Transcripts
1. Introduction: I like to draw, try different materials and also I like candies. My name is Olga. I'm a graphic designer, illustrator, styled photographer and just [inaudible]. In my new Skillshare class, I'd like to share with you a step-by-step process of creating nice detailed cupcakes sketch with markers. We will talk about material, some manufacturers, ways you can save the dollar and some stuff you should've tried to [inaudible] and yes, drawings markers can be not so expensive. Next, we will dive into some basic tricks and techniques working with markers. We'll go through the whole process from pencil sketched to fine detailed sketching. So welcome to my class. Hope you will enjoy it.
2. Class Project: As a class project, we will draw this nice cupcake. You can freely use this one as a reference or find another one on Pinterest or somewhere in the Internet or even draw from a real one. It would be even better but more challenging. I hope you are not like me, and have a great power of will to finish drawing before eating the cupcake.
3. Materials: Markers: Now let's talk about materials we need. We will be using alcohol-based ink markers. Basically, because this type of thing makes it possible to achieve smooth transitions in colors, make gradients and so on. Those making your art more realistic and adding that little artistic flavor. Such ink dries fast, almost instantly. But it drags two subsequent layers of ink [inaudible] , so we can achieve nice gradients or wash out a bit of tone with special marker called blender. Now, let's take a look on tips markers usually have. The differences will affect the way you draw. Fine tip is thin, bullet shaped tip, just like the classical felt tip pens have. Basically, draws lines with constant thickness. To make a big spot with it, you will need, either to fill the area actively or make some hedgehog. Brush tip is soft and elastic one. It allows you to make different lines just by varying the pressure you apply. It's the best tip to go for smoothest tone transitions. It's most suitable and convenient for making sketches and illustrations. Broad tip is wide tip. Useful for even and quick filling large area, and you can do some neat and quickly work on details with it, just by rotating tip edge-wise. Markers often have two tips. Usually go in pairs, like brush plus broad, or fine plus broad, or brush plus fine. That's really convenient. It's good to try out all of them, and choose what kind of tip fit your style. Personally, I go for brush and broad tips most of the time. Now, let's look what do we have out there on the market? Nowadays, the most popular is Japanese Copic markers. They have one of the richest and wide colored pens. Colors are beautiful, varying from vivid and saturated colors, to dimmed and natural tones. Copic has three types of markers. Copic Sketch is the most popular among all the Copic markers. It comes in the widest range of colors, 358 and features medium broad and flexible super brush nibs combinations. They are one of the best choices for illustration, craft and caricature. Also, they have "Sketch Original." It's just an empty marker which allows you to mix the colors or expand your color palette by using various ink to fill them up. Copic classic. The name explains itself. Plain, simple, classic two-tip marker. Broad and fine tips. The ciao marker is the cheapest Copic, providing the same great quality and experience a sketch, but at a more [inaudible] price. Has less colors, 180 and less ink. But don't be be carried away is it a relatively cheap price. They don't last long if used actively. I'd recommend to use them on detailed step. Copic wide marker is the optimal choice for coloring large areas with consistent stroke. Has less colors, only 36 and comes with two really wide nibs. All Copic markers are refillable and you can easily change nibs. They lay down and blend really good. They're not toxic. The only huge disadvantage is the price, especially when you need a lot of them. Very good alternative for Copics will be Korean Touch Markers from ShinHan Art. They are original Korean markers, which often mixed with fakes like Touch You, and so on, and other stuff you can find on AliExpress. Original markers are way better than fakes. They have nicer body, giving you full control for creating an elaborated and complex sketches. They have two types. Touch twin, two-sided with fine tip and broad tip. Touch brush, with brush that imitates real watercolor brush. This is my favorite brush for now. Touch markers are definitely good. They blend good, they can be refilled, and their nibs replaced. Non-toxic inks, dry very fast, and acid free. A really reasonable and quite nice price, good ergonomics, and fine control. The only downside comparing these Copics are, not that big color palette, just 208 colors. Palette itself is more vivid and has less dimmed and smooth tones. Of course, there are cheaper alternatives like Potentate, Stylefile, Promarker by Winsor and Newton, and Sketchmarker. In this list, I'd highlight Potentate and Sketchmarker. Potentate is nice, cheap brand, but most of compounds and materials are Japanese. Pros. Two-sided, fine tip plus broad. Overall good-quality, ink lays evenly smooth on paper, blends nice, and dry fast. Low price. Cons. No brush nib, small palette, just 120 colors. They're not refillable. Sketchmarker is a rational new common brand. But they've made really nice stuff. Pros. Two-sided, fine plus broad tip on regular a sketchmarker and fine plus brush on sketchmarker brush. Refillable, nibs can be replaced. Amazing quality to price ratio. Colors are soft, smooth, but neat enough. They mix really nice, dry fast. Should I say they're, of course, non-toxic. The downsides are: the size of palette, and not very ergonomic design. As for colors, last year, they had only 236 colors. But they expand and they have stayed milestone of making a total 401 colors, till then throughout the year. As for design and they state that it's not a final version. Unfortunately, they're only available in Russia for now. But, I was a bit curious contacting them and have good news for you. They are expanding. According to roadmap, they will be available in Ukraine and maybe in Belarus in August 2017. In Europe, something about December 2017, and in the United States, spring 2018. Anyway, I'll drop link for their international page in class materials so you can check back later. Personally, I prefer touch twin brush and sketchmarkers and sometimes Copics when I need more natural, subtle, and dimmed colors. The last thing I want to mention is about the not original stuff you can easily get from AliExpress, for example. They're usually cheaper, it's about $50 for a quite big box of markers like this. They even resemble original brush. Look, here's the original touch marker, and here is the fake. You should remember that the quality is not so good. They can differ in colors a lot from what you would expect. Usually, colors are too vivid, even like acid colors. They can bleed on paper too much. Sometimes, they bleed really waste, sometimes they don't ever dry. As a con, they may dry way too long. Usually, colors change dramatically after drying. Inks have really strange chemical smell. There is no way they're non-toxic. Yes, they can be very handy, of course, and you may be very likely to get some good results, some of which as I have told. But I'd not recommend it to start with them. But if you already have them, you can still use them. I have seen a lot of people create really wonderful stuff with them. If you're about to try markers and want to save some money, I would recommend you to start with Potentate or sketchmarkers if you can get them somewhere. Because they're affordable, yet have a really good quality. You will get a quite rich color palette, instead of just 10 or 15 Copics for the same price, for example.
4. Materials: Paper and Other Stuff: As you know, there are a lot of paper for any artistic needs and markers are no exception. Special papers for markers is helpful with lots of things. Colors lay down and mix better. You can easily achieve amazing gradients and shades. The most crucial, ink losses are lower which is a huge advantage. There are a lot of brands and you can find separate sheets of paper or special sketchbook. Personally, I prefer sketchbooks. They are convenient and I like the way they look. If you are a fan of quick sketching, you can easily take them with you. [inaudible] 1970s sketchbook with bleached white paper, [inaudible] smoothest gradient almost like watercolors. But markers tend to bleed out of line so it's the thing to keep in mind. Sketchbook from our local brand. This one is even with my print on the cover. Paper is nice, clean wind, ink performed [inaudible] and almost don't bleed. You can, of course, use moleskin sketchbook, but I don't like cover [inaudible] seems to come in. I love white. So if it's not an issue to you, you can try them. But keep in mind while using any sketchbook to protect lower pages from ink that may seep down, those making watercolor-like markings on the next pages. To prevent that, just use additional piece of dense paper as an interlayer. Or your sketchbook may already have special interlayer just like this one. Recently, there was some breakthrough from Canson paper brand. It's a special, special paper who's foil interlayer, Canson the Wall. You can draw on both sides of sheet. Foil will prevent seeping and you don't need additional interlayers between pages. Some people even doing sketch books with it. As for me it's a bit hard to work with. But for you it's can be the best thing because I see a lot of people enjoying the Wall. So you'd better to try it yourself and find what is yours. As one of the cheapest and really nice options, you can use dense office paper from Color Copy. It handles mixing, washing colors out very good and really durable when you're under a lot of color layers. It consumes more ink, bleeds and seeps a lot, but it's affordable, easy to get, and you can achieve mass results. A little tip, avoid drawing on textured paper like watercolor and so on. It consumes a lot of ink and tend to grind nibs down very fast. Okay. Now let's talk about other stuff. We will need liners. Why gel pen for additional essence and details. A simple pencil and eraser that doesn't tread the paper. You can use your favorite liner. Copic Multiliner, [inaudible] , Stabilo, Faber-Castell, Touch Twin liner, just to name a couple. They all give constant line and most of manufacturers make range from 0.01 millimeters to 0.7 or 8 millimeters. You will usually need to choose one primary length thickness and couple of additional sizes to put some essence and details. Like 0.1 for main outline and a 0.3 with 0.5 for details, for example. One important thing your liner should be alcohol and water-proof. Before drawing make sure your markers don't mix with or don't wash lines out.
5. Minimal Pallet and Sampling markers: As usual, the color on the clip and the color on paper are not exactly the same. That's why you should make some samples of ink on a blank piece of paper and some like this. It would be better if you will use the same paper that you draw on. This way you won't find yourself in place where you take for example, live gray but on paper much darker. Usually when it dries, it becomes more lighter, keep that in mind. You can say for other manufacturers, but corporate content ships special colored chat you can download on their websites, print and feel this, and see what is the respective colors. You can find them in class attachments. So hidden field color charts are handy. You can see how markers would behave, what colors you need, and what colors to buy. Little tip about storing markers, it's better to start with them horizontally and obviously close tie, hence making and spread evenly and prevent them from drying out. Then Co-pic state their markets can distort vertically and if kept properly at the last three years or something. I haven't tried that but I have no reason for distrust. Minimum palette. So most popular device is, you will need three shades of all primary and secondary colors. Like light red, red and dark red for example, [inaudible] , a few shades of gray, range from 01 to 09 with two shades step, for example. But I'd say you need to keep in mind what you draw. If it read, best train need more my RAM browns and yellows. If it would be nature, you will need more greens and a bunch of deep natural colors. So if you don't want to start with 48, color books for example. Now what you will draw, you can write down the colors you will need.
6. Basic Drawing Techniques: Welcome back. In this section, we will look at main techniques working with markers. First, one-tone even fill. Touching that fill, you basically should keep nib on the sheet, just like this. You get such fills without joints. Just keep your nip on the paper all the time. Also, you can do it with hedges, here it is. Next one, uneven one tone fill. Usually make hedge work or brush strokes. Use a broad tip for hedge and a brush tip for strokes respectively. Hedge fill is usual for interior sketch and especially for flowering or brick wall for example. Brush-strokes, make fill more artistic. It's common for full illustration, natural sceneries et cetera, here it is. Next one gradient. Well, you can make nice gradient with only one marker. Fill some area, wait a bit for ink to dry and fill next layer but with small area. Then again, rinse and repeat but you should remember that you can do it endlessly. At the some point you will see no more difference and it will start to bleed because you reached paper maximum in capacity in this area. Thus a classic way blend in markers of one color but different shade. We take three, lets start with the light one. Then without waiting for ink to dry, we go with dark marker. Then we switch back to light and blur border a bit and one more time with the darkest color. Basically go from lighter color to darker and blur joints with light color from the rest pair. Remember that best mixing will be those colors that close enough with shades and tones. I want to add a bit about blender. It's the same marker but filled with clear alcohol base. You can use it for washing out dark colors a bit for fixing little artifacts and mixing colors. Also you can use marker of much lighter tone to wash some darker colors but be careful with that technique, you can achieve dirty colors if you will over do. Hope you got the basic so it's time to move on to some practice.
7. Pencil Sketch: Welcome back. Now we are ready to start. We will need pencil and eraser in this tip. Don't be afraid to screw something up. You have an eraser just press your pencil gentle. Okay, first thing we should do is to understand where we should place our cupcake because it will be just one object, I think it's better to place it in the middle and not making it too big or too small. This way, it will neither face borders of paper, nor to be too small to be lost and create a feeling that something is missing. We'll make central axis and borders of our cupcake. If you about drawing two cupcakes or place in some letter with it, you should use rule of course. In short, you should divide sheet in nine equal part, with two vertical and two horizontal lines. Following that rule will help you to make composition more pleasing and harmonic. I'm sure most of you use it every day while taking pictures with your smartphone. Now we will start with the cup itself. I will make ovals for the top and bottom parts, making them with solid line to keep perspective. We will clean them later. Don't worry if your lines are not perfect. Remember we are making a sketch here and not going to fully replicate anything. Your reference serves just as inspiration and the if maybe. Then we approximately mark the creamy top of the cake. Keeping details for later. Then we remove needed part of our oval. Next to mark the cake, keeping in mind that dough tends to leave and hang a bit over the cup. We draw that influx making it to a bit uneven because dough does so. Next we add some berry topping, making some berries but not detailing them. The last thing, mint leafs. Now it's time to add some detail to cream. It's not the easiest part but you should carefully look at your reference, especially on the cream edges. Don't take it to heart. If you cannot achieve full resemblance, it's not the point. The point is to find out how does light go, where shadows and what is the shape of the cream? You just need to make it look like cream. Nothing more. Now we draw creams swirls. I'll start with central one. Slightly touches the berry. Yes, I'm not sure you have swirls on your reference. Just keep in mind that in the real life cream shapes are not perfect. As it goes out from [inaudible] too. I have no cup on my reference but I'll take one from another picture so you can see we can use as many references as we want. Yes, I am pushing too hard on the pencil. You can see the lines on the video but you should do the opposite. Lighter lines are easier to remove. Okay, here it is. Our initial sketch is ready.
8. Liner inking: We have our pencil sketch and next step we'll be outlining it. Before we start, we will slightly erase our guiding lines, but not fully, so we can see them. That's why we need an eraser that doesn't tear paper. Again, as I told in the previous section, don't push your pencil too hard. It's much harder to remove lines if you do. Now we have really subtle outlines. Next we grab our liner and start outlining our sketch. I'll go for 0.1. You can use any other but not the thickest one and don't get upset if you slip a bit, miss the line or you line is not straight, we're drawing cupcakes, or they're not perfect and geometry by default. Basically, all food is like that, all the nature, even architecture is not absolutely straight lines. Moreover, we are making illustration here, not the photo-realistic. Outlining the contour and here you'll add more details on blackberry outline. You can make dashed lines if you need. Then adding in some details. Now we're lining all the cup. Of course you can rotate your sketch book if you like. Adding a bit more details to our berries and adding edges tower cup. As you can see, it's unnecessary to finish the line. Well, we have finished our line art. So we finally erases all the pencil strokes left because you won't be able to erase them after next step. We are ready for the most interesting part, coloring. See you in the next part.
9. Coloring: Part 1: I'm glad you're back. Are you ready for coloring? A little thing before we go. If you are not drawing all fancy two-sided fold paper, check if you haven't forgotten about interlayer. Just to make sure our sketchbook and table as safe. Let's go. On my reference slide goes from top right corner, so the left part will be in the shadow. We start with cream. I prepared three whiteley tones, but you can make it of any color you like. Just make sure you have lighter and darker tones of that color. Remember, I'll talk that while working with markers we always go from lighter tone to darkest one because adding shade and making things darker much either. We take our marker of the lightest tone and make an initial field of whole cream. We start placing strokes according to our outline using brush or broad teeth. We can leave some areas as glaciers, but that's not crucial. Here we have shadow and here and this is lighter part. We can already darken some areas. We take darker tone and working on shadows. Here and here. Slight moves are the key to make sure we won't over do it. Basically we will have shadows and places where our squeals blocking the light. Here we have really intensive shadow. Next, we take lighter tone and start blurring these joint so their transition will be smooth. Our cream will be much darker as in one on the reference. But again, we're not copying it. Reuse it to place correct shades and check shapes. Anyway, ink will dry apparently making colors brighter. We add shadows in most shaded areas with darkest Dali hat. Here,here, and here. Then draw joints again with lighter tone. We have the darkest areas on the cream skittles. With the same tone we add little pieces of berry on behalf and the cream, just know the stripe but certs strokes. May examine be blown with lighter tone. It seems that this marker file and a dice. Anyway, we have finished our bulgy cream.
10. Coloring: Part 2: Now we will color berries. It's indeed dark green. The shaper has dull texture. So we don't add glares here. I'm using dark green marker and applying non-uniform sheath here. Just leave this tip for later. Now we take darker pen and let darker areas on the base. Next, we take black mark and finish the tips. Of course, we can use blander in their to make slight highlight, and some berries, but be careful and do not overdo these. Next, we will take down green marker and draw Blackberry. It has Claire's, do it glossy texture. So I'll try to save some areas. But don't worry if marker bleeds out, we can fix it with white pen later. Now this black marker, we add shadow on seeds of Blackberry. Now we'll do leaves, It seems to be mean such a gentle green color here. Will take light green and feel loops. These one, will be lightest one. We take one dough darker, slide a [inaudible] rainstorm these and fill other one this way. Take a new marker with docket then doing wings. Next as you suppose you take a lighter color and blurred joints. Now it's time to start working on cake. Dough will be darker then roughly, now white. For cake, I've selected P1 brown tones. Dough always have one colors as all the colors we used for drawing food are warm. Just because warm colors make food looks yummy until you draw something rotten. So what making base for our dough? Reuse non-human field basically because in most cases dough is spongy and not homogenous. Next we go to darker tone, edit some shadow areas, and then the green would be the darkest place. We will make this cub groups darker, create some depths. We'll work with that how to strokes. So retake darker brown, a flower set, and let's some shadow with dot work to darkest area and a little bit on the bright side. Now we can learn a beat with lighter tone, but it's not required. We will work with gold. It's made of lighter paper but it's usually becomes a bit transparent when baked. So we the take same lightest shade we use from dough. Add some shadows on the edges and crooks of the cup, placing them with such strokes. The most drastic part is in the bottom, so it won't be darker. You can place dots at there. Now, we take light gray and start slightly to desaturate some shadow errors but you can fully fill the cup. Next with dark gray, we start working on shadow errors and at dark brown here. Now we blur it and again connect some dots. Again, dim it brown with gray. Now, we take again dark gray. Down, I have the [inaudible] working on the bottom a bit making essence on darker errors. A little bit of brown, and we'll stretch it in light areas with light gray, and in dark part with this basic gray. I add a dark gray here. Now we add primary shadows. We add gray to creaking only in darkest areas here. We add some bearish shadows, and here there's a shadow of green. Now, we stretch it with the lightest gray. Now, with dark gray make shadow of green fallen under, then the bit on the leaves. Well, my edge part is finished. We have far worse shape colors, and of course you deserved a coffee. Take a break and we can move to final touches and details.
11. Final touches: Glad you're back. Now we'll do some finishing moves on our cupcake. So we take the thickest line over here and start working with it on outlines, because markers bled on some places. Next, we go for berries to separate them visually. A little work on blackberry won't hurt to add some depths and texture. Outline in the cream on the bottom in its darkest place, and a bit here. Next we go for our cup, cream. Now we add glares and some accents with white gel pen. Remember that we have more glares on the bright side, and almost no glares in shadows. You can't fix places if marker bled out of contour, something like this. Well, this is the final result. Our cupcake is ready.
12. Final thoughts : We finished drying markers and now we have our advertising cupcake. Now you can put it in some frame to decorate your kitchen for example, or you can digitize it and upload on print shop. Or you can just start a new color schedule, for example. Hope you have enjoyed my class and I can't wait to see your projects. If you have some questions, feel free to ask in discussion section. Thanks for watching and your positive review.
Olga Sh, food illustrator | graphic designer
