Skillshare Live: Drawing Simple Yet Expressive Self Portraits

1. Introduction: I have heard so many times people would say that they can't draw. That makes me sad because that is not true. Everyone can draw, everyone. That's a human thing, it's a human quality. It's just a matter of feeling a little bit more confident and taking breaks. Hi, my name is Karla. I'm an illustrator and I have been doing an editorial work for the past couple of years now. I have been a Skillshare teacher for about six months now, and it's been a great experience. I have two classes, one is on Character Design for narratives and the other class, which is a little bit more technical, is on color and how to pick color for, you and I are working with limited color palette for your illustrations. If you follow me on Instagram, you see that I love to draw people, people is one of my favorite subjects. Today we're going to be drawing a minimalistic self-portrait using a very, very limited palette. We're going to be using three colors for drawing, which is going to be a little bit of a challenge and we'll going to be doing a couple of warm-up exercises that will help us to draw a portrait a little bit more freely, rest will feel in a good mind space, so just have fun and enjoy the process. This class is beginner friendly. Whatever your level is, I really like starting from the very basics, I think that gives us a really good foundation to draw whatever it is that we want to draw. Don't worry if you're just starting in your illustration journey or if you'd just like to draw for fun. For this class, you're going to need very, very basic things. You can work with pen and paper if you want, like traditional media, it's fine. Any medium that allows you to work a little bit quickly, it's perfect for this class. I'm going to be using Procreate for this session. If you want to work digitally, that's fine too, and you can use any other program, doesn't have to be Procreate, any medium will be fine. The only requirement is for you to feel comfortable with that medium and something that's familiar to use so you're going to enjoy the process where we're doing it. I hope that at the end of this class, we are going to feel a little bit more playful in our drawings so that they can carry out with that playful sense of drawing into the other things that we do. This session was recorded live and participants were able to ask questions when we were withdrawing together. Now let's start drawing. 2. Learning to Draw People: Hi everyone, I'm Daniel from the Skillshare teacher team, and I'll be today's host for the live session with Karla. Karla we would love to hear a little bit more about what you have planned for us today for the live session. Perfect. We're going to be doing a minimalistic self portrait. We're going to challenge ourselves to use a very limited color palette. It's going to be a challenge for me as well. Hopefully, you'll find that fun. But before that, I would like us to do just a couple of warm-up exercises that I think that will help us as well to draw our portrait. As I'm doing it, I would like to share with you a few things that I think they are helpful when drawing people. I was talking to a student this morning, that sadly couldn't join in, but she was saying rather, that one of the things that she loves doing is to draw people. That she finds it really daunting. That she finds that it's the hardest thing to draw and I would agree, I would agree with this. I think partly or the reason why I think it's a bit difficult to draw people is because we tend to overthink it a lot. Maybe because we are people and we know what a person must look like, we tend to be a little bit more perfectionist; is the hand wonky, is the eye a little bit and that's perfectly fine. But I just want you to remember that we humans, our brains are equipped to recognize faces in a most simplistic way. There's actually a term; pareidolia, I think it's called, that when you identify faces in objects, because our brains definitely are trained to find simplicity and you're like, "oh, that's a face". So, don't worry too much about detail or perfection. I think that's one of the things that stop us when we're drawing. In this class, I would like us to feel really relaxed to embrace messiness. Do not think too much about the outcome. Just enjoy the process, do have fun and hopefully to use this, if you like to draw on a regular, to use these techniques, hopefully there 'll be helpful for you as well, and most and foremost you have fun, that's the main goal of this class. Awesome. Can you share just what students will expect to try to finish the live session with? What they 'll striving to finish? Yes. We're going to do a very simple self-portrait. I'll explain a little bit more as we go along, what I consider a simple or minimalistic self portrait. We're going to add color to it. We're going to try to work with a triad with three colors, so it's a very limited color palette. Also, the aim of the portrait is not to look like completely, completely finished, there might be a few things that may look like they're not quite ready, but I think that gives it a lot of personality. That's the main goal, to have that portrait finished with three colors and for it to look a little bit unfinished, a little bit unpolished because I think it gets a lot of character. That is the goal. 3. Warmup #1: Before we start with our portrait, I would like us to do a few warm up exercises that will help us to warm up our joint muscles. I think this warm-up bits really important. Well, not this one in particular, but I think every time we draw, I think it's important for us to do some warm-up, I think and it's something that I was telling you before, I think is like when you go to the gym, I think it's important for you to stretch your muscles to avoid any injuries or also to make the most of your muscles like if that's a thing, I don't go to the gym, so I don't know what I'm talking about, but I do know that warming up definitely helps when you're drawing to feel less stiff. Also to feel more confident. I think that's the thing. Like usually people, like they say to me that they can't draw, I don't think is that they cannot draw is just a matter of confidence and warming up really helps with that. Hopefully this warm-up exercises will help with that as well. To feel more comfortable would drink something difficult as a person, but it's going to be fun. Hopefully, I promise it's going to be fun. I'm going to be sharing my screen on procreate. We're going to start with a blank page. If you're working with regular paper, we're going to need three sheets of paper and the paper is fine. We are going to divide our paper into four sections. Let me just show you on screen undoing. If you're working digitally, I would recommend using a brush that doesn't have legs streamline. That kind of just allows you to actually move your pencil well, it really easily. I'm going to be using the HB pencil, which is one of my favorite ones like that's the one I used for textures, for sketching, for everything that comes with procreate. We're going to divide our paper like so to have four panels. Now for this warm-up exercise, what we're going to be doing is to draw the same object four times. That's where we have four panels. Now, here's some rules. I would like us to see this warm-up exercise. I say game rather than like a warm-up exercise because I would like us to feel a bit more relaxed and not overthink what we're drawing. We're going to start growing our first object in the top-left panel right here. We're going to have a time limit. So that is the catch here. For the first part of the drawing weren't or the first panel, we're going to have one minute to draw the object that I'm going to tell you what it is in a second. There's other two rules that I would like us to follow. The first one is that no referencing is allowed. Let's say as an example that we need to draw a lamp. You could have one right in front of you, don't look at it. Just try to remember how it looks like. Just try to use your memory as much as you can. The other rule is that and that's a hard one, no erasing is allowed cylinder. So it doesn't matter what you're drawing looks like we're not looking for perfection here. We're trying to challenge yourself a little bit, so no erasing it's allowed, no referencing is allowed. For the first panel we have one minute. So I'm going to time the whole thing right here on my phone. I would let you guys know how much time we've got left as we go along. But yeah, for this first bit, we have one minute. The object that we're going to be drawing right here is a cat. Again, if you have a little cat over there, just don't look at him. I just draw it as you're remembering. So we're going start grab your pen or pencil or whatever it is that you have to draw. We're going to start in 3, 2, 1. Let's go. Okay, so don't feel pressured. I already feel the pressure right now, but remember this is not about making like accurate drawn cat. It doesn't matter whether a cat looks like. The goal here is conscious to use her memory a little bit. If you're working digitally, I think is really I was going to do, and that's why it's like a quick reminder. Try not to do the double tapping because I think we do it instinctively. We have 10 seconds to finish our cat. Again, it doesn't matter whether cat looks like. Time's up. Timers keeps going on. This is my one-minute cat. The cheekbones are amazing. Thank you. I do have a little cat and she's got like really a prominent cheekbones that one thing I remember about cats. But let's see how that goes. Now, let's move to our second panel. We're going to draw a cat again, but for this cat, we've got 30 seconds. Let me just get the timer ready. We're going to start drawing my cat and 3, 2, 1 let go. Oh gosh, this is it doesn't matter if you don't fully finish it. That's okay. We have some five seconds. Sorry, I forgot to look at the at the timer. Time's up. We start to see a few difference there in our cats. The next one, we're going go to our bottom-left panel. Who at the time of accident. Again, let's try to draw a cat again. We have 15 seconds for this one. Get ready. We're going to start in 3, 2, 1, lets go. Carl keep drawing. Quick question of different poses for the cat, I would say go for it if you want to change up the pose on the next drawing, go for it. Definitely, yes, definitely. Times up and I didn't finish. But yeah, about pose yeah, I'm just going for the same one because it's my safe pose. But obviously if you want to change the pose, that's completely fine. Everything is allowed here, but erasing and referencing. Let's I'll put a little cat I didn't finish him. Next one is going to be tricky. Next I'm going to be tricky because we're going to keep drawing a cat, but we only have five seconds for this one. It's going to be difficult. Five seconds. Grab your pencil and we're going to start in 3, 2, 1. Time's up. This are my cats. You may be wondering right now what does has to do with drawing a portrait, and I promised you there's a reason for this, and we'll see what it is when we're done with the next activity. 4. Warmup #2: Now we're going to try the other warm-up exercise. I'm going to add another layer here and hide this one. We're going to be doing the same. We're going to be drawing four panels. Same rules apply, we had a time limit for each and one of the panels, no referencing and no erasing. Now the referencing here it's important, if you have a mirror in front of you or a photograph, something at home or where we may have that, don't look at it, it's important. Again, we want to work with our imagination and our memory. Well, I'll let you know in a minute. Let's start with our first panel. Again, we have one minute for this one, and what I would like us to do here is to draw, this is not going to be your final self portrait, but I would like us to draw our self portrait. Again, messiness is allowed. Doesn't matter whether portrait looks like, it'd look like a with a cat, my five second cat didn't look necessarily like a cat. But this is all about embraced the slowness of your drawing. I'll let you know, because I think I'm going to be spoiling it and if I keep talking. We have one minute. Don't look at yourself in the mirror or a picture. We have one minute to draw our face or body as well. Again, everything is allowed in this bit. We're going to start. Let me just set the timer for one minute. We're going to be drawing our self portrait. Again, this is not going to be our final thing. This is just to warm up. So we're going to start in 3, 2, 1, let's go. I think for this one I'm only going to be drawing my face because I'd rather [inaudible] have enough time. We still have plenty of time, we have 30 seconds. If want to you're allowed to you add maybe shading to your portray, add more details to the clothes , some earrings. Time is up, sorry I just got a little bit too much into my drawing. We have one minute for this one. Same with the cat, we're going to have 30 seconds to draw the next panel. We're going to start in 3-2-1 and go. It doesn't have to be the exact same pose. You can try different things in here as well. The main thing here is for you to feel it a bit more free and to not think too much about the outcome. I think that's important. Okay, time's up. That went pretty fast. I know the one minute one seems to go for a little bit longer, but the 30 second one they just go. I think those are my favorite ones wants to be [inaudible] 30 second ones. Let's do this exercise, again. We're going to try with 15 seconds. I'm going to be saying this a lot, let's just be judgmental about our own drawings. This is not about how pretty it looks or how functional our drawing is, this is just about three things. That's the main goal of this exercise. We have 15 seconds for this one. We're going to start in 3-2-1, let's go. We have five seconds left, and time's up. This is going to be the tricky one is a five second one. Get ready, and we're going to start with this in 3-2-1, let's go. Time's up. The the ears is [inaudible]. Okay, so these are my drawings. 5. Warmup Lessons: I would like to tell you a little bit more why I think this is a good exercise specifically when we're drawing portraits or we're going to be drawing something that we want to depict a little bit more, perhaps not accurately, but the way we want to draw it a bit more specifically, if that makes sense. Let's look at our cat drawing for a second. If we look at a one-minute cat, maybe we're going to notice that we added quite a bit of stylistic things to the cat. Perhaps we added more fur, perhaps we added shading and we have time to do so. Maybe if we had time, we drew a funny pose. As time progressed and we had less time to work with, our cat still looks like a cat, but it varies in many ways. I think this exercise is important especially in the five-second one. In the five-second one, like I personally doesn't have many details. I can still tell that this is a cat, mainly because of the ears and the whiskers. I was thinking like a winking cat almost. I like that. It is a winking cat. My winking cat here, you can see that is still a cat even although it doesn't have many cat-like qualities. It doesn't even have a body. But the ears and the whiskers give away the fact that it's a cat. You can sit that this features were repeated in each one of my panels. In those four panels you can see that all the cats, maybe the face changed a little bit, the body changed, but I chose, my head chose to keep those features. I think this is important especially when we're drawing portraits, and especially when it's a minimalist portrait. These exercises are good because help us to capture the essence of the object or the animal or the person that we're drawing realistic without having to think too much about it. It allows us to simplify it quite a lot. Then we can start building our portrait from those simple features, and I think that's really helpful. I find it really liberating because sometimes when you see the whole picture is a little bit tricky to know where to start. I think this allow us a little bit more. In case I wanted to draw a more finished cat, perhaps it will pay more attention in the ears and the whiskers. Perhaps there's going to be the attributes that I would like to keep or to add more details, like more shading to make it look like a cat. In our self portrait, it's the same thing. If you can see mine. All of them have us. I'm just trying to find the pattern here. I think all of them have a couple of similarities. The one-minute one has this bun, I like to keep my hair up in a bun. I do belly. Every time my hair is in a bun, today I wanted to look a little bit nicer, so I brushed my hair. But usually, my hair is up in a bun and it's a mess, most of the time. I think that's one of the things that make me who I am, me and my messy hair. Also there's like, rosy cheeks. I got this question. It's really funny because sometimes I get questions, is why do your characters always have rosy cheeks? It's like, well, it's just because, unconsciously I have a skin condition and I think you can see it on camera and I'm always like, I always have rosy cheeks, and unconsciously they think that's something that I incorporate into my drawings. Maybe because at first I was really self-conscious of it. I was like, you know what? I'm going to embrace it. It's not going to go away, so it's fine. Messy hair, rosy cheeks, and I think my eyebrows as well, like I think that is something that I don't know. Like I think they're not particularly anything, but it's something that maybe I like about myself and I tend to have drawn them like quite slick and straight. Those qualities repeated themselves a little bit, maybe not in this one. But I try to depict, the messy hair, the cheeks. Also that the close, like now in quarantine I don't necessarily dress up as much, but I used to like doing that. I only go for comfort now where I still try to slip a little. But if you look at your drawing and if you've find certain things that you think makes you unique, perhaps, those are the things that repeated themselves and were in each one of the panels. That's maybe something that I would like us to work with when we go ahead and draw our actual self-portrait. If let's say that you draw your hair, if you have short hair and that's something that repeated themselves. Maybe I would advice to add more detail to those things. Maybe your nose is something that, you drew in a particular way, and is something that you would like to focus on when we're drawing a portrait. The clothes, even the pose, because I have a friend and she stands always like and that's so unique to her. Like if I were going to draw her portrait, I would definitely draw her doing like the way she stands, is so unique and so her. So this exercises, I think they're great to not just to warm up, but to capture the essence of what we're doing. The third exercise that I was planning on doing, and I will tell you what it is if you want to do it at home, is to pick a random object and do the same thing repeatedly. I'm going to give you and show you the website that, like you're seeing for this, its theme. It's called pretends.org, and it's just the random object generator. It will just give you different ideas. In case that you're having that blog. I guess, you don't know what to draw. I think using this is great, is really quite crystal. Like specific, which I think it also helps. I think I love. I really like working with limitations. I think they free us up a little bit in a way. I hope this little exercise was helpful, in case that will be helpful when we draw our self portrait, to know where to start or what to draw a little bit more in detail because it's going to be minimal. We're not going to be able to draw a lot of things, so maybe these attributes will help us. 6. Starting Your Portrait: We're going to draw our portrait right now. For this portrait, there are no limitations, you're allowed to reference if you want and you're allowed erase for this one. Do whatever you feel comfortable with. While I'm doing it, I'm going to be sharing a couple of things regarding emotion and pose that I think are very important when we're drawing humans. I think maybe these are going to help us a little bit because definitely drawing humans is little bit complex. I am just going to be drawing my portrait like a bust from up to here, just because it's a little bit easier for me and I don't want to over complicate it, but I'm going to be sharing that did some posts anyways. When I draw my characters, I like to draw the face shape first. One thing that I would like to say before I actually start drawing the portrait is it, there's nothing wrong with this. But if you do it, I will encourage you to try to challenge yourself and do a little bit differently. I do it as well, but that's what I'm saying right now. I know that some people, when they're drawing freehand figures, they tend to they stop. I would encourage you to just go all the way and draw the circle. Because if this is a stylistic choice, that's fine. There's nothing wrong with us, but I think this cannot stop us from doing our own thing if that makes sense. I have seen so many students with great line work. It just flows and I think it comes from not really stopping themselves when they are drawing. Like seriously limitations, our own soap limitations can stop us a lot and maybe without even noticing it, you're stopping yourself from letting your unvoiced come through. If you feel a little bit shy while drawing and doing those motions, I really would encourage you just retry it higher and just go all the way. It doesn't matter if it's messy, doesn't matter if it's wonky. We're learning in this thing called life, and there's no such things as mistakes. Keep trying, keep learning and keep trying experimenting, and that's the only way because that's another thing that I get asked a lot about. How do I find my style? Experimenting, making mistakes, it sounds really cheesy, but it is true honestly just experimenting and keep learning new things. I just wanted to say that because I do see it quite frequently that some students not real extra because I've seen them do that and it's like no, like tray harder and I promise you that you're going to feel more free and that's the goal of this. We want to enjoy this process, we don't want to feel that this is like a chore or task. We want to actually enjoy it. Back to the portrait. I like starting with a face shape of because I think this helps me to place the nose, the mouth, and the eyes a little bit easier. Another thing I like doing, and I'm going to use another layer to draw that. I like to divide my face in four, I know that some people like to do it in six or eight even I've seen people who like to do that. But I like to do it in four because I think keeps it a little bit more playful. Instead, like the eyebrows go here are the eyes go here. It's just allows a little bit more freedom to work with. I like to place my eyes on this vertical line right here. Now when it comes to eyes, if you've seen my Instagram, or my work in general, you see that I my characters are quite simple. They don't really have a lot of stylistic things in her face. I think because I've seen like many Illustrators are so talented and they a lot of little details. I do like to keep it simple. I let to keep the eyes with enough information to make them look like eyes, and that's it. I'd encourage you to do that as well sometimes like there's this really good Illustrator that's called a crossword and she only does the eyes and the mouth is just like a smiley face. It's still like a very lovely portrait because she adds more details to the character and it makes it look like portrait without having to add a lot of information to it. For this, when I said I was allowed to erase, I'm going to erase because I know I didn't like that eye. Allow me drawing the eyes on that line and I am going to be drawing the nose. For me is just a straight line and a vertical one. Just another information again to make it look like a nose. But there are some people who like to do a little triangle, or if they're big noses like a curved line and they look beautiful, they look really beautiful. For me the mouth is just like a simple line on this way, do you think that's enough. One thing I also wanted to share. If you want to draw your portrait looking to the left and if you want to do this dividing thing, I would advise you to draw this line a little bit to the left and the line like that and that's going to make a character perhaps look a little bit more slightly tilted to the left. If you want your character to be looking up a little bit, it's the same thing. But instead of drawing the horizontal line like completely straight, trend wrote a little bit curved and that will make it look like the character is looking a little bit up and has led to a face like that. Then you can add a little bit more shading here to make it look like the light hitting this way. But I think this is quite simple and it helps to identify where you want, the eyes and the mouth and the other features. 7. Adding Different Emotions: Now I'm going talk to you how I add emotions to my portrait. I'll let me stop drawing the mouth because I want to talk about emotion, and why I'm doing this for things, or how I give this face as well, there's a reason for this. The reason for this is because I have found that if you want to draw a minimalistic portrait, but you still want to convey emotion, the placing of the eyebrows and the mouth is quite important. I like to divide the place into fours because I think that gives me a good guideline on where I want to place them. For example, usually I found that if you placed the eyebrows quite low, our character is going to look more sad or worried. For example, let's say like that, and if I place a mouth closer to this vertical line, our emotion is quite muted, perhaps we're like a little bit more worried, perhaps. However, if we draw our eyebrows a little bit higher and the mouth a little bit lower, that's a completely different emotion, even if our eyes are the same, that portrays something different. So that's another tip if you're wanting to draw minimalistic portraits. Maybe the eyebrows and the mouth can give a lot of emotion without making it look too complex or adding any more details. If you want something a little bit more neutral, I would try the eyebrows and the mouth to be a little bit more equidistant to each other, so I like them, maybe, here, here, and here. That gives the character a little bit more of a neutral expression that doesn't look worried. It doesn't look surprised or concerned. It just look calm, and I like that. I aim to be that character, just to feel calm. The good exercise for making the portrait of the image you want experience for yourself. That's actually, I don't know why I think about this whole thing of manifesting things. I don't know what I think about but maybe it's part of that, just manifest what you want in your life with your drawings, maybe it will happen. It's a good way, like if it's a self portrait, it's good to see yourself in that position. Now I'm going to just erase this bit right here, I don't need the the divider anymore. I think my face shape is a little bit wide, so I am going to correct that with this. I think my face is a little more angular, so now I'm going to erase the rest. Hey, [inaudible] quick question. We got on eyes and was around incorporating eyeglasses. Do you have any tips for how to incorporate glasses? We're drawing those in. If you wear glasses everyday, I would try it to make it a big feature, if that makes sense. For example, I don't know what it's called that thing on the glasses that goes right here, the base of the glass, I don't know what it's called. I like to draw it right in the middle where the line would be as well so it's not on the same level as the eyes, if that makes any sense. Then I try to make the glasses big enough for them to be recognizable, but a little bit smaller make this is a little bit wonky. The eyebrows are still visible, if that makes any sense, so just to keep it. If you want, another thing that you can do is, like I said, some people instead dividing the face into four, they like to do it in six, so maybe you can try and do it like that so it will give you a better idea where to place them. If your glasses are little bit like more like of statement glasses, if they have a cool frame, then maybe focus with color on them or either quite simple, I would just recommend drawing the shape of them like nothing to keep them as simple as we can, just draw the shape. I have circular glasses, and I was draw big circles, and for me, that's enough information to make them look like eyeglasses. But if it helps, maybe dividing image is good. Let me just draw this again because I think is not clear. Maybe something like that, and try to draw the glasses within those lines. Of course, this is quite wonky, and draw this part of the eyeglasses there, where the eyes go, like so. It's seamless, so it looks a bit balanced. You could try the exercise of drawing different glasses, as well, just to get enough information. What does glasses look like, maybe they just need like a couple circles in a line, or maybe you need something different. This is all about personal language as well, so I hope I answered to the question. 8. Drawing Poses: Before we go on, I would like to give you a few tricks on how I draw poses. One of the things that I really recommend when drawing poses is to break down everything into geometrical shapes. For example, those little dolls that they sell in art stores, I found them really creepy, little dolls that you can move around, and to draw poses. I actually find them quite complex to work with, so I would recommend breaking it down into certain shapes like a circle for the head, a rectangle for the body, and if you can, try to use like little circles for the joints like the knees, and the arms. Just because that will help was with proportion because, if we just draw, all of this is going to be the arm. Sometimes that can be tricky when maybe the arm is going to be shorter. Drawing the joints help, and I think breaking it down like this help us quite a lot when drawing poses that are a little bit tricky. For example, if you want to be drawing a person that's sitting, maybe we'll want to do it freehand, that's going to make a little bit tricky because we're seeing the whole picture, and I honestly think starting from the simple more basic things allow us to keep adding details as we go, and makes it more easier, and fun. It doesn't feel like there's an overwhelming task that we need to do. We're going to draw a person that is sitting. What I like doing is think of well, it's the head, and it's facing that way, and there's this rectangle so it's going to be facing that way so maybe instead of facing the front is going to be facing this way, so it's more like a rectangle, and maybe it's going to be holding something. The hips, I forgot to mention this, and that's important. The hips. Let me just draw this little guy again. The struggle of drawing things on different layers, if work digitally you know.. The circle, the chest, the hips. I think this is quite helpful. Instead of having those like dolls that I told you that I saw in the art store, I think those are quite difficult because they have quite a lot of circular shapes, and for me that makes it a little bit more complex so this is maybe something that would be helpful if you're drawing poses. You're going to be drawing someone who is sitting, just to break it down like that, and other hip will be like that out, let's say the legs, don't forget the joints, and that makes it a little bit easier to then draw the flesh or the details. Let's say [inaudible] is going to be looking that way, and then the arm. Another thing, if drawing straight lines doesn't work, maybe try with a noodle shape. I think that's a good technique as well. It's not going to look accurate, but it's going to look really flowy, and with a lot of character so that's another thing that I would recommend, for example, arms. If you don't want to draw line joint, line like those noodles that come in mac 'n' cheese like that, they help a lot. Then that can help you to start growing a little bit more easy or flowy for your actual final thing but yes. Those are quick tips when it comes to poses. 9. Adding Unique Attributes: Now we can go back to our portrait and add the elements that make us unique and special. Again, we don't want to overthink it too much. I don't even have banks. I don't know why I always want to draw myself with real banks maybe because that's something I wish I had. As we did in the warm-up exercise, we really want to focus on the attributes or qualities that repeated themselves. As I said for me is that my hair is always messy in a bun, so I'm going to draw this bun. Maybe I'm going to just focus on adding a little bit more detail on the hair and erasing the bits that are no longer needed. One thing that I was going to say if you want to copy what I'm doing that's fine, but I would encourage you to add your personal touch because it's really, really inspiring to see how other people see the world or how other people see themselves is so inspiring and I think it's going to help us all to see if you can share it later. What it looks like. Quick question on how you did the cheeks, did you use a different brush in Procreate? That's a good question. No, it's the same brush is the HB pencil and what I do is I tilt the Apple pencil a little bit. Instead of drawing like this I tilted the muscles I can like that just to create a shading. It's the same pencil, it's just tilting the Apple pencil gives you different qualities and not just with the HB pencil, with any brush. If you tilt it quite a lot, you're going to get different results. As I said, I like working with figures for poses. For the neck, I like using a triangle or a trapezoid or whatever it is called and I think that it helps me just to know where the shoulder should go. I like drawing a line like that and the arms. Lately I have been trying to keep my drawings like this. Like a little bit more playful because I do think that it just gives it a little bit more personality. Maybe not, but let's say that I enjoy a little bit more than when I'm drawing really carefully drawn portraits. I actually have more fun just having a little bit of lines are not quite in place. I'm going to be drawing myself wearing a cardigan because I can't wait for fall to start so that's going to be that. For this I may be stare in some shading as well because remember that we're going to be using very, very limited colors. Shading can be a good thing to do at this point if you want obviously if shading is not your thing is not necessarily your style and that's fine. Let me just correct the face shape a little bit. Clearly like the other one. I think I look more elegant in myself portrait but that's okay. We're allowed to cheat a little bit. See I am doing it right now, I'm overthinking it and now I'm adding a little bit of issues drawing this bit. If you're having issues like this, if you're drawing a line and it just doesn't seem to be quite right. I will recommend going to a drawing something else in your drawing. Don't stay in that area because it's just going to become impossible then. You going to keep drawing the same thing over and over. Just take a little break and maybe draw the hair. Maybe do something that it's more fun in the moment and then go back to it don't put any pressure. This is the thing, I have heard so many times people say that they can't draw and that makes me sad because that is not true. Everyone can draw everyone, that's a human thing, it's a human quality. It's just a matter of feeling a little bit more confident and taking breaks. I think it's the same with life, honestly. Just take some breaks when things aren't going that well. Don't feel pressured, enjoy the moment. [inaudible] as a metaphor for the way to live life. Just trying, taking breaks and coming back to it. I'm trying really hard to follow my own advice, but if you can follow my advice its good advice. It's following the advisor that's the tricky part but yes. When am drawing hair because as I said, hair for me is one of the things that I think it's my unique qualities, so to speak. Instead of drawing hair by hair, I just like to draw a few lines and that gives the idea of that being here without having to be very specific. Again, just going back to basics and whatever it is that you think makes you unique, something that you like about yourself, or even things that you don't like about yourself. Honestly as I said, I was really self-conscious about my skin and drawing those things over and over again has helped me to embrace and be like you know what it is, what it is and that's okay. Now let me just go back to this part that I couldn't see I'm actually quite happy with this bit. Honestly taking breaks does really help. I would like us to finish this up just quite quickly. We want to make it minimal. We don't want to make it a realistic portrait, we want to have enough elements to make it look like a portrait, but we don't want to make it like a lake hyper-realistic or anything like that. I think those features that we picked or that repeated themselves are going to be enough to give away the fact that this is you. Yeah, that's good enough. I think I'm happy with my portrait so far. Just let me just draw more shading here because as I said, we're going to be using three colors for illustration here. Any shadowing that we can add at this point is very welcome because it's going to help us a little bit. That's my portrait. 10. Choosing Colors: Now, let's talk really quickly about choosing a limited color palette that we're going to be using for our portrait today. I'm going to show you a color wheel, we're not going to talk about color too much into detail, because I have a class on that if you want to go and check my class and we talk about a lot of things that I think are useful to know, but right now, I like us to talk a little bit about color. What layer is up? I would like to show you quickly the color wheel. Were going to pick three colors for our illustration. I will like to show you my process when I pick colors. Again, it's more detailed if you're taking the class and you'll see it there. We're going to work with a triad. A triad is basically three colors in the color wheel there are equidistant to each other. There's the same distance between the yellow, the blue, and the red and those are the primary colors too. Those are the ones I am going to use for my illustration. You're free to use any other colors. There's quite a useful at the beginning asking me what colors are your favorite and there were so many triads as well, like the teal and pink and purple. For my illustration, I am going to be using this one. This color wheel is going to help as well because obviously if you want to work with other colors, let's say that you want to work with greens because is your favorite color. We can work with green, blue. Well, it's more like purple. Blue, purple, and orange can work really well together. If you want to work with yellows oh, it's going to be the same as I'm going to be working. This purple, blue, and orange work really well together. If you have no color rolling around, because sometimes we do have this things hanging around and how specially, if you like drawing, that's perfectly fine. But if not, I'm going to give you a few colors that already picked in case you want to copy those colors or you can use the ones I'm going to be using because I'm going to be cheating a little bit. I said that I'm going to working with the primary colors. I'm going to be working with yellow, blue, and red. But each color has different color properties and for me, and for my style of illustration, this colors seem a little bit bright for me, I like more pastel colors, colors that are live him renewed it. When I said that I am going to cheat is because I am going to be using a different version of those colors, which are this more muted version of yellow, a darker version of blue. This is tricky because pink it's in between this two colors like purplish and red but because this color wheel only allow us this variety, I am going to treat it as a light red. Pink is going to be my light red. I'm going to be working with a darker blue and a more muted version of yellow. That is allowed if any colors you want to work with, that's fine. As I said, if you don't know what colors to pick, don't worry. I have selected quite a few if you want to use them too or any colors honesty there are no wrong answers here. This is like artists sulfur giving everything is allowed. There is no right or wrong. You can pick any of this colors that are part of a triad and there's pastel colors too. Another thing that if you were digitally, this is another thing that I like doing when I don't want to think too much about how to pick colors, I usually tend to work with markers like this markers. What I did is I just grab a piece of paper and did a lot of swatches of each and one of the markers, took a photo of it and then just sample them here on procreate so I can have the exact same colors of my actual markers here. I think that's helpful as well in case that you would like working digitally. So yeah, there are the same colors that I like to work with and I also did it with pencils, with my color pencils just to have the exact same shade. As I said, I'm going to be working with this too. Another reason why I like working with this navy. Now as they said, I think my hair is one of the things that make me a little bit or that I think that make me, me if that makes sense but sometimes we're working with this color, I find it a little bit difficult because I am set in my ways and if I want to work with pink is like, but I want to work with pink and maybe this color doesn't go. I tried to use navy blue because it's still a dark color, so I can still use it for hair and maybe its not going to be accurate but it's okay. As I said, there are no such things as right or wrong when it comes to art, we can experiment. 11. Coloring Your Portrait: Now that we have picked our colors, we can add them to our portrait and add a few details to finish it out. I am going to be using just a regular brush, I don't think there's one came with procreate but honestly the brushes that procreate comes with are great. I think they are all really, really good and as I said, I'm going to be assembler color of the Copic marker that I already have and I like using for my hair on a regular basis. When working digitally, I like working on the layer underneath, just so I can still see the pencil or the details. For this particular illustration, I want keep them messy. So I don't want to think too much about perfection. I think minimalist of portraits and messiness go really well together. I don't know why, there's something about messiness and limit in very simple portraits that kind of makes it look like more finished, it looks intentionally unfinished, and I like that. Hey, Carla. What's the brush that you're using now that's of procreate? This actually didn't come with procreate. I cannot remember where I got it from, but I'm pretty sure if you google Joe watercolor detail brush, your going find them. No, we're not in color. Another thing that is like cheating, but not, it's to add layers to it to create more depth. We're working just with three colors, but we can still add a lot of shading and create a different shade of that color. Just because you're working with a limited palette doesn't mean that the color has to be or look flat, just enough information to make a look finished but unfinished at the same time. The shading that we did with the pencil helps as well to make it look a little bit darker, which gives it a little bit more depth. I am going to just use the same brush just to draw the baby hairs, because I have a lot of flyaway, I always have flyaway. This is actually quite accurate, this is how I look most days. My third color was pink, let me see if I can just keep it here on screen. I like using pink in my illustrations for shading as well. Regardless of the skin color, I like to add another layer of pink or orange and I'm not going to do it in this one because as I said, I want to keep it minimal, but I usually tend to, when I work digitally to set it on multiplier or on linear burned. That kind of gives it a nice, burned, shadow quality when I'm doing shadowing on skin but right now I am just going to use it for my cheeks. I'm going to keep adding layers so it looks a little bit more red but it's still the same color, so technically I'm not cheating. Maybe the mouth swell to create lips and to give a little bit more depth to the fake piece, like here where the eyes go to make it look a little bit more, here with the hair falls on the forehead. Hey, Carla. There's some questions about the filter, the Linear Burn, can you just share how you found that and use it for the watercolor? Yeah, Sure. You go onto the, I think option, I don't know what it's actually called. Here you have a lot of blending options. It's usually set on normal, I like to set it here on Linear Burn. Sometimes and depending on the color and I think that's important mentioning, it isn't going to be that noticing on Linear Burn, so maybe try color and burn as well. Oh, in this color for example, Color Burn doesn't work but Linear Burn does. Right now because I didn't have a color as a base let me just try and use, let's say this color. So you can see the difference between the modes that's multiplying, color burn with that color doesn't necessarily work, in linear burn it looks a little bit more burned, then it would do under normal setting. The colors look a little bit more vibrant than they do on normal. When you're working with a color base, I think this is a great option to add shading and maybe use the same colors that you're working with on a limited palette but to give it a little extra pop of color but my preferred one is this one. They're just like here on the blending modes on procreate but yet for this one, because I am not going to be working with a color as a base I am just going to use the regular one. Oh, that's not the color I was working with. If you tilt your pencil on procreate, because this is the actual color, so you can see it's like quite bright, but if you tilt it, you're going to get a more muted version of that color or more diluted. I think that's perhaps a quick tip to try. If you tilt your pencil, I think it's easier to keep working on adding more color because if you work with a very dark shade, I treat this as if I we're working with watercolors, starting with a very pale base and then adding more to it as I go. I like starting with a very diluted version of our colors so I don't feel too pressured like the color is not exactly what I wanted. I feel like I have more control basically. For this one, I'm going to use this much but I don't tend to use it as much, but for this one, I think I'm going to try and do that and I am going to be using the yellow for the clothes. If you're working digitally, because this happens to me a lot. Don't forget to work on separate layers because sometimes you want to get rid of something and it's too difficult because there's details on that layer that cannot be changed. 12. Adding Details: Now, we can add them to your details to finish well. Again, if you're working with a limited palette, you are allowed to erase as well in case you want to add details to your drawing. I am going to be drawn this stripy cardigan. Maybe I'll flower here like one of those printed t-shirts. But yeah, this is just me erasing things. It's not necessarily adding an extra bit of color. You can also erase, Oh, it's a different layer, you can also erase to add more detail on the cheeks, maybe the lip, to give a little bit more light, there as well. That helps to keep them minimal. Also, just real quick, I wanted to touch on balance and how to keep balance. Especially when you're working with a limited color palette. For this one I think it's quite straightforward because it's just like the face, the hair, and the shoulders. But just a quick tip, when you're drawing with a limited color palette, think in advance, where are you going to place your color. I think it's quite important. Because otherwise, you may have a lot of pink on one side, a lot of purple on one side, let's say. It looks unbalanced. I maybe adding a little bit more details. So far I think I'm quite happy with my portrait because it still looks quite unfinished. But I like that it doesn't look, I think it gives enough information for me to know that, that it's me. That's me with my hair, that's me with my eyebrows, and with my yellow cardian. One thing that I really encourage you to do is to sign your portraits or your drawings because it makes it official. It makes it, officially, it's finished and it's mine and especially if you put your work out on the internet, it's really important to have your little mark there so like nowadays, sometimes people think that, artist free, so that makes it yours and no ones else. Definitely don't forget to sign your work, it's really important. If you want, you can also add a little bit of coloring your background, which I think I will do. Then I think that's going to be my last detail for my portrait that I'm going to be adding because I do want to focus more on, as I said, the other qualities that I think they're unique to my face. I think this is another thing I like to do and I'd advice if you're working with a limited color palette, if you're working with a solid color background, I'll like to add little tiny details of either one of the colors that I'm working with or maybe white. If you've seen on Instagram that sometimes I like to draw little dots, like flame dots, I do this necessarily because, oh, it looks good, I do it more for the background color to not look as flat. It's just a little detail that I'm adding. You could add flowers as well, you could add like little lines, something like that. But I think for me it looks a little bit better having little details as well because it doesn't make it look as heavy in the background, I think. But of course that's a completely personal choice. Yeah, me personally, I think I'm quite happy with my portrait. But you know what it is. You can always find things to add. This is the same yellow that I used, but I'm just going over the yellow width in some places to make it look like shadows. But yeah, I think this is my portrait. I think I'm quite happy with it. Yes. 13. Q&A: Now we're going to open it up to questions from students and audience. Here's a good question of where do you find the most inspiration for your drawings from [inaudible]? Well, that's a very good question. I like to write a lot. I think every people who like to draw, we have a very overactive. Why do you think most humans we have an overactive mind? So I think writing things down helps me a lot to not feel that stressed out about things and I think I get a lot of inspiration from what I write. Also, when I feel that I don't have any inspiration, I like to go on little walks, my house is in the middle of nowhere, which is cool. It's cool because I get to see a lot of flowers, wild flowers, a lot of incredible sunsets. I'm very lucky that I live in a place with really nice pink sunsets. So going out always helps me in my writing as well. I think those are the two things, and music, listening to music always help. Another question here is just around color, is there any colors that you never use or colors that you typically avoid in your illustrations? I think orange. I don't know why I like dark orange, because I too love rounds and like this orange that I think it's more brown pieces right here that's orange, but its brown. But orange I never use. I find it very difficult. I don't know why, orange is I think orange is one color I'm going to try. This is going to be my challenge for the week. So I'm going to use orange in one illustration, so, yeah. 14. Final Thoughts: Thank you so much for being here. It means a lot for me that you guys are here, joined together is a great phrasing to connect with all of you and I hope that you guys enjoyed it, if possible, I would encourage you to keep trying the warm up exercises, especially when you feel stuck. I think they're great little things to try when you feel a little bit uninspired and also if you can, you can draw portraits of friends and family and if you're practicing a lot and that will be great and it will be fun as well. It will be a nice gift as well if you want to give them to friends and family, so I would encourage you to keep trying and keep exploring new things. Keep drawing and let's just embrace the niceness that life is. Let's just not fumble everything that comes our way. Please don't forget to upload your projects, your project gallery section is so inspiring to see your work and is so good to see all the unique features in one place. Please don't forget to upload it there, I would love to see it. You want to know more about me and my work, please check out my Skillshare profile, where you can find my two classes and you can reach out to me if there's one. [inaudible]