Stylized Character Design with Affinity Photo

1. Intro: Affinity Photo Two is a powerful image editing software that lets you draw and paint your character ideas to life will be using it to create some cute, stylized characters that all fit within a science lab theme. We've got scientists, a technician, and the monkey in some kind of astronaut test suit. I'll take you step-by-step from rough sketch to final presentation. In order to help you focus on designing characters and using various Affinity Photo features. We're going with the cartoony style that doesn't require accurate anatomy. You need a pen tablet, as well as any version of Affinity photo in order to follow along. Photoshop or similar software is fine too. After this class, you'll be able to design, sketch, draw, paint, and present your characters to others. For feedback or 3D production. Don't let your character ideas just sit in your head. Instead, learn to bring them out on the screen. Today. 2. Overview: Hi, Welcome to the character concept art course. We are inside of Affinity Photo to feel free to use any other image editing program of your choice, such as Photoshop, as long as it's compatible with way com tablet or any other pen tablet of your choice. Over here we have a list of steps that we're going to go through to generate these character concepts. First, we need a design prompt to know what we're concepting. Before we draw anything. I like to spend at least a couple of minutes doing a warm-up sketches. Really doesn't matter what you're drawing, just as long as you're putting pen to paper, or this case pen tablet too. The tablet surface in getting your drawing muscles ready to actually start drawing. And then we're going to knock out a handful of characters. Sort of like an ensemble cast of characters that belong in the same world. The same story will transition from loose sketches to a more refined but still rough sketches. And then from there, we'll clean it up into a final line art. With that, we'll move on to filling it in and masking out parts of the art where we can separate colors and materials, which will make it a lot easier to start coloring. So after that, we block in colors. We do a shadow pass and we add some realism to what would be up to this point, just a flat shaded character. Then we doubled down on that realism by adding some textures to indicate what kind of material, let's say certain outfits are made of. And then we're going to do another final polish pass to have our concepts are ready for final presentation. That's just a quick summary of what to look forward to in the rest of the course. So with that, let's get started with the first step, the design prompt. 3. Rough Sketching: For this exercise, let's decide on a group of people who work in a laboratory. We have four characters. A couple of them are scientists. One of them is a technician, and the last one is a trained monkey or maybe a chimpanzee. So now we have an idea of a cast of characters that generally belong in the same place and the same work environment. We also need to decide on a style. For this exercise, I want to go with a very cartoony, stylized, very simple form of character design. So let's go ahead with a new layer selected and a brush selected. And we'll just go with basic default brush like so. These sort of proportion is that I have in mind for these characters are around shape for the head, and another round shape for the torso. And a pair of arms coming out to the side and then no legs. So they're just glide over the floor. It's implied that they have legs. It's implied that they're walking across the floor. So this is the kind of style that would spare us from having to spend too much time and effort on getting the anatomy right. This will allow us to focus more on kinda characters these are, and what kind of story you want to tell with these characters. So imagine one of the characters can be like this. Maybe another character is a little taller, a little skinnier, but still retaining the same general shape. Alright, so two of these guys are scientists. One of them's our technician. And finally, over to our right, Let's do sketch, proportional sketch of what the monkey might look like. So imagine big years. Pair of nostrils and mouth. Like so. Okay, so let's say this is our technician is probably wearing some sort of protective clothing. It may be an overall or a coverall, actually. Right. And he's going to have a utility pocket, long sleeve. Probably. Maybe he's got short hair. Give him a pair of eyes, nose. And I know this is cliche, but I think I want to give one of our scientists pair of glasses. And then of course, it's definitely going to wear a lab coat. Right? And we have our final scientists here. Let's give him a mustache. And he'll also get a lab coat. Okay, so this is very rough, but now we have a decent idea who our characters are and what they're wearing, what they look like. So going back to the steps, we went through the design prompts. And even though we actually skipped the warm-up exercises, let's just lump it in with the character sketches that we just did. Since they are very loose. Just to go into the warm-up exercise for a second, could be as simple as drawing a CAN, drawing a box, drawing a mug, a beach volleyball, or tree. Really any random thing that comes to mind, you're just gonna do this and to cover most of your page, don't get carried away and spend like half an hour on it, but at least a couple of minutes. And then you'll be good to do the work for your actual concept art. Fear of feeling like your hands are a little stiff and you just want to get into the groove of drawing. That's great way to make that happen. 4. Rough Line Art - Scientist #1: So with the first three steps out of the way, we can move into rough sketches. We're going to take it to the next stage where there's still rough, but not as rough. So let's just center this. Bring the opacity way down. Had a layer on top. And to help us keep track of which layer is which, Let's say this is the initial sketch. And we'll call this layer the rough sketch. And let's lock this layer so we don't accidentally draw into it. I can bring this layer into the core steps folder. So that's out of the way. And make sure you select our new rough sketch layer. And that's going to be where we draw our rough sketches. So starting with the first scientist on the left, we can zoom in a bit. I want to decrease the opacity on this bottom layer here. So it's even more faint, right? Going to bring it down until it's, it's very light but I can still see it there. So back to selecting the rough sketch layer, I'm going to now trace over our initial sketch, but with steadier strokes. And actually I wanted to switch my brush to cause the basic default ones pretty harsh. Am I thinking maybe a marker would be good? Let's decrease the size. Test it out. Yeah, I'm liking this a lot depending on which way com tablet you have. This might be different for you, but most of them have a dial on the tablet somewhere and I have it set up so that when I run my fingers across it in a circular motion, it can increase and decrease my brush size. I like to use that feature on my tablet. It's very handy for resizing my brush on the fly. So anyway, back to our first scientists. I'm going to go over the sketch, a steadier stroke. But at this stage I'm not trying to make it perfect just yet. So if it's not perfect, don't labor over it too much. So I just hit the hockey for erase and then the hotkey for brush. The hockey is tend to be pretty similar across the different image editing software. I believe it's E for both affinity and Photoshop to select the erase tool and then B again to select the brush tool. Okay, Moving on from the head, I'm going to start attacking the torso. Now if you like, this would be a good spot to look up reference images of lab coats. I'm just sort of drawing this off the top of my head. But if you have trouble recalling some of the smaller details like, you know, does it have pockets in the front? It's that have chest pocket. How many buttons are there? Where are they? You know, how, how big or long are these colors? That's definitely handy to look up. I think I have a pretty decent idea of what it's supposed to look like. So I'm just improvising here for the hands. Just going to make them sort of a round ball. Right? Again, we're going for a style where we're not forced to worry too much about anatomy. So the hands or not worrying about adding fingers or joints. Finally, drawn the bottom of the character here. Again, it's just a round, round bottom where legs are implied but not seen. And this is probably just some whatever pair of trousers as scientists is wearing. It may be underneath the lab coat. He's wearing some kind of turtleneck or some undershirt. K. So that's scientist one. 5. Rough Line Art - Scientist #2 and Technician: For scientists to, since they're both scientists, I think we can get away with copying and pasting the lab coat outfit. Oops. He try that again. Okay, so I'm copying and pasting over to the right. And to match the overall shape we established in the sketching phase, I'm going to stretch it up, scrunch it sideways. And yeah, that just leaves us with drawing the head. So any opportunities like that you can find to save work, definitely take it would have felt pretty silly doing the work, all the work of redrawing the lab coat only to realize, oh, it's basically the same as the first one. Alright, so let's see a pair of very thick framed glasses for this guy. Okay. And this time he just has normal here? No, not particularly stylish, just just a very average hairstyle case. So maybe I'll add a goatee for a little extra character. Okay, moving on to our technician. So since the first character is kind of wide set, second character is tall. Our third human character can just be the average of both. So let's give them a kind of a short haircut. Not a set on the face, but I'm going to put a pin on it and move on to the body for now. I'm thinking he's wearing coveralls with a lot of pockets, lot of utility pockets. Right? So this sun go down to about there. We'll have pockets here. Seem kinda running through the middle of the waste. Definitely a front pocket. Zipper running all the way down the front. So the thing I wasn't happy about was the hairstyle. Not sure what's going on here. See, maybe it's pretty similar to the second scientists. Maybe it's split in the middle. And let's see what happens if we give him a 05:00 shadow or a beard? Yeah. I think the thing I didn't like before was just how child-like the face was is to baby-faced. But yeah, that that beard or dark 05:00 shadow is making them look like an adult again. So I think that works and the hair slightly longer here, that's kinda split in the middle. I think that's working pretty well too. 6. Rough Line Art - Monkey: So let's move on to our fourth and final character. In this ensemble cast. It's gonna be the monkey. So let's see. So far we've been keeping separate layers for each of the characters. I'm going to continue that with the monkey. So the monkeys, a couple of traits that give away the fact that this is a monkey right away. The wide mouth and the nostrils, I think are the key features here. And the big years, right? Any one of those combinations, if they're off, this character just could appear like a different animal altogether. For the body. I'm wondering if we shouldn't fit them with some kind of test suit. Her an outfit. Rather than being a natural naked monkey. I'm thinking of chimps that have been sent to space. A space outfit type of deal could be cool for this character. So let's go ahead and draw in the rough outline of this monkey character. Can start from the neck area, given them a nice metal color of some kind. From here. We're just going to improvise some sci-fi shapes. Maybe he was wearing a full sleeve suit. There's probably some some type of apparatus or monitoring device on the chest with some wires hanging out. And maybe there's some kind of a strap that's holding that device in place over the shoulder and around the ribcage. Alright, and then again at the bottom, we're going to imply that there's some sort of trouser type of deal. Okay. Me group these together into the rough sketch folder. Yeah. So that will bring us to cleaning up the rough sketches, turning him into clean line art. 7. Clean Line Art - Scientist #1: Let's bring our drawings backup. Going to do copy of this folder, rename it final line art. And I'm going to group everything into its own folder. Call it a reference, dial down the opacity. And then we're gonna do something similar to what we did before, which is trace over the previous drawing. You'll notice that this time around, I'll do a lot more undoes. I got my fingers trained over the control Z button so that I can instantly undo any stroke. This may be a little challenging at first, but with a little practice. You can get the hang of this. Try not to grip your pen too hard. That's going to cramp up your hands. And the trick is to just redo your strokes over and over again until it looks nice. And it's okay to overshoot a little and erase the excess stroke. Oops. This is also where I'm going to pay more attention to line weight, which is just the idea of thickening your strokes or lightening it depending on which line you're drawing. So if there's a line that indicates that something is overlapping, like the way this flap of the lab coat is. You want to make that a little darker. And then the lines that go around the outline of the overall object, that one you'll want to make. Thick as well. Kinda like how I have it over on this shoulder. Hence the name line weight. You're giving different weights to different lines. Some angles are easier than others. To draw smoothly. We're almost there with this scientist. I want to make the line weight for this color a bit late because it's just a pattern in the shape of the inside sweater. Looking back, I noticed this line should be darkened. Same with this line. Okay? And if we turn off the reference layer and just look at it by itself, It's looking pretty good. This way. You can also clearly see what's in the actual final line art layer and what you're seeing from the previous one. 8. Clean Line Art - Scientist #2: I'm going to move on to the second character. Let's take the body. In fact. Let me just change this mode to the squiggly line and not the magnetic one. And i'll, I'll just go ahead and take the bottom of the head there to move it over and resize it. I want to emphasize again. Let's say you took a break between drawing sessions and you're picking up where you left off. It's always good to warm up with some drawing exercises before you start. If you're struggling to get these smooth strokes. It could just be because your hands are a bit stiff and they need to be loosened up. Makes a big difference in how you draw. Also try and catch yourself. If you notice you're gripping your pen too hard. If you're trying to draw for hours, make it very difficult. But if you just draw in a more relaxed way, you won't feel as tired out from drying. Let's check how it looks without the reference layer. Trying to clean up the lines inside the glasses here. Let's add a little more line weight to the noses. And that'll do it for the second scientists. 9. Clean Line Art - Technician: Let's turn our reference layer back on. Now we're going to tackle the technician character. Notice how if you're having a hard time doing one smooth stroke, you can break it up into smaller strokes. So I did three here to do the bottom of the chin here. I'm going to draw these lines inside the hair with a much lighter touch. Then the outline of the hair. There isn't too much to say at this point. I think you get the idea. Doing a fair amount of clean up as I go. So this line doesn't indicate that he's wearing pants. It's one jumpsuit, one cover all with seam across the hip. So that's why I gave it a very light touch. This pocket opening is overlapping with another piece of fabric. Hence why I gave it a thicker line weight. And this is supposed to be a zipper. So I'm going to draw little lines all the way up and down it. Trying to be careful not to go outside the lines and then cleaning it up a tad wherever I can. Let's see how it looks without the reference. That's looking pretty good to me. 10. Clean Line Art - Monkey: Let's move on to our final character. And before I do that, let me just separate these two characters into their own layers. Okay? Challenging enough to do these curved forms. But then too, have to repeat that same sheep. Save for the inside of your ear. That can be tricky as well. Okay, That does it for the monkey's head. Drawing the strap Over the monkeys shoulder, that's partly holding up this device on the chest. These cuffs are similar to the metal color. Like a middle of marine cuffs. Sometimes I like the way the stroke begins, but not the way it ends. So just keep the part that I like and then finish the rest separately. For long curves like this is really difficult to do it in one stroke. So broke it into several. And then you just kinda fix the gaps in between. Made the first and last lines seem a little heavier than the one in the middle, because these lines denote a material change from the rest of the sleeve. 11. Clean Line Art - Monkey Pt 2: Imagine this devices, measuring the monkeys vitals or recording it, then relaying it to the scientists. So it's got a little screen on it and some buttons and dials. Get rid of the zipper. Since this strap is overlapping. The entire soup. See, I think the original, I had some wires sticking out of this. So right to go along with that idea of it, are monitoring the monkeys vitals. The first time I'm drawing the one side of this wire is very easy, but then the second stroke has to follow along exactly, which makes it a bit challenging to go through it again to add more line weight. So I'm adding a couple of lines here similar to the ones on the arms to indicate some type of special material. And now let's have a look without the reference. And we're going to add more line weight where it needs it. Just meet some fixes to the bottom here. So it's a nice smooth shape. Is feeling a little lopsided before. Right? And do you also, if your strokes are looking a little rough, you can sand it down carefully with the eraser tool. Now it's looking pretty good to me. 12. Aligning the Characters: Before we move on to the next stage, you see how everybody is kind of on a different level. I want to make it so it appears that they're all standing on the same floor level because of the fact that we got everything on separate layers, we can simply grabbed each other, grabbed each of the characters individually. But let me create a quick object here that we'll just use as reference. So I want to bring this guy up there and bring them monkey down to here, right? So everybody standing really should be. Okay. And now I can delete this rectangle. And yeah, that's much better. I can even space them out a little bit. Okay. And now we're ready for the next stage. 13. Masking the Scientists: We just finished doing the clean line art of our characters. So you can go ahead and cross off this step. Move on to the next one where we create masks that'll help us with coloring and shading later on. So let's put this way and create a new folder. We'll rename this colored. And let's see. We can rename these layers so we know which character line drawings these are. So this is the monkey, the technician, scientist to scientist one. Let's create a layer on top of the scientists one. Call inside this mask. So the idea here is, let me switch brushes real quick to a basic brush. So the idea is to, then It's trues a bright highlight color. Let's put this layer under the line art. And we're going to color in within the lines for the entire character. So first we'll, we'll color in the entire character with one mask. And then later on we can break it up into different areas for skin, clothing, etc. And the idea is we, we do this groundwork as first steps for the coloring stage. And this, this will just allow us to color inside the lines. Keep our painting in the bounds of the, the line drawing. And I chose this green, this bright green color, because that's definitely not one of the colors that we'll be using for these characters. So I'm sizing up my brush for the inside. And then when I get to the edges and sharp corners like this, I'll resize it down so I can continue painting inside the lines. It's possible to skip this step and just start painting directly into the characters. Just straightaway, start coloring in the actual colors that you want. But you'll find yourself having to repeatedly clean up all your brush strokes because they will come and go outside the line. It's very hard to do shading and, and stay inside the boundaries at the same time unless you have a mask. So because of how much time this will save us from that, all that extra cleanup work. It's worth putting in the time to do this ahead of time. You can also see that the time we spent cleaning up our line art is really helping us with the coloring, with coloring the mask here. If we started trying to create a mask with the rough sketches, there'll be a lot of areas of ambiguity where we're not sure where the actual line is. So let's create a new mask layer for the scientists or the other scientists. We just stick with the same color. And again, it's not important that it's green. It's important that it's some distinct color that that you're not going to use for the final color. So it could be pink, could be yellow, can be blue or red. So for these, the interior mass, I can kind of blow up my brush quite a bit to fill it in a lot quicker. And then slow down with the smaller brush along the edges where I need more precision. I think the simplicity of the characters, how they're basically the same shape from character, character and generally round. That's making it easier for us to create these masks. If this were a realistically Porsche proportioned character with the correct anatomy and all the extra details that come with trying to reflect reality. These shapes would be a lot more complex. You know, these characters would have individual fingers. And they'd have a pair of legs, pair of shoes on each of those on each of their feet. Those shoes might have shoe laces that we also have to try and color. Not to mention the lab hair with more granular strands of hair than, than what we have here was just smooth over. So when you pick a stylized, cartoony character design, that simplicity cascades down to every step along the way. I think in the time that it takes one, it takes to do a concept art for one realistic character. We're able to knock out for, for simple ones. 14. Masking the Technician and Monkey: Moving on to the technician, let's create a new layer. I should point out that It's very easy to get carried away and paint and draw things on either the wrong layer or the same layer. If you, if you combine two things onto one layer that you meant to keep separated, That's going to be but that's going to create some headache as you try to fix it or we separate them. So as you're working, I wanted to stress the importance of being mindful of your layers, your layer organization, and just check that whatever you're working on, you're in the correct layer. It's very easy to forget. So one reason why I want to do overall mask of the entire character, as opposed to breaking out these masks into individual parts of the character from the bat is like, let's say that I did a mask for the beard and then another mask, a new layer for the skin. You're not gonna be precise enough to perfectly line up the edges from one layer to another. If we approached. It's separately like that. You might create like a tiny gap between the border where the skin and the beard meets. So later when we break, break out these masks, I'm going to use this overall mask as a basis for creating those masks. Because this way I know that every pixel, at least within the outline, is covered. Let me also say that this is just one approach of many. There. There are some artists who like to approach character design. More sculpture really, where they skip the drawing and line art process entirely and just go straight to brushstrokes and putting down colors. And then they'll kinda, you know, sculpt, the edges. And sculpt in the forums is sculpt and the shading with more and more brushstrokes until they have a character design. But this, this approach of doing mass works really well for, for designs based on line art. So you almost, you saw there how I almost started to paint the mask for the monkey on the technician layer. So that's an example right there where even I forget from time to time and start working on the wrong layer. I'll probably get around to 3D modeling these characters down the road. And I can already imagine how much fun this monkey character will be with all this high-tech apparatus attached to it. Similar to how this simplified, stylized character design is making the concept design process easier. That'll still be true for when we, when you take this to the 3D modeling stage. Again, you don't have to deal with, you know, individual digits for fingers. You don't have to worry about legs are like complex hair. That's gonna be very advantageous. You know, assuming you don't have an army of artists at your disposal, right, for making a small personal projects. Using style as a tool to help lighten the workload on yourself. It's a very good idea. I've noticed that in a lot of indie games with, you know, that there were made by small teams of say, like two or five or ten. They always have the most interesting art style because they had to get by with less resources. So they use creativity and style to achieve that. So now we got all the the mask layers blocked in. Let's take a quick look at what they look like without the line art. And I wanted to zoom in and just make sure that there aren't any gaps or bubbles. Want to make sure this is completely solid. So the first three characters are fine. But I noticed in the monkey wine we got a bubble here, a bow there. And that looks to be about it. So you want to catch those, those little spots that you missed, probably because it was covered up by the line art. And then when we go back to our steps, we can now cross off the mask fills step, and get started with blocking and colors. 15. Color Blocking Scientist #1: So let's go back to the first scientist. And here's how the mask layer works. Create a new layer and drag it into the the, the mask layer. Have that new layer selected and choose any color. And when you color, you can move your brush wherever you want, but it's going to stay inside the mask. And inside of this mask layer we can, we can nest even more masks. So let's say, let's say I want to separate the, the head and the hands from the torso. Let's choose a different color. And just color in the head and the hands. Okay? And then create a new layer and then stick it inside of that this sub mask. And then if we choose a flesh color and painted in, it sticks inside that mask, that sub mask. And the reason why that's handy, um, we're not gonna do this step just now, but just to give a little preview, if I were to shade the the hand e.g. and let's choose a softer brush. You can color outside the bounds of the actual shape and give yourself enough room to make the strokes that you need to create this soft shadow shading effect. So for now, let's just keep the colors flat and choose a default color. So I would reserve the creation of, of sub masks for larger chunks of the character. But once you get into smaller objects like the mustache and the eyes, I feel like it's just more work to create separate sub mask just for that. So let's, before we proceed, I want to name this the scientists skin area mask. And then this would be the skin area of color. I mean, it's it's kinda random but just name it whatever would help you remember what this is. And then let's see. Let's create a new where. Again, put it under the scientists, scientists mask layer. And this is where it will put in the scientists torso color. Right? So we're going to pick a sort of a off-white for the lab coat. And then let's drag this layer underneath the skin area mask so that it sits under under the skin color. Yeah. I might I might break this up into another some mask to break out the interior sweater and the pants. Let me take this and just erase this part. So by erasing away what's underneath the lab coat, we're actually creating a mask for the lab coat. I'm going to rename this scientist lab coat. I think these names are a bit long, so let's shorten them. If we create a new layer underneath everything else, this will be the sweater and pants. So let's pick up something out for the pants and something out for the sweater. I don't think we can just leave that on the same layer. Let's create a new layer on top of the skin layer and call it hair. Trying to decide if, if the scientist is old or just middle aged. Let me hard in my brush. Let me zoom in for the mustache. I said that we don't need to make a sub layer for every little object. But I think maybe, maybe it's not too bad of an idea to do that for the hair here. Because depending on how far you want to take your rendering, you may want to do some kind of special shading trick for your hair where it's kinda glossy. In that way that hair can be. I'm seeing there's some little spot we missed in the sweater. So let's go back to this. Pick the color by holding Alt and clicking on it. At least that's how it works in Affinity photo. But I believe Photoshop may have a similar shortcut. Let's see. Oh, so it's not the sweater layer, it's actually from the lab coat layer where we didn't completely erase this part. Okay, so that's better. While we're at it might slow light as well. Clean up that edge two. Then one last thing, we haven't colored in yet, or the eyes. Can we can leave that up top. I'm going to make it pretty dark. Like so. Also, I think we can clean up the edges here. It's not quite right up to the outline. If I turn this off and color pick that and green, makes sure we're on the right layer. And just color that in. There you go, that's much better. Okay, Turn the other layers back on. And so that does it for the flat shading of the first scientists. And we're just going to go through each of the other characters and basically go through the same process. But if we look back here, everything lives under the initial scientists mask layer that we created. And we can collapse that and keep our layer tab here organized. In fact, I want to group the line art and the color together. And let's call this the scientists to one group. Let's do the same thing for the others. Scientists to group, technician group. And finally, monkey root. 16. Color Blocking Scientist #2: I'm going to use the what we did for this first scientist as a reference. Let me name this, right? So we got five layers. Let me add the same five layers under our scientists to mask. 12345. Drag it all. The scientists to mask. Here's skin lab coat. Oh, you know what, we'll probably need to add layer for the classes. Let's just go through each one. Put down our flat colors. Switching over to the glasses layer. Moving on to the hair, will include the goatee in the hair layer. I don't need to remind you that these are obviously not going to be the actual colors. Juice masking in the shapes. And what's cool is that because the skin layer is beneath the eyes glasses and here, I don't have to be as careful with my brush strokes. Let's include the hands as part of the skin layer. We're quickly running out of colors. I did overshoot and some places but I can simply erase it, clean it up. So I put a layer under the lab coat mask. We'll call it that the lab coat color will pick the same color as the scientists next to him. And now I can just not have a care in the world about where the edges are. Just brush away and it's going to stay all inside. So that's the power of masks. And, you know, in situations where it's not as obvious what the color of the outfits should be as, as it is for a scientist's lab coat. Right? And you didn't like this first color that you picked out. You can easily pick another color and experiment and see how how it looks in green or whatever else. So the mass is useful for a lot of reasons. It also allows you to experiment without having to put in a lot of work to redo something. Let's keep going up these layers and pick out the actual colors that we want for the disorder and pants where there really isn't anything to mask since it's at the very bottom layer. So we can just leave that as is in color directly onto that sorter and pants layer. Let me clean up the edge of this lab coat color. Oh, and let's not forget the glasses. We don't want to keep that as purple, pink that it is right now. It's probably more of just your regular black frame glass. Like a dark gray maybe. 17. Color Blocking the Technician: Onto the technician. Let's see. We can try and anticipate what kind of layers we need for him. So we need skin, hair, outfit in. Maybe that's about it. Yeah, this is a simpler character since he's wearing a coverall. And then maybe one more for eyes. Let me copy and paste the technician words. I don't have to type it out over and over again. So technician skin, ignition, coverall. And here, drag all these layers into the technician mask. I wanted to do some shading on the hair so I will create a hair mask. You know what? I don't think it would hurt to create a different layer for the beard. Think it's, it's different enough from the hair to warrant its own sub mask. Especially because they collide right here. I want there to be a separation when I shade them. Okay. Let's let's name this technician, beard technicians, skin. It's not using actual skin color, but we're still, we're still just making a mask layers. This is kinda blending in with that green, some different more saturated tone of blue. And because of the coverall is at the bottom, we can just go ahead and pick the actual color that we want for it. I'm thinking a light navy blue maybe. So we can see some of the gaps next to the edges. So let's choose the overall mask with the same green color and fill these in. Okay, now I'm going to create the actual color layers. So skin color, eye color, and hair color, wheres? Maybe we'll give them a slightly darker skin tone. Maybe we can assume that since he's not a tech or he's not a scientist, he might spend more time in the sun than the scientists. Beers color. Let's go for something dark. Or maybe this is a 05:00 shadow, then it's going to be closer to the skin color. The tad darker. So it could be more like that. And then we can make the hair dark. I just want to check that it wasn't exactly the same shape as the first scientist. 18. Color Blocking the Monkey: K, That leaves us with one more character. For the monkey. Monkey eyes, monkey. Not skin, but for I guess skin and for yeah, we can keep the skin and first separate. And we need another layer for the suits. Let's do one more layer for the apparatus. So it's gonna be monkey eyes. Skin. For monkey suit. Monkey apparatus. Oops. Oh, I forgot to drag these layers into the mask layer. It's going to start with the skin. It's actually not the whole head, just a mouth here. The mouth and the inside of the ears. Moving on to for even though the hands are both skin and for we'll just we'll just lump it in with Phred. See how that looks. Good. Always change it back later. Monkey apparatus. Let's do a separate one for the wires. Just because it overlaps with the strap over here. Yeah, so this, this might feel a little granular than our other layers. But if you think that using more mass could make life easier than I'd say do it. Let's do another one for monkey rings. And that's referring to the cuff and the collar. Because I imagine those to be metallic. So I want them to be separate so I can shape them. Has a different material than than the fabric of the rest of the suit. I might as well add this belt buckle here. Is, this is probably made out of metal two. Okay. And then we're going to at the actual colors. So for the monkey skin, some, some type of tan color should do it. For Monkey, for a dark brown. Be not as dark. For the wire. They could be different colors for each bot will just do a neutral gray for now. That apparatus can be some form of gray as well. Monkey rings. If we try red. And for the suit itself. If we try, maybe just let's see. Yeah, maybe you could do it. Light blue, maybe. Yeah, grayish blue. And it looks like we missed the ring or the belt buckle in the ring layer. That's not going to be red. That's definitely just a grey silver type of deal. And we're going to have a different color for for the belt and, you know, got the zipper parts and buttons. But we won't worry about that right now. Let me do a little clean up along this the cuffed edge here. And after I find out where it's coming from, I think it's the for yeah. 19. Shading Scientist #1: Next up we got shading. Let's make a copy of the colored folder here. Rename it shaded. And we can start, you know, go from left to right, starting with the first scientist. So here we finally get to make a really good, good use of all the mess that we've created so far. So let's start with the skin layer. Oh, you've got to expand the skin layer and select the actual color layer that we're going to color into. And actually, why don't we leave that layer alone. Add another layer on top, and then we can use that to paint in our shadows. So I want to change this to a different brush. We can, we can, we can stay with the basic brush, but let's go for something that has a softer edge. Fact. Let me just manually bump up the softness. And at the same time, Let's decrease the opacity. So we end up with something like this. Now, it's kind of a stylistic choice. You can either go for a cartoon shading style where the the edge of the shadow is kinda like a line. And that actually goes really well with the line art. And let's roll with that for now. Right? If you want a softer shadows, you just bump up or reduce the hardness. Rather. We can give our lab coat the same treatment. I'm going to bump down the opacity of this layer, way down to 25%. Then I'm throwing in shade wherever it might make sense. Moving on to the trousers. So got some shadow along the top edge of the trousers to indicate that lab coat is casting a shadow. And same up here. I've added a shadow along the color here to indicate that there's being shadow cast by the color of the lab coat in a little bit from the head as well. And once after we've added a shadow, we could do a light or a highlight pass. So I guess there wouldn't really be a highlight for the trousers. Not really. Try it, see how it looks. Yeah, maybe something like that. But honestly, we don't really need it for the pants. But maybe the skin could definitely use something along the top of the head. A little bit on the nose. And on the hand. We'll bump up the opacity to something higher. Let's see if we can't do something with the blending mode. We can even switch the shadow layer into multiplying. It's always worth experimenting with different blending types. But in general, darker layers work well with the Multiply blend. And then if you're trying to add highlights, the add blend mode does a great job of blending that over your image. So let me zoom in here and do just a little bit of cleanup. 20. Shading Scientist #1 Pt 2: I think the buttons on our lab coat could be a light gray. So let's add that. And then for the eyes, you got to be careful about the way we drag our layer into the mask layer. And I want to add a highlight on the top corner, the eye. So just a dot on the upper left corner there. For the I. Maybe something along the lower right corner as well to really make the eye looks shiny. And then I'm gonna go with a tiny eraser and just kinda sculpt away at that. Actually. Let me do that. Just, just to make it look less like the white of the eyes and more like a like it's actually shiny. And then something else too. I'm going to reduce my eraser to half opacity and then make that darker. Like so. So yeah, now our eyes, nice, shiny marble kinda looked to them. Oh, and let's not forget the hair too. So for the hair color, pick the hair color. Slide the brightness a little over to the right. And then now with a soft brush, try and paint in the highlights. Let's also painting the darks. You reduce the flow too. Yeah. And already with just a few brushstrokes, we're giving our hair a little bit more, more of a three-dimensional look. All right, Cool. That's without and then what we just did. All right, great. So doesn't take much to shade our characters. We're going to repeat this process for the rest of the cast here. 21. Shading Scientist #2: So let's close out the scientists. One folder, open up the scientists to folder. Expand our mask layers. Kinda bring my flow back to 100%. So I've changed all my brush settings roughly back to what it was for my painting, the shadow for the first scientists lab coat. And I also change the blending mode for this layer to multiply. So now, one last thing, I'm going to set the opacity of this layer to roughly 25%. And now, when I paint shadows, it should look like the one on the first scientists going to paint in the buttons. Moving on to sweat or in pants. Oh yeah, let's change the layer settings. Now on to the skin layer. And I'm trying to be cognizant of creating new layer on top of the flat color layer. Just so that if we want to go back and make adjustments to the shading, we still have that flat shade color layer intact. See me add some additional shadows underneath the glasses. Just like that. Yeah. Maybe we don't need to add shadows to the nose. Some highlights to the face. I forgot to do shadows on the hand. Let me do that now. Okay. Let's see. We got the hair left to do. Use the color picker. Soften your brush, decrease the flow percentage, and start shading away. Okay, We can leave the hair there. So we need to give our second scientists the same shiny eyes treatment. So again, two dots on the upper right corner. And then instead of erasing at half capacity, Let's just go ahead and do a 50% gray and do the lower right. Shine, right? Great. Wonder if our glasses need some kinda highlight. Let's give it a try. Yeah, I think if it's a little bit to see that's without that's with just a little highlight along the top edges. So that does it for our second scientists. 22. Shading the Technician: While we're on the eyes, we can start with that. For our technician. I suppose we could have given their hairs the same sort of cartoon shading as the rest of the characters. But all right, I thought that the way that light plays on the surface of your hair is different enough to warrant a different kind of rendering. Yeah, so there's a little bit of style and consistency, a little bit of blended shading style around the hair and then just the flat cartoon shading style and everything else. But that's okay. It's up to you, it's up to the artists. So basically what I'm doing is I'm going in there with the highlights, I'm going in there with the darks. And then I go back over it with a bigger soft brush to blend the two together. So you don't have these harsh brushstrokes. Came. Here's looking okay. Let's go over the skin. Get my brush to the settings I want for the skin and also getting the layer settings to what's appropriate for shadows. Right? So we're going to have some shadows along the forehead. Shadows cast from here. Let's go ahead and do. The highlight on the skin to clean up those highlights. Go back to shadow. At some on the hands. Renewed need some shadow. On the 05:00 shadow on the 05:00 shadow. Alright, now we can move on to the coverall. Let's add some layers underneath there. Get the layer settings to match what we need to be for shadows. The Black Codes didn't need much highlighting because it's already so bright, but we couldn't use some highlights on our darker cover all here. Let's get our make sure we got the brush tool selected. Not a whole lot of highlighting to do. In fact, I probably decrease the opacity of this layer because this is a very matte type of material, will give off that kind of a shine. And let's color in our buttons, in the zipper. Can zoom in, so it's a little easier. Okay, that looks good to me. 23. Shading the Monkey: Let's go over to the monkey now. Let's zoom in a little more so it's easier to painting that precise shine on the lower right of the eyeballs. Let's go through and add those shadows. So now let's go into the Mogi for layer and add shadows there. And just as I had hoped, the shadow for the skin layer was starting to look just like the first layer. But after adding in shadow layer for the first layer, the shadow and for is separated once again visually. Hey, let's add highlights. In. Let's bring down the opacity to 25. Moving on to the outfit. Might as well. Just go straight to doing highlights, since we already have the correct brush settings. So we're going to add some hard highlights to reflect the fact that this is made out of metal. Now let's do darks. Change the layer settings. Make sure you have brush mode on. Okay. Now for the actual soup, Seems before, lay down the shadow. Your shadow brush strokes thick and then just chip away at the excess. Now let's do highlights. Erase the excess and decrease the opacity. 24. Shading the Monkey Pt 2: Shadows for the apparatus. Now, let's play around with the colors for the wires. Maybe one of them is blue or maybe they're both blue. I was going to say maybe one is blue, the other is red, but we already have read rings. So blue could work for both. Then I think some kind of a gray would work for the connection points here on the suit. A light gray. Let's add a shadow on those wires. So it's kind of a subtle effect, but does make it more three-dimensional. Going back to the suits, all these different pieces of the soup that we definitely need to color in. So let me color, pick the overall su, color and then just do different shades for, say, the belt here. Then I want something different for these parts of the fabric that cover the joints. Okay, so maybe I'll just keep the same color for this band here because. Graying out the whole bottom, they're starting to make it look like pants. But I think this should be similar to the technicians in that it's like more of a coverall type of situation even though there's a belt here. Yeah, that that would make it look more like a suit. Gotten metal zippers, just like the technician. Okay. Go back and do something about this belt here. Now let's go back to the apparatus and color in some detail. There. You need the screen to glow. Let's add some color to the buttons. I'm going to zoom in for that. It's getting really hard. Here we go. And I think I'm just going to use some highlights to look, still looking a little flat. Came looking back at the monkey's face, realize going to fill in those nostrils. Let's play with the opacity. That looks good. Okay, and then you zoom out. That's all of our characters fully shaded. So after this, we can add some more detail in the form of textures. 25. Texturing the Scientists: Just wrapped up on cheating. Let's slap on some textures next. And then after that we'll be on to final presentation very close to the end, just a couple more steps now, let me duplicate this folder and name it. Texture. Expand that. Again. Let's start with our first scientists. The first thing I want to add textures to is the lab coat. So I'm going to select the lab coat layer and expand that will create a new layer on top of what we have there, where we'll place our texture. Now. Affinity has this neat feature where on the rightmost tab next two layers, there's one called, called stock. And you can see here I already searched for some fabric textures. So there's a handful of good stock photos in here. So you can grab one of these, drag it into the project, and use that as your texture. There typically extremely high resolution, That's why it's taking up the entire screen. Then you'll resize it and fit it into the object that you want to texture. Now, if you don't find exactly what you're looking for in the the, the stock photos here. You could just do a simple Google image search and find your textures there. And that's what I did. I have opened up a separate folder elsewhere on my screen. So I have a fabric texture here that I think might work for the lab coat. Hey, let's play with the opacity so that we can still see the original texture or the paint work that we did. And in fact, instead of relying on the opacity, might be better to play with the blend mode. I think darker color could be a good candidate. And then let's also reduce the opacity. Let's try resizing the texture. And I think that looks pretty good. Let's add another one for the sweater. So I'm going to expand the sweater mask group here, add a layer on top of what we have. And let's drag in a knit fabric texture. For this, the multiply blend mode would work best. Then we can quickly preview the other ones by hovering over these different blend modes and see if they give any results that we like a little bit better. So I think Linear Burn is actually pretty good too. Then let's play with the scale. The opacity. I think I'll just leave the opacity at 100. If we zoom out a little bit. The fabric texture for the lab coat is subtle. But still there. And the knit pattern really sells the idea that this is a sweater underneath. And the second scientists is basically wearing the same outfit. So we'll give them the same set of textures. Will close the scientists, one group. Expand the scientists to paint layers, add a new layer on top of everything, drag in the texture and resize it roughly to the same scale as the previous scientist. Let me double-check. Okay, so for the first scientists, the texture was scaled up to about that size. It's going back to the second scientists. It's roughly the same. Good. And let me see what the layer options were set to it. So 75% opacity and blend mode to set to a darker color. So let's apply the same settings, 75% darker color. In fact, maybe it'd be easier if we just copied and pasted the sweater texture over to the second scientists. There we go. And so it even carried over the same blend mode. So that's good. Right? So that takes care of both of our scientists. 26. Texturing the Technician: Let's move on to the technician, expand the coverall. Pink group. So I have a handful of different textures. Let me give this a try, see how it, what it gives us. So I think soft light is doing the trick. Reduce the opacity. And I also want to scale up the texture so it's not as granular. And that's too big. So I'm going to size it back down again, right around there. And think I kinda like that. Adding texture for a technician was pretty simple because he's wearing a coverall and salt, basically one material. 27. Texturing the Monkey: So we're moving quickly over to the monkey. Start with the suit because it's the biggest surface at a new layer. And let's try a synthetic fabric of some kind. Try this on for size. Again. The blend mode that keeps the detail intact while also allowing the color and shadow information to pass through. That's the one we want to use. So let's try a soft light. With the opacity tone down. The monkey suit is made up of a couple of different materials. And we just have this texture covering all of it. So let's create a mask on this texture and will manually paint away the parts where we won't. We don't want this texture applied like this armband, e.g. that will be made with a different material, same with the band here around the waist. Let's do the same for the belt strap. Okay, so this way we're reserving the texture is strictly for the sky blue material. Let's just go over the zipper while we're at it. Cool. And then I want to add another texture for the gray material on the suit. So for that, I'm going to use something that looks more synthetic and high-tech. So we have an extra empty layer that we don't need. Let's create another mask. But this time, we're going to fill it with black and paint in the parts that we want this texture to show. So it's like the opposite of what we did with the previous texture. And for that, you need to set your brush to white and paint in the parts where you want that texture. So maybe we could have saved a little time if we painted these bands as a separate layer earlier. But you could just as easily mask it out, painted in later like we are now. Okay. So I definitely don't want it to be this dark. So I'm going to tone down the opacity, play around with the blend mode. Again. Maybe ad could work for us. The only thing I don't like about this texture is I think the, the pattern is too large. So I got another texture that I think is worth trying. So let me drag the right mask onto this. Change the blend mode. Tone down the opacity. Alright, so the difference between textured and shaded is gonna be very subtle. Let me switch it on and off for you to look at the difference. It's very subtle, but it does add a bit more information to our character design. And ultimately this is to help the person down the pipeline, say the 3D artists and the texture artists and the look they have artists. They'll look at this and be able to gather more information out of it, the more detail we put into it. So with that, let's cross off step nine and move on to final presentation. 28. Polishing for Presentation: Copy and paste this whole group. Call it final presentation. And first thing I'm gonna do, I want to add a new layer beneath all of these groups and just paint in a 50% gray. So right away, our scientists pop out of the background and they're more distinguished from our white background where they maybe blend in a bit. Next thing I wanna do is add a shadow beneath each of the characters. So it appears as though they're standing on the floor because right now they're just kinda floating in the air. Let me switch over to the Elliptical Marquee Tool and just draw this flat circle beneath them. Give that a black fill. Drop the opacity, and just see how that looks. And then play around with the shape. Maybe something like that. And then let me grab the actually let's I was going to say we can grab the eraser brush. And I basically wanted to get the top of this shadow to kind of fade out. But instead of using the eraser brush and kind of using a destructive method, we could instead create a mask and mask out the fade. So that way, we can always go back to this original circle shape if we don't like the way the fade looks. So that's a less destructive, easier to edit approach. I wanted to bring my hardness to 0%, signs up my brush, and then just erase along the top. So we now have this nice fade upward. Right? So let's say, I don't like how much it's fading and I want to bring some of this back because of the fact that I used a mask. I can always switch my brush to white and bring it back. Okay, I think that's looking okay. Then we can simply copy and paste the same shadow blob. For our other characters. I want to resize the shape of this blob to better follow along the contour of the bottom of each of the characters. And this is actually probably the shortest, easiest step. Really doesn't take much to bring your character design to final presentation, we change the background to a darker tone. We added a shadow beneath each of the characters. And we can compare it to what we had before. And it just makes a huge difference. For whoever you pass this off to. It's much nicer to look at. Back to the steps page. And we can cross off this final step, off our entire list. And because of the fact that we saved our progress into these folders, we can now look back at all the steps that we went through. So here's the rough sketch, the line art. Based on that rough sketch. The colored version, the shading that we did afterwards, the texture that we added, and then the extra bells and whistles. For final presentation. This is how you do a cute, simple, cartoony character design roster.