Stylization for Illustrators: How to Draw Objects Less Realistically

1. Introduction: Hello, welcome to stylization for Illustrators. How to draw Objects. Less realistic. My name is Mr. Tom Froese. I'm an illustrator. I'm a teacher. I've been teaching online for about a decade, and I'm also a newly minted author. I have a new book called Drawing Is Important. So I made this class because as strange as it seems, many artists find it harder to draw less realistically or non realistically. So if that's you, you've come to the right place. So maybe you've looked at a stylized illustration, something that has a kind of look to it that other people have made, and you've wondered how they've figured out how to do that. You might want to do something similar in your own work because maybe you want to have a more unique illustration style, but you don't know how to get there. Especially, you don't know how to do that in a way that isn't just copying what other people do. You want to do something that's unique. So I'm going to get into this later in the class, but I'll just say that stylization is something that you can develop on purpose. It's not really a special talent, but something that you figure out bit by bit. I remember a clear point in time when how I stylized actually became very clear to me. Was this project here that we're looking at for a cover for a little local magazine called The Growler, and my idea was to have this character on it. I wanted some kind of guy drinking beer, but I didn't know how to fit it into this squarish space that I had to work with. I drew this beer bottle shape, and then I thought, what if this guy just fit into the bottle? What if he was somehow fit inside, like a ship in a bottle, I guess, how would he fit? What would his posture be? Importantly, I give myself permission to break free from realistic proportions and anatomically correct or possible poses. That might seem obvious at this point, but for me at the time, it was like, I get to do that. Now, this was more related to stylizing people or figures, and I've already taught this in a class called Odd Bodies. But my point here is that so much of this is about mindset. We're not bound to draw things as they are in reality. We get to play with them. We can actually just have fun and draw completely in the wrong way. So the backbone of this class is what I call the five principles of stylization, flattening, abstraction, customization, exaggeration, and singularity. And together, these spell faces, which hopefully is a convenient mnemonic device for you. Now, I'll explain each of these step by step in the class, and you'll get a chance to practice each one as we go in little drawing exercises. For the final project, we're going to be illustrating a favorite object based on your favorite era and hobby, and that can be used for something like a T shirt or an art print or poster. The focus, of course, will be on the illustration, but I find it's always helpful to think about how an illustration is actually going to be used because illustration is always made for something. Real. To complete this class, you're going to need some basic drawing tools. Honestly, for most of those class, you'll probably just do fine with a sketchbook and a pencil. If you want to complete the final project, then you'll also need some kind of illustration tools, whatever you want to use will do. I'll be using Procreate and my custom brush pack called Inky Basics in my demos, if you want to follow along or use that, I'll include this for free with a class and you'll find that in the class resources page. So if you're ready to start styling objects with me, let's begin. 2. What is Stylization?: First things first, let's talk about what stylization is. Stylization is about drawing things in a non realistic way for whatever reason that might be. For illustrators, it's usually about having our own unique style. When you see the work of an illustrator and recognize their style, a big part of this is in how they stylize or reinterpret real life things, creatures, people, and so on, in a more interesting and recognizable way. You know, just take, for example, this tiger that we're looking at here by Alison Martin Provenson. You can see that it's a tiger, but obviously it's not a photograph. It's done in a very playful. Stylization can be about telling a story as we saw in the previous slide, or it can be to mystify the ordinary, like what we see in this abstract version of a tiger by Celestino Piari. Stylization can also be a way of creatively drawing attention to a particular quality or idea. In this clever illustration, the stripes are actually formed by where the leaves those green leaves around the edges overlap the tiger in a playful way. Why is it so hard to stylize for some of us? From a young age, we're taught or just instinctually believe, I guess, that the most important thing to learn about drawing is how to draw realistically. This is what most people think about and probably want when they want to learn how to draw. By the time we're adults, we have this one way of drawing that seems to be the most important and it's become so ingrained in how we approach drawing that it's hard to shake out. Anything that's not realistic that comes from our own hands feels like we're doing something wrong. We might even think that it's a bad drawing. How do others know how to stylize and how do they know how to do it in a way that doesn't just look like a bad drawing? You might think that such lucky illustrators are just born with a certain natural talent and the rest of us will never have access to that. You have to be talented to figure out how to do something in a unique and stylized way. Well, the first big shift that I want to give you in this class is that stylization is something that you can learn and develop. It's not a magical skill that you're either born with or not. The second big shift that I want to give you is that there's this key difference in intent between drawing realistically and drawing in a more stylized way. They're both valid ways of drawing, but one has a different purpose. You can put it that way. It's a difference between depicting reality and expressing an idea. Take, for example, these two illustrations representing a typewriter. They're both stylized to a certain degree. They're clearly both not photographs. One is far more about an idea than a particular instance of a typewriter. This is an example of the principle of abstraction that we're going to talk about in a little bit. So any illustrator is going to stylize to some degree. Some illustrators will stylize more and some will stylize less. In my maps, for example, the figures and objects that I include are stylized as both a storytelling and design decision. That's kind of my reason for stylizing here. Want to represent the various buildings, beaches, figures, and so on, in a way that tells the story of the place, but in a more simplified way. In a map, there's so much going on. I need to keep each icon simple while they're still being I want those icons to be recognizable for what they are. But I don't want to simplify them so much that they just become really boring. Then finally, I want everything in the composition to just look like it belongs. I try to stylize all the elements in the same way, and this is part of how I achieve consistency within the image. So in my more conceptual illustrations, these are more idea based. You can see that I don't represent reality very faithfully here either. Instead, I look for ways to use things as symbols to express ideas. The important thing here is that I have to balance expressiveness and clarity. I want to play with the proportions of my figures and simplify things like the hourglass or the pencils in this case, but not so much that they stop making sense to the average viewer. So stylization isn't just about making things zany or jazzy or crazy. They have to be grounded somewhat in what people understand as reality or as a meaningful symbol. These are just a few examples of what stylization is and what it can look like. So just to conclude, stylization is about drawing things less realistically. And as illustrators, we usually have a specific reason for doing that. So I named a few of these reasons in lesson storytelling or just to have a style. But now we'll turn the question to you. Like when you're here taking this class and clearly wanting to learn how to draw less realistically, why? What's your reason for wanting to draw in a more stylized way? You can write this down in your sketchbook or share it with a class. Either way, I'll see you in the next video where we'll take the first steps in the hands on part of the class. 3. Choosing Your Object: Now it's time to take that first and important step in the class project. You're going to be illustrating the same object a lot in the next few lessons. So it's important that you find it interesting enough to draw over and over and over again. So just to start, think of your favorite era and your favorite hobby or pastime. And then think of an object that represents both of these things. This will be your muse for the rest of the class. For me, I love the 1960s and by far, my favorite pastime is running. So after a bit of brainstorming, I landed on what is probably the most obvious thing that's related to these two things, which is running shoes. For you, take a moment to brainstorm what that is for yourself. You have your favorite era, maybe it's the 1980s and then your favorite hobby, maybe it's I don't know, winemaking. What does winemaking in the 1980s look like? That's very specific, but you can start to think about what are those objects that would be related to that. So that might be wine bottle, corks, some kind of machine to put the cork in, a carboy, like, the thing that you actually, like, ferment the wine in. And then you can make it even more specific by thinking about what did these things look like in the 1980s? So this example is maybe an example of something that might be more challenging because maybe there's not really an 80s aesthetic to winemaking. Maybe there is, but that's the idea. So it might take a little bit of trial and error to get to the perfect object for this class, but that's basically how we get there. So the next step is to go and find a specific instance of your chosen object. You might already have it in mind. Maybe you went right for a particular make and model of a car or a favorite camera. For me, I went to Pinterest, and I looked up 1960s running shoes. And then from there, you know, a bunch of results came up and I found a pair of shoes that I thought were pretty cool, and this is what I chose. You're looking at some beautiful Nike daybreaks. I think that they look both nice and vintage, and I now basically want to own these shoes. Before we go on, once you've selected your object, go ahead and draw it in your sketchbook. Draw it in a way that you would normally do right now before you learn anything in this class. You can try to stylize it as best as you can, or you can just draw it in whatever way comes natural. It's important that you do this now rather than after you learn and actually understand stylization more because that way you can compare how you draw the same thing now with how you'll draw it later. So pause this video now and spend maybe 5 minutes drawing your object. When you're done, you can share it on the class projects page and then come back here to resume this lesson. So let's talk about what makes a good subject and a not so good subject, at least for this project that we're going to be working on. So the first tip is to find something more iconic rather than generic. Something that's iconic has features that are unique to it, like the CLE running hat. Well, there are a lot of imitators of this style of hat today, CLE kind of invented this multi paneled look. You know, it has these different panels of different colors, and the hat's a specific shape. And then they have this large CLE logo right on the front. That's kind of like the classic product that they make. Anyone who knows about these hats would recognize one even if it didn't have a logo on it. Now the opposite of iconic is generic. Take the pink hat on the right, for example. Do you know what brand of hat that is? Can anyone even lay claim to that style of hat? Even though I pulled that directly from Lulu Lemon'sPducts page, it's basic and it's open source. You know what I'm saying? No one owns that look and that's what makes it generic. Either way, it's recognizable as a hat, but it has no real distinguishing qualities that we can sink our teeth into today. The next tip here is to find something that has a well defined shape. This is versus something more shapeless and blobby. Case in point, can you tell what these objects are, you can probably tell what one is, but not the other. As delicious as that pano choco looks, it doesn't really have a lot going on in its overall shape, and that makes stylizing it more difficult and the results of trying to draw that in a stylized way more disappointing. So the next tip is to choose objects that have the right meaning built into them. For example, if you need an object to represent the idea of fruit, then one of these is going to do a better job of that than the other. You know, even if you knew that the right object was a dragon fruit, it's more obscure than an apple. Now, whether you need to choose a meaningful versus obscure object kind of depends on the assignment. In today's class, choosing something with a more defined shape is more important than whether it's symbolically meaningful. All right, so the next tip here is to choose an object with enough detail to work with. Again, there's no rule of how complex or simple your subject is. It really depends on the assignment. For this class, I recommend choosing an object that has enough defining details, both in the overall shape and within it to play around with. For example, perhaps a single orange is too simple, but a bag of oranges like the one I'm showing here by Alice or provides lots of interesting details to play around with. On this note, I'm showing two illustrations, not reference photos. But for this class, definitely use real world objects either from a photograph or something that you actually have physically in front of you. Otherwise, we're just stylizing someone else's stylization. The next tip is to find a reference of your object that shows it in the most recognizable way. If you own the object, then place it in such a way as it can resemble what we're talking about here. Often if you're trying to capture the likeness of an object, it's best to show it in a flat, straight on view, like what you see here with this Botti stovetop espresso maker. So the images here show the same espresso maker in two views. In one, it's iconic shape. It's really clear, while in the other, it's more obscured because of the viewing angle. If you work on a flatter graphic style like I do, you'll struggle to make recognizable stylized illustrations when you're trying to draw them in some kind of angle like this. They call this three quarter view angle. I'm not saying it's impossible to stylize an object at angles, such as this Eames chair or the espresso maker we were just looking at. But if you're struggling to draw something in your own style, this might be the reason why. Speaking of Ems chairs, some objects just have a built in style to them, like the Ci hat or the BLD espresso maker. These have an iconic, instantly recognizable shape. But just like anything else you want to draw in a less realistic way, it can be fun to play around with iconic objects like these and just see how far you can stretch it. 4. Principle 1: Flattening: Now it's time to dive into the five principles of stylization. Make sure you have your drawing tools with you because we're going to be drawing our different objects in many different ways to learn these principles by hand. So I mentioned this at the start of the class that the five principles of stylization are flattening, abstraction, customization, exaggeration, and singularity. Now let's go through each one of these in more detail, starting with flattening. So flattening means to remove the illusion of depth or three dimensionality. Its purest form, that means no shading, no shadows, and no perspective. A key feature of my own style is in flatness. I don't show much depth, if at all. I like how it looks when I flatten things, and I like the challenge of trying to represent the real world in a flatter way. And by that, I mean, with minimal solid colors and most elements defined by their own shapes rather than outlines. So imagine a silhouette of the object, and it's still being recognizable, like we see in this vespa writer. Flattening is the most fundamental quality of stylization and possibly one of the hardest shifts to make if you're used to drawing in a more realistic way. So this is just an example of an Eames chair shown as a flattened, more pure silhouette, so on the left, and then in a very simplified way, but in a more straight on view, like we see on the right. Flattening can happen in full force or it can be more subtle. Just, for example, the espresso maker on the left of this slide is more extremely flattened while the other retains some information about its depth. Both are equally valid choices. It really depends on personal preference and sometimes the context or the assignment. Either way, in both, the specific object they're representing is very clear. So let's dive into our first drawing exercise. So in this exercise, we're going to practice drawing in a flatter way. So first, draw your chosen object with some details, but without any sense of depth or dimensionality. And then in the second part of this exercise, draw the object as a pure silhouette. And in this demo, I'll show you how I did this with my own chosen object. So first, I'm drawing the shoe in a flat way, and I've chosen to draw it kind of in its most basic view, which is the side view. I mean, when you think about a shoe, this is the elevation or the projection of the shoe you think about the side view where you see the toe and the heel and everything in between, as flat as possible. This would be a lot harder to draw in a flat way and resist adding shading or some kind of suggestion of three dimensionality. If I were trying to draw in a more foreshortened way, like with the toe in the front, and then you don't really see the heel at all. It's possible to draw that flat, and that could be very interesting exercise, but of course, it just makes it harder. So that's what's going on here. And now, in this second view, it's really straightforward. I'm just drawing it as a pure silhouette So I was able to just copy the first shoe and then fill it in. And then I see the silhouette. And even though this is a very basic exercise, it allows me to really see how effective showing this shoe at this straight on view is presenting or representing that object in a familiar or recognizable way. If I were to have drawn that shoe from the front view, like with foreshortening with the toe in the front, you don't see the heel or anything like that, filling this thing in as a pure silhouette would clearly not be very recognizable as the shoe that it is. 5. Principle 2: Abstraction: So the next element is abstraction, and that means reducing the object to its essential visual qualities. Think of abstraction as removing details all the way up to the point where it stops being what it is or being recognizable. Flattening is actually a form of abstraction because we're stripping away information that describes depth and perspective. In my own work, flattening kind of just naturally leads to abstraction. Example, this image of the Taj Mahal, it's actually a smaller spot illustration in a picture book because it's small, I didn't need a lot of details in it. And so this is just an example of work where I'm playing with a balance between too much and too little detail. And I really like playing with this quality. The question you can ask when attempting abstraction can be something like, what is the minimum amount of information needed for someone to know what this is? Classic example of abstraction that I've used in other classes is if you want to represent some kind of coniferous tree, you can show the tree with all its little needles and branches and its exact shape, or you can just draw a triangle, perhaps with a little stem on the bottom, and that could equally represent a tree, I guess, a pine tree, but just in a more abstract way. There's no right or wrong amount of abstraction. It's more of a spectrum. It always depends on your style and on the specific project you're working on. So in this image, I'm just showing you how abstraction can be more intense as in the left image and more subtle as in the right image or example here. I think it's also important to note that in the most abstract example here, it kind of needs those hands there to retain any semblance of a typewriter at all. If it was just the dots, you might see those as something completely different. So now we're going to do an abstraction exercise. And that means drawing our objects three times, first with maximum details, next with medium details, and then third with minimal details. I'll show you how I've done this with my own object. So in the first version here, I'm just drawing this shot with as much detail as I see. I'm not really holding back too much. It is kind of flattened, but you can see I'm even adding shading and tone to differentiate the different panels on this chute and your object can look super busy and detailed. At this point, it is supposed to have the most detail. For the second part, I'm removing some of that detail and we're calling this the medium amount of detail. And so here I've stopped drawing tonally, and I've even kind of simplified how I'm drawing the treads. I'm being a little bit lazier here. I'm letting myself not draw them in a more square way. It just took less effort to draw as these little undulations. Now, in the minimum detail version here, I'm just drawing it as minimally as possible at the risk of it being, like, really boring, to be honest. So I've just drawn kind of like the outline of the shoe, like, the outline of the silhouette, basically. And now I'm not filling in much detail, but I'm starting to name what the parts are that make this shoe what it is. Kind of jumping ahead here because this is actually more of a singularity exercise that we're going to get to in a bit. But in this abstraction exercise, we are thinking about what are the qualities that make our shoe what it is, and how much of this do we need to leave in for it to actually be recognizable for the exact specific object that it is? Then finally, I decided to go back to the medium detail version because this is kind of the sweet spot. You don't want it too detailed and you don't want it too abstracted, normally speaking. And so what I'm doing is just tracing over my original shoe, but with just a little bit less detail than I did in that first version so that it looks exactly like a Nike daybreak shoes just flattened and I have the details outlined in this way. Look different for you, depending on how you draw. And, of course, it's going to depend on the object that you chose. But if you do this extra step, you want to think about what is that sweet spot between total abstraction and too much detail. 6. Principle 3: Customization: The next principle of stylization is customization. This means editing the real world object to suit your needs. We can start with a source image or object as our starting point and then customize it in some way, whatever way we need to make it more interesting or to tell a specific story. I think this is fairly obvious but of course, we don't want to just illustrate from a reference photo exactly as we see it. I just need to make sure you know that you're allowed to deviate from your reference image or from your real world object that you're drawing. Fact, you might want to do this for various reasons, perhaps to distance your original art that you're making from the intellectual property of the photographer. That's important that you don't plagiarize, or at least that you don't make it so close to it that you can be accused of plagiarism. And also another reason is just to make the job easier for yourself. Just for example, this was an icon that I illustrated based on this reference photo, and of course, I didn't want to illustrate all those people. It was just a lot of detail. I had 24 icons to do in this map. I had a lot of work to do, and so I made it simpler for myself. There are three ways to customize or edit what you see in the original source. And so I just have three examples of a Nike shoe here, and hopefully this clearly shows what these different levels are. So we can subtract specificity, and that means taking away something that makes it too particular. Sometimes we want to suggest something without directly showing it like a particular model of shoe or a particular brand. Maybe there's a copyright issue. So in this case, we might want to remove the Nike logo from the shoe, and it's just more of a generic. Also add context or story to the image or otherwise change details in some way that we want for whatever reason. For example, here I just added a shoelace where there wasn't a shoelace kind of coming off of the actual reference photos that I saw, and this just adds a little bit of character to the image and perhaps a tiny bit of story. The third way we can customize is in editing the design in some way. So this is where we can change details, however we want for whatever reason. So in this example on the right, I've removed the swoosh from the shoe, but I thought it looked too plain. So I added back my own logo. I made it up. It's just a starburst, basically. And this brings back some detail without bringing back that specific brand that I didn't want to include in this example. Okay, so for this exercise, we're going to practice customization. Draw your object, customizing it in each of these different ways, subtracting specificity, adding extra context or story, and editing the design or the situation in some way. So first, I'm subtracting specificity. So that means I'm removing some kind of detail from my Nike daybreak shoes that makes them less specifically Nike daybreak shoes. And the obvious thing to do here would be to remove that nike swoosh. That's such a big part of what makes these shoes what they are. And so what I end up with is kind of a generic branded shoe. So in the second part of this exercise, I'm adding context or story, and that just means adding details to it that weren't there in the reference image for some reason. And in this case, I've added ankle, like you can see the sock there coming out of the hole part of the shoe. And then there's the toes wiggling out of a hole that's been torn in the toe. Then the lace. And so just adding personality and character. And why would I want to do this? I mean, it really depends on the situation. But the point here is that I'm able to riff on the object and bring more to it than what I actually saw in the reference image. And then in the last case here, I'm design editing. And design editing doesn't always mean like you're changing something and being a designer about it. In this case, it is a little bit more literal. I'm changing the design details of the shoe. I've removed the Nike swoosh. I've added in my own logo, this little Starburst, and I've changed the panels. Of the shoe, like the way the wrap around toeing looks and the thing that wraps around the heel. And this is just to show that you can take a reference image and not follow it exactly. Sometimes you just need to know what is the shape of a shoe or what's the quality of a running shoe or a vintage running shoe, in this case. And that's all you need. You don't necessarily need to show a very specific model. The other thing you can do, as you can see here, is just get carried away and see how far you can customize it. If you're having fun and you can't stop, keep going. And if you want to share it with the class in the class projects page, that would be great. 7. Principle 4: Exaggeration: The next principle of stylization is exaggeration. This means pushing one or more characteristics of the object beyond realistic proportion or intensity. I think this is the one you're going to have the most fun with. So just looking at the Eames chair in this example, what do you notice about it? I've exaggerated the complexity of the wire frame legs. Sort of plays with two things about this feature of this iconic piece of furniture, the complexity of the frame itself and the experience of trying to draw it. Exaggeration isn't just a stylistic decision. It can also be a conceptual or storytelling one and this one, I'm using it as a way of showing that frustration of trying to draw the eiffel base of this a. So in this sense, exaggeration is not just about scale and proportion. It can apply to any quality, complexity, texture, color, pattern, weight, delicacy, and so on. So in this old illustration of mine, I'm exaggerating or otherwise distorting the proportions of the body and the number of joints per legs. So exaggeration here is I'm going overboard with the bendiness of a pose. I'm making hands too big, the nose is too big. These are all kind of ways that I stylize. And if you think about caricatures, where people will draw someone and make fun of their big nose and make it huge or they have big ears and they'll draw giant ears. The caricature is using exaggeration, and that's what this principle is all about. Often exaggeration is about identifying what's most distinctive about the object and then amplifying it, such as the rectangularity of a city skyline or perhaps the wiry spiny complexity of a bunch of shopping carts. This is an illustration by one of my favorite illustrators, Ben Shen. So exaggeration works best when it's rooted in something real. Not distorting randomly, you're finding some actual essence that's there and turning up the volume. The question to ask is, what is the most interesting characteristic or thing about this object, and what happens if I push it further? And just an important aside is that exaggeration can go up or down. So if something's small, you can exaggerate its smallness to make it even more small. Okay, for this exercise, we're going to be playing around with exaggeration. So identify at least one quality of your object and draw with that quality pushed as far as you can go while keeping the object recognizable. You can do this for as many different qualities as you'd like. So for my object, the quality that I wanted to start pushing was narrow. And this is just a quality that a lot of vintage running shoes have. If you look at their side profile, they're not very chunky. They're very sleek and narrow. And so I'm exaggerating a little bit with this idea, and I kind of started off a little bit too chunky to start. And it was actually kind of like the opposite. And then in the second one here, I really went long in this shoe, and that's how it got super narrow. And so I was satisfied with that as an exploration, and then I moved on. The next quality that I wanted to play with here was the waffle sole. That's what Nike calls these soles, with these chunky squarish things, these treads. It's a waffle. And so here I'm making those treads really chunky. I'm really exaggerating how big and high those are and how prominent they are compared to the rest of the shoe. So the next quality that I wanted to exaggerate and riff on here was this wedge shaped mid sole. That's the white foamy part under the main body of this hot. And interestingly, when I made it really big like this in the drawing, I realized that looks a lot like the Nike Alpha flies, which is, like, the super shoe that elite marathoners wear, and this is something that was designed decades after the daybreak. But it is very interesting just to look at this modern shoe. It has this exaggerated sole, and it makes me wonder if designers at a company like Nike actually just riff on their own products to get new versions of their shoes that look like their brand, but just with slightly altered qualities. 8. Principle 5: Singularity: Final principle of stylization is singularity. So this is about identifying and expressing the defining quality of the object. What makes it singularly what it is, as opposed to any other thing? We've already explored this principle when we're looking at the Nike shoes and the Bileti espresso maker. At this point, you might be catching on to the fact that these principles don't work in isolation. They kind of happen all at once. The takeaway for this principle is that there are two different ways to think about singularity. There's the type level where we're asking what the defining qualities of a specific type or category of something are. And then there's the specific level, where we're asking what the defining qualities of a particular instance of something are. So what are the defining features of a stovetop espresso maker in general? And what are the features essential to the very specific model of espresso maker we see on the right, the BL Mocha Espress? Which level you work at really depends on the intent you have for a given illustration. Are you representing an idea of something or that specific thing? Perhaps more than in the other principles, singularity is the most related to what your object actually means. Not just to what it looks like. Both meaning and style are important and will happen at the same time, but knowing what you need to express the most, either the idea of the object or the specific instance of it will help you know how far to push one quality or the other. And I'm just showing a drawing I made a long time ago or an illustration of Asab 900, which is a very iconic older car, and it is a very specific model. And if you know cars, then you'll recognize that this is this particular model. And I couldn't just draw a general car to express this. I needed to add qualities like the spoiler and just the very particularities of its shape. It's just a strange and quirky car. So for this exercise, we're going to play with singularity. So first draw your object at the type level. And so for my example, I'll be drawing a 1960s running shoe or a vintage running shoe. This is what I mean by type versus specific instance. Next, draw your object at the specific level. And so, again, in my example, that means drawing specifically the Nike daybreaks. So in order to do this exercise, I pulled out some more reference photos just to get a sense of what do vintage running shoes from the same era look like? And I'm starting to identify with these little callous what those qualities are, like these branded panel swooshy things. That's where the Nike logo would go or the adidas stripes. And then they have these kind of wrap around outsole that kind of wraps and curves up over the toe in the front and often wraps around the heel as well. And then there are these suede panels, and often there's this kind of nylon mesh material between them, and they have these kind of bright bold colors. And so that's what I'm riffing on where I'm drawing just like this idea of the 1960s running shoe. What are those qualities in other versions of product as the Nike Daybreaks? And now, in the next part, I'm drawing specifically a Nike Daybreak. And of course, after all these exercises, I have the essential details of what makes this particular object what it is in a singular way. But I've decided to actually go and pull other versions of Nike running shoes from the same era to further dive into what really makes a Nike Daybreak what it is compared to other models. It's kind of sibling products there. And I'm just playing around with what that form is in different ways and even drawing it at a different angle there. There's no wrong way to do these exercises. These aren't about making some final illustration that you're happy with. It's about just asking the question. What do each of these principles mean? 9. Putting it All Together: All right, you've practiced each principle in isolation, and now it's time to bring them all together, and that's what this lesson is about. For this exercise, we're going to set our references aside and try to draw our objects purely from memory. This is key to drawing things in our own unique stylized way. The way this works is that when you draw from memory, you're probably going to get a few things wrong and a lot of how you draw in a unique way is in how you fill in those gaps. It also gives you space to draw in a more expressive way because there's no correct version of the thing staring you in the face. Without a reference image to go by, you maybe you have to flick a little switch, but there's a part of you that wants to do the correct thing and see the image, but it gives you this wide open space where you're like, I guess I have to make it up, and it's in that making things up where your style and that kind of magical shift can happen. I mentioned this already, but the five principles of stylization aren't like a checklist that you kind of go through one at a time in isolation. They kind of happen all at once. I guess the idea here is that you often control which ones you lean into most, and it always depends on the situation. As you go in this exercise, try to consciously apply the various faces principles in different ways. So that probably means drawing the object over and over and over again. The end of this class, you should have at least one version that you're happy with. And then you can use that as the basis for the basic version of the final class project. So you're probably also going to find that you tend to lean into just one or two principles the most. When you look back at all the exercises you've done so far, do you notice a trend? Are there certain principles that seem to come more naturally to you or ones that you're most satisfied with when you see the results? These might be clues about how stylization works as part of your illustration style. When uploading this one to the class projects page, I encourage you to share about your process, of course, showing those drawings, but also writing in some reflections. So earlier on in the class, I had you pause the lesson and draw an object before learning all these principles and going through the exercises. And now you've come through kind of learning what the faces principles are and more intentionally brought these into the drawing that you have now. So I encourage you to reflect on the differences between your first drawing and the drawings that you've done now. 10. Extended Principles: Repetition and Variation: In this lesson, we're going to move beyond stylizing just one specific object and play with multiple objects of the same type. Recalling the lesson on singularity, we played mostly with stylizing the specific instance of the objects, such as the Nike Daybreak running shoes. We're going to play with stylizing a bunch of different objects of the same type. For me, it's going to be 1960s running shoes or more broadly, vintage running shoes. By exploring variations of a certain type of object, you can become more fluent in generating your own versions with or without references of that object in the future. Hopefully, as a result of doing this exercise, we'll help you draw whatever your object type is from memory in your own way without needing the training wheels of a reference image. Here's the exercise. Find three to ten different examples of the same kind of object and draw them all in a similar stylized way. For example, in my project, I chose a handful of different types of running shoes from the same era as 1960s Nike daybreaks. So I look for similar models in other brands like Kuma, Adidas, New Balance, G, and so on. Then I drew each one of them using the faces principles, aiming to use the same level of stylization across the entire set. So again, I'm not drawing them kind of flat and then abstract and then customized. I just try to apply an even quality of stylization to the entire set so that they were stylistically consistent. Now, by studying different objects within the same category in this way, you start to see patterns. Like, what are the basic parts to a certain type of object? What qualities or parts are essential to the category and which are kind of like extra or very particular to just one model. What distinguishes a Nike daybreak from a Gla E lamb, for example? Like you're going to find that they share certain qualities, kind of, on average, the vintage running shoe looks like this, but then there's little extra things that each one of them has a detail that makes it more uniquely what it is. This exercise feels a lot like the singularity exercise when I was riffing on the type of object, in my case, the 1960s or vintage running shoe. The difference here is that I don't have to draw these ones from memory at first. I actually have my reference photos in front of me, and I'm trying to draw them all in a very similar style. So same viewing angle, and eventually I'm going to lead up to actually drawing them all with more or less the same shape as well. So after kind of studying them in O mode or observation mode in a rough pass, I do a second pass here. I started drawing each one based on the same platform, if you will. You can see that I drew the exact same or I actually copied and pasted the exact same shoe shape over and over again. I tried to hold to that shape for every single model as possible. And so here I'm making a family of vintage trainers that are specific, like Glas, Nikes, New Balance, Adivas. But making them look more similar to one another. And so this just gives me a chance to practice stylizing in my way in a repeated way that's more intentional and creates a really cohesive set of objects in this particular sketch. So I did this in three total passes, and in my final pass, I wanted to refine and simplify my drawings as much as possible, and I really can't get to this level of consistency and refinement in the set without going through them a few times. In the end, I have a set of sketches that I could easily transform into a completed illustration. The end of this exercise, you'll have a set of stylized sketches that can become the basis for the extended version of the final class project. Remember to share your sketches on the class projects page, along with any notes about your observations or your experience of stylizing any struggles that you encountered, any breakthroughs that you had along the way. 11. Final Project: All right, it's finally time for the class project. This is where everything you've been drawing can come together in a more final color illustration. All right, so here's the brief. We're going to be creating an illustrated graphic for a T shirt or print and we're going to be basing it on one of the sketches we made from the last two exercises. There are two options for this. You can do whichever seems most interesting to you or you can do both. In the more basic version, you just would illustrate a single object. Basically transform one of the sketches you made in the exercises into a final illustration. In the more extended version, you would be drawing multiple objects of the same category. So this is based on that variation and repetition exercise we just worked on, and then you're going to show them all together. And I'm just showing you my example here where I have just a single Nike daybreak, just a beautiful, simplified, stylized version of that shoe. And you could see that being like a cool graphic on a T shirt or maybe a sticker. And then in Option two, I show how I've done lots of different types of shoes within the same category, and that kind of creates a cool I mean, that could be a nice T shirt graphic or an art print, as well, especially if you're really into vintage sneakers. So here are the project constraints, and these are just kind of more technical things. So I suggest working at eight by 10 " at 300 DPI. This gives you enough resolution and sort of size to make a good T shirt graphic or, you know, framable art print. When you're saving your file, no matter how you're working on it, whether it's Procreate or Photoshop or Illustrator or something, save the output file as a JPEG or PNG so that you can share it to the class projects page on the web. I recommend that you work in a maximum of four colors, and this just will help you. It forces you to be creative because if you start feeling like you're running out of colors and you don't know how to represent a part of your illustration without an extra color, you have to be creative in what you substitute for that color. Maybe it's adding more texture or maybe it's drawing an outline, or maybe it's overlapping those colors so that they create an extra color. Those are all ways of adding to the sense of stylization in your work. So for this one, I recommend not having any background, so I just have white or a solid color only. You can think of that solid color as being maybe the color of the T shirt that might actually be a good thing to think about before you begin. Now, just a few tips. I would aim for a balance of simplicity and interestingness. How much detail can you remove before it becomes unrecognizable? And what details can you leave or add in that makes it more interesting. So just a word on what finish means in this context, it's about having a stylized drawing or illustration, of course, with intentional decisions about color, line, and composition. That's it. It's not about being super highly detailed or highly rendered. The tools and media that you use are completely open. They're your choice. You can use digital analog, mixed media. You can just do it with colored pencils in your sketchbook. Whatever is natural to your practice. Now just a little disclaimer. Of course, I'm showing you how I'm applying the stylization principles in my own way. I'm not saying the way I illustrate in terms of my technique or the colors or things that I like in my own work are the only way of doing it. I'm just showing you how I would do it because that's really all I know. I hope that you're able to take the principles and apply them in your own way. But I also want you to feel free to learn by what I'm doing, especially if you're starting out you need to imitate to learn. Later on, you can innovate when it's time to earn, when it's time to make original illustration that is more from you, you'll start to figure that out later on. So I'm working on Procreate, and of course, the first thing I want to do is create a new canvas. And because I'm working in a specific file size here, I'm going to create a new Canvas type being eight by 10 ", and I'm going to set the DPI to something a little more than I'm recommending. But I'm giving myself 350 DPI in case I need to make any of my final illustrations a little bigger for some unknown reason to me right now. So the next thing I do is paste my kind of sketch from the previous exercise down here and work at the composition a little bit so that's interesting. So that means adding a few details that I want in my final illustration, which includes some custom lettering, little labels under each shoe, and then ultimately reorganizing them so that they're not so much in a straight up and down grid. I want them to be a little bit more free flowing here. I have my sketch composed in a way that I'm happy with, I set the opacity of that sketch layer down to around 20%, and I set the blending mode to multiply, and this will just allow me to see the illustration I'm building from it through the sketch and actually create all the layers of my final illustration underneath that sketch in my layers. And the brushes that I'm working with here are in a custom brushet that I made called Inky Basics. I'm including that in the class projects and resources. Another thing just to note is that I'm working in a way that I like working, which is in minimal colors, and I multiply those colors over top one another so that I get these kind of nice extra colors called overprints. You'll see what I mean as I go on. I just like the constraint of working in minimal colors and seeing what I can do with those and what kind of surprising qualities come up when I try and overlap them in this way. I do my best not to have to outline anything in my final illustrations. Everything's shape defined is just my preference. And so that often requires going back and forth, changing the colors here and there, and kind of working that out as I go in the finished illustration. I find it's very grounding when I'm working with brighter colors to have one dark color, and that kind of helps the other colors kind of pop forward more. And like I said, it just gives each element in my illustrations a bit more of a grounded look. Once I've done one of the shoes, I move on to the other looking for ways to use the same colors. Now, looking at the Nike Daybreak specifically, I had fun with this one, not using color for certain parts of the shoe, so it looks like the shoe is complete, even though I actually don't have anything in that white area there. And this is another part of what I enjoy working with when it comes to illustrations. And one thing that I didn't think about while I was sketching that I came up with here was having a hole, kind of, like, almost like punching out a hole where the laces would go and repeating that element as much as possible throughout the set of shoes. That just creates a sense of visual harmony to the whole set. No pun intended. The logo in the Scene shoe logo in the middle there has holes in it in reality. And so it was convenient that I could use my little hole punch motif in that as well for some extra surprise harmony. So one way of stylizing that you don't get to play around with so much in your sketches is in colors. So one thing you'll notice is that the color of my reference shoes, like in reality, are very different than the colors I'm working with here. Sometimes I reference them as directly as I can. But most of the time, these are just non existent colors for the models of shoes that I'm referencing. This is customization, basically. I'm using my own colors and adapting those to these shoes just because these are the colors I always work with. Particularly in the new balance shoes that I'm illustrating here, the colors were just basically tone on tone, like blue on blue. In this case, I'm just letting myself customize the colors in a way that I want and that work well with my constraints. So for the goals here, I found it hard to not use outlines or lines to define these panels. I would have preferred to use shapes that were filled in, but because I wanted these Gas to be pure red, aside from the outsole there, I did end up for now, just using outlines. Later on, you'll see that I figured something else out for these and allowed myself to deviate from this all red look. You can't tell from the time lapse, but I probably spent about 2 hours on this entire illustration. You'll see here in the Adidas shoe that I was also trying to figure out how not to use outlines, but I ended up just using yellow over blue for now. And letting it be an outline rather than a shape. And then I realized, Oh, I could just use yellow for the tongue and the kind of back of the heel part. It was at this point, when I was drawing the Adidas Tokyo that I decided to add one more color because I wanted a lighter tone, especially for this shoe. I felt like a defining feature of this shoe was the lighter tone with the red motifs, those kind of zigzaggy stripes appearing over. And so once I did that, it kind of opened up to me using that lighter pink elsewhere. We'll come back to that in a moment. Doing this ree book classic was actually really fun. It's actually a very different shoe in its shape in real life, compared to the others. So part of the interesting project for me here was still making it look like it was part of the set and not really thinking about what the shape quality of each shoe is in reality. Three box here just have a very different panel arrangement where the logo is complicated enough that it actually is included as the sort of upper part where the lace is laced through. None of the other shoes have that quality. I start to notice just how each model of shoe has very particular things about them that none of the other shoes have. Like the Puma has these kind of ridges on the toe. But meanwhile, a lot of the shoes have this kind of reverse angle wrap around tread on the heel that at first I thought was uniquely something that Nike Daybreaks had. Here I'm struggling with the amount of detail to give the stitched part of the Puma logo, trying to figure out how essential that is to actually making that logo look like what it is. Detailed do I get? Do I start drawing in the logos? And I realized I was getting a little carried away there. All right, so the last big step here is drawing my lettering in. And so I like to do hand lettering and I like to create very structured hand lettering. And what I mean by structured is you can see I'm working with a grid. Everything has kind of even proportions. I have a top line and a baseline for all letters, and I kind of cut the terminals of letters, the ends so they have a more squared off look. Gives them that sense of structure. This is just something I like to do might be a little bit. Sometimes I feel like squaring off all my ends is a little bit of an obsession rather than a necessity, but I enjoy doing it, and so I do. You also see that I create my lettering all in one go rather than in place under each shoe kind of separately. And again, this gives my strokes and my lettering, this kind of even consistent look. Every time I come back to have to do lettering if I wait too long or if I do it somewhere else, it will vary more. And so I like batching different parts of my illustration so that similar parts come down at the same time and end up having a consistent look as a result. So with the Gla Elans, I decided that I would try making that the light pink that I had introduced with the Adidas Tokyo, and that meant I had options for what to do with the leather panels instead of outlines. The outlines aren't that bad, but I guess it's just my preference to create shapes. Now, this is a place where I got really carried away, and it was really a bonus part to this project. I'm not expecting you do this, but I wanted to just see if I could add a title to this group of shoes. Imagining it being some kind of art print. First of all, I had to think about, like, what is the title? What would I call this vintage shoes, 1960 shoes, foot fleet, feet fleet. And then what would the style be? And so I was playing around with different styles, of course, working in the grid as I do and trying to find a quality of lettering that worked well as a title, but also kind of harmonized well with the shoes. I really got carried away, but that is what happens sometimes, and it's actually a good thing to get carried away if you have time for it. I was just trying to figure out how to bring a certain quality to this lettering that made sense to be paired with these shoes. So the unique thing here about my inky Basics brush set is that it has these texture stamp brushes, and you can create this kind of printmaking effect by creating a mask on a layer and then filling it in, filling that mask in with one of the brayer textures or whatever texture you choose. And this is how I went into each color layer, and yeah, I just gave it a little bit of that printmaking texture that I love. And then seeing where I could add that back into the lettering. And as you can see, towards the end, I decided that the lettering could actually have qualities like the shoes, like the outsols like you see with the little blue ridges or dark blue ridges on the bottom and different panels and textures that kind of suggest suede, I guess. So bringing in some of those contour lines in the middle and extra colors, I got super carried away. In the end, I decided that having the lettering was just too much extra and that I probably didn't want any of it in my illustration at all. But along the way, I kind of created this interesting lettering style. And so it's not a complete loss. So when you're done this project, please share it on the class Projects page. And don't just share your final illustration. Share your process along the way. This is a great way to document your progress. If you share anything on social media, be sure to tag me at Mr. Tom Froze, and you can use the hash tag stylize with Tom. And definitely, don't forget to compare how you started out in that first drawing earlier on in the class to how you just drew it now. Did learning the faces principles change how you approach drawing less realistically? Let us know, write some of those observations along with posting your images on the class projects page. 12. Conclusion: That's it. You just learned how to draw in a more stylized, less realistic way. You learned the five principles of stylization. And you learned how to apply them in both isolation as best as you can, and then in a more natural integrated way. Of course, these principles are meant to work together. This isn't a formula that gives you instant results, but a framework for drawing what you see in a more interesting and often playful way. Eventually, with practice, you won't need to think about these principles at all. If you ever feel stuck on how to draw something, you can always run it through these principles to figure it out. Alright, that's it. Class is dismissed. Look out for my next class in this series stylization for Illustrators. How to draw. Figures. Less realistically or people. I'll figure out the name later. Anyway, thank you so much. My name is Mr. Tom Froze. I'll see you in the next one.