Transcripts
1. Class Intro: Hi. Welcome to my class. My name is Rodrigo, and throughout this class I will teach you the basic tips and tricks for drawing realistic portrait inspired by fictional characters by developing the basic skills of understanding basic shapes found in every figure. Also, you will learn tips and tricks for using Procreate such as, quick action gestures to make your work flow more efficient, taking advantage of different brush settings for different drawing styles, liquefying to make minor but life changing adjustment or improvements for our drawing without having to start all over, and working with layers to fine tune your sketches and line up. You will use these skills to create your own line of drawing, which will serve as the foundation for your realistic digital portraits. I am Rodrigo Diaz and I'm from Nicaragua. I'm a hobbyist and a teacher, and I am a strong believer that anyone can develop their artistic skills with practice and patience. I have always been fascinated by the human face, its expressions, its motions, its diversity, and I find beauty in every single human face and all the expressions that they can give. I was self-taught through Skillshare, and I would like to share with you some of my favorite projects that I've been able to create using Procreate. This class is for any beginner or intermediate student who'd like to take their sketches to a whole new level. I will teach you the basic understanding of the human face structure. By the end of this class, you will be able to find inspiration from fictional or real characters. Draw clean, realistic looking liner, and use Procreate efficiently and intelligently to create beautiful pieces of art. Do not wait any longer to start creating your own realistic art. Let's get started.
2. Procreate Tips & Tricks: Welcome to my first lesson on procreate tips and tricks. The first tip I want to give you is to curve one folder and procreative for you have all your different brushes, and to create one version of each brush, one with streamline and one with no streamline. I advise you to memorize the following gestures to improve your workflow. Tapping with two fingers will undo your work while tapping with three fingers will redo your work. Now take note of the following gesture where you can have access to a menu with different options. To activate this menu, you can select the settings bottom, go to preferences, and then select gesture control. Once you are in that menu, click on quick menu and you can personalize how you can have access to the menu. You can also personalize different gestures that you can use throughout procreate. Please take advantage of these menu so you can personalize procreate your own way. Procreate now includes the option to have a reference window within your Canvas. This window allows you to use references in two different ways. The first one, is to actually see how you're making progress in your own drawing. You can shift, you can zoom in, in your actual Canvas. But then within the reference picture, you can see how your picture and drawing is progressing. For your other option is to actually include an image reference from your photos. By clicking on image, you go to import a picture and then select the picture you want to upload or include as a reference in procreate. This way, you now have access to the image that you want to use as a reference for all your drawings. As you can see, you're able to move it, shift it, resize it, tilt it, and rotate it within the window. Let's now take a look at one of my favorite tools, which is liquefied tool. You can resize a brush and with it you can make minor adjustments to your picture, but be careful not to overdo it as if you overdo it, you may completely distort your image. Procreate also gives you the option to draw perfect figures. If you hold your pencil when you draw a figure and then put your finger on the screen, you can actually create a perfect circle, perfect triangles, and perfect squares with your pencil. These shapes can be highly useful in your sketches. Also, you can make straight lines by making a line and then holding your pencil, and this will allow you to make a perfect line which you can rotate or shifting the angle. All the brushes allow you to resize the tip and this can be highly helpful to make thick or thin lines. Using streamline and no streamline brushes is highly helpful for your sketches. Having no streamline is like drawing on paper, you can actually do all the lines and the pen will follow your exact movements. However, this can create jitter. With the streamline option, you'll be able to create more clean lines, however you will have to move slowly so that the pen is able to register your movements. You can actually use different pens with different pressure points where you can make darker or lighter lines. Now I will quickly demonstrate how using a pencil with no streamline allow you to better draw a sketch. As you can see, the brush follows your exact movements, and you're able to sketch just like you would do on paper. This is the greatest advantage of the no streamline pencil to draw, just like you would do on paper. As you will see in a moment, using a brush with streamline will make sketching a lot more difficult because the pencil will not register your movements if you're going fast. When using a streamline pencil, you need to draw very slow. These are a few tips and tricks, see you in my following lesson, where we'll use shapes to sketch.
3. Project Intro: Hi, welcome back. Today, we will be creating a more realistic liner drawing inspired by the Kitty K LOL remix doll. This project should be uploaded into projects section as a JPEG image so we can all take a look at it. If you want, you can include a 30-second time-lapse video of your work. That is also welcome. I chose this project because I love creating concept art from fictional characters. I like imagining what they will look like in real life. This doll is a good place to start on because even though she looks complex, her accessories and hair don't have much detail and are pretty straight forward. Straight hair is always the best place to start with. Then you're starting to recreate art, as it has the least amount of details and volume. Also, most of her forehead is covered by bangs. So these reduces the amount of details that you have to take care of. If you want to include clothing for your drawings, make sure you go with something simple. As you become more familiar with details, you can start including more complex pieces of clothing and hairstyles. Before you start with a project, you should create a mood board with all your reference pictures, color palettes, and backgrounds. I have provided a sample jam board template for a mood board. Also, you should do some warm-up exercises. Some experts recommend doing simple shapes and lines. I like to practice my calligraphy and I kill two birds at the same time. You should always remember that when sketching, you can go fast, however, when doing the final line art, you need to go slow. Really slow. If you need to familiarize yourself more with human faces, I recommend you watching Gabrielle Brickey's class on character illustration drawing female portraits in procreate. As she heavily focuses on the very basics for drawing human faces. Our link to her class is included under project resources. Also, we need to make sure you have the brushes you like the most ready in your procreate app. If you like, download the ones I provided in the resources page. Furthermore, having your reference images ready and save under Pictures app. So let's not wait any longer, let's begin. See you on our next lesson.
4. Sketching with Shapes: Welcome back everybody to our first lesson. We're going to start drawing by using shapes. So whenever we draw our first sketch, I recommend using a no streamline pencil. We're going to start by drawing a circle and then holding our pencil and our finger will allow us to make a perfect circle. This circle usually covers two-thirds of the face. Then we're going to draw a very rounded triangle around our circle. This is going to be the jaw for our character. We are now, going to divide our face by drawing a line that passes right in the middle for shapes, and right where the line crosses the bottom side of the circle we'll draw a curvy line to represent where the nose will go. Then on the top of the circle, right in the middle, we'll draw a line to place our eyes. Since the character is looking upwards, we will draw our line curving to the top. So we draw the line and then we draw two other lines that are parallel to this one, one on top and one on the bottom, where we will put the eyes and then we'll draw the neck. But sometimes, it's a little harder whenever you want to draw necks when the face is tilted to a side. So one of my recommendations is to actually draw a line that will represent how the body's going to be shaped. That will facilitate the placement of the neck, as you can see right here. So far, we have made use of very basic shapes to draw our figure. Now let me show you one little trick for resizing your sketches. So by clicking on the arrow on the top, we're going to open up this menu and we select on the interpretation where Procreate gives us three options, the best of the three is to select Bicubic as it is the one that will keep the same quality for your drawing, while the other two always pixelate a little bit your drawings. So I'm resizing my sketches and want to more details for my drawing. I want to be able to put all the other details. So we're going to continue drawing with shapes and we're going to place where the rest of our body is going to be. So I'm going to start with the right arm and just draw a little line that will tell me where I'm going to put the body. Whenever the articulations are bending, the best option is to draw some circles to allow you to represent those bends or those angles in our bodies. So now I'm going to draw an oval or a little egg shaped to represent where the torso of our body is going to be. Then the ears usually go right in the middle where the three lines where the eyes are. They come out from the top line and on the bottom line and you just draw a simple shade to represent where the ears will be. For the mouth we'll do a smiling mouth. You can actually test different placements to actually see where you like it best. To complete the nose, we'll add tool lines to make a little cone shape for the eyes, just like how we did it with the mouth. We're going to test different placements to see which one we feel more comfortable with. I will show you how you can actually use different shapes to see which placement you like better. So you can try and do the almond-shaped eyes to see if you like it better. Or you can draw small circles to test the placement of the eyes. So here I was feeling more comfortable with circles to actually just tell me where I will be placing my eyes. So as you can see with this first sketch, we are not really striving for perfection. We're just trying to place where our characters characteristics are going to be. I am now going to change my image from my reference because I want to select one with more details. I have added the place where the bangs are going to be. Now, we're going to add more details for my characters such as cat ears, the hair, which is coming out from behind the cat ears. To go back to my previous reference image, I am importing again the previous image by clicking "Import" then selecting that again, just to continue drawing some small details for my drawing. By using the eraser tool, we can actually clean up some of the lines we don't like. So this is just a basic representation for our sketch. On the next lesson we will do our first line art sketch for our drawing.
5. Your First Sketch: Welcome back to our class. Today, we're going to continue drawing our first sketch. I will like to start by showing you how you can select a portion of your drawing in order to make minor adjustments. In this case, we're going to select the S looking tool in the top and select part of the face. Then with the arrow, we're going to shift and tilt our face to make it look more accurate to the angle that we have on our reference image. We are now going to make use of a new layer in order to draw our sketch. On the previous layer, we can adjust the opacity by reducing it in order to be able to see very slightly the previous drawing. Then by continual making use of our no streamline brush pen, we're going to start drawing the details of her faces. In the case of the eyes, I will now draw a more realistic looking eye by making it more eyelashy, more almond shape, and I do the same for the second eye. I want to show you one tool that I like to use, which is flipping our image. Whenever you flip an image, you can actually tell when something is off with your drawing. I'd like to show you one of my favorite tools, which is the Liquify tool. With it, you can make minor adjustments to your drawing without actually having to start over. In this case, the eyes of our character were a little bit sad and we're lifting them up so that they look a little bit happier. We will now add other details, such as the nose and the eye browser for characters. Right now, we don't have to focus so much on being so precise with our drawing. We will still continue to embrace the imperfect as we're not yet focused on making those realistic and clean lines. We continue to add details for our character. In the case of the mouth, we will attempt to set the open mouth expression by drawing first the shape of the open mouth, and then adding the lips of her character. At any moment you can make adjustments to your sketch by improving the lines, so you can make adjustments and erase the lines you don't like. In order to further continue improving our sketch, we will adjust the size of the eyes and make them a little bit smaller to make them more realistic. Remember those circles that represent articulations, they allow you to better draw those parts of the body, such as elbows and wrists. We will continue to add more details to our drawing, keeping it very basic and making sure we do not obsess with much detail. We will focus on striving to draw more perfect lines and adding more details in our next lesson, when we start drawing the first draft for our line up. So please stay tuned.
6. Line Art - First Draft: Welcome to our next lesson on drawing your first line art sketch. First, make sure to turn off any layers that you no longer need and only leave the one you'll be using as a reference. We will be using, for this occasion, a brush with full streamline and we will be needing to draw very slowly. This will allow us to draw clean lines with no jitter. So again, remember to go slow, very, very slow. You can actually save time if you like something you just drew by duplicating it. For this example, we are duplicating the eyes and then flipping them horizontally so that we save time on our drawing and sketches. A great strategy is to have your eyes on a different layer. This will allow you to move them around and repositioning them as much as you need. As I have mentioned earlier, I am constantly moving my eyes to see what's the best position. If you quickly want to delete an entire section of your drawing, you can select it and then swipe down to select Cut, rather than just using the eraser. One of my favorite parts of sketching is actually drawing the liner because it allows me to relax while I draw very slowly. I focus on the lines and these releases lots of tension from my daily life. Continue to add details to your drawing and remember, go slow, very slow. Changing the angle or your viewpoint can go long ways. I often find myself flipping my image and I find easier to draw certain details this way. Talking about changing your viewpoint, flipping your canvas horizontally can help you visualize mistakes. The liquefying tool is one of my favorite tools in Procreate, it allows me to make minor improvements to my drawing without having to start all over. However, you need to be very careful because you can easily distort your images. Digital art is very forgiving. I had forgotten to switch to a different layer and I drew everything under the same layer as my eyes. If you make this mistake, you can correct it by selecting the parts of your drawing that you want to move to another layer and cutting and pasting them, and this will move them into a whole new different layer. Continue to add details to your drawing and remember, go slow, very slow. Take advantage of the different settings that Procreate provides for you in their different tools to make adjustments to your lines. I really hope you have enjoyed this lesson. See you on our next lesson when we draw our final line art.
7. Project - Line Art Final Draft: Great job. You made it to our final lesson when we will draw our final liner project. Let's begin by merging down our previous layer and then adding a new layer. On the previous layer, reduce your passage. We may use our previous sketch as our reference guide for our new sketch. We are using a brush with full streamline, so we must make sure to draw very slowly. Please take note that this video is three times speed up, but I'm actually drawing very slow in real life. Make sure you draw as slowly as possible to be able [inaudible] the cleanest line you can make. Taking advantage with the streamline pencil, you'll produce the jitter and by drawing slowly, the pencil will register your movements and drop very precise lines. This is a technique I like to use. I cover one eye with my hand and then move the other one around to see if the placement was correct. As a tip, keep your eyes on a different layer. If you liked how you drew your eye, remember that you can take advantage of the duplicate option, and then rotate or flip the next eye so that both eyes are looking exactly the same. Make sure to frequently flip horizontally your image so that you're able to visualize any mistakes and then make the needed corrections. If you're struggling with the symmetry of your face or with any other shape within your drawing, you can create a line or a specific shapes within the reference layer to have a visual lead. I often rotate my canvas when sketching because having a different viewpoint allows me to easily draw different details. In this case, whenever I draw eyelashes, I always draw it with an angle or with a campus flip upside down. I advise you try to make different details on different layers so that you may move them around with ease. When drawing the iris and the pupils, I like to make use of the perfect shapes so you can draw on procreate, and then merging them down so that they're in the same layer. This will allow you to move them more easily and then you can duplicate them to have the exact same shape and size for your eyes. By flipping the canvas and then covering the eyes with my hands, I'm able to see if the eyes were placed correctly. Keeping details in different layers allows you to erase certain lines without affecting other lines that you really like. Also you're able to make quick adjustments without affecting any other parts of your drawing. Remember that faces are symmetrical, so if you really like one side of your face, but not quite the other, you can actually copy and paste it and then have very symmetrical faces and improve your sketches. Please remember that when using a brush with full streamline, you need to draw very slowly. Continue adding details to your sketch by guiding yourself with the lines from your reference guide below. I find hands and fingers a little hard to draw, so I like to add sausages as a reference to my fingers. Again, as you can see, by having details on different layers, will allow you to quickly erase something from a different layer without affecting your previously drawn lines. I really take my time when drawing all the details. I find this step extremely relaxing and I can spend a really long time drawing these lines. I also like to make use of the perfect shapes by holding my pencil and this will allow me to draw even cleaner lines. The liquefy option is always a great hack in order to improve some lines without having to start all over. The great advantage of growing digital portraits is that you're able to keep an eye on the lines that you don't like and quickly correct them and have better looking sketches. We're now adding the final details for our sketch. I really hope that you have enjoyed my class and that your sketches are looking great. Thank you for joining me.
8. Final Thoughts: Congratulations on finishing your first line art sketch. You made it. Remember that this line art will be your reference when you're coloring your portraits. We covered everything from using Procreate more efficiently and using different settings for your brushes to be more productive while sketching and drawing with Procreate. If there is one thing that I want you to remember from this class is that nothing is perfect the first time. We must embrace our mistakes to improve. That is what sketching is all about. Please remember to upload your project on the projects gallery in the class page so that we can all take a look at it. Remember to upload an image of your work in JPEG or any other image format. Also if possible, add a 30-second time-lapse to Procreate videos so that we can all see your process. If you like this class, please leave a review. Also follow my profile so that you are the first one to know of any new classes I publish. If you publish your work on Instagram, make sure you use this hashtag so that I may see all your work. Thank you so much for joining me. I cannot wait to see your work. See you next time.
Rodrigo Diaz, Skillshare Teacher and Art Enthusiast
