Sketchbook 101: Start a Sketchbook

1. Welcome to Class: [MUSIC] When I think of the quintessential artist, I think of that person who's always carrying around a sketchbook creating art from cafes, parks, or in the subway. I always wanted to be that kind of artist but I could never figure out what to do in my sketchbook, so I gave up the practice for many years. Is that your story too? Thankfully I took it back up again a couple of years ago this time for good. I'm obsessed with my sketchbook practice, and I can't wait to share all that I have learned with you. Instead of my sketchbook being a visual journal of my life I've preferred to use my sketchbook as a tool to improve my illustrations, develop new ideas, into to. In this class, in three-part series, I'm going to be helping you to start a sketchbook practice from the ground up. We will be starting with small steps of drawing simple objects and making collections of character features to really develop the groundwork of your illustrative style, and then from there we'll be learning how to create your own inspiring drawing prompts for character development and building up to gradually being able to put together large illustrations. A huge bonus is that you will also be developing your style in the process in a very organic way. Hello everyone, and welcome back to another classroom and meet Christina Hopkins. I'm an Illustrator and Surface Designer from [inaudible], Sweden. As I said I gave up my sketchbook practice nearly 20 years ago because I never really figured out what I was supposed to do with the sketchbook. I had already found my style; I thought and I knew how to draw, so what was the point? But I was wrong. Two years ago on a whim, I picked up a sketchbook again and now I'm hooked. I finally learned what I was missing. A sketchbook is a place to learn, and grow, and discover new things. Because you can easily go back and reference what you created at the beginning and see improvement, at the end you get really motivated by your progress. I could just kick myself for dropping the practice nearly 20 years ago when I went to art school. I feel like my art and creative practice has developed and gotten so much better in two years. Imagine how far I would have come in 20. I'm so excited to share my process of starting a sketchbook practice that's sustainable, and fun, and playful, and I hope that you get as much out of this practice as I feel like I have gotten. So let's get started. [MUSIC] 2. Your Class Project: [MUSIC] In this class the first part of this sketch book series, we're going to be starting with the groundwork. We're going to be starting simple with objects, and we're going to be creating collections of pages of character features and characteristics that we can later use to build up large illustrations. When you start small, it becomes a little bit less overwhelming than jumping straight into a final illustration. Even though I've been drawing for a very long time, I find these practices going back to the basics really helpful because you start to hone in in how you actually do like to do things and you start to learn and process things. I love being analytical and nerdy about drawing as well, and I really do think that it helps to develop your style further and just make sure that it's constantly evolving and getting better. As an illustrator for the most part if you're working in traditional illustration, you are required to tell stories and create characters whether that is humans, animals, children, objects. You're telling a story or a story line about something that's happening. This class is going to be very character-based and working on creating characters that you can illustrate so you can illustrate stories for your children's books, or editorial articles, anything like that. It is the quintessential thing that you need to do as an illustrator, be able to tell a story using characters. Again, that doesn't have to be always humans, you can talk about characters and objects as well. This sketch book series of classes is inspired by my red sketchbook that I have here, I'll show you that in a little bit. I started that in November 2020, and I had the intention of finding my children's book style. I've been working as a freelance illustrator for over a decade, but I haven't really jumped into the world of children's illustration and since having children I've been really inspired to do so. I got this sketchbook and I sat down with those white scary pages, and I figured out a process of making it easier to develop my character style and I really broke it down. That's what we're going to be doing in class. The class project is going to be to start a sketchbook practice. I'm going to be sharing several different exercises, and lists of objects, and characteristics that you can draw in your sketch book of your class project. What I would like you to upload to the gallery are a couple of photos of your favorite spreads of these simple exercises. Feel free to update your project in the Skillshare gallery by uploading other spreads as you move along in your sketchbook and you feel like you're developing and getting better. It's always fun with a sketchbook being able to flip through and see your progress. Maybe at the beginning you feel a little bit unconfident, but by the end like I did in my grad sketch book by page 200 I felt that I had really gotten somewhere and I was a lot more confident in my lines and how I was developing my characters and things like that. Uploading your project to the Project Gallery is an incredible way to get some encouragement and feedback from me or your peers. Please be brave and upload your work, it's going to really help you to grow and give you a little bit more importance to sketchbook practice. 3. My Sketchbook Tour: [MUSIC] Here's my special red notebook and when I was just starting out, I did feel a little bit shaky about where I was going with this. Wasn't really sure how to use sketch book. But as I continued and push myself and brought this sketchbook everywhere I went by, kids were playing outside of the park I brought it. Even if you manage to do just a couple of sketches or a couple of scribbles or even just some writing, I think it just helps you to always have this creative mind going. Like I said, by the end of the sketchbook, even though by when there's only a few pages left, I really just want to fill it up and move on to the next thing. I did feel like I was getting somewhere and I was really excited about having a sketchbook again, and I couldn't wait to open up my next one. Personally, it took me about a year to get comfortable with my style for this new direction that I wanted to take my career with children's book illustration. I wanted to add another thing to what I can do. Having a sketchbook practice has been vital to moving in that direction. Not only as just the practice, but also as a reference whenever I create illustrations, I have pages upon pages of objects and hands, and faces and expressions so that I can reference for future illustrations to make them really neat and unique and that is paramount when you are an illustrator you have to create unique work that is original. [MUSIC] 4. Sketchbook Supplies: [MUSIC] The supplies that you need for this class are pretty basic. You need a sketchbook and you need something to draw with. For me, for this class when we're doing our basic drawings, I'm going to use this sketchbook which is an A5, regular it has cream pages. They're quite thin probably 80 or 90 gram paper. It doesn't handle paint or anything like that, or very heavy markers and something like that. I prefer almost to just work in pencil, just a regular pencil it can be mechanical, use just a regular traditional pencil and that's it. But if you prefer to sketch in pen or colored pencil or something like that of course works as well. I also work in other slightly more precious sketchbooks. I have paper that are little bit thicker and this is when I am working with more mixed media such as squash or pastel pencils or colored pencils, and I'm creating more work. We will get into that in the rest of the series. I just wanted to mention that I do jump between different sketchbooks just because I have different uses for them. Some sketchbooks I want to be a little bit more finished and some I want you to just be scribbles and open to being able to write something, to notes and also take some traditional sketches and then figure out ideas. Just figure out what works for you. I like these ones that have a hard back and I could [inaudible] their their because it fits nice keeps safe, you can have it on your shelf and fold them a lot. But if you still feel that's a little bit too precious, you can of course use traditional spiral bound sketchbooks that have very thin recycle paper and things like that, even scrap paper, loose papers, and you can bind them together in some notebook or folder later. But I really like this kind of notebook that has thin pages. This particular notebook comes from a brand called United office. I've also used the Loish Drum regular notebook as well that has 80 gram paper, and I really liked that one as well. My more fancy one, this is the Loish drum, that with the art paper, art edition, something like that. Then the paper is 140 grams. It does take a lot of it can be painted on and things like that. Another recommendation I'm going to go through everything is I really like these ones by Royal Talens and the Art Creation notebook. I feel like it's somewhere in between the Loish Drum that has that crisp white, beautiful thick paper. This one's ivory and it's still quite thick, so it does handle a little bit of paint, but it's not too precious as the crisp white perfect pages. I think this is a good in between plus it comes in light pink, which is adorable. Other supplies that I sometimes use in a simple sketchbook like this, it can handle a little bit of colored pencils, so I have a selection of my favorite colors. I really like the brand pattern dash, so I use their Pablo pencils and luminance. If you're wondering, these are the current new pastel number two, so they're water soluble. They are fun to play with too. All right, now that we've talked about some supplies and seriously only need paper and a pencil. But if you will have, which I assume because everybody has waiting [inaudible] art supplies, you can use whatever you like. 5. Where to Start?: [MUSIC] Before we get started, I think it's really important that you set some intention with your sketch book. What is this sketchbook going to be for? Is it going to be a place that you can be free to create lots of sketches and notes, and it's not perfect, or do you want that Instagram-ready, portfolio-ready sketchbook that is beautiful piece after piece? I highly suggest, if you're just starting out with sketchbooks, that you choose the first option. You are a little bit more free, and you don't feel crippled by having to create a perfect piece every time you just switch the page. Also, it could be interesting to have some plan or intention with your sketchbook. Previously, I've had sketchbooks that I only paint happy florals. I have a class on Skillshare about that, if you'd like to check it out. Like I did told you, my red sketchbook was about developing my children's book illustration styles. Then I would create sketches for my other work, for surface pattern design, etc. Just having these little ground rules and things that you're thinking about help you to get started as well so you don't feel blocked by the white page. If you're lacking in ideas and inspiration, it might mean that you're lacking outside influences. You need to get out more, essentially. When you are getting out, just have this intention of trying to gather inspiration. Be a total creeper, and eavesdrop on people that you're walking paths towards, sit next to on a park bench. Watch different series that you normally wouldn't, and pay attention to the details of people's clothing or the way that they build up a scene with composition and color. Go to a different cafe than you usually go to. Sit in a seat that's a little bit different than where you usually sit. Just start to do things a little bit out of the ordinary that you usually do so that you start to build up different experiences. They don't have to be revolutionary, but you just start to see and notice different things. You see some funny dude with crazy socks walk past, as you're sitting on a park bench. Remember that and add that to your arsenal of things to draw, or in movies or something that you wouldn't typically watch. Look for international movie from a country that you've never watched movies from. I would also like you to consider a couple more things such as, when are you going to be using your sketchbook? Is it going to be a daily practice that you set out at 30 minutes before you start your day? Every day to do some warm-up sketches and to figure out things, or is it going to be something that you take with you all the time? You're always sketching in between on lunch break, when you're on the subway, or any chance that you get, or are you going to set out maybe an entire day? I have shared before, I always have fun Fridays, where I use that time, an entire workday, to explore and try new materials, take classes, and usually spend a lot of time in my sketchbook. Consider when you're going to be using your sketchbook. Then you could also consider writing a list of the things that you'd like to improve. What was your intention for this sketchbook in which you need to work on? Create a list inside your sketchbook of the things that you'd like to work on. Whenever you feel like you don't really know your direction, again you can go back to this list. Remember that, "Yeah, I should be working on expressions, etc." Lastly, I would love for you to check out 5-10 of your favorite artists. I just really study them and see what it is about them that you really enjoy or don't. Not just those typical things like, "I just love their work because it's so pretty." You have to dig in a little bit deeper, and think about, "I love the way that this artist creates such graphic shapes," or their color palette is so strong and individual. They always have crazy pops of color," or "I love the way that this person captures expressions with just a couple of lines." When you start to notice these things in other artists that you admire, you can start to figure out what you would like to develop as well. It's not about copying. That's bad, don't do that. It's just about mindfully going through what your preferences for art are. Once you've done all that, you have set in an intention for your sketchbook, you're ready to get going and drawing. It's just a matter of picking up a pencil and getting started. 6. Project: Small Objects: [MUSIC] In this first section, we're going to start small. We're going to start with objects. I think that this is a great way of just taking the pressure out of having to draw hands right away or eye shapes or expressions. We're just going to draw simple objects like cups, vases, house plants and really get loose and have tons of pages of reference for later. Let's get drawing. We're starting with simple objects. I wanted to show you from my red sketchbook a couple of examples of this and why I think it's a great practice. We have here a spread with tons of different bottles and cups and vases and I haven't drawn them very detailed. I haven't done any shadows. I've mainly just done outlines. Why I love the practice of doing this is just to come up with different shapes than what you'd normally come up with. Maybe you start off by doing a normal vase shape or normal cup shape. But then if you start to research and you start to think about different forms and you start to create your own forms, then you start to make more interesting cup shapes and choose something that may be a little bit unique rather than always doing the same thing. I love having pages like this in my sketchbook as reference later. If you take the time when you're feeling like you have a little extra time, you want some sketchbook time and you create pages of reference images like this. Now when you sit down later to create an illustration, you can reference your sketchbook rather than going to the Internet for every single item that you're thinking of drawing so it goes much quicker. I also have house plants. This again, it just makes it easier later when you go to do some drawings, you've already spent time researching shapes and forms. When you sit down and you make another illustration, you'll remember something that you created that you really liked and you can use that in your illustration. Here's some chairs as well. Because when I sit down to do an illustration, maybe I'll always choose the same kind of regular chair that I think of but when I did my research, you could do lots of vintage chair research or modern or look just scour the Internet and find lots of different cool shapes and tweak them to make them your own so that you're always trying to be unique. But I think it's also okay to do certain forms and things like that. This is obviously a butterfly chair. I think it's okay to use in the illustration. But things like that. When you start drawing different shapes, you start to understand how the legs can be formed then you can start to design your own types of chairs. Here I did lots of frames. If you've framed artwork in the background of your illustration, rather than just doing a square frame around, imagine if you had all these ideas lined up of different elaborate frames that you could add in. I just think this is a nice, easy exercise to where you sit down to your sketchbook. You can have lists of different things that you can draw like frames, house plants, chairs. What else do I have in here? Shoes. Rugs are really fun to draw so that you have different patterns going. You could have pages of patterns that you could add to your artwork. Here's another page of house plants. I think this is an excellent space and place to start your sketchbook because you're just drawing. Either you can start with drawing things around your house, then you can start to draw things that you're finding on Pinterest or Google. You can search different house plants and mix them together with different pots and try to make your own designs. Then once you've done a couple of pages of different house plants, you can start to draw your own house plants and come up with things, and that applies to any object that you choose to draw. [NOISE] Here I've done windows. That's another thing. When I go to sit down and draw a house, I will just draw the regular one window with a cross wherever those windows slats are called. Here a traditional window like this. But there's so many different kinds of windows that you can draw. Just having this reference is incredible. I want that for you as well. We're going to move over to my new orchid-colored sketchbook. A friend gifted this to me, so thank you. [NOISE] Here I've already started a few pages of drawings, but here I wanted to show you that I started to do some more objects. In here, on this one side, I do my simple outlines of different jars and jugs and things. I started to add a couple of designs on them just to get some ideas going and then I did a couple of larger sketches in some scribbly color just for fun like this. I don't think that they're revolutionary, but it's just fun time to create and play with color as well. This is your sketchbook, this supposed to be fun as well. It's not just about learning about different shapes. I thought we could draw some objects together and I'll show you my process. [NOISE] A blank page here. For this class, I've created a reference for you. I've created a list of objects to draw so that if you're having a total blank, you don't know what to draw. I've created that for you. I have written it here in my sketchbook and that's something that you could do as well. You could take a look at my list and then write it in your sketchbook so that you have a reference page. Here my collections of objects could be things like bottles, vases, jars, wall art, cups, glasses, teapots, pitchers, house plants and pots, art supplies, kid stuff, kitchen stuff, bathroom stuff, windows, trees, flowers, furniture, rugs. Anything that you have in your homes, anything that you would depict in an illustration in the background. Just like all those funnel things and I think they're really enjoyable to draw and it's a lot less daunting to draw those kinds of things and jumping straight into drawing people. We've already done some bottles and jugs and things like that. What should we do this time? Should we do more house plants because those are really fun. Let's do house plants. We'll just get right into it. I think it's great to just start off with drawing something that you have in your house or from memory. Because you'll start to notice like, oh, maybe you made that a little bit generic. I can draw a plant that I have here in my studio and it has that very normal-looking pot like this. Like one of those mini monstera plant. As I'm drawing it, I'm trying to make it look a little bit nicer than what it actually looks like. It now looks a little bit mangled but I've tried to make it look balanced here, something like that. This is, I think, something that I could have drawn from memory. It's not very exciting really but it still gives you an idea. You don't always have to be so revolutionary everything you draw. One thing about this pot, it has a pink ombre, which is really pretty so it's pink at the top then it goes to white. I can mimic that by just giving you a little shadow here. You guys continue like this. You can draw a couple of more things from your house or from memory. Here we'll do another jar like this, we can do another cactus that I have and he's falling over, that's squiggles on him. We need to get bigger. I'm going to get this pot some legs because I think that looks cute. You can have a little pattern on this for fun. Now I've done a couple of from my room here. What do you do when we want to start referencing? Here's my cute little kid. We will write house plants. When I use reference images, even if it's a plant like this, it's not like a famous photographer's photo. It's still important to make it your own and not just copy it exactly photo-realistically. Take what you can from it or just what you need from it if that makes sense. Here's a nice shelf with different plants that are hanging. It's interesting with a plant like this, because its rye is hanging down. This seems to have a part that looks like this, which is interesting and you could put some stripes on it and then it has dangles. [NOISE] At the same time as I am gathering inspiration like this I'm making it my own so when I do go back to reference these, I'm 100 percent sure that I can use it. That these are my ideas because that is important to be unique. There's another idea and you just keep going through. Now I'm getting ideas for different planter shapes. That looks interesting. It looks like a basket. These are just sketches to me. They're just ideas. I'm gathering ideas, so I'm not trying to work on my shading or anything like that. But if that's something that you are trying to work on, then feel free to add way more details. But I just want to think about shapes and use my brain to come up with different ideas. Maybe it should be some palmish thing that has lots of cool green shades. I'm just making this up. I didn't see anything like this. Maybe it has weird squiggly, scratchy looking palm tree stem thing. [LAUGHTER] Then we're just going to keep going, just keep googling, mismatching different items. If you see one plant pot that you like mix it with a different plant, come up with your own plants and then the same thing goes. If we were to switch maybe on this page, we can do the same exercise but thinking about glasses. When I think of a regular cup, I would draw something like this. It'll be pretty boring illustration. But if we look up some other vintage ones, I like the look of vintage things. We can look at modern things as well. Just remember not to draw something that's really recognizable as a certain brand. I have something like that looking wonky. Here's an interesting shape. It has a pattern on the glass as well. This one has some pattern. That's fine. Again, these have bubbles almost all over it. How do you depict that? It can come off the side. Here we have the lid. You get the idea, so I'm just going to keep going, creating my little objects and you can too to fill out as many pages as you want with houseplants or cups. You can refer to my list of objects to draw and just fill up pages and pages and pages. Whenever you feel like you don't know what to draw, you can always refer and you can redo, do another page of houseplants, do another page of rugs or cups. Redo pages that you've done before and pick out a few and create a little bit more detailed sketch of those. You're never going to run out of ideas. There's so many different objects that you can draw. You can redraw them over and over again so you get better and better and you learn new things and you figure out different ways of drawing. I also haven't mentioned, you can check out other illustrators' work and see how they depict different items if you want to figure out different ways of depicting things. But just remember to not straight up copy 100 percent somebody else's work. You need to make it your own in some way. Let's try to figure out an example and we can try to find some plant depicted somewhere. If we look at this illustration they have a plant like this. That's interesting. But I think it's very important not to just straight up copy this illustrator's idea, but we can take some things from it. I really like the idea of having huge leaves with a smaller plant. That was a fun idea. I'm going to do a different plant pot. Let's see. I love the idea of big leaves, so I'll do leaves like this. I like the stripes in there too, so we can take that as well. Then we need another flower. Let's do a daisy looking flower. Now we can be sure that we haven't stolen somebody else's idea, but we have moved on from that idea by making it our own. Plant pot, I'll just make it a nice long, skinny squared and I put a nice pattern on there, so we can think of a different pattern to put on there. I like when it like this, drips of paint. There we can even give it a place to stand. There you go. That's how I use reference to get other ideas of how people create leaves. But you can't draw this exact plant. That's somebody else's thought process. But you can reinterpret it in a different way. That can help you to learn different ways of creating. The same thing with this. It's very simple. It's a vase. You can do your own type of vase here and put some sticks in here. There we go. There again, we use that idea but made it our own. But I highly suggest to use photographs rather than somebody else's artwork. But if you are inspired by somebody else's artwork I just wanted to mention that you have that in mind, that you're always making sure to make it your own. Like this cup, print was cute so I do some stripes here at the top. There you go. You can even make some balls at the top of my plant to give it a little bit better shape. I added in a few more of my plant pots here and then I'm going to continue and create some more glasses and things like that. [MUSIC] Now I filled up two pages of even more houseplants and even more vintage modern, who knows, cups versus bowls. Next time I sit down to draw illustration and I'm going to add different items like this I have so many things to look from. That illustration is going to take a lot less time because I've sat down to practice these shapes and get ideas going. I can continue to work on things like this. It's just a nice pass time, I feel. Then again, you can go in and work on a couple and sketch them out in color or add some shadowing to them so that you work a little bit more on that. That's completely up to you. Pages and pages of objects are so much fun and really useful because you can go back and reference them. It's not just about drawing them and getting used to creating different shapes and trying to think of things and reinterpreting what you see on Google. It is a great reference. I hope you enjoy creating lots of pages of your own reference objects. 7. Project: Character Features: All right, in this section, we're going to be starting to create some character features. If you've never drawn people before, this is a perfect place to start. I think by just picking one item to focus on, just eyes, just hands, just noses, you really get to figure out what style you like. Let's jump in to that, creating characters isn't scary as long as you break it up and start small. All right, now that we have worked on many pages of incredible objects for reference, it's time to move on to developing our characters and starting simply by researching different eye forms and noses and hands that instead of working directly on a character, we're going to create the building blocks of this as well to make this process a lot more simple and also do it again, create a reference library of different eye shapes and ways of creating eyes. Here in my red sketchbook, I have a page of faces that I put together creating different ways of drawing noses and mouths and eyes. I'm starting to figure out which look I like the best. Because in this sketch book, I was trying to figure out my character style. I've done a couple of reference artist studies of how other artists create faces just to get an idea of how other artists. I love David Sierra Liston. The way that he creates forms of faces that are very misshapen and they have very dramatically large eyes. That's something that I really like. But I, of course, don't want to mimic his style. I have to make it my own. This is just exploring different shapes and things like that. For this section I have a whole list in my sketchbook to do draw list. I have the collections of characteristics that you can start to collect such as eyes, nose, ears, mouth, hair, head shape, hands, feet, clothing, and everything that goes with clothing, accessories like pages of hats and scarves and shoes and gloves. Again, pages for you to, first off, just have fun, have something simple to focus on and draw. Then second off, you can start to focus, just build up a reference library. I've created a couple of pages here. Here I did some hands and feet because hands and feet are difficult to draw, especially if we want to make them simplified. I also did some hair. Again with hands and feet like this, I go in and how would I want to draw first. I want to do it quite simply, and then I've also thought, looked at referenced other artists and how they do hands. Just do simple lines like this just to mimic a hand with the fingers, which is a very simple way, especially if you have a blob of color that is the hand and then you added a couple of lines like that can be really expressive and work as a hand. You don't always have to draw every single finger, and fingernail and every thing like that. That's just exploring that. Feet are also really funny to draw and weird. Do you want to just always just draw your feet in shoes or socks to make it simple for you and you can create different shapes for feet? I love the idea of a fat foot with just a tiny little toe sticking out. Or you can do really long, which is going to be fun and skinny. When you are creating your own characters, you can create them exactly how you want to. Also from character to character that can be different. It would be really weird if you're a world of people who would all have the same feet and hands and eyes and things like that when the world for real has so much diversity. Again here just exploring different feet shapes and how to do feet. I'm not sure what I have landed on yet, but I just like a regular here. This was funny, I saw a picture, I don't remember what artist I saw it with. Just a couple of toes and a heel on that gives off the look of a foot even though it's quite square. Maybe I would prefer it to look a little bit more natural. How does a foot look? It's like look at your foot, it's a little bit more ankle, maybe. Something like that. Something that you're working on. Hairstyles and how to depict hair is also very interesting to figure out and play with. Do you want it just to be just flat forms that cover a head? It can be really graphic like this. Just some lines attached to the head or really flowy lines or is it going to be made up of just a bunch of scribbles to mimic curly hair? There's so much to play with. Or just expressive lines coming off of the head to do like really expressive, long, straight hair like that. I thought together we could do some pages of eyes, nose, and mouth. I'll break this up, and we can do eyes, nose, mouth and ears. We're going to come up with different ways of creating eyes. To do that first step, I'm just going to come up with what I can think of. Then we'll start to look at the Internet and how other illustrators have depicted eyes and how I can use that in some way. Also, there are many artists that do the same things, so sometimes it's okay. For eyes, you can start off with just simple dots. You can do circles, you can do almond shape. Something more realistic. Some artist create pointy eyes with just a little pupils, bigger, rounder with a little pupils. I think that gives off a little scary, so those are my favorite. Could do smaller little eyes. It depends also if you draw, them slightly close together, you can have more comical look. But if you draw farther apart, for me I think it makes a character look a little bit more innocent and sweet. It's something you can play with. You can add eyelashes. Okay, underneath. Others, you can add eye lids going on as well. This gives some more expression. It's almost like adding eyebrows. Also, if we started adding eyebrows here, our little center would be very expressive as well. Eye shape more like this, just a loop. Also just playing around with the placement of the eyeball, having it really fill out the whole thing. Large pupils just like a line work like this. Little dots again, but with a little bit of expression, a little defining and they're curved. There's so many ways of drawing eyeball, so just keep going with that. If we move on to noses, we can do this. Again, there's so many ways of drawing a nose. There's pointy noses, snow button noses or [inaudible] three. Looks like a dog foot. I've seen it depict just a rectangle or oval as a nose. You can make them really long nose. You can even make the tip red or roundish, tiny little nose like this point to the side, with a long nose like this. What about more graphic like this? It depends. I also like when you add in the eyebrow as a part of the nose, as if the eyes were here. I do like that. The rounded nose. Again, it depends on your character I feel. But if we start to get some ideas, we can just do nostrils instead. Just do nostrils, really long nose, I think it's also impactful. You have some face in there so you understand. Again, the idea of including the eyebrows as a part of the nose, I really like that. Again, if you want to reference other artists, it's completely fine to do that as long as you're not stealing an entire look that somebody has created. You're not drawing the exact same eyes as them, nose, ears, hair, everything. But if you decide that you like a way that a person creates a nose, and you see other artists doing that as well it should be fine as long as you're bringing your own thing to it always. Again we can go into Pinterest and look like David here. He has very expressive noses like that. It gives a funny shaped in his work. Let's see here what else we can find and working with really long nose and different shapes at the bottom. Really fun to work with. It's really sloping. Looks like it's a little foot. Very triangular nose. Not my favorite thing. I don't really like that look. I'll level this expressive lines and just simple things. It depends on the character. Again, just keep going through that. Now we can move on to mouths, and mouths there's tons of ways of drawing. We can do the simple smile, little smile with little smile lines for just one. You could do circles, open mouth. You can open the mouth and add some teeth, a tongue. I personally love to make especially with kids making something like a gap. So cute. They're small shapes you can hardly see tiny little smiles like that. Sometimes a little face because sometimes it's hard to see what they look like. Later on, once you've done this, you can start to create other pages like I have done here and combine them to see what it looks like when you put it altogether, but I think it's a great exercise. You just create pages of tons of different eyes, and noses. When you do go and figure out that, then you have to go back and forth. You're just found another nose idea with like the nose up turn, like this, like little peaky nose. It could look really cute. Same thing. You can have it connected too at the bridge of the nose a little bit. Nose. I'm not getting as many ideas for now. It feels like you just either do the line where you create some shape within. You can start to do lips. I'm just going to form that just like [inaudible] circles. Circle like this can be cute, slightly bigger upper lip, and lower lip. Depends on your character again. Moving onto ears. Let's see. You do really round ears like this. Different shapes within to define the ear like that. Here's some different shapes if you do that and then you could do it with a more shape like this. Same thing. Something like that. Also again, I'm not getting as many ideas for ears. For me, maybe it's easier and then also ears can have a big impact depending on how you place them on the head. So we can do a couple of heads here because I feel like ears just by themselves look weird. You can have teeny little ears. Really big ears like Rebecca Green does. She has very big ears like this. I think my personal favorite is in-between the shape better, I'm trying to understand what inner shape I like. I like this simple list or this one. What else? Other artists I've seen do ears like this. [inaudible] not my favorite ear shape, but it's still something that you can play with. I think this is it. There we go. You can just keep going yourself and create different eye shapes, mouth research a little bit from other artists how they depict eyes and nose shapes and mouths and see if there's any combination that you like. Then we can move on to creating a couple of reference heads which can be fun to mix and match all of these things that you've learned. We didn't do eyebrows. You can add in a little bit here, but on the eyes, do really bushy eyebrows which could be really fun. You can do scribbles like this. You could do hair. Just do little lines. What else can you do? Really bushy lines like that could be expressive. Think about eyebrows as well. We'll move on to creating a couple of faces and these can be so much fun. We're just going to do startup with ovals. But feel free to do different head shapes as well. That's another thing that you can start to play with different head shapes. I always keep different head shapes. Create a character with a really squarish or roundish head or really round, really long. Start to work with shapes like ridiculous shapes. You can get really fun characters in that way. There's so many beautiful classes on here on Skillshare about character development that you should check out so just look at those also for some ideas. It's great to explore yourself, but also take some classes that are specifically on that because I'm not going to touch on basics of human anatomy and things like that, but creating characters is supposed to be fun and you can make them however you want. Let's create a couple more ovals over here. Let me get some weird shapes over here. If there is a certain feature that you really like you can start with ears if I've decided I really like small ears. That could be something and do all of these characters with small ears. Because it's characters and you're creating them, you can just change how things are supposed to sit on the head so you can create a character that has eyes really low on their face or a little bit too high, like making a really long nose, and their ears are way too low for their face. Or somewhere in the middle where it's supposed to be. Just keep going mixing and matching here we'll do some of these pointy ears that I like. We're still keeping these quite simple, but you can play around with all the different options and keep referencing like what nose do I want here, and try. I really like how that one turn out. [NOISE] You start to see how the features affect what age they look like. Because I made the features a little bit bigger, like the nose bigger this guy looks more like an older man. Because I made the features a little bit smaller, wider, apart and made this character look a lot younger. Those are the things that you're going to start to find and it's really fun. We could start to add some hair if we wanted to. But these ones, I just wanted to mainly be about finding different ratios and combinations of face features that you really like. Some of [NOISE]. Here are some eyelids. Looks a little bit angry. Looks like he's up to no good this one. Then what else? There we go. Here is this endless possibilities for creating characters in different character expressions. You can just go to town you could fill an entire sketchbook just with things like this before when you're developing different characters and how you want them to look. You can start to figure out what you like and you can start to add them to forms that are a little bit differently. We can make this one really long ears and a really long nose. This one has really big features and ears like this. Blocky teeth like that bushy eyebrows. It's just a matter of playing. Because you've referenced lots of eyeballs and different mouth shapes and ears and noses. You're sitting and not looking at a blank page like completely blank. That's why I like doing this. This is why I like creating a process like this. I need a couple more characters here. They look a little bit funny because they don't have any hair. This could be like a little baby. This one look like a really stern teacher or something. You can even test out, looks like you don't really like, really close up that looks funny. Or what else do you like or not like? Not really into the whole shape, or nose like this. Doesn't do it for me. It has eyeballs. You can give him the mustache. Here we go. Here's just some quick look at creating reference images for different character features. This is going to be something that you keep building on and you're going to start to think about what kind of look that you like for your characters. Of course, remember that you can always mix it up. I always feel like you can have worlds with people that look different because the world is made up of different looking people. Just remember that and have fun with this. Just do as many pages of different eyes and eye shapes and things and things like that. Pages and pages of different just simple faces like that, just to get to know what you like and then reference my characteristic drawing to-do list here. I've added in all the other things we can of course, jump into doing clothing and all that fun stuff as well. Have fun in your sketchbook. Possibilities are endless with these characters' studies. 8. Project: Character Expressions: [MUSIC] Now that we've started with those small basic things, I think that we're definitely ready to move on to character expressions and start to look at poses and how characters built up. In this section, we're going to look at character poses, even animals and anthropomorphic animal poses, and we're going to keep building on all these small illustrative features that we created before. Again, these are going to be incredible pages for reference later. Now that we have gotten comfortable with drawing some characters and starting to play with the forums and how to make little cute people, we're going to start to build onto that and we can talk about adding bodies and poses and we can do facial expressions. Because this class isn't about character development, this is about working in a sketchbook, I'm not going to cover how to do this. There are many classes here on Skillshare that I suggest you take, and take notes and do that in your sketchbook to learn about how body types, and human anatomy, how that's all set up. I can link a couple of classes that I really like here on Skillshare so that you can check those out to get to know that process of how you can first understand how a human body is made up, and how you can play with the proportions to make characters that are really unique and fun. It's really important to understand how the body is made up so that you can play with it, also with age, how a person develops. It's really important to understand how as artists how when the child is really small, their head is a lot bigger in comparison to their body, and soon as they get older, their head is the same size but with longer and longer limbs. I highly suggest that you take lots of classes, and take notes in your sketchbook of everything that you've learned, and test it out and learn how to do these breaking up anatomy so that you can create characters and play with body types. However, I thought that we could go over emotions because that is also fun. As we play with our faces, we notice that it's depending on how you draw the eyebrows or eye in a certain way, you can create different emotions. Here here we have happiness, sadness, surprise, anger, overwhelm, and delight or super happy. These are ones that I've previously done in my sketchbook, and I can't even tell you how many times I've referenced these for my characters and illustrations; because having a reference like this is really important. It is difficult to come up with faces like this yourself, it is easier to have something to reference. I can show you on a place like Pinterest, you see if you look up face emotions in photography, you can see lots of facial features like this face right here, it's really interesting to draw how he is holding down his eyebrows, one is like this and one is like this and is looking to the side, give him a little side, here's specific nose and we've got stirring mouth. What emotion is that? You can do that and try to figure out emotions yourself. There is also a lot of different sheets with cartoonists especially are really good at this. We can use faces like this that are very simplified to understand how to create some different emotions. There's tons of different ways, and they're drawn in different styles. But if you use that and then use a style that you feel most comfortable with, you can make it your own like I always say. Using references like this, you can build up a library of your own emotions. Let's quickly do some emotions here. Again, I'll break up my page into four. We can do happy, sad, mad, surprise, overwhelmed or most so scared. I'll do three for each for you. You draw a simple ovalish head, I can do my ears that I like. This is very simple. I'm going to reference the ones that I've previously done, and you're happy to use these expressions as well. For happy, the traditional cartoony closed eyes looking up, lifted eyebrows also make someone look really happy, and a big smile. We also have really bright eyes, really round open eyes, again, slightly lifted eyebrows and open mouth, looks quite happy. You can do start to play with eye shape as well, view that really like use half moons because your base gets squished up when you're happy. It's really happy. If we move on to sad, we have the traditional course, just the downturned mouth, and just doing that really makes someone sad. Again, similar to the eyes, with the eyes it's like the lids well up with tears, so you can do the tears are taking over the eyes. Just by having the mouth turned down, you look sad. You can have the eyebrows pointing up in the a worried sad face. We can do a mouth like this, downturned again and eyes to this side. This could be a little angry, but if we add the eyebrows again, it's sadness rather than anger. If the eyebrows are pointing downwards, inwards, then it would be an angry face. You can do quite a very sad anguish like a little child screaming or something like that, there we go, so really squinty eyes totally yelling. There's so many more that we could do, and you can create a library like I did with a whole full page of happiness, because there's so many ways of depicting happy. You could also test this out in different eye shapes, and how do to use the eyes and the different features that you've been playing with for previously. Moving on, we'll go on to anger. Again, if we have the eyes and eyebrows pointing inwards and downwards, we get anger. Mouth can almost do anything, it could be just nothing or it could be a wider yelling as well. We have something almost like a sinister look as well, we've got the traditional villains in cartoons, we can have upturned mouth up and downturned eyebrows and eyes to get that sinister look in there, use subtle angry, eyes look like this, have side-eye here, subtle anger, contempt. Moving on to overwhelmed or scared. You can make the eyes look a little wary by curving them a little bit. Also moving the pupils so they're looking to the side gives that unconfident look. Just very overwhelmed, scared, anxious. You can do a mouth like this, the eyes looking down like this. He's sad. Nothing's going right. I could've said that. You can use some wrinkles as well through the eyes. Scared and overwhelmed look. Very weary looking upwards. This is something that you can really play with a lot. There's so much very subtle things that you can do by just moving an eyebrow, or the way that the eyeball is looking in order to. This is how we're going to play with for pages. I also suggest that you take anatomy classes, and character development classes so you can understand how the body moves as we won't be covering that in my class. I want to share with you how you can move on from creating expressions like this. You can create your own characters, and I create lots of character sheets. I like to create character sheets once I have created a face that I really like. I think that's the best move first, is to think about how to interpret that face in different expressions, rather than moving directly to the body, which can be difficult to draw sometimes. I can show some examples. Here, for example, is my daughter, Tilly, that I have explored. I did do her body as well. She's three, and I did some poses with her, but I also played with it using reference. I gave her a surprised feeling, really sad faces, and disgusted faces, and silly faces. It was fun to play with a character in this way. Also how you move the face up and down, it's interesting to help with emotion. I did my son Stark as well. He's five. Just having lots of playtime with a certain character. It can be somebody you know, or somebody that you've made up. Maybe one of the characters that you created, just playing around, you can continue to work with. If you really liked this guy, or this person, you want to keep working on. Find somebody that you really like in your sketchbook and continue exploring, creating faces for them. Here's another example I was trying to come up with a character, and I did different versions of this character. What I landed on finally, I thought that this was the look that I liked the best. You can just tweak small things until you figure out the look that you want to go for. As you get more comfortable drawing very simply, and figuring out the shapes of eyes and things that you really like, then you can move on to making a little bit more details. Here I drew elderly people. People that had a little bit more wrinkles and things, and that was really fun to capture even drawings. I really liked how this one turned out, and this one, so I created character studies of them as well with my body proportions that I prefer to use. Here's another example where I've done also with animals. I've done this to show expressions using an animal's head rather than just a human. Here's a young girl and her monkey. It's really good practice to create sheets like this. It's really simple because you're just using a head, but they're very impactful. Then trying to move the head and show different angles is quite challenging, but you can totally do it. I just want to show a couple more examples. I do this with animals as well. I'm not going to show that in this class, but I created some animal heads to test out what a fox, a raccoon, and a cat would look like. As you can see, I went through quite a few different styles, I guess, until I figured out something that I really liked. Sometimes it takes a few tries to figure out the proportion, especially with animals that you can play with a little bit more with different shapes. Then moved on to adding bodies, but also expressions with their faces. I'm here with my raccoon character, playing with different expressions, and body poses. There's so much that you can do with characters, and character development that in your sketchbook. We will continue on in the rest of the series to move forward with these ideas. But I just wanted to introduce that as well if you wanted to focus on animals as well, it's totally an option. Here last but not least is my cat. I wanted to get some inspiration for cat expressions, and how I've been working on things like that. Besides incredible emotions, reference images on Pinterest you can find for body poses as well, and I found those really helpful. They're just simple stick figures, but they give you an idea of how the body is moving as it uses a framework to put your character into with your proportions that you've created. There's tons of reference images like this of little stick figures running, or jumping, or walking. It's going to be much easier to use that reference. Also these little stick figure guys I find really helpful for funny poses. Because they're so simple, you can adapt that to any character in any body type. That's how what I do when I am creating my characters. I will find a reference image like this, one of these little stick figure guys then I can add onto it. It can be a cat, it can be a little monkey, it can be whatever I want. I wanted to mention that. Also, before we go, I just want to mention one more reference, and that is a website called FILMGRAB. FILMGRAB has tons of stores from tons of different movies. Movies, you know, they have a huge budget for cinematographers, and photographers, and lighting. You can find really interesting images from so many different movies. These are great practice to draw from because they're usually a little bit more, and less posed. This is quite posed, but it still feels like it could be anytime, just someone peeling potatoes. You can look by genre, and by countries. You can look at old Italian movies, or French movies, and you can get different styles and ideas for posing and characters. I highly recommend that you check out FILMGRAB to get some photo reference. Again, when we mentioned that this is somebody else's artistry, even though it's in photo film form, so you still have to make sure that you're making it your own. You're drawing this person right here, make sure to change his sunglasses, and change the background a little bit, give them a different hairstyle, a different body type. You can use him as a reference for how the body is formed in the head, and how that all sits, but make sure to always make it your own. I hope that you've enjoyed [NOISE] having fun with me in your sketchbook. Getting to know how to start a sketchbook practice, especially within character development and finding your style. I'm really excited to see all of your pages of what you come up with for your first starts of characters and things like that. It's going to be great. [NOISE] Again, I'd love to mention my sketchbook drawing to-do list where I've listed out tons of things for you to go through and draw. We had our collections of objects, and then our characteristics that we worked on. Then we started to work on facial expressions, but there's all kinds of other things that you can also work on, on your own time, such as body types, poses in action. You could copy some of those stick figure people in action in your sketchbook. You can reference that rather than always having to go to your phone or a computer to look at things. You can do animals, realistic, and anthropomorphic. Anthropomorphic meaning that they're humanized, that they have clothes and things like that. Usually standing upright rather than on four legs. You could play with aliens and monsters. You can do character development by showing a character from the front, from the side, and the back. It's going to be great for when we move on to creating a scene with a character doing something, but just having these basic illustrations of a flat character can really help as a starting point. Then characters in action, characters doing things, and then of course, characters together. That is your to-do list. Hopefully you'll find that inspiring and you'll never have nothing to do. You'll always have something to work on, and that was my hope with this class. Thank you so much for watching with me, and I can't wait to hear about your sketchbook journey. 9. How to Keep Going?: [MUSIC] That's it for this first section of this sketchbook series. I can't wait for you to see number 2 and 3. Look out for those. Before I leave you, I just want to make sure that you're really excited about this sketchbook practice. Does it feel like something you can maintain that you're excited about building up? Even if you have been sketch booking for a while, if you feel like going back to the basics and really honing in on hands or eye shapes has helped you in some way. I really want to keep this momentum going. There's a few things that I want you to think about. One, did you get a little obsessed? Was this fun? That's the important part and art is supposed to be fun and it's supposed to be a part of your practice, but it's not supposed to feel like work. I really want you to find the things in your sketchbook practice that bring you joy and make it feel like a hobby so that you will want to maintain and keep going. Was it really motivating to see the first sketches if you go back and look at the first few pages and then compare them to the last pages that you just did? Focus on that energy. Number 2, I'd love for you to check out my drawing to do list. I've created a whole list of drawing prompts and objects and character features for you to draw so that you have something to go by. You can print out the list that I've created for you or you can transfer it into your sketchbook so you always have it there when you're not really sure what to draw. Then lastly, I just want you to keep going. You can do this. Sketch booking is fun, drawing is fun, being an illustrator is incredible. As long as you're drawing, you're going to be learning all that cliche stuff, but it's true and I know it personally. Even though I've been doing this for a while, I feel like now I'm just starting to get momentum, I'm starting to get good or I can noticeably see that I'm getting better as an illustrator, especially when I'm pushing myself to draw and try new things. Please just keep going. 10. Final Thoughts: [MUSIC] It was that fun. How many pages did you get into your sketch book, did you fill 10 or did you fill 100? I will be so excited to see that, and I can't wait to see what you're going to be publishing in the gallery. Remember, this is just sketches, they're, nothing spectacular. Maybe it is spectacular to you because you started on page one, and you did some doodles that you weren't really happy with, and by page 100, you have now developed an eye shape that you love, and a way of creating poses in an animal character that you developed, and you're just totally in love. So make sure to post your progress in the project gallery so that we can all see, and be inspired by how helpful sketch booking, and working on your drawing skills is. That's it. Thank you so much for watching this class with me, Christina Hopkins, I love having you here, and I appreciate you as a student, and I can't wait to see your first sketchbook spreads in the project gallery, make sure that you upload your projects. Also, please make sure that you are subscribed to me on Skillshare, so that you'll be notified when I publish new classes, and also check out my profile page where I have all of my other 20-plus classes available in this platform. If you'd like to hang out with me outside of Skillshare, I'd love for you to follow me on Instagram @emmachristina ,or my website at @emmachristina.com. I've also created a private Facebook community where you can get to know me better, and I have a lot more free, beautiful content there, I look forward to see you as well. Thanks so much again for watching, I can't wait to see you in my next classes, bye.