Inky Marks to Sketch: So once I've made my key marks, I just scan them in using my scanner. I use Image Capture on Mac OS. I use 600 DPI just to scan them in at a nice high resolution gives me lots of resolution to work with. Then I save them to my scan's folder that I made. That's where I can keep my scan separate from my actual illustration files. Now back in photoshop, I'm going to open my first scan, the line work 1 and do my levels adjustment. This is the same thing that I did with the sketch. Hitting "Command L" and just sliding in the sliders toward the middle to get the widest whites and the darkest darks. These are the marks that were made on regular printer paper, is not real subtleties in it. Just a nice kind of bleedy edge, which will work just fine. I want to start with the tripod. I feel like one of the straighter lines is going to work and I think they should be a little bit thicker. So I'm just going to use the last hue tool here. You can hit "L" to activate that. If you press "Shift L" the same time, you can toggle through different modes of selection. I'm just going to select that, mark, copy it, and then I'm going to go right to the very top layer in the art group and just paste it down just to see how it sizes up in here. So I think that's going to be the right size. So I can just undo pasting that. So if you've done my other inky classes, you know what I'm going to do next. I'm going to be going into my channel's panel here. I'm going to be creating a new Alpha channel. I'm going to invert it to make the background white because the background of my scanned image is white, I'm going to deselect that selection. You want to make sure you deselect and now I'm going to invert that entire image on the alpha channel. Then I'm going to command click the alpha channel. This selects anything that's white as the selection. Now, back to my artwork, I have my selection loaded and we're going to do something with that in a second. So let's just go to where the telescope is and we very wisely labeled our layers, so we know where it is. With that alpha selection we just made, I'm going to fill that with a solid color. When you go solid color fills the selection that you loaded from that alpha channel, and here we want to use, I think a nice dark color, the blue, and it's not going to contrast very well, obviously if it's against the darker blue but the lighter blue that is for the black leg, it's fine. I want it in the blue zone, but I guess I'm going to make it just a little bit darker by dragging it a little bit toward the darker area. I'm just making it a little bit darker so it stands out as the tripod. Hit "Okay," and if you go back to using your move tool by hitting "V," can move it around. You can see that in front of the telescope, behind the leg, just as you can see in the layer order here. We want it behind the telescope, so I'm going to just drag that towards down, and so it's actually now under the telescope, and I'm going to just call this line 1 for now. Again, if you know my other classes, I like to turn these into smart objects. So I just right-click on that layer and hit "Convert To Smart Object." What that does is, it just makes sure that if I were to resize this and mess around with it, as I'm trying to work it into the artwork, I don't lose any of that original resolution. All that resolution is maintained in this sort of embedded file and so that's what I've just done. Now, I'm just trying to place it in the right angle for my tripod and also the right thickness. I want it to be not too thin and I don't like the bottom here, so I'm going to hit "Command R" to rotate. Then if I'm holding "Shift" and just rotate it 180 degrees, that will just make sure that the rotation is exactly 180 degrees by holding Shift. That's a nicer bottom and I can just copy and paste and re-angle these. Now, I probably don't want these all to look copied and pasted exactly like this. So I'm going to show you a little trick that I can do without having to use another one of my scanned in lines. I can use the same line and make it look like a different line every time because I have a lot of extra length on it. The first thing I want to do is just make sure there's sort of like intersecting at the top there. I'll make some refinements in a sec. But I want these to look different. So what I'm going to do is just pull this one down a little bit, and also this one, I'm going to just actually flip it around 180 degrees and put it about there. Most important thing right now is that I'm making these all intersect up here in the right way. So I want to make sure I can chop off the excess parts of these lines. That's basically the trick, is you just use different parts of the line and then it looks, they all look unique. So I have line 1, line 1 copy and line 1 copy too. What I can do is just gather those together and put them in a group and call them tripod. Now, I'm going to put this little thing called a layer mask on top there and using the eraser tool and making sure that the eraser, your background color is pure black. Make that a little bigger. As long as you're on that layer mask, anything you erase from the layer mask gets actually masked out from that group. I have to make sure that my layer mask is selected. If I were to turn off that layer mask, all the line is still there, it's just being masked out by having erase that. I just want to round those corners a little bit and what I might do is, just shrink my eraser down to a little bit more precise and just round off those edges to look a little bit more organic. I want to just see if those all line up at the bottom and they do. Again, all those lines in this tripod group right there, if you hit "Shift" and click that layer mask it enables and disables the mask. Turn off the sketch. There's our first line work, and because I was able to slide this line and use different segments of it. It looks as though each leg of the tripod is more unique than it actually is. I can continue just using this line. I did make a bunch of options of lines, but now that I have this line width established, I'm going to see if I can just keep using it in other parts of the illustration. The next part I want to use it for is the hem of the pants. So I'm just going to take one of these lines, I'll just take line 1. I'm going to make a copy by dragging it to the little new page at the bottom of the layers panel. So I've just made another copy of it, and I want to drag that out of the tripod group and put it in the front leg and torso group. Now you can see that it is here, it's masked in to the rest of the shape of the leg and torso group that we made. I'm just going to use Command T to rotate that. I want to make the same curved line on the other group. But we know that, that is in the back leg group. So let's just drag the copy I just made, the back leg group, there it is. Then just use the transform tool to place it. So now I want to go back to the front leg, I want to add a line here just to define the top of his size. I'm just going to use command and drag to create a copy and rotate it in place. Now, this line copy here, and I'll just name it to be super clear, I'll just call it thigh line. I just want to rotate, so it's in the right position. Now, I can actually add a layer mask to this layer itself and do the same erasing of masking out of the rest of the line. I could even just take the selection tool, chalk that out, round out the bottom of this by using a smaller eraser, and then up here, I just want to erase any of this extra stuff that's sneaking past and maybe just round that out a tab for now I may have to go back and change that in a bit. But let's turn off the sketch for a sec and just see. You starting to get some nice definition in the illustration. It's the line work that really starts to make the illustration come alive and feel more dynamic, save my work. The next places I want to add line work are the hands and maybe the coast of the shirt. So let's just keep trying to use the same line that I've used in the same way. Now, if I click into the hand, I can actually reuse the alpha channel I made. This is just that same scanned bit that I copied and put in my alpha channel. I'm just going to create a new channel from that same mark. I'm just going to fill it with a solid color. Now for this, instead of that dark blue, I think that would be too strong and the wrong color for details on the face and hands. So for these parts, I like to find a mid-level gray, maybe just under 50 percent, somewhere between 30 and 50 percent for this marking and just kind of see it here. Obviously this isn't the right color but let's just turn this into the smart object, and then if we just change the blending mode of this object to multiply, suddenly you get this nice dark line that takes on a little bit of the hue of anything beneath it, which is great, and this is exactly what we want. At this point, I realized that I put the line in the wrong part of the hand. I have put it in the bottom when I should have put it in the top because it's going to be the line that separates the fingers. So I'm going to start right back again from that part where I am reusing the alpha channel and filling it in with a percentage of gray. I actually found this 40 percent gray, a little dark even. So I'm going to bring that down to maybe 25 percent gray, and then turn that into a smart object. Set the layer to multiply and this is a part that I'm just going to use for the liner, for the hands, and not much is needed here. I'm definitely going to have to clean up that ended my eraser. I'm using the same sliding technique that I used for the tripod, where I'm making it look like these are two different strokes by just using different sections of the same stroke, and then using a mask on the layer to clean up and removed extra line. Obviously, we have this extra line down here. I'm just going to use the Marquee Tool hitting M, select the whole thing, and if my background color is set to black, and I just hit Command X or Delete then anything in that masked area will get removed. I need to do it to both smart objects there, because each one has their own individual mask now. There's the details for the hand, pretty straightforward, so I want to add line work to the lines of the fingers here. I'll just turn on the sketch so we can see what I'm aiming for. I have some lines that I need to do here and so again, I can just go into my author group here, command click it to make a selection, and add that nice lighter gray that I had made, that's exactly the color I used for the lines on the other hand, I'm going to turn that into a smart object and multiply it. Now, what I should've done for the other hand is just placed my lines, and then put them in a group, and then did my masking to the entire group. It's just a little more elegant, just enough setting, and then we can do if you take too much out is just go back to your brush tool. Use your brush tool to whatever brush you have, make it small, and draw back of the line. Now, I'm erasing now I'm drawing it back. I'm just going to erase back the line to about here, turn back the sketch. So maybe something that, I would want to play around with here is the trapped spaces in the hand shape itself, you have a tiny bit of that gold of the telescope coming through. I'm just going to go to the masked, masking shape for this whole group. I've clicked on this mask on the group, and then I hit A just to activate the Path Selection Tool, and if I hit Shift a to get my white arrow, which is my direct selection tool, I can just make those tiny tweaks to each little node, then this finger here has a tiny bit of the lumpiness to it, but I don't like, so I'm going to add a node and this smooth that out a tad. So to look at it up close, it looks a little bit weird, but when you zoom out, you don't notice too much. I think that looks all right. One thing I might probably want do is make these lines from this smaller hand a little bit thinner, and that will be a simple as just selecting these two smart objects finger line 1, finger line 2 using the transform tool, and just overall bringing the size of them down a bit just to be a bit more proportional and as long as I put them back in the positions they were, before I resized the masking I did still applies. If I turn that masking off the line you saw there, I just slide it down to a different portion. There you go, that's a little bit nicer to have thinner lines there. They're more proportional to the hand compared to how they look in the larger hand. So you can see that the arms here are all jumbled together because they're the exact same color and you might think that the first thing I would try is to just add more lines here and here, which I may end up having to do. But first I'm just going to see what happens when I throw in my short texture and let that define the direction of the different parts of the yellow shirt there. This is now the sketch book paper that I've sent out. You can see that there's just much more settle to use both because I used a wash. So just like a lighter tone of the ink by adding water, but there you can also see some of the nice texture of the paper come through too, which was really nice. I want these lines to be somewhat even the range from dark to light, and maybe that top ones is just to dark. Let's just make them really dark. I'm using the levels tool just to make everything super dark. I'm just going to copy this whole little group of lines, and then hit Command C to copy it. I'm going to go right into my shirt. I'm going to go to my Alpha channel. I can just delete that by dragging into a trash can and creating a new Alpha channel and inverting, pasting my selection of scan there. Inverting again Command, clicking that to load a selection, and then adding a solid color for this, I'm envisioning white. In this part, I'm adding a texture, the stripes to the shirt, and this is very much the same process I used for the rest of the line work so far. The main thing I was spending my time on here was working out a direction for the stripes in the different parts of the arms and the upper body. The really tricky part was the elbow, making the lines go around that curve. I ended up just using one line that I repeated and just rotated a little bit each time around the elbow and that seemed to work. Those stripes themselves just on their own really add a dynamic element to the piece. It was worth all the trouble. I do now want to add some lines of the cuffs or just of this cuff, it's really the only visible cuff and then the color, and again, I can use the lines I made for the fingers. Let's just do the details of the face now and find an ear that's roughly the same thickness as the line that I made for this. This one looks clean to me. Go to Alpha channel, remove the deal, and this is going to be the same shader gray that I made. So long as I confer to Smart Object multiply size down nicely, don't forget to save your file at this point, anything bad can happen. The last part we want to do is the mouth from the face, and here we conveniently have a few smaller lines. I just want to find something that matches the quality of the ear that I just selected. I'm going to copy that, do the whole Alpha channel thing all over again. Create to Smart Object, multiply, and turn on the sketch just to find where I put that mouth, and what angle it is. I want this thickness of the line to match the ear. Ear is actually a little bit thin, but I'm going to deal with that in a second. Let's call that mouth and mask the mouth, and use the eraser tool just to cut off this part here. Another opportunity for some good textures is in the hair. Let's find our hair textures that we have, I'm just going to go with my gut here and try this one in the middle and do the Alpha channel thing. I'm going to my gray as well, 25 percent gray that I made. I'm going to just smart object it, and multiply and suddenly it just got some nice subtleties in the hair, and you can play around with that. Maybe the top, there's a bit of a highlight because of the direction of the light or you can make the texture go the whole way through. It's hilarious, it looks like he has slicked back hair. The final parts that I'm going to get in is the stool legs, and then the shading. The stool legs should be the same color as the tripod legs. Now, the thickness of the stool part there might be too thin. One thing I could do to thicken that up a bit, is just go into the smart object, create a selection from the alpha mask, and then go to select and go modify, expand, and add two pixels all around to it. Then go to the actual mask and make sure the background is set to white now and use Command X. Just open that up a bit and save. Now, it's just a little bit thicker. I think it works. I've done this tool, now I want to add some shading to the actual body parts. Now, these things obviously I want the white to be as white as possible, and then the shading itself. I want it to have some of these subtleties from the papers. So don't make it too dark, maybe something like that. I'm just going to use the last soot to select just that piece, copy it, and then clicking into the legs and torso, and deleting this Alpha mask, making a new one so I can paste in nice clean version of my shading. Convert that, create a selection from it, then of course, using our 25 percent gray, turning that into a Smart Object, and multiplying it. I'm very lucky here that the size of my shading actually really matches the size of my illustration. That doesn't always work out that nicely, the one I'm bring it all the way to the top above the shirt. I'll take the shading rate to the top layer and the leg and torso groups. It goes over everything and you get this nice subtle shading effect, I like that. Now, I can see if this whole piece will work also in backlog by making it a little bit bigger. That works for the backfire, I might just rotate it the tad. This works for this leg here, and now there's this part of the leg in here, that's not getting the shading. I can actually just copy and drag part of this whole shading. I've made another copy of it, I'm just going to use a part of it in there. So I also want to get some shading on the back of the boot here. Again, I can just reuse the shading from the leg, put it into the boot. From here, I continue to add more shading to the boot, the telescope, and the arms and after this, I'm pretty much done adding textures to the illustration. The only thing left to do is just to go through and look for any finishing touches that I need to add, and then clean up the file. I'll do that in the next step.
17. Finalizing: For this final step, I'm really just giving the illustration one more sweep through, removing any of the bits that shouldn't be there. Also taking the opportunity to make any last-minute adjustments that will improve the overall quality of the illustration. In this particular case, I want to make sure that all the parts on the bottom line up on the same line. That just gives it a nice able feeling. I messed around a little bit with the boot, I just wanted to get rid of a part that I felt was a little bit too pointy. Fussed around with that quite a bit. Then, ultimately, decided what I had was almost perfect. I just need to make a tiny change. I also had forgotten a button on the wrist there. I borrowed a piece of inky bit from the stool legs and just took that round bit and adapted it as a button on his cuff. I forgot his collar. I used some of the lines that I had already made to make his collar, also, and fussed around a little bit with that until it worked. Other things that I've played around with in the file that you can't see are, of course, unused alpha channels, unused paths. I just take those things out so I won't need them in the final file. If I need to give a layered file to a client, I make sure all my layers are nice, and tidy, and named and that way, the file is easy-to-use. Otherwise, I just flatten the entire file and give the client a flat file. That ensures that if they need changes, they need to ask me to make those changes and don't try to do them themselves. Also, I make sure I save the file as a JPEG. When I do that, I re-size it down to about 1600 pixels at 72 DPI. That's perfect for posting on the projects page here on Skillshare and of course, on Instagram with the hashtag #OddBodiesIllustration.
18. Final Thoughts: All right guys, thanks so much for following along through all my lessons and lectures and exercises and final project. I hope you had a lot of fun watching the class videos, and I hope you have a lot of fun going through the exercises in the final project. If you have any questions along the way, please ask me a lot of your questions. Of course, there's always going to be something I missed or some little trick that I did in Photoshop that you want to know more about. I'm always eager to answer those questions. Just let me know when you're done the exercises, when you're done the projects please post and share on the class project page. This is the best way for us to encourage one another here on the skill shared community, just by seeing projects were motivated to make our own. Of course, when you post your projects, you can get feedback from your fellow students. Of course for me, everybody who post a project on my classes gets direct personal feedback for me. If you end up sharing any of the work you did in this class, whether directly or something that's related are influenced by it on Instagram, please hashtag it, odd bodies, illustration. That's a great way for me to just follow up with you guys and see how these skills are following you guys through your own creative journeys. Thank you so much guys for taking the odd bodies. I'll see you in the next class.
