Transcripts
1. Teacher Introduction + About This Class: Hi, everyone. I'm 70 core fee. I am an artist in the Philadelphia area. I work here in my home studio, which is pretty convenient because I have three little boys always running around that I can easily keep an eye on. I dabble in all sorts of creative things I love to, so I love to paint abstract acrylics on canvas. I like to teach art lessons to kids on licence, my art for products like greeting cards and Home to core and Wall Art. And I published books in the art instructional space on topics from doodling to fashion design to painting with your kids. But the topic of this skill share class is one of my very favorite things close to my heart . And that is drawing adorable little kids character sketches based on a photo inspiration. Now, if you follow me on social media, I'm sure you've already seen a 1,000,000 examples of this exact kind of thing. But I'm gonna teach you my tricks. I'm gonna teach you exactly how I approach drawing like this, and I'm gonna teach you in the same exact way that I would teach my six year old son who often likes to sit by my side and draw people, even if you're intimidated by drawing people. I think that these tips and steps will help you to see a huge improvement from your first attempt to maybe you're fit. 6 10 12 attempt. It's all about practice and kind of getting in a rhythm. So I hope you're excited, and I'm gonna get started with a short list of materials and next video.
2. Class Materials: everyone. I'm gonna talk to you real quick about basic materials that you will need to do the character sketch glass. Since it's a sketching class, you will need paper and pencils. You can go from basic to a little more advanced to artists quality. And I'm just gonna tell you that on the regular basis, copy paper or typing paper, whatever people call it nowadays is just fine. It's great for practice, inexpensive. You won't feel too bad if you scribble a few pages out and toss it, so that's fine. It doesn't work for the watercolor part of the end, but for practice, it's great. If you want to get a little bit fancier, you can go with either watercolor paper or just an artist sketch book that has some heavier weight. John paper In it, you can see kind of the weight of this. This is a can sahn drawing a notebook that I just got a craft store and you can see. But it takes the watercolor pretty well, so I wouldn't hesitate to use this in your practice. It's also pretty portable for watercolor paper. You can get a small, inexpensive tablet like this that's made by cans on. I recommend cold press paper, which has a nice to the texture to it. And I think is a lot more forgiving, uh, for beginning water, Polaris and even for me, who has been with her coloring for years. I don't have much success with the smoother hot press papers. I like the cold press and one of the really nice papers if you're doing a gift or something , is this Arches paper. It has such a nice feel to it. It's made out of cotton. It's heavyweight and just really lovely. So if you wanted to step it up once you've got this in the bag, Okay, So for pencils, you can use a basic mechanical pencil that you would just get in any office supply store. I use mechanical pencils like they're going out of style. I love that. I don't have to sharpen them. I have them in every drawer there, candy and, um, I always use I never used this eraser. I always use a needed gray eraser so that I don't tear apart my paper when I'm racing all my straight lines, this just sort of grabs the extra graphite and pulls it up off the paper without destroying the page, which is great when you come back later and do watercolor because you won't have this scrubby no be texture on your paper. I won't use artists pencils. I would suggest using a harder lead. So the pencils range from four H 26 b in this particular set, and the B pencils are soft lead and the ages air hard. You're gonna when you use the hard, because it doesn't lay down as much black graphite on the page That will just muddy up your watercolor later. So use a hard, um, lead in a lighter touch for your sketching so that paper and pencils and really you could stop there. But if you want to go on and do the fun part with the watercolor that I have some recommendations, Um, as far as watercolors go, there are so many sets that you can buy, so I don't even wanna point you necessarily in one direction or another. You can get a really cheap set, just experiment with the craft store, and that's fine. I use those two. But these are the steps I use on a regular basis, and people ask me a lot of questions about because the colors are very vibrant, so I want to share the names with you. This is a well upset but not expensive. It's, um, Angora watercolor set 36 pants, and I think the company is royal talents, and you can get it on black dot com. I like it because of the jewel tones, not so many primaries. That's kind of more interesting colors. And then this set, which is more expensive, is a mission gold tube set. So instead of dry pans of color, these come in a tube wet. You can, you know, kind of pick the colors you like the best and make your own palette mixing in the middle. And even when they're dry, you can react to beat them with water. And then, lastly, the one that I take with me when im sketching in the car on the go at the Kids Practices or gosh, in the coffee shop, you want people watching to your character. Sketching is this little portfolio made myself with Nicholson's peerless watercolors. These watercolors are pigment that's dried onto card stock, and when you get it, it's just these big, long cards, and then you can cut it up and make your own little portfolio of colors. You can google this. A 1,000,000 artists have made cool ones probably cooler than mine. Um, and see about making your own palette. The best thing is, it's such an easy way to travel with your art supplies, the same paper towel that you'll need to block your brushes. You stick between the layers. Some people use acetate, but I'm just like, no way, man. Put the paper towels in there, tie it up with this tiny little driwater color palette and grab the next thing. I'll tell you that, which is my pen. Tell backwash water brush. It has water in the handle so you don't need to bring a reservoir with you. You squeeze it to get water to come out into the bristles, and then, if you have your brush loaded with color is, squeeze it again and kind of rents off on your paper towel until it runs clear. So if you have a water bottle in your bag and you can just keep refilling it, this will work forever and ever take it with me everywhere. So if you have these little doodads just this little bit you can pick, maybe the pencil, right. Go to the park and people watch and sketch there. So if you want to use traditional brushes, which is fine and I actually will use a little bit of those in the class, I would just recommend some around rushes in a medium medium to small sizes. The tapers nice. It doesn't matter if they're expensive, then for the puddles and little atmosphere that will get behind our characters. I like to make puddles with one of these, like more mop brushes that can hold a lot of liquid and a lot of paints. We could make puddles and then any kind of brush that you can flick dried up mangled brushes that had dried, painting them anything that has the type of bristle that you conflict. It's good for flicking watercolors. Weaken makes fatter will be great. That's definitely all you would ever need. But I do have a few little fun things that, if you wanted to add to your collection, would be nice. Um, when I do clothing, which is my really love doing the clothing on the characters. I don't ever try to paint polka dots. I don't usually try to paint polka dots or stripes. I will often just add them with the gel pen at the end so you can use a white gel pen. Or you can use white ink, an opaque white ink like this one. Um, sometimes it's easier than trying to, like, paint around all the negative space. And then finally, this really super metallic brilliant gold wash for like, earrings or studs on a little purse. Or who knows, shoes. Whatever is a nice little accent at the end, and that's it.
3. Choosing A Great Source Photo: So when I make these kind of character sketches for clients, they will often ask me what kind of picture I need to work from. And for the purposes of this kind of sketch, I usually tell them full length, like I'd like a head to toe kind of picture with nothing cropped off toe work from. But I also tell them to try and think about their kids personality. So I always say, Try to capture a moment. Don't give me a mug shot so you don't want your kids school picture where they're just standing at attention and looking straight forward, You want something that has some joy, some character that gives you a sense of time and place and is really like a memory. So this sweet brother and sister at the beach is a great memory, and you can see if you look back on it, they'll remember that point in time. The sweet little bathing suit could not be any cuter, and it's nice how they're facing each other and interacting. So to me, that's a moment and the same thing with this one over here. They sent a CB atoned photograph, and I did the sketch and see Peotone, to which kind of gives it a timeless quality. And she's got this classic Chuck Taylor sneaker going on with her little two to style dress , and she just looks so joyful with her head thrown back. So to me, um, it's not about what color her eyes are. What shape are they? It's about capturing this moment of joy in this moment of interaction. So if you look for photos that give you that sense of, um, kind of, ah, emotion and feeling, then those will be great subjects for your sketches. So the next tip is to look for great shapes and an angle you can handle. And what I mean by that is that you should pick more of, like, kind of a head on angle, where there's not a lot of distortion because the photo is taken from above or from underneath. Unless you feel like you can handle that. If you're an accomplished artist and foreshortening doesn't bother you, then go for it. But for beginners, I would often just recommend that you take ah full on front angle, where the proportions are all more correct when I say look for a great shape. It's really about the pose. Like, what's the overall outline? This one is so symmetrical and balanced. Um, you can see the shape of his legs are the same on either side. The ball balances everything. It's kind of a really nice, proportional, kind of tight shape overall footprint of the image. And then here she's got so much personality, these little bunny ear kind of headband going on and her little leg off to the side and angled little arm angled as well. All these things make for a really balanced composition and something that looks like it can stand alone. It doesn't need the background around. It's nice and strong. Now, on the other side of the coin, you have these two photos, which I would say are more challenging angles. This one, taken from the lower part of the hill as the kids air sledding and looking upward, is showing you the bottoms of feet and a foreshortened kind of proportion to the body. There's legs and arms everywhere, and it's just a more challenging angle toe work from. So if you're a beginner, maybe don't tackle that one. And if you're a little more advanced. Hey, go for it. Um, again, Same thing with this one on Adult took this picture, obviously, which I think is adorable, but it's taken from a downward angle, so her legs air really shortened in her feet, are a little smaller proportionally than they would be compared to her head. And if you feel confident in looking at the source photo and just translating those proportions and getting that angle, then great go for it. But if you're a beginner, maybe don't pick this angle because it might end up looking a little wonky. Proportion wise, the next tip is to appreciate clothing, accessories and props with personality. So what do I mean by that? You're trying to capture the essence of a character. It's not really about capturing their exact facial features or, you know, their exact likeness. It's more about creating a character that recalls their personality, their essence as it were. So you wanna pick photos that really represent the child. So this mom had sent me a picture of her son, who is a hockey player, and even though this is some might say, it's a mug shot because it is opposed picture. There's so much personality that comes through at this point in time. His age, the way his hair is kind of like swirled onto his head, probably probably had his helmet on. Who knows the hockey stick? The team he played for. This captures a moment time. So I think it kind of isn't so much a mug shot. And I do think that it will recall a memory. It's all about his accessories, his clothing and that character that comes through there. The number on his jersey will remember that the team that he was on represented by the logo so that that clothing choices just really strong and the same with this little boy. He's got a cool accessory. Who knows? Maybe that was his favorite dump truck at this age. Maybe those were his favorite kicks. I don't know. My son loves thes sneakers every time he sees the sketch. He's enamored of the plum colored high tops and even this really character filled little neckerchief that he has. It has little dinosaurs on it, and I could have just skipped that and made it any pattern. But, um, I really did draw the dinosaurs because it's gonna capture that moment in time. Remember when Remember that? Remember that dump truck that used to carry around everywhere you went? That captures kind of a moment, and it's kind of a hook for the image, even if your face doesn't come out looking exactly like the photo. This character overall is gonna recall this child because of all these little details that were adding in. Now here's the girl's version of that same idea, paying attention to the clothing, accessories and props. So this little girl, who clearly loves riding horses and whatnot, has her cowgirl hat on. She has her leopard print, turquoise trimmed cowgirl boots, and she's carrying a bucket with I don't know if that speed or hey or whatever it is in there. But clearly all of these accessories and little bits and pieces to her apparel and her accessories and her props are telling a story about who she is, at least who she is at this age. So that's really strong and will recall a memory and again, even if the faces an identical if you don't get that identical, which is not really the point. This is gonna capture the essence of this character. And then this little girl also seemed thing. I mean, this dress is one of a kind, so it has horses all around him. Line she's got her Fedor on Just got some attitude, great pose and these purple Navy boots. It's It's so specific that it brings the character to life and really kind of will give you an idea of who it is. Even if you never saw the face, you probably know if this persons in your family, you'd say, Oh, that so and so with her fashion sense. So that's a really strong example, too, of a great voter to choose. And then the last tip, which you may or may not want to pay attention to, depending on your level of skill. If you're a beginner, if you're more advanced is to pay attention to the hands, feet and the exact kind of facial expression or features in the picture that you choose. If you're not good at hands or feet, look how you can cheat. I mean, this picture really has that's barely a hand. These feet are buried in the sand thes air buried in a sleeve. There's plenty of opportunities where a hand is in someone's pocket or behind their back, and you can just kind of avoid it. If that's not your strong suit. Now it's good to practice, and I encourage you to practice, um, and get good at drawing hands and feet. But if that's not something that you feel like doing today, then you can kind of put it off and just look for some good pictures where you're not gonna be challenged too much. And then in this example over here. And I feel like eyes air, often the most difficult for people because it's hard to represent an eye with minimal lines. And so if you feel like you're always over drawing the eye or under drawing it, it's just a dot. And that's not something. You're happy with this smiling expression with a little kind of slit shaped eyes. It's a way to cheat the system. So, um, the same thing happens with smiles. Sometimes, if you have a close lipped smile, you can just draw. It is a curve, and you can kind of cheat that way, too. So, um actually, like drawing eyes. But this picture was a good example. This is my little boy and I love when he laughs like this with his eyes, all squinty. But that is definitely awaited. Cheat. Get a real real smiley picture. We've just got the little the little rainbow eyes. So those are all really helpful tips in choosing a photo That's gonna help ensure success when you're trying to do your character sketch. But really, the question you should just ask yourself is, does it make you smile? Does this image make me excited to sketch it? And if that's true, ignore everything else and just dive in headfirst in the next section. We're gonna do some gesture drawing so you can do just that, see in a minute.
4. Gesture Drawings: So this section is all about gesture, drawing what is a gesture drawing People do them all different sorts of ways, but essentially they're drawing this done quickly and is mainly used Teoh map in the form and the pose of character in a figural drawing, so I tend it probably be a little more exacting when I do mind, some people really, really scribble on. There's a lot of black carbon on the paper by the time they're done, they're getting kind of an outer shape and form etcetera, and I do a little bit more detail, but I think the principles air just the same. You want to get a quick framework before you concentrate too much on any one area of your drawing. This'll helps you to work more evenly across the entire image and gives you a nice, strong framework that you can then carve out and detail as you like to get a great finished result. Now I want to do some live gesture drawing and then described you my process and what I'm thinking as I go and how I'm kind of, uh, moving through the drawing by looking at spatial relationships between different parts of the body and that sort of thing. So I have four to show you and two boys two girls. So let's get started. These are supposed to be quick. In fact, try and look at it as though you only have two minutes to do it, and that's it. And you want to get an idea of the suppose that your subject is in and specific proportions , things like that. But try not to labour everything too long. I always start with the head, and a lot of times instead of drawing an oval or circle, Um, I'll draw this sides, I'll draw it almost has a square. So I'm really examining. What's this angle right here of the side of the face? Kind of. Put that in first and then move across to the opposite side of the face. Figure out where the chin is. Figure out where the top of the head is, and then kind of connect the dots, and this is all gonna get refines later. And then one thing that people usually do is drawing neck coming out. If you're really looking at the drawing, you'll see that his shoulders air coming out of his face out of his head's down. So you're proportion is actually here, and then I'll just get the hand. That kind of comes across at a right angle. Maybe I'll refine. This looks like it needs to drop down. The point is, you scribble a lot checking yourself as you go. The hand is kind of under the year. Here's the ear. So straight down, here's the hand, and I just dropped blocking a hand as a kind of geometric shape. Sometimes it's a triangle. Here's this little neckerchief. See this? And I'm looking at How much space is there between that and a little bit of best that you see a tiny little bit of space? Um, and then we have a dump truck. I'm just gonna put the whole truck, has a square. There's only a little bit kind of tucked under his hand wheels, some that sticks out here. It's very basic. His best comes straight down outside of his farm, so that's here. It's very boxy. It's a little bit below the wheels of the truck and see, right now, I feel like this is too long, so I probably don't. I probably have the truck too big, so you can kind of correct as you go. I'm gonna move that up. I'm gonna move his vest up and probably there we go. That's a little better. Also, at this point, you can kind of put in the grid for the face. I always find that midline that goes right down the nose into the chin and draw that in, and you instantly have a sense of direction and where the face is looking. And then if a subject is looking up, you're gonna have an upward arc for the eyes. And if they're looking down, you're gonna have a downward one. So where is that I line? That's a map for you. To a lot of times, I will map in the hair. Um, just the basic shapes that you're getting. Um, he has more volume on top of this head, so I can add that. Keep referring back to the picture and seeing where you look off. I also like to move around the drawing a lot so that you don't focus on one spot so long that you can't see it objectively anymore. So now we're down to his legs. I almost always do the legs as, like Little Stems like little sticks. And, um, then I'll draw the base of the feet almost before I draw anything else, and sometimes they're not in the right spot. Sometimes they are. But I like that baseline and then connecting the dots through so visually, halfway down the leg, Here's the knee, so always right. Draw a little line for the shadow under the knee, and then it's all kind of connecting the dots from that point. He's got these cute high tops. They're very chunky, kind of triangular, and that's it. So there are things I can already see that I want to fix. I've made his shoulder broader than it really is. When I do my actual drawing, I'll shave that down. And that makes him a little thinner, too, that sort of thing. But that's the gesture drawing. You wanna limit yourself in time and you want to scribble, go quickly. Don't give yourself too much time to labor the point or Teoh get inside your own head, so let's move on to the next one. Okay, so I picked this next one because it's an interesting composition. This might be challenging if you're a beginner, but still the process of drawing the gesture, sketch gesture drawing is the seem. And so I went ahead and chose a challenging one. Doesn't matter if you look closely at it before even begin. Everything you know about human proportions looks out of whack because her heads a little forward, so it's larger, aspires the cameras concerned. It's a little larger, her shoulders air coming out of almost the top third of her head because she's really leaning over. So in this picture, it's really important to draw what you see and using the's spatial clues, so I'll show you what I mean by that. So if I draw her face and again, here's my little Here's the chin on paying attention to this angle of the lower part of her face and see how it opens up here. It's not a right angle. Little things like that will really help you. Teoh. Draw what you see and not what you think is there. Her mouth is right down into her chins will just throw a little line there. Her nose is just a tiny smidge. Sometimes I'll draw that little that little distance in to give myself a marker, and I'm not gonna draw the entire news. I'm just gonna draw the angle. Looks like a cat right now. Um, Q t pie. And then her eyes are kind of like look at the distance here, look at the distance here kind of market. And then I'll do this curve because one thing is people will do eyes and they won't be on the same plane and they won't be on the scene. Kind of, I guess that's more like a meridian. Um, you don't really see the one I under her hat. However, we need to know that we can kind of see a little lashes, and that's a marker for her hat. Her hat sweeps up like this. So having that line, the grid lines for the face is really helpful. It helps you keep both eyes on that same cross hatched a line, and it helps you with other kind of geographical references if I'm looking at everything in the picture and trying to relate it to something else, so that's a little more in depth, and I usually get for a gesture drawing. But I had to have had to discuss it since it was there. Okay, so that's it. So now she has, um, her ear its way up higher than her. I that's it's not really like that in real life. It's just the angle that we're seeing. And then the shoulder comes out of the year. Arm comes straight down. Well, not straight on an angle, but it's her arm is not flexed. And then I'm just gonna draw this random Nothing for her hand. It looks like a shoe kind of, but doesn't matter. And then over here, out of her cheek comes a strap. And then there's a diagonal line that cuts just by her chin for her out for her little top . Um, this is how I just keep going back to the picture and looking at collectivity. Where is where things connected? Um, from her ear and upward is the band of her hat, and then it kind of mushrooms out. And then the brim of the hat and this proof at the top of the hat kind of hit the same spot . So we'll do this. And then that poof is there. She's got some hair here. We'll just indicated by a squiggle. And there's that strap from her dress. She has a little dip down, and then the other arm. It's now if you look at the two arms. If you were to draw a line between her inner elbow here and this elbow, you're getting this strong line this way, and that can help you to see where the bend in her arm needs to happen. Also, the hands one hands here, and this one is just slightly lower where it's leaning. Here's a crayon again. These angles seems so wrong because see how short her forearm is. It's because she's reaching forward on its foreshortened, this tiny little short bit and this really long upper arm. It looks wrong to your eye, but it'll look right in context to the drawing once you have all the details flushed in and then her knee kind of comes out where her elbow is like this got a bunch of lines in here for her legs and whatever. They're doing. A little bit of shirt action. This is pretty much a vertical, so we'll just draw that straight down. And then this scoop in here of her shirt tells me where the Legace. So that, like kind of comes up here and back down again. You really see any feet? Everything's kind of tucked in, but let's draw the book because that's kind of cool. So this is here. And then she's got this straight section, the book she's drawing in my angle. Check your angles. My cram is not slanted enough. Here's the thumb. And then here's a little ruffle for her shirt, her hair over here kind of covering and then a little bit that kicks up there. So now if you go back in to clean this up, some of the things I see immediately or that I want to soften the lines through her face so she looks more child like it's a little wider and rounder, and you can finesse all that stuff as you get further into the drawing. But that's the gesture. That's the proportion that's, um, the pose. And it's kind of like the framework for your sketch and you'll get really good at thes. Some days I feel like I'm really good at it in Sunday's Unlike man, all my gesture joints, they were terrible on that will happen. So no worries. Um, sometimes you're in the zone, and sometimes you're not. But this is a great practice to do from life or if you're somewhere and you're not comfortable drawing from life um, unnecessarily taking pictures of strangers but can take a picture of your kids doing whatever they're doing so that when they run off and leave pose, you'll have it on your phone. Or you can have it on your iPad and work from that reference. Um, digital photography is awesome for that. Okay, so the next one IHS um, my son. OK, so, ups, turn it one. Okay, so here's another one I wanted to do to that were crossed like it cause this one's taken downward and that one was taken up for So I think our well, her head's down. But, um, I think this is interesting to see a similar pose A boy, a girl in different angles. So this one you've seen before in the course and the examples, But I love him. What can I say? So again, I'm gonna look at this line for his face now in orientation to the picture. It's vertical right through the middle. He's slanted, but you can start with this vertical line. I think it's so important to have something to start with. And sometimes I do an action line, which is like the mainline through a figure. If someone's bending over arching their back or something, you might drown action line right through the center. But for this, when I'm starting with the face, I'm always looking at chin and then the relationship of the sides of their face. Are they narrow? Are they acute angles? Are they up to see this one's further than 90 degrees So his little face comes out like this and then kind of right in this spot right here. It kind of opens up a little bit. It's getting wider near the top, so basic shape. Here's his ear. His haircut, that's the other thing here isn't on the head here is always usually touching the ear and has more volume than the actual top of the skull. So, um, if you look at the face here, what I'm seeing as a sketch is this I line matching up to about the middle of his ear. If you're looking at him straight on, most people's eyes line up with the top of their ear. So right about in the middle of the year will be his eye line. I feel like that almost makes you see the face right away here. This thing I can I use this all the time where his part is. Draw the part. It almost builds the hairstyle for you. It shows you how far out into the face the hairline comes when I drop things I must always drop up from the bottom. Spiky bits on the boy's hair, not smooth curves usually helps it to look a little more masculine. Um, so that I'm just going to find the center So you see much more of this side of his face than this side. So I'll mark that right through here. And don't you feel like you can kind of already see his face? I feel like this island, a little high school. Adjust it and then he's got, like, the little squinty smiley eyes going on. And then I usually will come up from the chin. Um, special relationship between on dsi here. I am not really doing the gesture drawing. I'm getting into the face, but I'll move on to the body in a second. If you would go up from the chin and find that sweet spot where the bottom lip is, I think you already got the eye line. If you have the bottom lip, it's much easier to figure out where the nose goes. His top lip is kind of ST on Mouth is the most important thing is how much black space you see in the corners, because that kind of defines their teeth and how wide their smile is. And then it's usually just a shadow for under their nose. All right, anyway, onto the gesture drunk. So you see under his ear. His ear lobe is where his shoulders come out, and on the other side, it's out of the full, full part of his cheek That helps you build that. And then also the neckline, the necklines. Not here under the middle, the necklines coming also from under his ear and comes back up into his chin. So you find these map points and it's easier to make the drawing. Now. I'm just gonna kind of get his hands. Kind of just balls for hands is fine. General shapes. If you have short sleeves here. The short sleeve got words here Not gonna draw them right now. Here's where the shirt kind of comes in. How much wider than his elbow and like his head is this knee I would say about here and then on this side, you're almost making a triangle from his head down to his knee. Here it is, So then that will help. You kind of sketch that in this knee. If you look at it like it's a circle, it's catching like that. It will help you find the spot where, um the the thickness, the fullness this bottom edge of Shin is, and everything in the middle is kind of shadow, his one foot scrapped off. I have drawn this one, and I just from what I know of feet, I just kind of filled it in. So I encourage you guys to get pictures where you can see the whole form. But this is the basic kind of gestural structural drawing for this. I can see some things that I need to fix already. This lines not is a little off, but just go quick and scribble. It gives you less time to get frustrated over proportions. Okay, we have one more a girl. It's a standing posed this time, and I've started with just the basic outline of the face in the grid lines, looking at the distance between her chin and her neckline and seeing that it's pretty similar to the height of her face, or at least to wear, her eyes come in. So that's one of the visual cues and then also the side of her face and where her neck comes in or kind of the same, too. And since you can see a little bit of the turn into her shoulder, you know that the neckline has to come there. This is just I'm just trying to verbalize like what goes through my head when im sketching . Some people are like, How do you get the proportions? Correct. And, um, you know, it's it's Ah, it's a train of thought that you don't necessarily, um, talk to people about because you're just doing it. It's just your habit. So but I do. I'll come up from the chin, find the bottom lip and then come up from the top lip and find the bottom of the news on And that's after I've already drawn in the grid line. So I just got a big flower on her head, which is really cute. I draw the part. I do draw the part, usually in hair. Um, when I draw hair, I try and just look at the overall shape of the hair and not the individual strands of hair . So there's that, and she has kind of this big front on her shirt sold sketch that in basics, because mostly I'm drawing the the parts of the clothes that I'm drawing or because they're good part of the road map of the drawing. So, however deep this little buttoned placket is is similar, a little smaller than where her hem line hits and headlines a little bit on angle. So her shoulders are coming, her shoulders or a lot easier to see so you can see that a little bit of her shoulder peeks out of her hair a little bit on kids. You have to be careful not to make their shoulders too broad. It doesn't look like a grown up hands are just usually like a real roughed in shape. I'll be looking at the picture and just kind of drawing in a blind curve of what I see for their hands. So hers kind of looks like this if you see the hand comes and comes up with set of fingers . So that's kind of the overall shape that might help me later, because I might just fill in the fingers this way. I mean, not so chunky like that. But, um, it's a roll shape of her hand. This hands a little different. It's more like a triangle and the, um, fingers fan out, it's going more an upward angle to I wouldn't put this in the gesture, drawing per se, but that's something nice to know when you're blocking in the shape and you're just a drawing to try and make it kind of mimic the sheep you see in the picture. Some people just always draw, um, circles or squares or parallelogram hands for, um, hands and feet. And that's fine, too, when I do arms. I'm really looking at this negative space in here because I'm not drawing her arm. I'm drawing her sweater. Her arm would be up here somewhere, but her sweater is here. So again, the same thing over here. Only a tiny little triangle shows that's helpful. And then this curvature on her sweater matches the outside of this little U shaped bib, and then, when he hits, her hand comes outward. So these are all the things that I'm seeing. Obviously you want the hem of the sweater toe mostly match on this side. This skirt comes right from the edge of the sweater and out on this side. It's on the inner side, in the edge of the sweater. And then here I will do in action line. So she's standing pretty straight, but you could tell that she has on her hip, kind of popped out to one side. It's popped out over there. She's kind of like this, and so her legs are gonna one's gonna bow out like this, and the other one's kind of just it's more street. So when you're seeing a foot from the front, it can be tough. You're really seeing the circles of the front of the toe. You're not seeing the length of the toe so just dropped that way, and then her her pan. Such a stroke out of the line where the pants stop so it matches on both sides, then my work my way up because there's three rows of ruffles, right? So and then her skirt. Where does it come? It's below her knee needs About half way down. Here is the knee, so we'll put her skirt right about there and again. The skirt has several layers here. Ruffles. So we'll get those in the final drawing and not worry about it now. We'll just kind of mark. Where health, How wide are they? Are they all the same with and just kind of map that in one and up here she has a drop waist on her on her skirt, and it comes almost to the bottom of the sweater? Not quite. There's a little difference there. Um, I wouldn't normally do this in a gesture drawing, but here's those kind of gathers you see and her skirt, and then it's just connecting the dots. Here's her little cute pants ankles, and if you draw the baseline of the foot like you're seeing the front of her flip flop, it'll be easier to kind of figure out where her foot goes. That's the gesture drawing I would use for this. See up here, you can find your mistakes. If you draw the whole thing and then come back to the top, you'll see where your mistakes are. Her face is a little bit too long. Um, her neck isn't long enough, so that's good, because I can kind of crop it off here in the same time, I'm making her face a little less long. Her neck will get longer, Um, and if you feel like you're getting too much black line on the page, by all means a race, but for the gesture, drawing ideas kind of not to erase just to scribble in the scribble in the action and move on. And so that's it. So your assignment for this section is to choose, Ah, photo that you think you can handle the pose in and show us your gesture, drawing what you came out with or show us a page of gesture drawings, failed attempts, successful attempts. Um, I think if everyone shows a few on, then others can kind of see, you know, not everyone gets it right. We're perfect the first time. Then that's great. So do that, and I'll see in the next section
5. Simplifying Faces: in this section on simplifying faces. I'm gonna show you how to look at a photographic reference and interpret the facial features that you see into their simpler form. We'll do a little bit of face mapping so that we can get proper positioning of the facial features. And then we'll look at the photo and decide how to simply represent the eyes, nose and mouth with minimal lines and a lot of personality. It's not that hard. Once you get the hang of it, it just takes a little bit of practice. Be sure to choose photos that you really love and that make you smile so that will truly enjoy the process. And most of all, have tons of fun. Okay, now I'm going to show you some real time sketches of simplified faces. You can actually, um, see and hear my thought process. While I'm going through the motions, I'm going to use my iPad pro because I want to show you a little bit of, um, base mapping. That mate might help you to see the actual structure of the face a little better if actually draw right on the photo and then kind of show you how you translate that to paper . So and this image of this little boy, I think the tendency might be to draw an oval head and then set into drawing. The features kind of centered on that oval. But if we look at it skilled back a bit and we really examine the proportions, let's see what's actually there. So here's the oval of the head. Roughly his hairline comes in here. His eye line comes in here, and I kind of missed the chin a bit there. But and then his entire facial features fit in this lower. It's a little bit less than half its not quite 1/3 but this lower portion of the face. So if you ignore that and ignored the hair on just started drawing, you might have the eyes way up here. So it's important for you to kind of see the overall shape first and then kind of start mapping in the different features. Um, the reason you see so much of top of his head because he has his chin tip down. But let's see how this translates when I draw it in pencil. Okay, so we've got an oval and like I said, I don't often draw. No. Why? I just tried to draw Noble. Usually I'll do the two sidelines, find the chin and then start connecting from there. So if that's the overall shape of this face, then I know that the hair is probably coming in right about here. And with that said, he has a little bit space for forehead. So look in my mind, I'm seeing this distance. Okay? So I'm gonna put the eye line here on the midline is pretty straight on in this picture. So that's here. Me race the arrow, and then I'm gonna come up from the chin. As I said, he has a pretty pronounced chin. There's a pretty good distance there. And you might want to in your character sketch, not exaggerated too much. But make sure that that's present, because that's gonna be one of the defining features of his face that makes it look a little bit more like him. Or call him Like I said, this isn't a true portrait, but we're trying to capture personality and the basics of someone's face. That's one of them. Usually when I look at noses, I think of Is the nose turned up or turned down? Are you seeing the nostrils? Are you seeing more of this downward kind of point? And you make that decision on, um, every drawing that you dio Because if you labor the nose and draw it too precisely, it's going to start to look like a portrait. And this is meant to be, you know, more of a whimsical style sketch. So his nose is just gonna get that much kind of detail. Just that part right there. I'm not gonna draw the bridge or anything like that. And then look at the space of his eyes. So some kids have really far speak far set wide set eyes, and some are a little more evenly spaced somewhere really close to the midline. So I would say his ERT maybe a little bit toward the center. But they're pretty much in the in a in a proportional space. So I'm just going to draw circles. He has kind of smiling eyes, but I almost always start with a circle, and then I could kind of chop into it. So if they've got the squinty kind of smiling eyes, find that angle Are they flat? Is it slightly angled up to the side whips? Sorry, I've had sensitive. Are they slightly up to the sides and decide on that? And then mark that in and you can see that I'm cropping into that circle of it. When we come back in to kind of finalize the face, we can get rid of that bit below the cheek, and you can see how it makes him look like he's smiling again. There's no there's no top lid. I'm not drawing this in a portrait style. It's just a circle. And then I try to keep it to, like, just the circle of the eye and then maybe a lash line or one of these kind of smiley, kind of, um, smushed up cheek kind of lines. Try to keep it as minimal as possible so that you're drawing won't start to look to Portrait E. I always say that the most important parts of the mouth are these corners because it tells you how much teeth east, how much how wide their smile is. So look at that. Define that, and then some kids, if they smile with their with their teeth like kind of a Colgate smile perfectly pressed together, you could indicate that with a little line in the middle, see what a difference that makes. And then, lastly, especially with kids. Sometimes they have these little cheek lines. They have all this motion, their cheeks so it gets up into their eyes and it gets at the sides of their mouth more than adult would. So you can put these little lines. Everyone's drawn, those little lines on, you know, yellow smiley faces in their day, I'm sure. And then for the lower lip, I usually just do a shadow eyebrows. I must always do those more in an expressive way. I don't follow the picture unless they really have eyebrows that are defining feature, because I find that if for kids, if you draw the eyebrows, just is there in the picture, it looks a little too grown up. Eyebrows. It doesn't really look a kid version or grown up version of eyebrows, but I find if you draw them just like the picture, you don't get the expressive quality in the face that innocence. So I almost always will tip the eyebrows up a little bit in the center because it gives that wide eyed look which is, you know, very characteristic of Children. So I'm just gonna use my gum Aries or my kneaded eraser to get some of these grid lines out . We can kind of see what we're working with. Just clean it up. Gonna talk to you about the hair. Next. All right? So he has, you see a lot of the top of his head. You don't want to draw all these little bits of hair in for hair. I usually focus on the outline, so his is pretty close to his head. Um, if we map in his ears, it will help us find. See, over here, there's actually quite a bit of with up into the ear for the hair and on this side, you see a little bit less, but it's still there. So you have those little sections sideburns, and he has a pretty close cropped hair cut. So it does kind of follow the contour of his head with boys. I try not to connect the lines or draw too much of a curve. A little choppy kind of feathered instead of strokes in a few places and broken lines helps it till not look too feminine. But you still get a little texture. And then here, basically, you just want a few directional lines to show that some of the hair sweeps this way and some of the hair sweeps this way. You don't really need to show anything other than that Always leave a little glint of light in the eyes. And as a character sketch goes, even though there's a little cleaning up still yet to dio, I'd probably leave it about their or reference back a little bit. I can see here that I've made it a little too wide. Sometimes you might need to walk away from it and come back, and you can immediately see where your mistakes are. Here. The fullness needs to come down a little bit lower, but again, this isn't exact portrait either. So try to stop yourself shy of, you know, getting super involved in the specific measurements and details. If it represents the photo that you're looking at, that's that's pretty much the goal. Okay, let's switch to the next one. So we'll go turn this guy off and we've got this one. Okay, This little girl has a lot of cool, defining features and something that's often hard to deal with with kids, which is missing teeth, because you can make them really look like a jack o lantern or kind of make their mouths too much of a focal point if you try to get the teeth to exact, so I'm gonna show you how I would handle it. Okay, so let's look at the basics of her face. If I look at the sides, they kind of angle outward. If I find her chin, it's somewhat wide flat. Connect these lines and then it's kind of a little more broad at the top, right? Her face is centered, so that's there. Um, and her eyes are fairly high in her face. She has kind of like an elongated face. So here's the eye line. And then if we come up from the chin, here's the lower lip. So translating that to our paper, I think this will actually really help you to see if you can even turn off the picture for seconds. You can see her face is kind of divided in half by her eyes. There might be a little tiny bit more space at the bottom, but it's pretty evenly spaced. So when you're drawing your, um, kind of map of the face, we've got these outward angles flat, shin connected and a little broader at the top. It's getting the basic shapes, like when people draw a caricature. Character artists, they will accentuate base sheep so they might have her with really a teardrop shaped head. In reality, it's only slightly wider at the top. But exaggerating something like that is kind of a hook that will get people t really see right away who the drawing is. And like we said, the island is about halfway. People have a tendency to put the eyes in the top of the head on the top of the oval if they're not used to sketching faces. So this is a good exercise. And then we came up and found the bottom lip. So those kind of match. So let's see how we go. If we turn it back on, turn off this grid and we actually sketch the rest of the space. Oops, there we go. All right, so eyes and a lot of times I will. You're kind of drawing the eyeball here. So the child has really what large eyes than these circles can be bigger. She has pretty big eyes, and if they have smaller eyes, then you can make them smaller. Kids generally have bigger eyes, and it's just a cuter thank, cuter way of drawing them. Anyway. It's now her nose. Her nose turns up a bit, if you can see nostrils the nuts, usually a time when I would choose. It's almost like this little triangle How I show the nose. Um And actually, um, I wanna erase this midline first rate in that area. So, um and then we had This is her lower lip and her top lip is here. Defining features of her mouth from eight are that it turns up at the corner here. See those little lines. That's a huge defining feature for her. Smile is that it turns up right here. And then she has these little triangles as we talked about where you can see how wide or not her smile is little line indicate her lower lip now the missing teeth. So this can be tricky, and you might have to try it a few times till you get the one that looks just right. But really, I would just Even though she has one missing there and one missing there. And you see this gap over here? I'm just gonna pick this front one that's missing because that's gonna give the indication of a child who's missing a tooth and just move on. I'm not gonna labor the point. I'm not going to darken it. I'm not gonna make it black. That's gonna give enough indication. Okay, now her eyes. You might have a tendency to want to draw all this stuff in these little kind of ridges under her eyes, These little pockets and you can see her top lid creases. Well, it's too much for this kind of a portrait. All I want to show is that her topple, it is heavy and kind of comes down over the side with her lashes. And she has a smiling face. So we're going to do the smiley lines and then we're gonna do a heavy lash here with eyelashes. Let me get some of these lines out of here. Anything that ever starts to get heavy. I like to kind of keep it more feathery in the in the sketch, especially if you're gonna come back in with watercolor. So okay, and then her hair. So and she's got heavy eyebrows I'm gonna do is in a second, but I would put the hair and first So just basic, she has this little curve here. I'm just going to go basic. Whenever you can simplify something, do it because that's gonna help keep the drawing more graphic and stylized unless portrait like, Here's your little headband and her eyebrows so they're heavy, their thick. That's a defining feature for her. So and they do tip up in the middle, and you can exaggerate that a little bit. Then we'll come back in and dark in them up. She has really dark eyes, so that's something to focus on. Two. And then, since I cut through her eyes for that little smile, line my little eraser and make sure that the I doesn't go below that. She's got her smiley cheeks. I actually think that I made her nose a little too low. It's a little more in the middle of her face, and that's OK. And then her ears, we can see that they're kind of lined up at the top of her eye. Now I cropped. Her is longer because the ponytails air so defining here, and I wanted to show you how I handle that. Um, I would probably just draw in action line for the clientele like it's their here and this one kind of ultra on her neck a little so weekend kind of get a sense of how they're laying on her shoulders. So and then this one. It's coming this way. Okay, so you have the length determined here. There's the bottom of the pony, and this one's a little wispy market where the rubber bands are cause these air kind of long tails, then worry about kind of the volume of her pigtails for braids. I always just kind of just do a couple scallops on either side just to indicate it. You don't have to be exacting, and she's got a little bit of hair here, and that's pretty much it darkened up your favorite lines and kind of chisel away at that. But there you go. So it's a simplified version. This is definitely a cartoon, not a true portrait. We're not relying on shading for many of her facial features, although when we come back in with our water color, we can indicate with, like, little strokes of watercolor under each eye, that little bit of shadowing she's got there on that little bit of scrunching, and that's good. That's something to know when your minds that you can put in later with the water color so you don't have to put everything in in pencil line. All right, so let's do another one. Okay, here's a little boy. Here's our little boy with the dump truck Will work on his face. His face is so round. So that's a defining characteristic. Learning to see these overall shapes is, um, a tool in your arsenal. Um, try not to just see a face try to see ahead as a whole, so his head is so around. I mean, it's a little bit egg shaped, but his head's go. It's pretty round, as opposed to elongated and because his head is down her, his eye line is gonna be quite low and on a little bit of a curve to see that it makes his chin almost non existent. Because you're looking at this downward angle So we'll put his bottom lip here, which is so close to the chin and then the little line of his smile. And he's got a downturned nose. So and the airlines. And remember I told you about that magical part. That's kind of like the whole kit and caboodle right there. So let's turn this off and go back to the image and sketch it. This line right here in this line right here are angled away from each other, and it's pretty round through the bottom of his face. He does have a, uh, a little bit of a flat spot, the bottom of his chin. But mostly he's rounded because he's a toddler. He's super young. He's not gonna have a lot of angles going on. Okay? And like we said, the mouth it's so low down and the eye line is here. Find the part that leads right into his ear. And then we've got his cute, adorable little swoosh of hair. You can see there's a little bit of with and squareness at the top, so you can just add a little bit. See that I just made it a little wider at the top and it makes all the difference. Sometimes when you put the hairline intellect, you know, give you a visual reference to see if you're, um, I line is a little higher low. Here's a little shadow under his nose. His little cheek indentations are kind of more angled downward, and that's he's kind of furrowing his brow. So that's kind of an important thing for his, uh, now it's all little subtleties in the mouth. Um, you can just draw smile. And if you're just using this photo is inspiration. You could changes expression completely, and we could just give him a big toothy grin. But if we're trying to use a reference and captured this moment, I don't know what he was concentrating on. He was obviously looking at something pretty intently, so we'll do those little downward lines, and that captures that expression. Same thing with his eyes there lowered their kind of the opposite of the happy, smiling eyes. They're kind of like a you shape. You're mostly, um, just seeing darkness. There's no there's no light because his eyes were down and the lights not catching there. So you're not seeing that little reflection. So for the purposes of character sketch. That's probably all you're going to see. He does have kind of cool eyebrows going on, so maybe we would use them cause they're part of this expression. He's concentrating. So he gets this little kind of curved shape, the angles down in the middle for his eyebrows and again for his hair. Let me race thes smooth lines so I can show you how it would dio um, just a little bit of feathery lines that aren't necessarily connected for his hair because it helps it to look more rugged. It just gives a little bit of, ah, male vibe. And here again, it's a little wispy hair going on. You can see his other ear over here. He has a little dividend, his chin. I will often do that with a little squiggle and the little dimple on the chin, but you can ignore it. Do it, however you want. Men's just refining. I think I need to come down a little further on this side. I need to race out the lines that you didn't want. You get the just maybe raised this through the middle of his heists. You can get a better sense of how it looks. So that's the general gist of that one. All right, one more. The reason I'm showing you so many is because I do think that this practice is a visual thing. I could explain to you or diagram a 1,000,000 ways to Sunday how I map in faces and sketch characters and simplify features. But it's easier to show you want to say, See this picture? This is what I see. This is how I'm translating that notice. See this picture? Here's how I'm translating this little toothy or toothless grin. And in this picture, here's how I'm indicating the you know, the little frowny face and dimpled chin. I just think it's easier, Um, for this sort of thing to be a visual learner and watch someone. Okay, so she's super symmetrical. These lines are almost parallel. They tip out a little bit from each other, and she has a very angular jaw. So for now we won't even try to soften it up. We'll just keep it very angular. Tip this out. See, my first line was wrong, but I can just adjust it as I go, because if you're constantly darting her eyes back and forth between the rial on the sketch at this very loose stage. So much easier to see what you've done wrong. If you like, sat here and focused on an eyeball for 20 minutes and then you realize, Oh, well, it's in the wrong spot on the face That's no good to you. So sketching it and I think her hair is gonna run into him. She's got this boo font here, dio Sorry. Um, so I think keeping it loose entirely at the front end is a way better strategy Since, um, anything we need to fix is easily fixed. Since you have light strokes that come up easily And, um okay, so I've got her chin a little squared off chin and I'm coming up and I want to find that bottom lip. Now she has a very kind of Ah, a tight lipped smile, and it's pretty broad, so you can almost exaggerated and make it a little wider than it is. And she just a lot of times instead of that little line at the corners, you'll just end up with a few extra little ball little dot It gives the indication of fullness there in the cheek, but it's not that full on baby cheek. A lot of times, I'll just shaved the top lip instead of like drawing an outline for it. The top lip is usually in shadow, cause light usually hits downward, and so your top lip tips tips in towards the crease toward the opening. And so the top lips almost always in shadow unless someone's looking up to find the light. So I'll put a little shadow here and then shade the top lip so will come up and find the bottom of her nose. You're probably gonna predict, since I told you before, she has a very defined nose and we could draw it exactly, but we're not going to. We're just going to give her this little kind of V shaped shadow for her nose to indicate it, which is perfect, and then her eyes. So on your little I line Meridian that you drew through, if you tryto, if you're trying Teoh, make sure the eyes are evenly spaced on either side. This mid lines helpful because you can either kind of visualize, then being the same distance from the mid line which mine or not, um, or you can vision kind of visualize centering them in this space between side of the face and center line, depending on if they have wide or narrow set eyes. Kind of adjust. But that map is is a good tool. The grid line is a really good tool. So she has huge, wide open eyes and in a character sketch, you might just choose to show them as dots and not anything else. Um, let's see what happens if we leave them like this without lashes or anything, we'll just give her. I'm gonna give her kind of an arch Tyrrell, because she does have kind of sophisticated looking this picture that's not super childlike or whimsical. So let's just leave it like that for the for a moment. Um, now her hair. So we see that it comes pretty close to her eyebrow. So we're gonna do that big sweep and just kind of put that line in there to give us an indication of where that goes. And then from over here, we'll see that in this picture. Her ear bottom heart of her years, kind of just below her eye and the rest is higher because of the angle of her head. That's not typical anatomy if you're looking head on, so that will tell us where the hairline comes in. So we'll do that there. Every little thing that you draw is a dot to dot to connect to the next thing so I can see that her headband starts a little bit above her ear. It's probably right where I drew the top of her head, so that leaves. That had been and she's got a bow over here just for pretty. I'll probably make it a flower because you can take this liberty and it's easier to draw without trying to figure out what that Bo is cause translated to a picture. You might not know what that is. So and then let's figure out the shape of this proof on the top of her head. It's actually pretty straight on the sides. It tapers up from the side of her head like this, and then it's highest in the middle. So we'll just kind of swooping in like that. I'm gonna run into a little boy's head, which was concerning me, but and then a couple direction lines may be coming from the headband to show the up do. Okay, so if we come back down here to her, I think what she needs is she needs the lashes for the glam look. So will draw her heavy. Um, lash line. I just usually do like three little eyelashes for her bangs. I don't want to draw all the hair. I just want to draw a couple lines that showed direction, like from the root outward. And that's it. And here she's got, like, these little baby hairs and that makes her look more like a kid. So these sharp points right here are making her look a little older than she is. What we can do is come back in. We can still see the lines, but soften everything up, make it curves a little chin, make it dainty. Curved lines will always make a drawing look younger and angles kind of ad age and years in real life and in drawings. You lose all that baby fat, get more angular as you get older, so you can't really see much of the year over here. But I'll just indicate it. I hope so. I did a little bit to go seeks was trying to draw anatomically into paying attention to my drawing. See, everyone makes mistakes. Let's actually just figure out the bottom. It's there and figure at the top there, that'll make it look even with the other side. When I draw years, I'll usually just draw one line like this and intersect it online like this. And then I don't kind of get into the whole working here part of the year. So there you go. So hopefully watching me and hearing my thought process and what I'm seeing in the picture and what I'm trying to translate onto the page has been helpful for you and will help you in doing your simplified faces that aren't direct portrait's but are more of like a whimsical, cartoon style interpretation off, um, character filled face of a little one. Your project for the section I'm sure you can guess is to do a side by side posting for me off a face that you choose of child and then your simplified version in pencil right next to it, so that we can kind of see the comparison and see your process. So get cracking on that and we'll see in the next section
6. Finalizing Your Sketch: Okay, so now we're gonna put it all together. I'm going. Teoh, start with the gesture drawing. I'm using watercolor paper this time cause I will take this sketch all the way through to the water color. Um, and I'm going to speed up the gestural drawing part so that we can skip through that since you've already learned it. And then I'll slow it back down to show you how I do a cleanup and a final sketch and then in the next section will move on to a little bit more close ups. You can see how I add the water color layering. That's it. Let's get started. - Okay , so I think this is pretty good for my gestural type drawing. I cleaned up some of the lines just so that wasn't so much of a mess. So I can show you how I'm gonna go in. Refine it now. So one thing that I see right away is just with her legs in the positioning of her legs. There's a little bit of space between the two legs, and I didn't have that before, so I'm going to correct that. And as I go, I'm very I'm sketching lightly and I'm picking up stray marks. You can kind of sharpen your memories her kind of and make it a narrow just by pinching it . And you can kind of make a point and get little, little, uh, sketchy bits out without wrecking your good lines. So that's I'm going to do here. Try to look at the the picture as a whole and don't focus on one area. So as I examine the proportion, I can see that her hair probably Nick, needs to be a lot longer. So I'm not a lot longer but a little bit longer. I think the proportions kind of right. But I like to exaggerate things, um, in the finish drawing. And sometimes we even put the picture away and kind of just, um, use artistic license to finish it in a way that looks great to me. I didn't draw any of the hair on the side of her face. That's because I wanted to clean up this edge. So we started with a straight line here so I could get this kind of slope right there. And now I want to go in and clean it up because of kind of. I pulled out the curve of her cheek a little bit so you can just take away your original guideline and then just put back in the clean lines. And when I put back in the clean lines, I often don't connect. Um, so the side of her face, for example, you can kind of see her cute little rounded cheek, and I don't necessarily connect that to where the chin comes down. It's OK if you let your I do a little bit of the connecting for you. Um, and then right here, I think her hairline comes out a little too far. It should be right above her eyebrow. So just little things that you can find, tune and clean up without going too crazy and again just a really light touch with hair. When we add, um, watercolor, you'll get a lot more, um, of like some light and shadow so you don't need to do it with your pencil on dso over here . I'll fill in these little wispy bits of hair, and I won't necessarily draw them exactly as they are there. I'll draw them in a way that's gonna look kind of um, more artistic has a little more flair. Two strands of hair side by side, like this is a nice way to show wispy hair, and that's good enough. And then I want to get the grid lines out of her face. A lot of times, you'll really see your drawing coming together at that point when you kind of remove all those mapping lines and you see what you have left kind of like magic, and you also will see right away. Um, if you've, if you've gotten it, if you've captured it, if you've gotten a good likeness and the thing is this is a practice, so even if you didn't, that doesn't mean that you're drawing has to be a failure. Go ahead and continue it and make a cute character, even if it doesn't really look like your source photo. That's okay. Um, in fact, sometimes it might be preferable. If you're drawing from Pinterest, you know you won't be able to sell or monetized license your work or whatever if you're drawing it from someone else's photograph. It's great for practice, but that's someone else's intellectual property. So, um, changing on purpose that way you have something unique. So I don't think I went over this when we were doing the eyes before. And actually, I should mention there's gonna be a little cheat cheat for you guys. Um, that you can print out a couple cheat sheets for things that I didn't go into into detail. Like some hand poses. You could kind of practiced some feet and some facial features. There's gonna be a print out for you attached to the class project section. I think so. I think it's all the way at the bottom. But look for it. There's some downloadable PDFs for you. Okay, so but this we've got her little ear and her hair ornament is like this crow shade kind of deal, and I'm just gonna I'm not gonna try and draw every little tidbit of that. And I'm just going to do kind of a big, lumpy blossom. And that's good enough again with hair, some little wispy bits. Two lines next to each other. Accomplished that pretty well. She has a little bit coming down in front of her year. Some details. If you don't think they're important to the character, you can just skip and then some things like I actually think this little bit of here in front of her ear. It's like this wispy baby hair. I think it's it's a big part of her, um, her look, her her age and her look, because that little baby here, you know you don't have it forever. So I included it because I think it adds something if there's a detail in the drawing that you think is just going to be clutter to the drawing and won't add anything to it and just skip it. So she has a slightly open mouth smile and there's teeth showing it everything but this size, I can't show it accurately. And I'm not gonna try because it'll just make the mouth look over complicated. So I'm not going to. I just have the black space for the slightly open mouth smile, and that's gonna be enough. Um, I'm gonna end up painting a floral onto this shirt, so I want there to be as little cluttering detail and the silhouette as possible so that it doesn't muddy up my florals that I'm gonna paint in. So for her hand, I'm really just putting in a form and all kind of indicate fingers with a few little lines , and you don't need more than that. Her hands not doing anything important. It's not holding anything. And so it's better not to labour it, um, fingers can very easily look like sausages if you outline them to death. So any time you can just kind of be a little representational with hands and toes and fingers, really, um, and just indicate the position of the fingers, then that's better. So little things here at the bottom. I had the him just come straight, but she has a little cuffed sweatshirt him, and I think that that's you know, that's that's a part of the style of her outfit. I think that's an important detail. So I don't want to leave that out, just making choices about what's gonna add to the drawing. What's gonna be a useful detail on what's just gonna be clutter? And you know you make those decisions, and as an artist, some people might simplify more than you. Some people might add more detail, so that's your choice, and that's what's gonna make your art look different than someone else's. The editing. I always end be artists who are excellent editors because I feel like I can edit. But I have a tendency to include more details. And sometimes I wish I could be a little more simplistic in my drawings a little more stylized. I kind of walk this line between portraiture and kind of cartoony illustration. All right, so, um Alright. So back to the legs. So this part right here, I can see that I need help. The needs supposed to be higher again. I think I drew the legs a little longer and then probably I should have. I have a tendency to draw leggy characters. It's just my aesthetic, I guess. Can't help. It just happens. Um, that's okay. I think anyone who looked at these two would be able to see that. You know what? The inspiration waas. And that's good enough. So now down to these boots, shoes, shoes convey really tricky. Um, I would say this is one of those times where, in the other lesson where I showed you kind of tracing on the actual photo. If you make a print out of your source photo, you're having a hard time drawing shoes because of the angle that they're drawn at because you can't seem toe force your eye to draw what you're seeing rather than what you, you know, is there, um, trace over it a couple of times printed out, like just on printer paper. Print out your source image and get some tracing paper. Or just use a marker and trace the actual outline of the shape of the shoe. It might help you come back onto your paper and draw it correctly. Sometimes people will erase a line and then just keep redrawing that same line over and over and over again because they just can't, you know, get past that mental block. So if you trace what's really there, you might have like a little epiphany so you could see very loosely. I'm giving that rubbery texture to the bottom of her boots. And I went a little too far. Here's your heel. So we'll just to race the part where I went a little, you were a little too much trid. Okay? And then she has this cute buckle detail, so I'm not I'm just gonna look at what it looks like. There's two kind of half moon kind of shit or half circle shapes and a buckle in between. And I'm not going to be real specific about it. That's enough to indicate it. And I'm not going to do the stripes on the boots at all. Um, I might indicate where this back over this top edges and where this back kind of seem is. But all those colorful lines will do in paint. So knowing when to leave out certain details that you can just kind of paint in on I mean, honestly, for me, the rule of thumb is leave the clothing patterns out, draw the structure of the clothes and leave the patterns out and do the patterns just in, Um, just in paint, okay. And we're almost done. See, I drew this boot a little bit too low at the bottom. So, um, the bottom of the boot is actually the bottom of the heel will just correct that. Okay, so that's probably all I'm going to sketch. The rest is all gonna be in paint. Um, so hopefully my little cleanup tips were helpful, but things that you can concentrate on our what details to put in what's gonna advance the drawing me get better. What details? To leave out things that are just gonna clutter it up and kind of take away from the the prettiness of the simplicity. Just leave those out. Um, make sure that you don't leave too much graphite on the page. Any place where you can thin out of line or lighten it up or disconnect lines. Um, that'll help just stylistically with your finished drawing. Check your proportions, but don't stress out if they're a little bit off. Um, some tips on how we did hair taking artistic license a little bit if you, um if you want to with the way I'm not gonna draw the, you know, the embroidery, uh, have a little needed a texture on her flower. Um, and how to do a little wistful pair. Did I miss anything? Oh, if eyes were looking to this side and this will be on the cheat sheet, which is what made me think of it before is adding this little arc to the opposite side. The eyes were looking, and that will be on the little cheat sheet you can download and take a look at. So that's gonna be it for now, and the next lesson, I'm gonna come back in a zoom in a little bit. I'm gonna show you exactly how much water color I add and how editing is really important. When you're out in the color. Your challenge for the section your project is to create your finished sketch and put it side by side in the gallery with your source photo and let us see how you took your, um gesture drawing and cleaned it up into a finished pencil sketch.
7. Adding Watercolor: Okay. Now we're really in the home stretch and ready to add water color to our sketches to bring them to life. I'm gonna demonstrate my painting Tips by water coloring are finalized. Sketch from the last lesson, I'll show you how to find the light and shadow in your reference photo and capitalize on those in your work. I'll show you how to translate texture and patterns and expressive and artistic way. And use your creative I to decide what elements to accentuate in which you might want to edit out. Finally, we will add some classic wet into wet and spatter watercolor techniques to add a pop of color, fun and flair. Tore finished illustrations. I hope that watching my demo in real time will help you to complete your own. So here we go. OK, Now is the time when we're gonna add some color. I've got out two sets of water colors. Mostly I have this one out so that you can see when I'm mixing. It has the white background on this tray. It's a little easier to see me blending colors, and I have this pallet out because it has a ready made flesh tone. Um, I mean, a basic Caucasian flesh tone, Um, and you can mix that yourself, but I'm gonna be lazy. I usually start out with a hand pallet by moistening, um, pans so that they are more activated and you can pull up more color without scrubbing at it with your brush and wrecking the bristles. I've got my trusty water brush all full in the barrel with water, and I'm ready to go. So what I usually do first is I do skin tones, and I'll usually tell you with watercolor to go a little heavier handed because watercolors drawing later than they look when they're wet. But with skin tones, I usually are. I'm a little more conservative because you don't want to muddy up the face. So for this little girl space, I'm gonna go in and get some of this peachy Beiji color. And what I'm gonna be looking for are the are the shadows are the dark tones in water color . You want to leave your highlights the white of the paper. And so you're really just painting mid tone and shadow. And specifically, I'll even tell my one student she's 12 more water coloring. Just paint the dark's so we'll look at the face over here and we'll look at the spots that look like they have more color. So it's along her, and we try to also use just singular strokes. You don't want a color in like you do with a coloring book and scrub back and forth with your brush. You wanna make deliberate strokes because those air gonna dry in a way that looks very watercolor s. Can the layering that you get with watercolor and the particular properties of how it dries work the best if your deliberate with your strokes and a little conservative, you don't want to scrub back and forth and just color in like a coloring book because that defeats the purpose. So she has a little shadow here under her hairline, and you just wanna think about it. First place one stroke and move away. She has a little bit a shadow. Usually there is shadow in the hairline. There's a little bit right here under this flower, and then it kind of comes right here along the bottom of her jaw line. She's got some shadow on this side of her face so a lot of times, what I'll do is I don't want to draw the nose in, so I will really just look at the shadow that defines that shape. So I will put a little bit of color on this cheek and that all sort of define the far side of her nose. Same thing under her lip. There's certain places on face that always have shadow, and you'll start to recognize that as you paint a little bit more under this eyebrow, she got some under this I. So it's all these singular strokes. You could tell I was touching up a little bit in here with the point, but mostly just trying to get one stroke of color. And at a time she's got this bit right here at the front of her cheek and probably a little more so this. This is where the water color comes in. So this was the first strictly painted right along here. I'm using very minimal water. You don't ever want the paper to look shiny when you're doing this type of watercolor drawing because our painting, because layers drying and then being able to paint on top of them without, um, losing that stroke is what's gonna make this look, um, water calorie, watercolor. Once it dries on the paper and then you layer another stroke will get darker. Where you over late? It If you're painting wet into wet, though, everything kind of blends together. So back where the spurs stroke was Aiken, darken it now with the same color paint without changing pain just by painting another stroke, because those two will layer together evidence. I also want to put this little bit of shadow right here. So all the areas where you've kind of painted over twice, like right here it got paint twice because I painted that shadow in. And then I painted this over top, so it's a little bit darker, so I haven't changed colors. I haven't even read IPT my brush, but you're going to get this layering effect where the 1st 1st strokes have dried. And then you put the second strokes on top. Just keep looking at her face. You want to leave the highlights behind, and then I have ah, paper towel over on the side that I couldn't fit on camera and with a completely clean brush anywhere where it looks really harsh. You can kind of blend out and soften it. This is a step that you can do. You don't have to dio, and then we're gonna leave that alone and move to any other place where you see skin. Sometimes you know the characters wearing a dress or shorts or something. There's tons of areas, and this one, it's really just her neck. The neck is always darker, especially right into the jawline, because it's in shadow. So I'll just fill that in a little darker, and we will come back to these sections and layer again. But this is the first wash through and then on her hand, as you can see over here, the colors all on the left and there's a highlight on the right hand side of her hand where that highlight ISS, we're not gonna paint at all, So we're just gonna do one stroke through here and then leave it, even though we could articulate the fingers, all that stuff for the purpose of this loose watercolor. That's all we're gonna dio. And that's all this I should do her year. Sometimes I sat tend to forget the years so her ear just the inside, Really? We'll come back to it. Shading comes kind of next layer. All right, so now we're gonna lay in the base color for all the rest of the areas on the painting as well. I usually start somewhere away from the face because any areas that are already wet, you don't want them to bleed. So if I were to do the hair right now, some of the color that I put into her hair could bleed into her face because that's the way watercolor paper works. Um, areas that are damp acts like a wick, and they'll pull the color in. So when you're painting adjacent areas and you don't want them to mix, make sure the one area is dry before you paint the second. So I'll go ahead and do her, her sweater, her sweatshirt and I'm going to put in a very pale wash of the first color, which is kind of this science blue. And I don't really have to mix it because this color in my pan is pretty much the right color. There's not a ton of highlight going on in her sweatshirt, but we know from her face and her hands and everything else that the lights coming in from this direction. So I'm were to interpret that and we'll paint everything on this side of the sweatshirt more solid. And then I'm gonna wait my brush a little, come back in and move my way toward where the light iss and get a little more color. Her arm acts like its own entity, so it will have a dark side in a late side, wipe off a little bit, and then you just have, like, a damp brush with a little bit of color, and you can kind of blend this over a little more color. Basically, what you're going for is for it to look kind of washy and almost a little scribbling and leave that highlight on the side. Now her hand would be blocking the light here. So you know that you're gonna have a dark section here. This is where, like, you have to interpret a little bit in the picture. You don't see a ton of different tone, but that's where you interpret it a bit. And that line might look a little harsh. You can take a clean brush and kind of feather it out with a really light touch. Or you could leave it harsh because honestly, as it dries, it will feather itself and it will lighten. Watercolor always looks the darkest when it's wet, so you might do a painting and think, Oh, I have great contrast going and then it dries and it looks a little dull, so don't be afraid of the color. So now you can see it looks like she's lit from the right hand side, and you don't see tons of that in the picture. But this is where you kind of like use your artists brain and know that since the lights coming this way, let's exaggerate it. We're gonna do the same thing and you can see it's not about perfection. This is a little uneven. There's a little bit of white showing their its okay, this is interpretive and a little Impressionist. So her pants or yellow. So, um, you want to get the color? You don't wanna be applying straight powdery pigment that comes off your palate. Um, so if you have a pretty empty pout like this, it's kind like you could mix it in the bottom. But if you're if you have pretty, pretty full pan, you might want to go over to your palate. If I have a spare space and kind of much the color around a little bits that you're really working from, like a watery pool of color rather than having that chalky pigment on the end of your brush , I want to do the same thing with her legs that I did with her sweatshirt. I know where the light ISS, and so even though you don't see a ton of it in this picture, you can see a little. She's got shadow and a darker kind of marigold or Toby kind of color on the side of her knee and not as much over here, but we're smart. So we're gonna interpret that, and you can tell that this color is a little more lemony. But that's OK, cause we're gonna come in and layer it. The beauty for me is never being done in the first layer with watercolor you can be That's a That's a look, Um, but I like to do at least two layers. All right, so now this is a bit of fun So for her boots, we're probably not gonna count into every single straight. But let's look at the colors in the palette for these stripes and trying to our best to get a facsimile of that. So it's like a hot magenta at the top and the bottom. And let's see, we have a little bit of this hopping make a color on your palate. This is a bit of magenta color had, and I'm putting a little more. Uh, Pinky, this is called Bright operates my favorite kind of hot pink color in this mission gold palette. And just with a light touch in the very sharpest pointy bristles of your brush got those bands in on then I'm not gonna paint this straight down the back because it'll blend with every straight that I paint, so I'll do that last and then we'll do the souls. And now, right now, while we're doing this, I'm conscious of the fact that her sweater is drying so that I can start to paint the florals on top. It's all about timing and moving around the painting to know the results you want. If she had blend the water calorie looking flowers on her sweater. I might want to paint thumb right away so that they would blend into that background blue. But she doesn't. So, um, I'm letting the blue dry so I can get more crisp florals when I do my layering. So this color is a little light, like I said, but that's because we'll come back in and add some shut shading after the fact. So she has a couple of the stripes and her boots that are the same color. Um, and this is where I mean, honestly, if there were seven stripes on these boots, I would probably pay attention more to their positioning. But there's so many stripes that we're just gonna indicate them. We're not gonna count them. We're not going to try and make it exact. I'll put these two pink ones, kind of where they belong, and then we'll just move on. Okay, so that's it for now, on that it's tedious, but it's fun. So if you guys have details like that in your reference photo that you need to spend some time on, just enjoy it. Don't try and race to the end. The end result all right, but Let's go up to the hair because at this point the face has dried and I don't have any worry about, um, bleeding from the hair color. So with dark brown hair, I tend not to go in just with dark brown color. I'll pick a mid tone, so find the lightest light in the hair. So, like the highlight here has this burnt sienna kind of color. So I'll try and find whatever color that highlight is. And, um, starting with that dark hair tends to need more than two layers I find, especially with watercolor, since every layer dries lighter than, um, you lay it down and you're really trying to achieve that contrast. So I've got this burnt sienna color, um, with a little bit of brown mixed in, and I'm gonna do the same thing as I did with the face. I'm gonna find the darks and paint those in first. That way they dry first, your ableto layer them in sooner. So this area right below the flower and use such a light touch because the points on the on on this tapered brush or your friend, you can get really tiny detail by just barely touching with those end little pointy hairs and then on areas where you can don't paint with the points, use the flat part of the brush, press on the color and really get a kind of beautiful brushstroke when you can, because otherwise the hair will look like it's scribbled in. You want to put in chunks of color, not every strand. So in areas where you need to be careful, I mean, obviously, that whole flower has to be left behind white. And she has a bit of the headband here showing, um, you could leave that, I guess, Or we could come in later with the gel pen and add it in. If it's a really fine detail, I do tend to just paint over and come back in with gel pen. Um, and instead of looking at it looking at it like a mistake, you can look at it as an opportunity to add another extra bit of mixed media. We see the glass half full. Okay, so that bit is all solid. But then, through here, stop referencing the photo. Just look at your line drawing and kind of sweep in. Press harder for thick strokes lift up to get this tapered off. Little lovely end. Just try and get some movement where you leave some whites. This part is kind of interpretive. If you try and follow the painting exactly or the reference photo exactly, you might make yourself crazy. Um, remember, it's not an exact portrait. We're trying to reference the photo, capture the personality in the essence of the character. But we're not. We're not striving for an exact, you know, photo duplicate. That would be boring unless you're doing that type of portrait, in which case go for it. And even I have to remind myself sometimes, too, not be too literal, because you can get caught up in in kind of the fun of really capturing all of the details . And I'm a detail person. But for these kind of just like I said, you want to use a little bit of your creativity and your artistic eye and the photo for reference that you have a little bit of credibility and realism, knowing where the shadows are not necessarily replicating the shadows exactly. It's like right there there's a chef shadow on the side of the flower. I'll leave it for a second. The section back here is just solid, and with watercolor, you can't have kind of like dynamic contrasts everywhere. There'd be nowhere for your ID arrest. So in areas that are solid, just let them be solid and then focus on the areas where there's light to kind of showcase the interest and your technique. Normally, on this part of a hairdo, you'd see a little bit of light. But because it's that side of her body and it's in shadow, you really don't. So there's not much going on up here. It's pretty solid, except for this little bit of extra shadow by the flower, all the cute. This is happening over here. This is where the face being dry. It's so important because you'd be having a muddy side of her face if you tried to touch this hair into it while it was wet and it would be miserable and I have done that. Gotten impatient and patients is the worst thing. If you're water coloring, a lot of people will use a hair dryer or any kind of dryer. I know they sell those, like heat guns at craft stores by their painting station to kind of hurry things along. But when I'm doing this style, I don't use a lot of water. So it drives pretty quickly if you're just moving and bouncing around the illustration and you can also see that the hair here acts like an outline for her face. We don't have ah, hard outline in these pencil type sketches. But when a dark area meets a light area and you're careful about it, you can really carve out the light by painting in the dark. Now you can really see the definition of her chin. All right, So that part's maybe one of the trickier parts would have to paint just cause we had to be careful. All right, so now her hair is actually drawing everywhere, so you can kind of just add in some strokes. They don't even have to be super meaningful. But you're gonna get layering and more darks and lights and tones, and that's pretty cool. Definitely dark in the shadow areas. And the more you touch it, the thing with watercolor is is it will pick up color, too. So if you scrub in an area, you're actually gonna lift color off the paper and then you get kind of this this whole and it's hard to fill it in. And if you feel like you're overworking a section you are If you even have that thought in your brain than just stop, come back to it when it's dry Don't say Oh, I just want to fix it But one more stroke Oh, wait, let me let me just touch that one more time cause all you're gonna dio is over work that section of paper and it's gonna be hard to recover. No. All right, so that's the base layer for her hair will come back in with almost some black in a minute , but let's move on. So the flowers on her sweater there are so many we can't possibly paint them all. So what we want to do is just concentrate on the colors and the shapes, and we'll just try and block in some of the basics so that we get an idea of what this sweatshirt looks like. They keep calling it a sweater. I guess it's a swish. Okay, so I got this hot pink color, and I'm gonna look for all the places where I see hot pink. So right here on her arm, we have one and I'm skinnies gestural. Kind of like little touchdown brushstrokes. Um, to show the pedals. It's not gonna be an exact facsimile of these flowers. I can't You wouldn't even want. I was gonna say I can't paint that well in miniature, but you wouldn't even want Teoh. It's not the point of this type of drawing, so we're just gonna touch all the places quickly, actually treated like a gesture, drawing where we see the pink and try and follow the shape and form that it's in. But don't try to paint every pedal. Okay, so now let's get some shading in. This is pretty fun. So we use this lemon yellow on her legs. Now we're gonna get don't get, like, an orange yellow because, um, basically, you want to look at the color you've got and go maybe one shade darker, one shade richer. So there's not really much orangey nous to this yellow. I get a little bit. It's kind of like a school bus yellow. So we've got a little bit of this school bus yellow, and we're going Teoh touch the places where they're shading. So always under a hem line, cast a little shadow and then this whole side of her leg. Remember, use your brush strokes. Press harder. Lighten up. This is not an exact science. It's meant to look expressive. And then we're just gonna leave that alone. Maybe we'll start doing a little bit more shading in the skin tones, so we'll come back to the face. She definitely has more of like a cocoa type complexion, so we'll find a warm color and we'll add it into the peach that we use the first time. Um, finding an empty spot on my palette to blend with get gets harder and harder. All right, so we want to accentuate those dark areas cause now everything's dried and you can tell that it's it's much less distinct. It looks a little harsh. Way first painted it, but that's as it lightens up. It starts to soften, and so we're gonna add in the dark areas again, the darkest of the dark areas. So they're sheeting along her hairline. If you feel like your color is not dark enough, remember, it's gonna dry later, so you always have to go a little more heavy handed than you think. I've learned. Teoh. Let it look a little harsh as I'm painting on the first try so I don't have to go back in 1000 times with more layers and again with faces. I'll often get all the color off and just used. I mean, it's almost a dry brush. It's damp because there's no water in the handle, but it's not dripping. It's not shiny, and then you can kind of touch the edges of the color and move it around a bit. I always say, like a little blush on the cheeks and the lips for last and faces Erhard. I mean, you'll find your flow. Don't expect it to be perfect on the first try, unless you just are super amazing and this is just your wheelhouse. Navy will just pick it up on the first try. But I mean, my kids always say Mom happen. You can paint like a face, and I cannot like, Well, I've been doing it for. Maybe I should be better actually, since I've been doing it for, like 15 years. But that's what I tell them. I'm like, well, when you're doing it for 15 years, you start to realize what things work, what things don't, and that becomes part of your skill set. So just blending out a couple of the harsh lines that I'm noticing if you notice something on a face and it's pulling your attention, drawing your eye, um, you should probably feather it out, all right. And then on her hand, I want to add a little bit of that darkness. To contrast is good and watercolor. The darker some of the tones are, the more vividly you see the light. If that makes any sense. Because if you only worked in pastel tones and didn't have any contrast than the light areas wouldn't look as light. You need the dark for comparison. Um, so this dark school bus yellow here really shows off the highlight. It really looks like the sun is shining on her more than in this picture, but that's my interpretation. So up here in her little hair flower, just because you don't want to look dull and just white paper, I'll go in with like, um, like a neutral, almost like I'll pick up some gray and maybe warm it up in some of the peachy pink. It doesn't really matter what color you pick. It's I'm just gonna put in some shadows and I'm just gonna touch it in a few spots. Maybe I'll add a little bit of yellow because there's a lot of yellow in this picture and it'll look a little bit like sunlight anyway, just just so it has some area of color and doesn't look dull and boring compared to the rest of your painting. So we're gonna dio some pinky color, so we're gonna grab, like, a little bit of, ah pinky kind of really pale, if you can see it. It's, um, like I would pick up some of my coral or something for my palate really blended out with water on the watery of the color. The, you know, the more dilute the better. And then, um so I've got a little this pinky color on here, and then I'll just kind of dab it off so it's not gonna make a puddle, and then I'll just touch a little spot on her face and I'll, um, come into her lips. Oops, I was on the palate. I touched some hot pink. And if you ever get more color than you wanted, you can kind of dab it off with your paper towel. Stakes happen. Okay, so I said I was gonna come back in and give a little more shading to her hair. You don't have to kind of stop here, but I think her hair looks a little flat. And since it is almost black, her actual color, um, you can kind of be free with brown hair. You could use a little bit of purple in your shadows to make it come more alive, which is always nice. You can use a little bit of red. It doesn't have to be straight up black. So this is kind of like a, um, plum color that I'm gonna drop into the darkest darks. And again, you have to make sure the background colors dry and not touch it. Scrub about it too much with your brush, because then you'll pull up that background color instead of laying down the top color. And that's the opposite of what you want. Because that area will get lighter, not darker. So try and touch it just like once or twice, and then get out of there right around this flower. This area of her hair or bangs is actually the darkest area, and that little bit of contrast will help. Same thing over here. Just kind of touch a few areas, had some interest, get some movement going. Only pleased to be careful is around the contours of her face because you don't want to distort that or just have it look messy. So in the areas that are broad like this, you can just kind of be free inexpressive. That's fun. But in here, like I said, be careful. I kind of find your moments in a painting like this. Some areas need to be a little tighter and a little more. I don't even want to use the word precise, but and then other areas you can definitely use artistic license. I'm gonna add a little tiny bit with an almost dry brush, and it just has a little bit of that darkish black color into her eyes on a blonde haired child or person. Whatever. Um, the pencil color is probably enough to be the darkness of the eyes, but she needs her eyes to be a little darker so that they can stand up to the darkness of her hair. So just if that makes you feel uncomfortable to use paint near the eyes because you can get blobby eyes. You can do that with, like a micron pan instead, or dark and dark in a pure pencil lines. When you go back, I'll show you a person like around 10. You could use one of the EU's and go back into the facial features you need to. Okay, so let's get well, depends a last. Okay, so now I'm gonna get my fluffy brush. My traditional brush, this one. It's real soft. It holds a lot of water, and a lot of people say, Well, this is a scary part. Here's a little cup of water and get my brush nice and juicy. And she has these rain boots on, which is kind of cute because she'll look really cute. Standing in a watercolor puddle had to decide what color we want to use, so she's got this blue sweater pink in her boots. Maybe I'll go just basic and do like an aqua colored puddle, so you want to get your brush really loaded on a triple my really loaded up in juicy with color. Um, you kind of can't have enough water for this. You can see the puddle of making in here and try not to overthink it. So you'll think for one minute because you're gonna lay in, like, hard line kind of around. You don't want it to overlap the feet a little bit around here. Try not to be too precise. Then you get some water. No more color, just moving around a little, and then you can even I just put, um, color and water on my brush. And this is important. Tap, tap, tap. Now, that was kind of magic, because none of my droplets ended up on the character, which is crazy. Oh, wait. See, there's one right here. You can lift it or if you want to like, since she's in a puddle, this is kind of representing a puddle and not just to flourish. If it was, some of the droplets landed on her, that would be okay because they would just look like they were in front. But magically, that happens sometimes over a piece of paper towel and kind of place it over the character before I splash that way I preserve anything, especially if it's for a commission. And I don't want to mess up any of the facial features Or, you know, um, I don't want to muck anything up for the person who is receiving it, but we'll just leave this like this right now. The only other thing you could dio is you can take your brush again, clean it off and for, like, just a little bit of fun. You can get a richer color or contrast in color or whatever. I'm gonna get this really deep teal and just load up your brush with it and then where the areas are really watery, touch it down and let it kind of move around a bit right now. So what I'm gonna do while the puddle is drawing, which I wouldn't necessarily recommend you do because you'll get your hands and all this wet color. But is it gonna come in with my white gel pen? I'm gonna add a little bit of fun detail. So she is this hearing this little pearl earring and so I will add it in in a nice break pop of white gel pen. Um, I might add a little bit of dot to her flower. I might see some of that with pencil. We'll add a little bit of headband in. I'm gonna add a little bit of, like, this tiny little Berries in her flowered sign and maybe some little lines to the flowers. Nothing, I think fancy. And I might have been really referencing the picture all that much, just kind of trying to make it come alive. We can see the gel pin just so easy, and then might and the vehicle then in places where you think you might need it. Like I said on a on a blonde or someone who's fair complected the pencil. The original pencil lines will be dark enough for their fates with facial features, but you might want to darken up. So with the darker complexion like this, you might want to darken up some of their facial features with your pencil just to make them pop a little more. That helps. And what's the other thing I was gonna dio on her? Oh, I was gonna outline a few of the flowers. Not a lot of outline, just to indicate that there is an outline in the design on the original. Just a little touch. I mean, I'm not even referencing the photo at this point. Just kind of doing a messy outline again. This is kind of like doing the final drawing things that you think will add to the image Adam and other things that you think will just attract you. Don't. You can tighten up any lines you want at this point. If you feel like you need a little darkness, anywhere was added in maybe the top of her boots. Oh, I know it is going to show you one more thing about cheating. The last thing I wanted to show you. Waas. If you take a kind of grade out or like blue Peri winkle kind of a color after your entire painting is done and dry, I might be pressing. Look here with mine being dry, you can add some shading on top so you can. It'll it's transparent, color, translucent, translucent, and so it'll go over everything that's already there and create shadow. If it's a neutral color light gray, you can kind of put it anywhere but a lot of time. Shadows have a blue cast so creatively speaking, you can add it anywhere. It just adds a little touch more of, um, depth. And if you think the character needs it, you can also add a little bit more rosy nous to their complexion or anywhere where the skin tone is. Ah, lot of times after everything's dry, I'll think for a cartoon type character, you know, maybe not in real life, but a cartoon type character might need a little more pronounced rosy cheek, and I'll add it, and that's it. So your assignment, this last assignment, of course, for the class is to show us you're finished illustration with little water color, totally spattered fund backdrop if you want. If not, you can just show us your character painted in okay, I can't wait to see what you make
8. Wrap Up: everyone. If you've made it this far, that means you've completed the glass. Congratulations. I hope that you've learned some interesting and useful tools and tips for sketching characters, using a photo reference and then adding some water color to really make it come to life. I cannot wait to see what you guys supposed to the gallery, so start doing that. So, Aiken, take a look. And also, if you'd like to, you confront out three pages of attachments Incredibles that I included here for you. One is a practice page so you can draw some hair styles and facial features. And I've just given you all that kind of blank American heads for that. With some good lines drawn in and the other two sheets or cheat sheets, there just some references for simplified facial features, simplified hairstyle, simplified hands and feet. In case you're having a a struggle with interpreting those from your photos, you kind of look at those and see if any of those hands, feet, facial features, whatever might work. And then you can use them in your drawing really into a teaching. And I hope you guys have enjoyed watching if you post any of your results on social media, I would love a tag on Stephanie Korpi. Artworks on Instagram and Stephanie for people artist on Facebook Catch next time.
9. ** Extra Tips: Shading & Coloring Jeans: Okay, So one of the students in the class had a question about getting realistic layering of color for jeans. So I thought I would post some of my digital drawings with the coloring portion. Slow down so you can kind of see how I put in the layers. I almost always start with kind of a more dull, grayed out kind of lighter blue color. Um, that's not very saturated. And I put in all the creases, all the wrinkles, all the darks, all the shadows. It's kind of like a tonal kind of rendering of the genes. Then I'll go in with the middle layer. That's more of a vibrant blue that you think matches that middle tone in the genes that you're trying to depict. And I'll go over those first shading areas and then some. So you're kind of filling in everything but the strongest highlights and then usually all finish with almost a blackish navy color and again layering. It's the layering of the three colors that get you those darkest darks. But I'll usually end with that blackish navy color in like the creases behind the knee and the him here, you can see up by the hem of his shirt where the character is sitting and you have, like, kind of that that weight from the underside of their leg. Um, the darkest colors will go there, but again to reiterate, start with a great out light tone, moved to a vibrant blue and then finish with adult out blackish navy. So it's the layering of the three of those is really going to give you the tonal balance. It's a lot less blue than you think. Hope this helps.
Stephanie Corfee, Artist + Author
