Sweet Spots: Expressing Big Ideas in Small Editorial Illustrations

1. Intro: Successful illustrators are known for their ability to visualize ideas in their own unique style. But how do they come up with their ideas and how do they know what style to work in? If you've ever wondered these questions, this class is for you. My name is Tom Froese and I'm an award winning illustrator and a top teacher here on skill share. Over the past six years working as a freelancer, I've created thousands of illustrations for hundreds of clients, including The Wall Street Journal, AirBnB, and Q France. While it's fun to work on larger projects, the reality is that most of my assignments over time have been smaller illustrations for editorial clients like magazines and newspapers. When we think of editorial illustrations, we often think of the more glamorous kinds like covers, spreads and full pages. But far more common and in demand is the small but mighty spot illustration. Spot illustrations or spots, are small self contained images that float in the layout of a page or website. Spots are the perfect laboratory to work out how you approach concepts and style in your own work. I believe that if you can master the art of the spot illustration, you will be more in demand as an illustrator if you're hungry for those bigger assignments. Getting good at and being hired for spot illustrations is the perfect way to get your foot in the door. Join me as I show you how to develop smart, expressive spot illustrations from start to finish, I'll walk you through the major steps of my process, including the brief research and discovery sketches and final work. Along the way, you'll get to discover how you visualize your ideas through concept and style. You'll learn exactly where those elusive ideas are hiding. My goal, as always, is not to show you how to do exactly what I do, but to help you discover how you do what you do. By the end of this class, you'll not only have a set of delightful spot illustrations to share with the world, you'll also have valuable insights into how you think and create the building blocks of a long and satisfying illustration career. 2. About This Class: This class is really divided into two parts. A primer at the beginning and then of course, the project. The primer gives us a foundational understanding of how style and concept work and of course, a closer look at spot illustrations and what makes them work. The project gives us an opportunity to apply what we learned for the project. We're going to illustrate two sets of stylistically related spot illustrations. In the first set, we'll develop a style on more simple object illustrations. And then in the second set, we'll use the same style to illustrate more abstract concepts in terms of required skills and equipment. Those with at least some basic illustration skills, whether physical media or digital, will benefit the most from this class. I recommend you use either Procreate or Photoshop or their equivalents. You could also use a pencil and paper or physical media like Guash or Watercolor. Personally, I use Photoshop for illustrating and procreate for sketching. The project will be taught using these tools and skills. I recommend you give yourself at least a couple days to complete the project. I think you'll get more from it if you paste yourself. This class will help you develop your illustration skills, particularly in coming up with stronger concepts and applying a consistent style to sets of illustrations not platform specific. Although I'll be teaching using the apps and tools and that kind of thing that I'm used to working with. Fair warning, this is not a Photoshop course. Of course, I'll do my best to walk you through what I'm doing. You can hopefully translate my overarching methods, which is the main point of this class, to your own way of working. Okay, let's go. 3. Primer: What are Spot lllustrations?: Okay, we've been saying spot illustrations over and over again. Let's just talk about what spot illustrations are. Spot illustrations are small self contained illustrations that float in the layout of publications and websites. The purpose of spots is to highlight key ideas in a story or article. Spots can be either conceptual or more purely ornamental. Spot illustrations are clear and simple in concept. They differ from main or hero illustrations, which are the more big full edged edge type illustrations you'd see in a magazine in the following ways. First, they differ in terms of format. Spots are self contained rather than bound by these hard or square edges of the frame or page. They're not anchored and they look more like they float in the layout. Usually the next way that spot illustrations differ from mean or hero illustrations is in their load capacity. Their smaller size means they have to be simpler and carry less conceptual load. They must be about one thing instead of many things. There has to be fewer layers of meaning. I like the example of a big truck versus a Volkswagen Golf. A big powerful truck is like the main illustration, It's able to carry a lot more. It's bigger, it's bulkier, it draws more attention to itself. It's louder. Whereas if you were to try to load a whole bunch of bags of sand on a little Volkswagen Golf, it's going to break down. But if the load is just right, that little guy is going to be zipping through traffic like it's boss. Spot illustrations often work in sets, so they have to be stylistically similar. Also, usually when you're working on a set of spot illustrations, they'll be thematic, they'll be related to the theme or premise of the article or story in which they sit. As you're going through the project or as you're making sets of spot illustrations In the future, I thought it would be helpful to give you this spot illustration checklist. This is really what makes where a successful spot illustration or set a spot illustration should be easy to describe. You should be able to look at it and just say this is a X, Y, or Z. A spot illustration should work at a small size. This has a lot to do with the idea of low capacity that I just described. A spot illustration should have a clear message, and we've talked about this in the principles of stylization. Whatever it's saying should just come through really clearly without too much mess or muck getting in the way. A spot illustration, of course, should be related to the content that it's sitting with. And that just means like if it's story about downhill skiing, your spot illustrations are probably going to be about downhill skiing. Also, another guideline for what makes a good spot illustration is compelling style. This is of course, like a huge part of this class, we're talking about the importance of style. And you could opt not to have those illustrations in the story or the article. You could use photographs. You could use dingbats or wingdings. If you have an illustration that's compelling in style, it's going to get people to enter into that content, be more engaged, and maybe even look at what they're reading or seeing or thinking about in a new way. Next, a spot illustration should be relevant to the audience. Now you can't always know what's relevant to your audience, but you can get clues of who's going to look at it, say by the publication or a magazine or newspaper that the spots are for. Oftentimes, a magazine will be sort of in a niche or a category. And then if it's for a car magazine, you know that it's people who like cars. And at least if you understand that, you can kind of gear your spot illustrations or your illustrations in general to be more relevant to that audience. The next thing is that a spot illustration needs to be self contained, so it just needs to sit there on its own and feel like one thing, the next is there should be no or minimal background. And this kind of goes hand in hand with being self contained. Sometimes it's just say if you're illustrating water bottle that water bottles floating just on a white background. But maybe if you need to add more story to it, whatever background you add to it should be very minimal, very secondary to that main object. And sometimes that background is just like a swash of color or a simple shape of color just to help hold it together for sets as a whole. Of course, you just want them to be stylistically consistent. I think that they should be balanced in the level of detail or weight. When you look at your illustrations all together, does one feel like it's way different in terms of how much detail is in it? Or it's way darker than the others? So you want to look for that balance, that visual balance across the whole. 4. Primer: About Concept: Of course, we've been talking about style and concept. Why don't we start actually talking about what these are? The first thing we'll talk about is concept. In illustration terms, a concept is a visualization of an invisible or abstract idea. A good concept effectively communicates an intended message. Without a concept, an illustration is just more of a pretty picture or a fanciful ornament. Ideally, a concept makes you see or think about something in a new way. Of course, not all illustrations need to have a strong concept. A pretty picture is sometimes just what the Dr. ordered. I'll get to this in a bit. A question I actually get asked a lot is how do you come up with ideas? Where do they come from? After thinking about this, I've realized that most of the ideas will come from two sources. One is the project and the other is the process, like just working out of what I have to do for that project. This might sound crazy, but there are no ideas in our business on concepts. Ideas don't just come to us out of nowhere. I think this is actually a myth that we believe, especially as illustrators who are starting out. We think that the best illustrators must just naturally come up with ideas just like out of thin air. And it's so easy for them, but the truth is, concepts, things we really want to achieve in our illustrations. They come from the project and from the process. The process is work. 5. Primer: About Style: Okay, we've talked about concept. Now we're going to talk about style. If a concept is an idea visualized, style is how that concept looks when paired with a concept. It's not just the skin. It really affects how a concept is experienced. Style is influenced by choices you make, including the tools and techniques you use, and also in how you use these to express your ideas in novel ways. Style is very important to illustrators. It's the most visible aspect of our voice. Style doesn't have to be exactly the same over and again within all of your work. Whether you commit to a discipline style is really based on who you are and what you want. You're a human and you will evolve and change. Especially if you're new at this. I actually get asked that a lot. Is, do I need to commit to a single style? What if I get bored with it? Stuff like that. If you don't want to commit to a single style, you don't have to. That being said, committing to consistency is important. But I think it's more important within a project than across your entire body of work. Style is the Holy Grail of illustration. I think every illustrator wants to know how to find their style. However, style is not something you can just find or somehow get off the shelf, like it's in a store or something. If you do, it's probably not your style. Style is more of a journey. It's a journey of trial and error and self discovery. Just enjoy the process. You're going to find your style eventually. To be honest, at this point, I've been doing this a long time. I still have so much more to discover because style is so personal. Everybody has their own way of approaching it. And of course I have my own way and I have my on what goes into and all that. And that's really what the next few mini lectures are about. I'm just going to break down how I think about style, what I believe the different components of it are, how those components work together and that kind of thing. 6. Primer: 5 Elements of Style: To help break the idea of style down to something simple and understandable, I've come up with what I call the five elements of style. These are, in a way, the visual tools in your tool kit. I don't mean literal tools, it's a metaphor. The first element is shape. Shapes are the broad areas of color that make up the forms. In an illustration, shapes come in three basic types. Geometric, organic, abstract. Geometric shapes are more precise. In mathematical, you'd think of perfect circles, super straight lines, perpendicular angles, stuff like that. Then organic is more round and blobby. I think I use a lot more organic forms and shapes in my own illustration. Abstract shapes you can't name. I think they can be a mix of organic and geometric. There's just an overall irregularity to abstract shapes. Personally, I mostly use shape to define my forms. I know a lot of illustrators actually use outlines and then fill them in with color. And I'll get more into that when I talk about line. But yeah, I use mostly solid areas of color or shape to define the forms in my illustration. The next element of style is line. Line is exactly what it sounds like, it's the lines in an illustration. I like to talk about line quality. Line quality is more about is it thick or thin? Rough or smooth? Is it super clean? Is it textured? Is it wobbly? Some illustrators define most of their forms through line as I've said, and they'll just fill the inside with color. I like to use Family Guy as an example of this illustration, where every single element in the artwork is outlined and then filled in with a color. Again, I define my forms a shape and then I use line for details to distinguish similar forms, especially when they butt up against one another. Let's just say if there's like some across in their arms. If these are just flat shapes, I'm going to need some way of differentiating these. I might use color to contrast those shapes, but often I'll use a line just to sort of break those apart. The next style element is color. Again, color is one of those things that I could write an entire book about or teach a whole class about. But I'll try and briefly summarize my thoughts on how color works as a style element. Here, color has a huge effect on style and message. I think the most well known illustrators are able to use color in very individualized way. Even if they don't always use the same colors. There's something about the way they use color that becomes part of their signature. Some artists change colors based on the mood of the piece. Others use the exact same palettes for everything. There's really no wrong way. I really think color can be overthought. You can have the most perfect colors chosen, but then your client needs you to work in their brand colors, or they just don't like them. It's really not what colors you use, that's as important as how you use them. I can say the best approach to working with color is to restrict yourself to three to six colors that you know work. Some of you might be wondering, how do you initially find your colors? Here are just some starting points that hopefully will help you get on your way. One way of finding your colors, just start with what you like. Color, I think for artists is very personal and there's no shame in that. Personally, like a lot of my work includes an orangey red and there's no reason for it other than the fact that I like it. I'm drawn to it. It's just a part of who I am. Start with what you like and then you can build up a palette from there. Another great starting point for color is to find an image with colors that you love and you'd like to try working in again. There's no shame in this. Go to Dribble, go to Google Image Search, even find images of art that you love. Use the color picker tool in Photoshop or procreate. Nobody owns color palettes. I think you should feel free to find a color palette and just use it. Another handy tool that I found in building color palettes, especially early on, is the Color Guide. In Illustrator, Color Guide is just a little feature, a little panel, that you can open up in Adobe Illustrator. And you just start with a color and then it builds out a whole bunch of different palettes based on kind of classical color theory. You don't even need to know how color theory works, it just makes them for you. And then you can find a palette that you think will work for your project or that you like. One last color prompt I can give you is just to go with a classic. So if you're at all familiar with printing terms, CMYK are the printing primaries. Cyan, magenta, yellow and black. And while these are combined in sophisticated ways to make thousands of colors, just as their own colors, the solid can, solid, magenta, et cetera. When you combine these as a palette, they really work well together. They look great. If you're really stuck in color, just work in cyan, magenta, yellow and black. The next style element is texture. Texture adds a tactile feeling or a surfaceness to the artwork. In digital artwork, texture is simulated to look like it was made with physical media. In pure vector illustration, of course, there's no texture. Sometimes texture is added to just warm it up. In my own style, I do have a vector component to my artwork and then I bring in textures just to warm it up. I used to create textures with physical media and sample it into my digital artwork. Today I'm more comfortable working purely digitally for the most part. Okay, the last element of style is shading. Shading is simply darker areas of color that give the effect of depth or volume. Texture can be used as a way of shading. Shading is not always necessary depending on the project or your style can, however, help an image pop a little bit more. Now I just want to make a quick little note about how your media or your chosen tools and techniques will largely determine the quality of these five elements. These so called tools of style elements are largely going to be determined by two things. Your tools and techniques as I've said, and your choices are taste. If I'm working in nib pen using black India ink on paper, the quality of the line that I can make with that is very limited and very specific. Similarly, if I'm making lines using the pen tool in Illustrator, it's going to have just a much more digital vector look to it. So that's a clear example of how your tool and technique really affects what your style looks like in terms of your choices or taste. You lean into your different tools and techniques and what they can do based on what your desired effect is and what kind of art you actually want to be making. 7. Primer: 5 Principles of Design: If the elements of style are your tools, The principles of design are how you use the tools. These are the guiding principles. There are official principles of design you can look up outside this class. But these are the ones that I think are the most important. The first one is repetition. It just says it sounds. This is where an element repeats or recurs throughout the artwork. Repetition can help achieve balance and a more cohesive feeling within an illustration. I repeat similar motifs in my own artwork. These become my visual vocabulary. These are little things like how I draw grass and trees, for instance. By sticking to one symbol for minor elements like these, I create unity and a desirable level of uniformity. Sometimes I repeat an unimportant element so it's not on its own, it feels less significant. So if I had just like one tree in the background of an illustration, it looks like it's like standing out too much and drawing too much attention to itself. Maybe if I just draw one more, it's like, oh, there's just trees. It's just a forest Instead of just focusing on the one tree. Another guiding principle for how to use style is pattern. Pattern is the most obvious form of repetition. Stripes, polka dots, plaid animal prints. You can use pattern selectively in illustration to create a graphic effect. Pattern can be used repetitively through your work as a signature. Go to move. Personally, I use stripes and plaid a lot. You'll see that throughout a lot of my illustrations. And it's just a nice little thing that I can add to every illustration. It creates visual interest. And because I do it a lot, it becomes more identifiable to me. The next principle is balance. Now, balance is one of the trickiest things to achieve in an illustration. I have spent hours trying to figure out how to make an image feel overall balance. And I'm not talking about hours over the span of my life. I'm talking about, in one illustration, I have spent hours just moving things here, there. Take it away, put it back. It is something that's very hard to describe. So I'll do my best here. Balance is the sense that everything is in the right place in the composition and that there's nothing missing or overbearing in any undesirable way. Balance is sometimes achieved through arrangement, but sometimes through repeating certain elements to lead the eye through the composition. One sense of balance is really essential to their voice. Okay, the next principle is grouping. Now, I learned this from my wife. We're both clutter phobes, but I think she is much more so than I am. I noticed that she would often consolidate messes by placing them closer together. For instance, instead of leaving the dishes sprawled across the kitchen counter, she'd gather them together near or mostly in the sink. The same amount of mess looks a lot less messy. Grouping helps unite otherwise sprawling or disconnected illustrations or parts of illustrations. I think this is especially important for spots where there are no hard bounds to keep the illustration together. You want the spot illustrations themselves and elements within them to feel grouped so that they're more cohesive. The next principle is contrast. Contrast is the relationship between lights and darks. In an illustration, strong contrast, we'll see darker darks paired with lighter lights. And of course, the opposite is true. You can have less intense darks and toned down brights, I'd say. With a higher contrast image, there is a more graphic effect. You can use contrast to differentiate between areas in the illustration, between two shapes. And especially between lines and shapes, The color of a line over that shape should contrast nicely. You actually see the line. The next principle is hierarchy. Hierarchy in an illustration is the order of emphasis from it to images. Should have a sense of internal hierarchy. Having one thing come through more than the others. That way the eye can focus on just one thing. Otherwise, there's this unresolved tension you feel when you look at the image. Conceptually, an illustration should have the most important idea come through above all other elements. 8. Primer: 5 Principles of Stylization: The next thing we're going to talk about is stylization. Stylization sounds a lot like style, but it's different. Stylization is how we move an image away from realism for the purposes of visual interest or conceptual clarity, or sometimes both. To me, realism is hard to achieve in an interesting way. I much prefer illustrations that interpret ideas and things from real life in more novel ways. That stylization, I've come up with these five principles of stylization for my odd bodies class. And I think they're worth revisiting for this class conveniently. If you took the first letter from each one of these principles, it spells the word faces. A nice mnemonic to help you remember, the F stands for flattening. When I talk about flattening in an illustration, we're losing depth for a clearer and more iconic read. Abstraction is the next letter. Abstraction is expressing a thing through broader dumbed down strokes. Take, for example, a Christmas tree. You could draw every needle branch and all the bark and stuff like that. But your goal isn't to show someone a photograph of a Christmas tree. You could express that much more simply, one of the most abstract ways of expressing a Christmas tree would just be a triangle, maybe with a rectangle on the bottom. The next principle of stylization is clarity. Clarity is very important to communicating ideas. When you're illustrating an image should have a clarity to it. It should not be vaguely constructed unless that vagueness is intentional. The message of an illustration should also be very clear. Another way of thinking about clarity is also just the sketches. In my sketches, I aim for clarity so that I know exactly how I will construct it later in the final. The next principle of stylization is exaggeration. Exaggeration is making something bigger to prove a point you're dramatizing. You can make something bigger in your artwork to draw attention to it or what it represents. Another word I like for this one is eccentrification, which is a bit different from exaggeration. It's more about allowing certain quirks and imperfections to stay in the art. Eccentricity is just something that's not perfect. You can dial up or down eccentricity in your work to make it look more human and unique. As you develop your style through your own creative journey, look for ways to eccentrify or exaggerate in the same way over and again, and that can become a part of your signature. The last letter is, and that's simplification. Simplification is the removal of any elements in an image or a concept that don't add to the story or removing those that distract from the story. An extreme version, of course, is minimalism, like super sparse, only one stroke and one shape. But for me, simplicity and simplification is more about balance. Too few details in an could make it boring. Too many it could just be overwhelming. Another word I like for this letter in the acronym is singularity. And this relates a lot to simplicity. This is the idea of an image being about just one thing at the expense of others. There's a focus to the image. Simplicity is very important for smaller illustrations like spots where you only have a small canvas to work on. 9. Primer: Inspiration vs. Imitation: Have you ever wondered how you can be influenced by your heroes without imitating them? Is that even possible? To be honest, I actually don't think it's possible. At least at first. We all start by being inspired by artwork we see out in the world. Our natural first response is to want to do that too. In the journey toward having a unique voice as an illustrator, we all go through what I call the Three eyes. This is in our journey from beginner to expert. First is inspiration. You are inspired by what you see even before you know what it is. This is the moment when you discover illustration as something you'd like to try. The next stage is imitation. Without experience or skills, you need to start somewhere. Whether learning the fundamentals or trying your hand at different styles you see out there. You have to, you have to learn from others. Imitation is how we express our inspiration and how we learn. Of course, this all leads to innovation. As you develop your skills through imitation, you also discover your own abilities, your weaknesses, your inclinations, your likes and dislikes. You purposefully or accidentally lean into these, which individualizes the more basic skills and techniques you learned through imitation. I have one ethical rule of thumb for imitation Im to learn innovate earn. Be free to imitate your heroes, of course. Be sure to give credit when credit is due. Never share work that looks just like it without attributing the original artist. And ask permission if you want to imitate it for a project that perhaps many others will see. If you're being paid by a client or employer to illustrate, you're not allowed to rip an artist off no matter how pressed for time. You are at very least borrow something of their approach. But in your own way, if you feel like it's too close, it never hurts to ask, especially if it avoids public shaming or a lawsuit. 10. Project: Kickoff and Setup: All right, we're finally doing the project. For this project, we'll be making two sets of spot illustrations, four spots per set. Each illustration, each spot should be three by 3 " instructions, four sets. 1.2 will be in the specific sections that follow. To kick off, these are the preliminary things we need, be thoughtful at this stage, as the rest of the project really depends on it. The first thing we're going to do is come up with the theme. We're going to choose a general theme like wine tasting, trail running back to school, New York. The theme can be very general. It's just about something maybe you're interested in as a general topic. Next we're going to come up with a specific experience or story related to that theme. The more specific the better for wine. It might be Napa Valley wine tour guide or things I wish I knew on my first ultra marathon. Or surviving your first year of high school. Things to do when you're alone in New York City. That's just like showing you the general and then the specific experience. And now imagine a magazine or a website article about this theme. What would the purpose be? This is an optional step, but I find this just helps contextualize what I'm making, gives me a better sense of what I'm doing. Is it a guide? How to, is it informational? Is it an opinion piece, a story, work of fiction? You've chosen your general theme and your specific experience. Now we're going to write two lists, and these lists are going to relate to our two sets later on. The first list is going to be a list of nouns for me, I have all these examples listed that I just gave you. I'm going to choose trail running as my general theme. My specific experience will be things I wish I knew on my first ultra. Now we're going to have our two lists that relate to these. For the first list, I'm just going to come up with simple objects. Now these should be things that you can immediately imagine and that would be relatively simple to draw or illustrate. Trail shoes, water bottle, first aid kit, race, Bib. These are things that I could just imagine drawing lube GPS watch. If I were doing tour of Napa Valley for instance. My simple objects would be like wine bottle corkscrew, maybe something more related specifically to the Napa Valley. Maybe a sign that I've seen in a guide or something like that. Just very simple objects. These are six things for my second list. Now I'm going to come up with more abstract concepts and scenarios related to the specific experience. These are not objects, these are things that you can't immediately envision. And I'll just go through some of the examples I came up with for things I wish I knew on my first Ultra Chiefing happens. I'm imagining like an article on Runner's World or something like that and it's like you're reading this, someone's written these things as tips in a way that's where these titles are coming from. Trail piece is slower, the battle is Mental as much as it is physical. You'd want to train for the terrain, you want to train for the specific rain that you'd be running on. So you know it. Next one would be, don't change your fuel regime on race day. Don't leave travel and accommodations for the last minute. I just want to add one more note about how this second list is super esoteric. I was able to think of all these very abstract things because of how specific the experience I envision. So there was the general category of trail running and then that could be so many different things. When I boiled it down to things I wish I knew suddenly I had these actual ideas for what I would make in this list. Again, I just want to encourage you to get specific and imagine that experience and then you'll have an easier time coming up with your second list of these abstract concepts. Now let's move into the first set. 11. Project: Set 1 - Research and Discovery: In this set, we're going to illustrate physical objects from the first list we made. The purpose of the first set is to work out style with simple physical objects, which is a lot easier than in a more abstract or intangible concept. Our focus will be working out how we use the five elements of style and faces those principles of stylization to clearly communicate each concept. In this case, each object in a compelling, consistent way. These spots should clearly represent the objects in a unique consistent style. With every project I work on after the brief, the first step is called research and discovery. I made this up, but I think it's pretty similar across any creative flow. It's just basically where you're researching and then coming up with just some initial information to work with. The purpose of the stage is to download information, in our case, visual information about our subject and allow ourselves the opportunity to discover new things about our subject along the way. We start just by setting up a folder where our work will go. This simple action will give us just the sense that we're working. It greases the wheels. You can organize your files anyway you want, but this is the way I set up my projects and it just makes looking for your files later on a lot easier. My base or my root folder is just the name of this project, we'll call it Sweet Spots. Then the next folder within that, we'll just call it set one, and then we're going to have assets, then references, then sketches, and then of course, finals assets. Or any files that you get from the client. In this case, it might be the thumbnail sheet that I include on the class page. You could just download that to assets and it's there at your convenience. Then this is where when we're doing our Google image searching and just finding reference images, we're going to just throw them in there. Sketches, as you might have guessed, is where we're going to put our sketches. We're going to keep all of those final illustration files. Okay, I'm about to hop back onto my computer here. I'm going to do my visual research. So this is where I'm looking just for images that I can draw from. Our concepts here are just very simple, they're stylized, but otherwise literal depictions of physical objects. So I have a Google open here and I'm going to just start googling the words from my list. So trail shoes is the first I'm looking for images that I feel represent the object clearly, which are not too specific or obscure. So for instance, for trail shoes, I'm not going to draw those shoes with all the separate toes or anything like that. It's too niche. And of course, we might want to also impose our own taste on this. So if there's a kind of shoe that we like or the colors we like or something like that, that's okay. As long as the images are mostly classic, or quintessential, or iconic of the object that we're the object that we're trying to illustrate here I am, I'm just looking for shoes that I like, love these color ways of the Nike shoes. I'm looking for a shoes that just have a profile that's clean and that I like. I'm going to move on to the next thing. Water bottle for ultra running. You're not going to be running with one of these fancy metal water bottles. You're probably going to have something like a handheld. This image shirt that I just came up with didn't come up with the right of water bottle for this topic. I'm just going to look for handheld. Just add handheld as my extra keyword here. And there we go. Now here I'm looking for a bottle that looks classic. I look for things that are not complicated. A lot of these images are complicated. They're like a weird shaped bottle with a little backpack on them. I don't think that's going to look good in the way that I illustrate this Nike bottle, I think actually looks great. It's got a nice profile and it has that little ***** pack or whatever on it that makes it look handheld. I'm going to download that. I'm going to just go and do the same thing for all of these images. The important thing is that you're looking for images that really look clean, and iconic, and emblematic of the thing you're trying to illustrate. The next thing is first aid kit. Of course, you're not going to carry a first aid kit on a trail race. Maybe it's something more like trail specific. So I'm Trail run first aid kit, now you get a lot of flat lades of what's inside. I think that might be too complicated for a spot illustration for trail running or hiking and backpacking. You get these little pouches. I think I'm just going to get one of those. I do like how iconic the style of first aid with the handle on it is. I think if you drew one of those with a cross on it, that would be very straightforward. But it's also a risk that it might not be appropriate for the subject. The next thing is the race bib, which is that number that you pin onto your shirt. The essential qualities of a race Bib in my mind are just black numbers on a white background and maybe a color bar on the bottom or both the bottom and the top. That there's a little bit of a no brainer for me anyway, as you're going through your own image searches, sometimes you'll just be very familiar with how these things look and you don't really need too many reference images. That's okay too. The next thing is Lube. Now I'm not going to Google just lub. I'm not sure what that will come up with, but I'm going to try anti chafing. That's the idea of the lube for runners. This is an important thing because you run a long time, you sweat, it's hot, you get some uncomfortable rashes. A way of avoiding that is something that you put on your skin to avoid that. Some of these are more iconic to me than others. Vaseline is well known in the lube world. And then we have body or glide. This blue almost looks like underarm deodorant that's iconic and familiar within this world of running. I think that's enough. I wouldn't want to get too creative with that. Maybe a squeeze bottle like that, just for extra reference. Last thing would be a GPS watch. Again, I'm looking for the most iconic version of a GPS watch, something like this, where maybe looks a little bit tactical, has a rugged look to it. And then a screen with some information or data on it. Apple watch is iconic, but not as well used by trail runners because of the battery life. Maybe get this, that gives me a sense of what might be on the information screen. Now the thing here is a lot of these watches are shown at this three quarter view, like this one, that's bigger here. The problem with that for me is that it's harder to flatten that. And as you remember, flattening is just one of the kinds of ways of stylizing. I look for ones that are more head on and it's just, quite frankly, easier to illustrate in my flat style and it's less distracting. There's less of that watch that I need to include, and that makes it a simpler, clearer image to depict in my illustration. After I'm satisfied I have enough visual references to work from, I start free sketching. It looks like sketching, but it's kind of what I'd call goal free sketching. The only goal of sketching here is to download visual information so I can more intuitively draw them from heart when I'm working concepts out later. This isn't about drawing, well, just about observing, you can be the worst drawer in the world and still really get a lot from free sketching. Use a sketchbook, loose paper, or the digital equivalent. I use procreate as my sketchbook. Now, it's just super convenient, it's fancy equipment, but I'm really just using it like a paper and pencil. If that's all you have, you can totally do this step again, We're just drawing what we see in our reference images. I have my reference images open here. I'll just go in order that they show. This is where I draw what I'm seeing. There's no concept here with a first aid pouch. You really just have the zipper and it looks pillowy. Maybe I'm getting a little bit into the concept, but a lot of them will have some kind of graphic on the first aid cross, that kind of thing. And one of my images here, I see just like different things that might be in the bag that might be helpful to remember, like tweezers and little satchels of gauze pads and stuff like that. And then once you've drawn from all the images in your references or you feel like you got it down, just move on to the next thing. Solicit is the GPS watch. It's really not about being a good drawer, it's just about drawing what you see in the best way possible. To download some information about it and you'll get some clues about what's going to be useful later on when you're coming up with concepts like for here I'm getting clues just even as I'm drawing it. It would be more of a challenge to draw on a three quarter view. And then you might have a map of some kind and some kind of timing information, maybe heart rate or something like that. Now when I do these for actual projects, I actually get really into it and draw very carefully. And just take my time. Just really sink in and enjoy this process because it, it feels like work in the sense that I'm actually working. But it's also just, there's no real concept involved. So I don't get too anxious about whether I'm drawing the right thing or not. I just enjoy the process thing. I'm probably mostly interested in the kind of information I want to download to my brain here is just like what's on those information screens. So you have like these dividers and you have numbers and charts. Now, because these are small illustrations, I'm not going to actually be very detailed in what I end up depicting. But it's good to know what these are so I can stylize them and simplify them, abstractify them in my final sketches and concepts. Okay, for this one just there's the rectangle shape of the lube and then there's some kind of logo on it or branding. And then sometimes they have the lid off and you can see what's inside. You kind of get a sense of what the different packages look like. In this case, like a lot of times a package of a product is almost as important as the brand or the logo. Getting that shape. That iconic shape can say a lot without needing any words. Maybe even the shape of that label starts to look like a jar of vaseline. And I can figure out if that's going to work in my concept later on. Here it's just about the rectangle and you'll have little holes for safety pins. And then some kind of bar, you have the name or something of the race or the runner name and then some kind of number. Again, it's not about getting this perfect, it's just about what forms describe this object. Okay, trail shoes, probably one of the more complex things that I'll illustrate or draw here. I'm looking for what are the things that make a trail shoe a trail shoe. They usually have beefy treads, a more substantial thick lower sole. Maybe some welding to hold onto the laces up here. Again, you can just really get into the details here and draw everything you see as realistically as you want and just really sink into it. It's just a different process than actually illustrating these later. Sometimes they have that you have your laces. Finally, our water bottle, it looks like I only downloaded one image for that. And it's really just this nice cylinder shape with a top part and the little squirty nozzle thing. They have this little ***** pack thing that straps on. I'm just looking for what does that look like. Later on, I'll be looking at how I can make that reads the little, it looks like it has a little zipper. There's the product logo on there. Of course, I probably wouldn't include a specific brand in my illustrations unless it was about that brand, but just something that looks just like a water bottle. So yeah, those are my free sketches. Again, they're just goal free except just to get the information. And I'm just going to let them sit there, take a break, go have a drink of water, and come back. And when we come back, we're going to start actually thinking about what these look like as illustrations. And we'll get more into that in the next part. 12. Project: Set 1 - Concept Sketches: In research and discovery, our only goal is to download information. Now we're going to make a concerted effort to develop concepts. The ultimate goal of sketches is to work out concept, content and composition. We work these things out in sketch form because it's faster and easier to change in pencil than in a more finalized version. Concepts in this set will be easier than the second because the concepts are super simple, the objects themselves. The challenge in this set for sketches is to work out how each object will look, a stylistic and expressive point of view. Because we downloaded the visual information in the last stage, the hope is that we can draw everything from heart. It's okay to peek again at the references if you need to, but a huge part of finding your own voice is in how you compensate for what you forget when drawing from memory. I'd say just give it a try. This part of sketching is called thumbnailing. I have provided a thumbnail sheet that you're welcome to use, but it's super simple. If you just want to make your own, you just draw a bunch of squares at a smaller size on your page. It's easy to feel anxious at this point. How do you start? I'd say just start drawing what you know. We're going to go through each illustration concept. Here we have all the things here. Our first aid kit, our GPS watch, et cetera. Now we're just going to go and try and draw these first aid kit, your general square, maybe there's some zipper pattern. I'll probably include the first aid cross on there. Just because it's so iconic, that makes it read very much as a first aid kit. Without, without words. Now it could look a little bit boring, so maybe I'd try more of like a pillow effect. Either with the images bulging out or coming in. And if you get stuck, just keep going. You know, maybe I show the zipper open and then show some band aids and maybe a tube of ointment kind of peeking out the sides there. Yeah, I mean, I'm starting to just get adds a little bit more visual interest. Yes, it's just the first aid kit, but we want to maybe show more than just the pouch. We want to show the kit part of the first aid kit. Maybe there's scissors in there or something that might be too much, but something in there is feeling good. Don't be too critical of yourself where you're doing these sketches. You'll have lots of chance to self critique after you're done. The point here is to just go for quantity more than quality. I'm satisfied with some of these concepts here. I'm going to move on to the next one, which is GPS watch. And again, I'm not referencing my images, I'm trying to draw these from memory. And there will be things that I forget and more quirks in what I'm drawing. That's actually a good thing. That's how I'm taking something real and literal and processing it through my own memory, in my own hand, and it becomes more identifiably mine. The GPS watches sometimes have this little button that's probably too much and then some kind of map, some kind of number like your time. It may be the heart rate and they often have the little ticks around the bezzle. I might try one that's three quarter view. I don't like drawing things in three quarter view, but sometimes I do things that I don't like doing or that I resist doing and find that it's exactly the thing I want. I probably won't do it for this one, just how this is turned out. But it's there and it could be interesting. It gets into like how does the strap work in behind there? What about all those other moving parts? You don't need this to say GPS watch. I'm circling back to this view, I'm drawing outside the bounds of my thumbnail. That's okay. I can size it down later. Probably just basic buttons. Nice big fat bezel there to make it look tactical. Then the information screen as drawn before I'm satisfied with the GPS watch. Maybe just another thing that I might try if I was trying to be really interesting in my image is like, do I show it on some hand right away I'm feeling like no Then it's more about the wear of the watch. I think I was onto things just with my original thing, because these really are about the objects. Okay, moving on to the lube. And as I was drawing these in the free sketching stage without meaning to, but to my benefit, started thinking about how am I going to communicate this idea, How is this idea going to come through? I already had like of course is the basic head on thing and instead of writing any brand, I might just write lube here because that's what it is. And it's adds character by adding a bit of type to the illustration. In my own style, I actually do include type a lot, so it's not uncommon for me to pull a move like this in my concepts. Maybe a little bit of some information there. It doesn't matter what it is, you get the idea. It's a roll on stick. Another thing I might try for this one is just to show it open. I have the lid maybe off at an angle. We have that little dial at the bottom, no surprises here. But it shows a little bit more of the product and it helps read as a roll on stick better. And it also is more interesting because there's just a few extra moving parts. You don't want to get into a case where you have too many rectangles. A lot of objects are rectangles. We have our first aid kit, our roll on stick, and the race. Those are all rectangles. So we're going to look at ways of how to break out of just a straight up rectangle with stuff inside of it. Speaking of race B, this is the next thing that I'm going to start drawing again. You can start just with what, you know, start basic. Sometimes that's enough. I want to include the safety pins that come with the bib to pin it on your shirt. I'll probably just have basic color bars at the top and bottom. Maybe there's a name of says like Trail Race or something like that and then some race number. It doesn't matter, that's very arbitrary. As long as the number doesn't distract or tell too much story. Like, I wouldn't put 666 in my number here. Because people will start to think that, oh, this is about an evil race bib, which it's not just try and be as generic as possible just enough to tell the story. In this case, it's a race, We're still doing the race. I might just do something a little bit on that angle. Have those little holes, I rounded corners in this one, which might help break it again out of that boxiness. Maybe one of the safety pins is open. Maybe I just have one of the safety pins off of it that allows you to fill the square a little bit more. It's the same set of elements in the illustration. It's just that instead of grouping them totally all together, you're pulling one apart. It's just a little bit more story there. It's like getting, are you getting ready for the race, Are you taking it off? Again, more story there. I think those color bars will just be nice to frame the white space. Keeping in mind this is going to be a self contained illustration, no background. If the middle of that bid is going to be white, I need something to hold it in there. And I'll probably end up adding some subtle texture there just to help pop that white against the white background. More again, I'm going to do some number there, it doesn't matter. I guess I've chosen 36 something to indicate this is a trail race in a very simple way. Okay, Trail shoes is going to be probably the most complex, maybe it's about having two trail shoes. Then you just want to get into some of those technical features that make trail shoes look trail trail. So I might just work on a few different arrangements of these guys. I'm drawing very rapidly. I've been doing this for a long time. I draw every day. I've been drawing every day as an illustrator for the last six years. I understand that the way that things come out of my pencil are going to look like. It's so easy for me and you know, full disclosure, I practice, I rehearsed this set, I just don't want you guys to be discouraged if you're not able to draw as quickly or rapidly. And everyone's at a different level. And I just want to encourage you, especially at this rough thumbnailing stage, this is really just about composition, content, and concept. We're trying to think of those things here. Let those quirks remain in there as much as you can and maybe keep a bit of that eccentricity in there. Yeah, I'm just going to keep going here. And I didn't have any of these in my reference images. I might have to actually look. But like what does the top down view of the, so these shoes look like? I could try that and then maybe one on its side. That could make for an interesting image. But it could also be really tricky to show that top view and have it really read clearly as a shoe and not be distracting. Because if you do that the wrong way or if it's not as clearly recognizable, it's just going to look off and weird. Do what you're comfortable with. I'm more comfortable with drawing from the side. I keep going back to this, these welds on the side. I guess that's just how I do it. You'll find that you do that as you're sketching. You just return again and again to a way of expressing a certain form. You just want to lean into that. You can also question it and say, is this really something I should be doing? But you might as well give it a try at first. And another example of what I'm talking about is the way I'm drawing treads. Trailshoereads are not usually undulating and wavy, they're more square then they'll actually grip the dirt. But for the purposes of expressing a trailshoe, that detail, in my opinion, doesn't matter. I'm just going to go to the last one, which is the water bottle, and we found a water bottle shape that was pretty quintessential and easy to remember. That's actually a good thing if it was too complex and had strange angles and curve suit or something like that, it's hard to remember. Maybe it's not as iconic of the thing you're trying to draw as it should be for this purpose. Had that like little ***** pack part, I don't know what to call it. I guess the pouch, maybe it had a zipper here with a little pulley, maybe a bit of shading, maybe even a bit of water. I could draw that on its side, in which case the water could still be parallel to the horizon. Which makes configuration interesting illustration, I might just try straps on the side of the bottle just to emphasize at this small size that it has something strapped onto it. That little handheld pouch part, I still want to include that zipper. It's just water bottle plus little backpack pouch thing. I wouldn't want to get into what's in the bag or what color is the stuff inside. I'd probably just indicate that it's water. Some of those things like color and all that, you don't really need to think about that until the final illustration, until you're actually working on the final artwork. I think that's it. I have my water bottle, I have my shoe, my lube, my race, my GPS watch, and my first aid. I usually do thumbnailing in this way for as long as I can until I just feel exhausted. If I have the time, if I don't have the time, I just do as much as I can within that time. After that, I just stop and take a rest. And that allows me to come back a little bit more objectively to the concepts that I just fleshed out. And perhaps see something I didn't see in it before. Maybe there's a sketch that I was like. I don't like that. But come back to it and be like, actually I really like that one. That one feels really fresh. When you come back, you're going to review your thumbnails and pick your best ones, and we're going to do that next. Okay. I've thumbnailed my concepts. I think I have enough. I'm going to go back and just make sure that I've covered everything. And now I'm just looking for the sketches that stand out the most. Which ones I think are working best. If you feel like it's hard to whittle down and just choose a few that are working. Maybe explain the project to a friend kind of briefly and have them comment on what they think is working. That's super helpful. Having that outside opinion, I haven't drawn too many here. I haven't overwhelmed myself completely. I think I'll be all right for the first aid kit. I think something in this zone is going to work the best. I just like how it's visually interesting. There's stuff happening coming out of the bag there, out of the pouch. And it fills the space nicely. And I think because it's this pouch style and not this more case style, it feels appropriate for the subject for the GPS watch. I think I nailed it on the first one, but I like the third one here fills the space. A little better. Something in between these two is something I might want to try. Moving on to the loops stick, I really think that the second one is going to work the best. I feel like it balances telling the story a little bit more and showing exactly what the object is. Now for the race bib, I really like this one. I like how it has a little bit more story just with the safety pins coming off of it. It's just simple tells the story, fills the space nicely. That's what I'm looking for. I think the hardest one will be shoes. I think this one and this one the best. Again, at this stage, we don't really have to make our definitive choice of which one we're going to take into the final yet, I'll just flag both of those out and make up my mind later for the water bottle. I just like this straightforward one now that I'm looking at it. This one feels a little bit too labored and there's parts of it that I can take. I think I could probably come up with the fatter straps on here, but otherwise I think this reads more clearly. I'm going to take this one into the finals. Before we get there, what we're going to do is take our chosen thumbnails and just refine our sketches. That's going to be the next stage. Now's a great time to again, take a rest and grab a sip of water and share your sketches with the class. If you want feedback and maybe other people's opinions on what's working best, share it on the class projects page. And that's a great way to get feedback from your fellow students and of course, from me. Now is the time to choose your favorite thumbnail for each illustration. How do you know? How can you whittle down from all the options, especially if you made a ton? Just go through them and ask yourself, is the concept on point? Do you think you can illustrate this particular sketch in your style? For instance, if I sketch something really elaborate and on a three quarter view, it might not translate very well to my otherwise very stylized and flat way of illustrating. I look for illustrations that I feel promise a stronger image. Lastly, you want to be excited about what you're going to illustrate. Pick concepts that you like. I think one mistake that we may make when showing concepts to our clients is we feel like they should decide what they like from our work. We show them a whole bunch of options, some of which we actually don't like at all, we don't feel connected. Then invariably they choose one of the ones that we least like. You can avoid that situation by only showing sketches that you like. Never devalue your own preferences in figuring out what to illustrate and what to show your client. If you still have trouble, try placing different combos of concepts together as a set. When you're looking at these as a set, how do you know which you are working well? Well, which images do you just intuitively think look best as a set? Do any feel like the odd one out? Does one have too many details or is one going to be too dark or too simple? That's just another way of processing which ones to choose. Maybe you have a great single illustration, but when you bring it into the set, it just seems like it doesn't fit in. You can quickly chose to let that one go for now. If you still can just carry these forward, refine all your concepts that you really like, and just choose later, you'll find out more which ones are really working as you try to refine them more. Refine each sketch by tracing over with more confident lines. Whereas our original sketches might be a bit loose, these refined sketches should be more confident and resolved. Resolve any awkward connections or intersections of lines and that kind of thing. This is your blueprint for the final. Do yourself a favor and make it work in pencil first, rather than trying to make it work out in the final. Whether you need to do this or not depends on the precision of your final illustration technique. Again, in my own style, there is a level of precision that I need in the sketches and it just works out. Clarify anything that doesn't read clearly and take this opportunity to resolve the overall composition, how it fills the space, in this case, our three by three square. I'm going to start with my first aid kit because I only had one. That's pretty easy. I know I'm going to refine that. I'm just going to copy that and paste it on its own layer. We'll just turn that off for now. I'll make a group for, let's say we'll call this selects and turn that off. Next thing is the GPS watch. Choose this one. For now, copy it. Okay. Go to my next page here where I have the race bib. I think this one for the trail shoes and lastly the water bottle. Okay, with my selects, all in this new group, I'm going to turn off the original sketch layers. Turn on my select. Okay, I have my final selects all cued up. Now for this project, we only need to do four. So I'm going to choose my favorite here, the ones that I'm most excited about turning into finals, and I'll say see later to the rest. For now, I'm going to go with the trail shoes, the GPS, watch the race bib and the stick of lube. That means no water bottle, I guess that means no first aid kit. These are the four that I'm going to refine upon at this point. I'm literally going to do is trace over them. What I want to do first is just have faded back in opacity, almost like I'm working with tracing paper. If you're working in procreate, what I do is I just put a whole layer of white fill over top. And then I screen it back to maybe 80% And that's gives me like a tracing paper feel. I can see my art below. And then I refine this sketch over top. As we start refining our sketches, what we want to do is just clarify. We want our sketches to be much cleaner in my own style. When I go into the finals, I really like to know how all the shapes and everything intersect with a certain level of precision. Depending on your style, You'll maybe be more comfortable with rough sketches and then you work things out in the final. For me, I'm going to be clarifying these as much as possible. I'll just start with the trail shoes and just make sure I was working in a fairly chunky pencil before. Might make that a little bit thinner so I can be a little bit more resolved. But keep in mind these are 3 " squared illustrations. Don't get too carried away with tiny fine details. For me it's about trying to capture that expression and spontaneity of the first sketch, but just doing over any bits that lack resolution, I still want to allow those eccentricities to come in. I'm not trying to make this perfect, I'm just trying to articulate what's in this image as clearly as possible. I might add a little bit more there. It doesn't have to be perfect, just clear because these are repeating elements. I can copy and paste these, maybe get a little bit of stitching, don't forget the tongue, the laces. Maybe a bit of a, I think that might work because it's just a pair of shoes. I can take a little shortcut here, copy that, paste it here. The trick will be here. And now is a good opportunity just to see how these shoes are arranged so that they're shown in the best possible views as best as I can. At this point, I can always adjust later because it's digital. If that's one overlapping, I'll quickly remove any overlapping bits that make it hard to read. And I'm seeing already that little loop on the back of the top shoe here is awkward. I can just fudge that a little bit. I've refined those shoes. I've decided not to do any las with these. I feel like that'll just add too much. A trail shoes don't have laces that come out like that. Anyway, that's enough. That's enough information and I've paired it back to its essence. The next one I'm going to do is the Bib. Again, just defining the form more clearly. One thing I tend to do in my art is everything leans a little bit to the right. All my drawings have a italic feeling to them. For some reason, it's part of my quirk, but sometimes if I'm able to help it or if I catch it, I try and correct it. That's what I do at this stage, is just make sure things aren't too tilty, Then we have nothing too crazy different from the first sketch I made. Just going in with a little bit more precision, I'm going to define these safety pins a bit more. Make them a little bigger because it will read better at this small size. I'm going to make some open and for variety I'm getting a better sense of how actually illustrate them. Then of course, this outlier here, safety pins are really secondary to the Bib. I'm not going to craft those safety pins super well. They can be a little bit more gestural then the number lettered. Now, we'll get more into this in the final. But the lettering for this, I don't have to figure out exactly what that lettering style is in this part, because as an illustrator, lettering is one of the tools in my tool kit, so to speak. How that looks will be defined by the techniques that I use for lettering specifically. I know that I can just rough it in here for now and work that out later. Then I think something a little bit more scripty up there will be nice. Now we have the GPS watch. Now, I'm just going to move this a little bit more centered into the thumbnail box there. That way I can see how it's going to fill that space. I'm going to have a bigger round part and focus less on the wrist strap because that's not as important. I need the wrist wrap in so it looks like a watch. But I don't need to make the wrist strap totally obvious because the shapes that I use aren't purely geometric. I'm okay with my circles not being perfect. If I had a perfect circle here, it would look, it would really stand. It would be too noticeable. It would draw attention to itself because none of my shapes are that precise. I could take a shortcut and use a circle tool or something like that, but it would take away from the quality of the final illustration. I'm still pushing a little bit outside the bounds of that border of the 3 " by 3 ". I'm just going to shrink it down a tad. At this point, I'm very loosely referencing the image below, trying not to be too distracted by, I might even just feed it back a bit more, that way I can focus on the image I'm making. I'm going to go for just two buttons here. I like the little Mapp doodle thing. Maybe there's a R here thing there, then some lines. It doesn't really matter what this number represents. It could be pace, it could be elapse time since you started your run. It doesn't matter. It's really just about this is a smart watch or a GPS watch that reads out information. In that sense I'm abstracting and simplifying. Then I have, of course, little ticks around the bezel. Maybe I just want to make sure that they're evenly distributed. This would be darker, something like that. Here we have our GPS watch. The last one is the lube stick here. Not a whole lot to refine here, maybe just get better in defining those round corners. If I define those round corners now, they'll be easier to trace over with the pen tool later. Again, using lettering, I don't have to be too careful with how the lettering looks because I'll craft that in the final stage more carefully. And there we have our four refined sketches for our first set of spots. Now it's time to bring these into the final art. At this point, feel free to share your sketches with the class so you can get some yes on it and just start filling out that projects page. 13. Project: Set 1 - Final Artwork: The final stage is where we create the actual illustration artwork with color, texture, and everything else that goes into a fully finished illustration. Whereas your sketches may prove your idea, there should be much yet to surprise and delight at this stage to start. First, create your illustration file. Because we're working on a set of small illustrations, it makes sense to work on them all in the same file. I would never do this for a feature illustration or larger illustrations, but for a smaller sets of spots, it's perfect. We're going to make a four up file, meaning we're going to have all four squares together, because it can be two squares by two squares. If you do more illustrations like six or eight, just make it eight up or six up. If you're making a four up file, the final file size should be 6 " wide and 6 " high at 300 DPI. Once the file is made, use guides to divide it into four panels. I use Guide Guide, which is a little add on feature you can add to Photoshop, but you can also just use rulers to measure where they go, basically at 3 " in both directions. Save the file. Descriptively, in the finals folder that we made at the beginning of this project, I usually add a V one just to know it's my first try. If I have to go back and make any changes or revisions, I'll just say that as V2v3, et cetera. Okay. Once you've set up your illustration file, begin the magic. I'll walk you through my illustration process. You're welcome to follow along or do your own thing. I'll describe the high level of what I'm doing, which will hopefully translate to any style. Personally, I always start with my shapes, so that's using the pen tool and Photoshop and just starting to create those big, solid areas of color. I usually don't know exactly how the colors are going to turn out, but I just start with any color and things work their way as I go along. And that's what's probably going to happen as we go along today. I just want to talk a little bit about starting point for those who don't have a style that they work in, I'm going to give you a kind of a starting point. I'm going to give you one kind of line to work with, one kind of texture to work with, and one set of colors. You can use the exact same things or just use it loosely as a template, but the idea is allow yourself to have very narrow constraints. The constraints seem very unforgiving at first, but you'll see as you go along that they actually can go a long way in creating a really consistent style across the whole set. And you can really start finding ways of being creative with this minimal tool palette, if you will. And I'll show you exactly what those look like as we go along. Even though we're working all in the same file, I would build up each illustration individually. And then once you have each individual illustration worked out, you can go through them on a second pass and even things out. What you need to even out and all that kind of stuff will become more evident once you have all four, in this case, all four illustrations up, you'll know what little tweaks you need to make to each of them. Sometimes what you find works in one place doesn't work across the whole set. Again, working on them as a set, you might make the perfect, in my case, Trailshoe. Then I go to make the water bottle or the Bib, and then I realize that some of the techniques I use don't translate well. In order to make them all work together, I need to rethink how I did it in the trail shoe, in this example. Okay, I'm making my four up file in Photoshop that's going to be three times 2 " wide, which is 6 ", 6 " high. The resolution is 300. That just make sure they're a good resolution for print. I'll just keep the color mode R AGB. You can ignore all the other settings and just hit okay. Here we have our file. The next thing I want to do is just divide this up into four squares, and these will be the 43 by three squares of each spot. So I'm just going to place one guide in the middle horizontally and then one guide in the middle vertically. They should fall exactly on the three inch mark in both ways. First I'm just going to go to the Sweet Spots folder that we made at the beginning and go to my set one and of course, go to finals and just give us a descriptive name, I'll just call it trail running, Set 11. Because I made my sketches in procreate, I was able to just share my file from my ipad to my Mac, and they're conveniently here. However, you made your sketches, whether on paper, ever scan them and do whatever you need to do to get them on your computer or your final illustration device. The next thing you want to do is just get those sketches into your four up, final illustration file. I'm just going to copy each one of these one by one first. The Trailshoes. Get my Trailshoes in here. Just let it fill that square as much as possible. You can leave a little space around the sides. I'm going to do this for each of my sketches. Okay? Once I have my sketches are what I want to do is make sure they sit back. Just like when we made our refined sketches, we made that tracing paper effect. We din them down a bit here. We want to do the same thing. What I'm going to do is just create a layer group folder thing here. I'm going to call it sketches. Just put these sketches in that layer group and din that whole thing down to say, 20% and that gives me nice lighter sketch to trace over and above that I'm creating a layer group called Art. This is very specific to my process in Photoshop. It will be a little bit different if you're working in a different tool like Illustrator or procreate. But what I want to do is all the artwork that I'm going to make now will happen in the art layer group. Because I want to be able to see those sketches below at all time. I make the blend mode of the entire art layer group, I set it to multiply. I'm just going to my layer groups for each individual illustration as I go along trail shoes To start, this is where I just start actually making the illustration happen. For those of you who need a starting point for style, I've created this prompt which has one line work style, one texture brush style, and four colors. These are Photoshop specific. But really what these get at is that you don't need much to make visually interesting stylish illustrations. I have one line work brush, that's one of Kyle Webster's brushes. The Kyle's inky box, old Nib 15 picks, and I believe all his brushes are available through Adobe. If you have Photoshop, these are totally free and available to you. The next one is a texture brush. One of my favorite texture brushes is this one from Retro Supply company. It's called the Godfather of grain, and I'll show you how to use it, but that's a great brush if you want to bring in texture to your digital illustration. And then I have four colors. These are my go to colors. These are actually part of the illustrations I make all the time. You are welcome to use them or to find colors that you, you think represent you more. The thing to take from my color palette though, I have a warm, I have a cool, I have a dark, and I have a shader. You'll see how these work out more as we go along. But basically warm and cool contrast in terms of how they feel. You have a dark, which sometimes you just need something dark, especially for line work. Then the shader you use, not surprisingly for shading, it's just something, it's a mid color, You can multiply it over your other colors. It's like a nice in between color. Okay, so let's get started with the shoes. I have my trail shoes here. If you're curious at all about how I use Photoshop to illustrate, I show more in depth and detail in my other classes, especially inky illustrations, but also in inky maps and odd bodies. I do have portions of those classes where I really get more into how I'm doing, what I'm doing. If you're ever curious about what I'm doing, I encourage you to go look at these classes. But in this class, really, I want to show you the steps, how I'm thinking about style specifically in here. And I will be using the very limited palette of tools, the lines, the colors that I just showed you, the texture. Just to show you how these minimal elements can really work together in a very surprising and interesting way. I'm using the pen tool here just to define the outer shapes. The biggest shapes, the most obvious things is where I start. I have my first major shape here. I'm going to fill it in with one of my go to colors. I'm going to try the orangey color. This is my warm and I'm going to work on one shoe at a time. And perhaps I can just copy and paste this shoe behind as a bit of a shortcut. I'm looking at ways that I can use extra color here in each shoe. I'm using shape to define these forms. No lines have been made yet. I basically have white red in this really dark blue to work with. Oh, I also have my cool color, but that cool color really vibrates against the red. So I might have to figure that out later. When you're illustrating a vector parts like in Photoshop, I'm using the pentile here. These are effectively vectors. I want to make sure that there's no sharp angles or spurs or bits of shape that feel out of place. And that's what I'm zooming in here to make sure when I put that tongue in that it's sitting nicely behind that shoe and has a nice smooth transition from shoe to tongue. I think this is a good place to start introducing line. I'm one brush. I'm going to use only this for a line work in the entire set. First, I want to define this line across the bottom of the shoe, in the sole, allowing the irregularity of my hand. You can see there's a little bit of wobble in it. I'm allowing that to remain as it is. And that just adds that ec centrification that I'm talking about. I'm also going to add the loop behind at the heel of the shoe. And I'm going to do that in a dark color as much as possible. My line work is going to be either white or this dark color. I'm going to tuck it behind the shoe because where I drew it, you saw that sharp spur of the back of the heel. And if I can just tuck it behind, it creates a much smoother and less distracting transition. Of course, next I want to add the laces which are, in this case, just simple lines. I don't have to worry about every possible detail of these laces, but I might want to add some of the eyelets behind the laces. This is where using my shading color will come in handy. This is a mid gray. I'm going to use it for the stitching along the heel and perhaps along the toe here somehow. I want to make sure that's in my shape, so I'm going to drag it within the shape. Now, I don't want that gray just to be gray. This is a shader. And because of that, I usually multiply it over top. The other artwork that gray takes on the hue or the color, the shape that it's over top. Sometimes it can be a little bit overbearing still What I do is I just scale that back to 50% Provides just enough extra detail without overwhelming the image. It allows the stronger elements to come forth without competing. I want to make these parts look more like stitching. I add a La mask. This is a very Photoshop specific technique. I think you can do this also. In procreate, you add a layer mask and then you, as long as your top color is black, whatever you draw on that layer mask cancels out masks out the information on that layer. And this is just a quick way of making a sense of stitching. And there's our first shoe. I think I'll add just a little bit of texture to that shoe just to give it a little bit more warmth. So I'm just going to pop a layer over top and make sure my gray is selected, my mid gray, and then use my texture brush, the godfather of grain. I'm not going to change the size for this entire set of illustrations. I'm going to leave it at 300 picks. And that's going to be one of my constraints, because if I size this down or up, the resolution of this texture will get finer or more coarse. And I just want that to be a consistent, a constant throughout all my illustrations. So I'm just going to do a subtle little bit of texture and this maybe gives a sense of dirt because this is a trail shoe. I'm going to set that layer to multiply and it's a little bit overbearing. And I'm just going to set that back to 50% I can go back and figure out if that texture is too much or too little later on, but there's a shoe and I'm just going to take all of those layers and groups that I made for that shoe. I'm going to group them and call it shoe one. I'm going to copy that for a shoe. To pop that behind the original shoe and I'm going to just drag it. There's my pair of shoes. Now, because these are identical, your eyes are going to see that. I want to make it look like I hand drew each of these shoes. And I didn't just copy and paste. You don't need to do much to do this. Just a few things just to trick the viewer. For instance, this little loop on the back. I'm just going to redraw a custom loop for this back shoe and that will give some variety, drew it a little bit too big. And I'm just going to erase a bit behind. If you ever have to erase a bit of your line work, you set your eraser brush to something similar to the brush you're using, and that any parts that your race still have that same rough quality. I'm using a similar brush, this old nib brush for my eraser. Okay. The other thing I want to fix the tongue, just make it a little bit different. A tiny bit different. I'm going to go and do that for a few of the things, especially where there's like something really glaringly distinct. I feel like the tread on the bottom of the shoes could be a telltale copy. I'm just going and adjusting some of my paths just a bit just to give a sense of irregularity and spontaneity to the illustration. I'll probably do that also for, for the laces. The welding here just a little bit doesn't need to be much. I think redoing this line will also help. Okay, now that I'm almost done this, I'm going to take a look at the illustration. Without the sketch, I see that there's something I need to resolve with the tongue because it's the same color as the tread. As good as that looks with one shoe. It's just a hard read. I have an option here to maybe move one of the shoes away from that tongue so they don't overlap. That might be one way of doing it. I think actually that might work, That might be the solution. The other thing that I was going to try was just changing the color of the tongue, but I really like how the dark sandwiches, the red and blue of the shoe. Other than that, I think I'll go in and revise the texture of the second shoe. So it's a little bit different. I did forget, I did forget to add the eyelets for the shoe laces. I'm going to go and do that. Just draw those. I think I'll scale that back also to 50% so it's more subtle there. We have two trail shoes. There's one other thing I want to adjust. The ankle part is identical and my eye is drawn to that. Again, I just want to hide the evidence that I copied these shoes. You might ask why copy. If you're going to have to adjust everything anyway. At least the two shoes are identical in size. That add a layer of consistency. Okay, now with my first illustration done, I'm ready to turn my sketches back on and move to the next one. Again, I'm going to make another layer group. This one is for the GPS watch. Again, I'm going to start with the most obvious shapes, in this case the circle of the watch face. Again, I'm not using the circle tool I could as a shortcut, but then it's going to look super regular and not at all. The way I illustrate, which is more eccentric, I'm just letting my imperfect circle be. I'll just create this first shape. Maybe I'll, I'll start with black or this dark blue, which is closest to black. The next thing I'm going to do is create the display again. I could just copy and paste the circle I made just now. And sometimes I do. But then I have to go and make it look like I redrew it on its own. With a simple shape like this, I just go ahead and redraw it for the inside. I'm going to punch it out with white. That helps this, otherwise very dark, weighty shape to feel more light just by punching a hole through it and letting the paper color or the screen color come through. The next thing I'm going to do is add the watch straps, and this could be pretty simple, just these trapezoid shapes on most watches. These are the same color as the watch face. Again, in the spirit of not being too different, I'm going to that same thing, can just add the buttons. This is sitting behind the watch face. I think those buttons should be red, just something to pop against that darker color. Usually the buttons are the same color as the watch, but here I just want to see a pop of red there. That's my own editing of reality. You can do that in illustration. One of the benefits of illustration versus photography is you can take these real life things and then make them look the way you want them to look. The next thing is I'm going to create the little parts of the actual display. I'm always tempted to just get right into the details and try and make it a cool display, like what would I want on my ideal GPS watch display and all those little complications and stuff like that. But the point here is the overall message of this illustration is GPS watch. As long as I have something that looks like an information display and somewhat believable, there's nothing in there that I'm like that wouldn't be on the watch. That's all I need. Otherwise, I'm just trying to create some visual interest. Maybe use red in my old nib brush to create this little map view. I'm going to draw that shape with the pen tool. To be consistent, I have red and that's an obvious color for the heart. Lastly, I want to do the little number read out with the rules. And for those rules I'll probably just use the gray. If I push really lightly, using my pencil here, my stylus, I can get a bit of a thinner line. Then if I push harder, I'm allowing a little bit of line with variation. That's okay for me, my rules, as long as I don't change the pixel width of my brush. And just to quickly show you what I'm talking about, these are the brush properties for this particular brush that I'm using, it's 15 pixels. I'm never changing that number up or down for this set of illustrations. Lastly, I'm going to create the number. Now this is a bit of a bonus tip, but I'm going to do a little bit of a special lettering here instead of just using my line. I'm breaking a little bit out of my style constraints just for this, because like I said, as an illustrator, lettering is one of my special skills. So I'm going to use that here. I'm going to lean into that thing that I enjoy doing. I'm going to just use a big chunky brush for this. Or maybe just something a little smaller. Yeah, that'll do. I've turned on my grid so you can go view and. Show grid. That's this grid that you see here. When I've made a new layer, I've made a new layer and I'm going to use my color for this. The numbers are 478. I use my grid as it's almost like lined paper. The secret to having regular consistent type is having rules so that everything is the same when you write it out. So I'm just going to take that out of the shape so I can actually see it. There it is, There's 04 I've looked at. I've had a lot of practice with lettering and I've done lots of practice with how to construct letter forms. That is a little bit outside of this particular class, but the general rules that I'm working with here is actually very similar to the rest of illustration. I'm using one size brush, just a little fatter, so I can have these nice fat numbers. I'm allowing making sure each number is the same height and generally speaking, the same with now again, how do I make these letters look less like they're drawn with a brush and a little bit more finished. I use my smaller eraser and I square off some of those edges. That just gives things a little bit more of a polished look with completely circular numbers like zero. There's not much I can do these dots. What I can do is take one of those thoughts away and add copy one so that there's more uniformity. And now I have my number and I can just shrink that down. And as I shrink that, a lot of those imperfections and stuff that were maybe more glaring at the bigger size go away. And I can just pop that in there. Turn off my guides or my grid. I have this numerical read out there that just sits in there. Because I've used a different brush, it creates a visual break from everything else that's super regular and same, same. That's something I've become comfortable doing over time. I'm just going to do one more number for the read out in the same way that I just showed you, 56. Make sure that letter spacing is nacing even then. I'm going to just pop that down into place. Okay, The rest of the watch is really just a matter of probably a tiny bit of texture and some line work first for the display. I'm going to add, or I'm going to do this over the whole circle part of the watch, the outer circle here and the display inclusive. I'm going to take my texture, select my shade color, create my new layer, multiply it, it's looking a bit dark. Going to take that down to 50% Yeah, I think that's good. Having a little bit of the white peak through, I might want to just have a little bit more white. I'm going to erase that and just do a little bit more subtle. Now for the actual, I think it's called the bezel, the round part around the display. I'm going to create a new layer and I'm going to add the ticks around the edges. I'm going to use the line work in white. I have the blue available to me also as a color in my palette. Just because you have all those colors, it doesn't mean you need to use them in every illustration. Illustrations can just have two of the colors, as in this case. I'm just going to turn off my sketch and see how the GPS watch is shaping up to me. Those tick marks are looking a little bit too. Lucy, go, what I'm going to do is actually create one straight line across, one straight line below. My watch is irregular. It's not perfectly even on all sides, but what I'm going for is just a little bit less irregularity. To have a feeling of more control or at least just not having something distractingly whimsical. I'm just going to copy that. I'm going to put that on 30 degrees and edit and then do the same thing again. In this time rotate at 60 degrees. Now it looks less distracting, but of course now they're all attached to the display, which is not good. I'm going to merge those together. That's one of the main things I'm trying to control here, is that everything's evenly 30 degrees apart. Those are the ticks. And now the last thing to do is just to define just the attachment between the watch band and the watch face. I'm now going to just use white to do that. I could turn on my sketch just to make sure I reference what to be more true to it. In my final here here, I've just drawn two parallel lines and erased the part of the first line that I didn't need. And then attached there, I'll copy and paste that, Flip it around, and then turn off my sketch and see how that looks. I'm not sure that I like how those are looking. I feel like that should be a cleaner edge. One thing I could do is just erase it to clean up the edge a bit, or which I didn't want to do, but I think I will. I'm going to turn that sketch back on. I've deleted that line work. I'm actually going to define that break using the pen tool instead, for a cleaner line there. Use the operations to knock out one shape from another shape. I'm selecting these two bits that I just drew and I can go to my path operations here and go subtract from front shape. And there you go. If you want to learn more about how to use the Pentool in Photoshop, I have a very quick class called Pentool Wizard. It's a great little on how to use the Pentool in Photoshop. Turn off my sketches how that looks might just add a tiny bit more texture on the watch band to imply very subtly, a bit of depth. Just the tiniest bit then multiplying, setting that the 50% if only because I've been doing that eber else I'm going to try 100% of the texture in front. It's too much. Yeah, I going to go back to 50% and I can always come back to it later. We have two finished illustrations. Two more to go. All right. We have the watch and the shoes. I'm just going to go in and just add one little thing that I forgot there on the watch, which was the little UR here indicator. Maybe a touch of blue is just what I need right there. The we'll just leave it at that. Okay. The next thing is to do the trail race bib. I have the round corners there, but first I'll make a, it is a plain rectangle and then add those curves after the fact. Now Photoshop has like a built in curved corners feature, but it's a bit too regular for me. I just find that by doing the curved corners more manually, it allows more eccentricity to end up in the image. One thing I look for in my pass is the straight line and that goes into curve. I want to avoid where I have these little spurs, these little sharp abrupt corners, because those look like accidents, which they would be. I'm just going to smooth that out a bit. Again, this little bit here looks a bit accidental. I'm going to use my little handle here to smooth that out. It's always a balance between making things intentional and regular without being perfect, Without looking totally perfect, it is a bit of an art to now, I want this race bib to be overall white. You're not going to see the color there just yet. I'm going to add the color bars top and bottom. Next I can just make that one piece and part of it will be masked out by the containing shape. We'll go with blue for that one. The next thing I'll do is knock out those holes out of the four corners. I'm just going to copy and paste that to each of the corners so that the holes themselves are uniform and not to different. But of course I can go and adjust it, makes some minor adjustments in each one to make each one look a little bit more unique. Because anytime an element is repeated, if that element has a particular quirk or feature, when you repeat it, that feature will repeat two and be amplified. If it's a quirk that looks eccentric and it's repeated over and again, then it just starts to cheapen that eccentricity because it's been repeated, I just look for ways of making each piece look a little bit unique and special. Even these tiny little details sometimes matter. The next thing I'll do is draw in with my line tool, we're going to do the safety pens. I'm going to use the dark blue for these. Okay? These can just be, like I said in the line and very simplified and stylized. I know this isn't exactly what safety pins look like, but in context they read exactly as safety pins. In my opinion, I hope so. We'll see how it goes. Because these are such small elements you really don't want to overwork them and get into details. If this was about a safety pin, this illustration, I would obviously go into as much detail as I can in that an object, but these are just very much secondary. I can be more expressive and gestural and how I make them, I use my eraser just to sharpen those points just a bit just so they don't look. Totally default of course where they go through the hole here, I'm going to make part of it behind appear to be behind the bib. Same on this side. Okay, so for the lettering, for the word trail there, I'm going to just use my liner. No fancy type trick here or a lettering trick because it's script I, that's better. I think it's perfect use of my line tool. The tool that I'm using for lines, but I will for the number 36. And again, just picking some lines in my grid to stick within. Sometimes when I do this, I do have a tendency to overwork, this will get shrunk down. It might be okay just to let it be. Shrink it down and see the big picture. I'm going to shrink that down, rotate it, place it in. I'm going to put that in the shape of my trail bib. Now again, I want to add a little bit of texture just to make sure that white isn't totally getting lost. For this one, where it says trail, where I have the lettering trail, It could just as well be like a scribble. That implies writing. This is just a stylistic decision. I could have just done that squiggle to imply that there's writing and that would definitely still read as a bib. But because this is a trail running, specific set of illustrations, having something that alludes to that. However, vaguely, I think it works, just putting trail on it a little bit odd. You would never get a bib that says trail and then your number. But it's for me, a stylistic choice sometimes to add words that are simple and they evoke an idea. It is just a little bit odd. That's me, I think just me coming through, like sometimes I like there to be a little bit of a cork or a mystery. Why did he write trail and not like trail run. One can overthink these things but I'm leaving it in. I like it. If it bothers me later, then I might edit it out. If this was for a client and they asked me to elaborate on it somehow or take it out or change it, then I would. We're almost done. The set guys, the last one is the deodorant lub stick thing. This one is really just the shape, another rectangle. At this point, I'm really glad that I didn't choose all rectangular things for this set. This one is not going to be a total rectangle. I'm also going to have that the shape of the lid popping over top on this angle as it is making sure those corners look intentional and controlled, skillfully made. And we'll make this one be blue for now. Yeah, this is a fairly simple and straightforward illustration. Just need to draw the inside product peeking through there. Now this product will be white and I'll just plan to put some texture in there to make that pop through. I'll do that right now, maybe a bit more. Knock that down to 50% and then I'll add a little bit of texture over top this as well. And we're going to multiply that, set it back 50% This isn't quite working, I think I need more texture. Maybe I'll do one more fresh pass over that. Okay, so for the details I'm going to just fill in that little dial at the bottom, so I'm going to use my shader color as I have before, multiply that over, and then take it back to 50% and add some of those lines. And the last thing will be to add that lettering for the lube. I'm going to bring this down to size, pop it in there because it's a sports product, it should be italic for sure, and just see how that's working out. I think we have ourselves a set. Now is where I look at the final work as a set to see if there's anything I need to adjust. I aim to balance the set and resolve any awkward bits in the images themselves. The hardest things for me to figure out are usually color and contrast. Because I work in a flat style with no outlines and I use minimal colors, sometimes I spend a lot of time making sure that my colors and everything are working together and everything's very clear. There's something a bit something lacking in the last one. I'm going to try that texture again, hope that resolves it. Going back to my texture brush, maybe just give it a little bit more extra something and I think that might be better. I'm overthinking it at this point. I'm going to leave it and come back to it later if anything. And that still bothers me, which it may or may not, I'll fix it. At that point, it might even become more apparent to me what I need to do, even as I'm just talking about it. I'm getting ideas. Maybe it's just a slightly rounding that at the bottom there. So it just has a bit more personality and dimension. Okay guys, we finished our first set. That's huge. We worked out our style, and we've used it to illustrate our simple objects. And hopefully you're as pleased to be yours as I am with mine. And now it's just time to share with the class and celebrate a little. Maybe take a rest before going into the next set, because the next set's going to be a doozy. 14. Project: Set 2 - Research and Discovery: In this set, we're going to illustrate more abstract concepts from the list we made. The purpose of this second set is to apply the style we worked out in set one to more abstract ideas that may or may not have immediately obvious physical qualities. Our focus here will be twofold. First, we're going to come up with visual representations or concepts of the ideas we came up with in our second list way. In the beginning we're going to use the same style we developed in set one, so that both sets one and set two are a family. The illustrations could be used interchangeably. These spots should clearly represent the concepts in a unique and consistent style. Keep in mind these are spots so they cannot say everything about your concept. You have to be decisive as we set one. We start just by setting up a folder where all our work will go. Just add set two in the sweet spots folder if you haven't already done. So we're now back at the research and discovery phase four, set two. Of course, the first thing we want to do, just like the last time, is conduct our visual research. Our concepts now will be more conceptual. Soon we'll be thinking more about those concepts, but for now, we do exactly what we did in set one. We're just downloading enough information or visual information to literally draw from in the sketches. Just like in set one, I'm going to just start Google Image searching with some pretty basic terms with chafing. It's specific to runners, I'll probably do a specific search, chafing running, just see what images turn up. The great thing about a Google image search is it's in a way, a cross section of what a lot of people visualize when there's a certain concept and you can get a quick picture of what cliches are and stuff like that. Here's the bleeding nipples guy, I see a couple guys like that. I'm not going to draw bleeding nipples in my illustrations. I don't want to gross my viewers out and turn them off. I definitely want to encourage them to join an ultra marathon. That's part of the purpose of an article like this. I'm going to keep the image there because there's something guttural about it. It kind of evokes an emotional response. Anyway, moving on, what else turns up? You have the idea of like parts of your body that rub together. Yeah, if you get stuck on your search, don't think too hard about the concept. The temptation is to try and solve your visual problem at this early stage. And the important thing here is just in a more non judgmental way, just do an image search and see what turns up. The next thing is trail pace is slower than road pace. What is the kind of image that I want to evoke here? What kind of information do I need to visualize? Maybe running pace. I get a bunch of charts which are not helpful at all, and lots of runners. I might as well just download a few of those just to get a sense of what running people look like. I might have to draw them in. Trail running, you actually walk sometimes, especially if there's a steep hill, maybe it's like walking on trail Race to be very specific, maybe show a guy walking with poles. Gives you a sense that you're not going super fast. Maybe I'll just do a full on just screen grab again of my browser window. Okay. The next thing is the battle is mental. As much as physical, the idea is while you're running, your body is tired and you want to give up. So much of your race is about not giving up. It's about saying, let's just finish this. There is that will power. I'm going to image search will power, and we'll see what we get. Not really seeing anything useful there. Maybe mental battle, these are very abstract concepts. A Google Image search is not going to reveal anything that juicy in terms of imagery. If anything, it's going to show you what the cliche way of conceptualizing this abstract term is. Oftentimes when I Google an abstract mental battle, world peace, you get a lot of texts because people can't visualize these ideas. They'll end up writing words that match this idea. That's a very common way to evoke an idea. But as illustrators, our job is to think beyond that obvious, like let's just use words to convey this concept. Our job is to give a visual to this abstract concept. Right now, I don't want to get too deep into trying to solve this problem Again, I'm going to screen grab this Google image result and move on to the next thing. The next one is, don't change your fuel regime on race day. So what happens if you do in running? If you eat too much, you're going to get an upset stomach. For this one, I think maybe it's about feeling sick, maybe it's about getting indigestion. When I think of indigestion, I think of peptobysmalybe. This can be a clue into what I might use as part of my imagery. I'll just plop that in trail pace. Maybe someone drinking just to get a sense of what it looks like when people drink. Runs, indigestion, lots of people holding stomachs. Again, I'm not going to try to gross out my audience, but it is there. It's part of the results of my image search. I'll put it in my pocket. Maybe it will be useful, maybe not. Lastly, the idea of travel and accommodation plan. You sign up for a trail race. It's eight months in advance and you're really excited about it. It's in the summertime you get to the week of the race and you realize you haven't figured out where you're going to stay the night before and you're going to need to stay pretty close to the trail. Turns out everything's booked up because it's the summer and now you have to sleep in the car. There's an image sleeping in the car. Something you don't want to happen as a result of neglecting this very important tip. Just being more generic in terms of accommodations. What do hotels look like? What is a common image or cliche of a hotel? You have, of course, the outside of pools. But even more iconic is the idea of the hotel room which usually just has a king or queen size bed and a lamp, and a sliding window, or a sliding glass door. I'll just screen grab all of these. I don't need to be too selective at this point. There is a little bit of crossover into the next stage where I will be thinking about concepts. But I'm not trying to come up with ideas right now, I'm just trying to find images. But as I'm looking for images, my mind is already working a few steps ahead. I welcome that if it comes along, but I'm not trying too hard. The idea is just to focus on one task in each stage. And the task in this stage is just finding appropriate imagery to draw from. In our free sketching exercise, I have just one more to look for and that is train for the terrain. So this is the idea of if you're running a really technical course with certain kind of single track or certain kinds of stuff that's going to be in your way. You need to be ready for that by getting used to it in your training. I'm playing the story out through my head. What kind of images first? It's just like trail terrain. Maybe that will show me something. And at least it gives me a sense of like different kinds of trail rains. The next thing I might search for along this line is the idea of an elevation profile for a race. This is usually some, a chart. It looks like a mountain because it's actually just like a cutaway of a mountain. Or the different rises and dips in elevation that you experience over the course of your race. This might be interesting as a visual to incorporate in this concept. I am thinking a little bit conceptually here now I might think about what might happen if I didn't train for the terrain. Maybe I get really tired and exhausted. Maybe exhausted runner, you have the idea of runners who are passed out before they hit the finish line. Once you've completed your image searching, you can then move into free sketching. How do you know when you're done your image searching? I'd say it's when your time is up or when you've exhausted yourself. You feel like you can't look anymore if you need more images later on while you're coming up with concepts. You'll figure that out pretty quickly and chances are you'll know more precisely what you need to be looking for. Just like the last time, we're going to do more free sketching. This is where we just draw what we see in our reference images without too much judgment or trying to figure it out. We're just downloading information. We already did the work of downloading our images to our computer. Now let's download some of those images to our brains through drawing. I've opened up my reference images folder in Adope Bridge, which is a nice visual browser. You could also just open these images up in Photoshop or in Preview. As long as it's easy for you to see and start drawing, I have sleeping in the car here. All of these images in this thing are super complicated. Rather than try and draw from these images, I failed myself in this image search here. Usually I try and find imagery that appeals to me in some way. It looks promising, none of this looks too promising. Maybe there's the idea of someone sleeping in a sleeping bag or in a blanket in a car. There's a bit here, what I'm going to do just as a shorthand is a silly car. Maybe the idea of someone sleeping in there, just a cue. Maybe that will become a concept later on. I think with this one I'm just going to move on within the same concept of accommodations. We have the hotel room. I'm just going to look at some of these ideas of like there's the bed, they usually have these big fancy headboards and fancy arrangements of pillows, some blanket over top here. I'm just looking at a very specific image, knowing that I can tweak this later on to look a little bit more generic. What else do I have? Just a hotel building again. Sometimes if I'm working on a project, I'll give myself enough time just to really sink into this and enjoy the process of drawing and be a little bit more careful. But here I'm just generally demonstrating the idea of looking at images, drawing them. Moving on, I have more hotel rooms here I can pick and choose from one of these images that I feel really tells the story. Well, they're really all the same. Even the angles that they shoot these hotel rooms in is all identical. You could replace one image with another and you never know which I guess is the idea of a hotel. You have curtains here. Hotels are meant to be pretty anonymous and generic because of that. Because a hotel is so stylized as an idea, as a concept, it's easy to represent in a drawing. Okay, moving on. Chafing my favorite. Yeah. I mean, you do have the guy with the bleeding nipples. There he is with the race bib. I'm pretty certain that I'm not going to use this image at all, but I'm going to draw it anyway. Because sometimes when you try something that you don't think you should do anyway, you might end up finding a way to use it. It's someone, just while looking at these images, maybe it's someone putting a stick of anti chafe stick on their armpit. I didn't see that image, but it came to mind while I was looking at the image. I'll just put it there and move on. Okay, People with painful faces, you have lots of lower bodies. I'm very loosely referencing these images. I'm somewhat comfortable drawing people in my own style. If it were more important to me that I draw these people more anatomically correct in my final concepts, then I would probably pay more attention to the details of these bodies. But I have a bit of a shorthand for how I draw people. I can quickly draw that while I'm doing image searches, and that's why my drawings look particularly unrealistic. But sometimes if I'm really getting into the details, I'll actually pay a lot more attention and draw what I'm seeing a little bit more closely. Representational way. Moving on for fuel regime, I'm going to come up with a new page. This one is about indigestion with changing your fuel regime. On race day, you've trained with, say, taking Gatorade, but on race day you try this new fancy gel that they're offering at the race, or bananas, and you hadn't been eating bananas in your training. What happens as a result? You get an upset tummy and then you need some peptobysmoal. I see some pictures of peptobysmal up on my screen. I'll just reference the package of Peptobysmoal out. If I were to draw in my final illustration, it would be about what are the features or characteristics of this package, of this bottle that we all know that represents you have an upset tummy. What are the features? How can I communicate that big part could be the color of it, could be the shape, could be design cues on the label itself. I imagine someone drinking the peps right out of the bottle on the race. Just looking at pictures of people drinking. What does that look like from the side? You just see, Especially if I've never drawn someone drinking before, it might be helpful for me just to get a sense of what that looks like visually. Okay, and then we have the guy who soiled his pants, which I don't want to include in my final illustration. I feel like it wouldn't be everybody's favorite thing. Could be funny. But I'm going to draw what I see here in this image just for fun. And maybe there's a way that I can use that idea in a more indirect, subtle way. Just a little Mr. lumpy pants here. Maybe someone holding their stomach. I think observing and paying attention to your reference images and really drawing them carefully, Unlike what I'm doing here is important, especially at the beginning of your creative journey as an illustrator, you're going to need to reference images more heavily. And that goes hand in hand with the imitation aspect of the creative journey we talked about when we were talking about inspiration and imitation. That's just a natural part of developing and growing as an illustrator. Again, I'm drawing really quickly here, just as I'm demoing the project. But it's also like I can look at an image and I see the gesture of someone holding their stomach doubled over in pain. For me, that's enough. Just knowing that idea, I quickly doodle it down and I'll work out how I draw that when I start actually going into the thumbnailing in the next step, the next group of images that I'm going to free sketch from are the ones that speak to the idea of running, being a mental battle. As much as it is a physical battle. Not a ton to draw from in this first set of images, which are all quotes and text. The idea of a battle, but maybe it's like someone holding their mind as I see in one of these. Then in a way it's like I see a lot of silhouettes of people, side profiles that might cue something later. A lot of these are more related to like depression and stuff like that. Those wouldn't be too appropriate. I'm not looking for something too dark. It's more just the idea of willpower, okay? This next one is trail pace. The idea of the trail pace is slower than your road race pace. If you're used to going a certain pace on the road, you have to get used to sometimes even walking. Maybe one way of wording this point is make friends with walking. That's an image that comes to mind, it's the idea of someone walking. And the one way of making it clear that someone's walking on the trail is to show them in a gesture of walk using poles just to maybe get the idea of what those look like. I'll draw what I see a little more close now this is a guy from the front, which is a trickier. Gesture or figure to draw than someone from the side view. So there's a guy just kind of holding his poles. You know, maybe it's this guy. He looks like he's maybe running a bit. Some interesting gesture there. He's got his hydration vest on, which is, you know, a good cue that he's on the trail running and you find sometimes some images in your search interest you more than others and you dwell on them. I feel like dwelling more on this guy. There's something really dynamic about his, his stance, the way his poles are faced forward, there's some rocks. It's a really nicely composed image that tells the story. I'm just loosely drawing what I see there, lots of good symbols in this, of what I'm getting at. There's a guy, he's trail running, he's got his hiked up socks and his hydration, vast GPS watch. It's all there, ticking all the boxes. So, I'm just going to leave that there and move on to the next. This is train for the rain. This is the point where we talked about the elevation profile. We have just this idea of a chart that looks a lot like mountains, a series of undulating bumps. A lot of these have like placements of aid stations. That's pretty much what an elevation profile looks like. It's just the side profile of a mountain. The idea of different terrains, maybe it's a ridge. Ridges are usually at the, at the top of a mountain where there's vegetation, more rocks and that loose rock. Then I just imagine some hillside with vegetation that I'm seeing in some of these images. Trees and then like someone coming down one of the images there, there's a guy running down the hill. Looks like he's a good down hiller. That's a good start in terms of just getting a sense of what kind of imagery I have to draw from when I start thumbnailing. So I think it's now time I can move on from the free sketching exercise. I think that if I had a little bit more time, I wouldn't mind just getting a little bit deeper into drawing each one of those ideas with a bit more care. But I feel like for the most part, I've picked up some valuable information that I'll be able to take with me as I start the next step, which is visualizing these concepts in my sketches. 15. Project: Set 2 - Concept Sketches: In research and discovery, our only goal was to download information just like in set one. Now we're going to make a concerted effort to develop concepts. This could be a lot harder than in set one, just keep that in mind. The ultimate goal of sketches is to work out concept, content, and composition. The challenge for this round of sketches is to develop visual concepts that speak to the subject in a clear way, but which is also somehow unexpected. Our elements of style can only go so far in helping us here. We must also think about how to express our ideas in a surprising way. It may be possible to express a complex idea in a simple object. For the set, the difference is in intent. The content we include in our illustrations are more symbols than depictions. The object doesn't stand for the object, it stands for an idea. The challenge is how to make the object stand for a bigger idea. Okay, I have my grid of thumbnails and now I'm just going to churn out some concepts as they come to mind. I'm going to go illustration by illustration here. The first thing we're going to start with is the one about accommodations. Making sure you have a place to have a good night's rest before the big race, and making sure you do that before things get booked up. I've just zoomed into my first square here. As I was looking at pictures that were disappointing about people sleeping in the car. I did just have this simple idea of a stylized car and the idea of someone's feet maybe sticking out of it. And they're sleeping in the back of the car bent over wearing a. It's late at night, maybe they're in the woods and maybe a bear is curiously looking inside the, the car. I might want to just try and figure out what that might look like in different configurations. Maybe it's just a slightly different car shape as much as possible. I'm trying to do this from heart and not really needing to look at images. And some of the weirdness that comes out as I'm drawing from my own intuitions can work in my favor. Trying not to be too critical at this point. I did like the idea of the bear. There's a bit of a funny story there. What if the bear is looking inside the window with his paws and then there's just a silhouette of a sleeper in there. It's a little bit vague to me right now. I'm going to move on to the idea of the hotel where we had that bed, the hotel bed, and the high backboard. Basically, I want to depict a hotel room in a very symbolic and basic way. So there's like the lamp. Then you have the sliding glass window, big window beside, maybe some curtains, Maybe there's a picture frame above the bed, some fancy pillows. Someone's like kicked off their shoes, they're on the floor, maybe outside you see the window frames, a mountain scene in the back, reinforcing the idea of the trail race and accommodations all at the same time. This is a lot of load for a spot illustration. If I'm going to do this, I'm going to have to make sure it's super simple. As simple as possible, but I think it's a good concept. I'm just going to move on and try a few other things. Maybe I change how, how big things are in that hotel room scene. Maybe the windows a lot bigger to emphasize the outdoors. Maybe you have a trail. I like the idea of being able to see the start line from inside the hotel. Something muddy about that. I'm going to move on, I'm going to move on to the next thing which is chafing. Okay, there's the bleeding nipple guy. Let's see what happens if I go with that, even if I really don't want to, is the idea of someone just like I see like the upper body of someone, maybe the idea of band aids in place. That might be a good way of showing the idea that you have a sore chafing area without actually showing it. I'm just seeing a sad person here, just move on. Maybe if I just bring this idea a little further, it's a person and they're putting bandids in the process of putting bandaid on. The other one is already bandaged up. There's something in this one that I like. He's Yeah. Got that. Got that. Maybe there's some just band aids here to tell the story of what's happening with a little bit more detail. Okay, the next thing is fuel regime. Maybe one idea is the peptobysmal bottle as a water bottle, like a handheld water bottle, a fuel call. Way back in Set Wine, we drew that water bottle with a little ***** pack on it that we can do there if we can get that bottle to clearly read as a peptobysmal bottle. Now in theory it's a good concept, but if it doesn't read clearly to the audience, ultimately not a good concept. It's a good concept to people who know and get it. But if it needs explanation, then you probably have to find another route. If I can successfully pull off this idea of the peptobysmal bottle. Mix that metaphor with the water bottle idea, handheld water bottle, and that's good. Maybe it's the idea of a peptobysmol bottle with a nozzle, like a sports nozzle on the tip. If I can combine those, the awkward thing is that you have that dispenser cup that the peptobysmol comes with conflicting with having a sports nozzle on it. That doesn't really work. Maybe it's more of a water bottle shape at the top. Almost a bottle with the sports nozzle. And then something like pepto, just to indicate loosely reference it's peptobysmal. I feel like this is a bit of a stretch. It's broken down. It looks neither like a sports water bottle, the peptobysmal bottle, maybe I'll just move on. I don't have to be too critical of myself at this point. The point is having quality and just to keep going, still working on fuel regime, maybe there's a way of incorporating the bottle with a person drinking water. We had those pictures of the people drinking that referenced for this, it's something like a runner drinking pepto from the bottle like that. Maybe there's something in there. Okay, the next one is the battle is mental, of course. This is about willpower, about climbing the mountains in our minds as well as the mountains under our feet. That right away makes me think of mountains and people climbing up trying to conquer it. When I think of, there's also like the idea of brains. You might have some mountain made out of a brain and the person's climbing it, which is gross to me. I don't like how brains look, so I don't know if I want a brain in my illustration, but there's something about the idea of mental and brain that work together. You don't have to show the brain. You can show a head. Maybe I just have a person's head. Part of their head is made out of mountains. It's mixing those two metaphors of the mind, the head and climbing the mountain. Here's someone badly drawn, running up this mountain, but the idea is a little bit clearer. I like that concept. I like this idea of yeah, but I can evaluate whether the soul work later. I wonder if there's anything else I could do for battle. Mental, there's idea of battle. There's a shield. Maybe it's like a guy walking instead of poles. He has swords. But then we've totally lost the whole point of the mental battle. I may have solved it with the mountain head guy. Why don't we just move on and see if we need to return back to that? Okay, the next thing is trail pace. The idea of it's slow, maybe it's a GPS watch and it's showing a turtle. That watch could be on someone's wrist or not because it's a spot illustration, probably not on a wrist, but we already have a illustration of a GPS watch. If we had all of these in a set from set one, set two. If we showed all these at the same time, it might be redundant. But I do like the idea of the turtle. Maybe it's a turtle ascending the trail, Here's the turtle shell. Now, I didn't reference any turtles in my reference images. If I felt like I needed to, I would go and look for more images of turtles, which I might need to do. This turtle is wearing trail shoes and maybe some hydration vest, a hat. That's a cute little images. You see some rocks and grass, maybe to make them look more like a runner. You put a little race bib on a shell 36 or whatever number we've been using that might do it. Okay. I'm going to move on to the next which is train. For the train, I had that idea of elevation profile. I'll just start with that and see where that leads me. The idea of those aid stations. Neat, that graphic, it might be a little bit too obscure for people, especially if you've never ran a race before on a trail. You might be totally new to the whole thing and not even know what an elevation profile graph looks like. What's another way into the idea of training for the train? Just be straightforward. Maybe, maybe it's the idea of just like this crooked, jaggedy path coming down the mountainside. And you can see that you're really high up because there's a lake or an ocean way behind and a forest. Some birds, maybe some rocks on the trail. And then you have a runner skillfully navigating this step downhill ascent. This is a story I'm making up, but it could make a nice image. Yeah, I'll just move on. What else? Train for the train. The idea of not getting exhausted. I guess we had some of those images of people falling over. Maybe I didn't end up drawing these from my reference images. I might have to go back to a sense of what someone lying on the ground, exhausted looks like. But maybe this concept is to specifics. You could fall on your back and have exhaustion for all kinds of reasons. Heat stroke or dehydration. This doesn't really speak to the mean point of this illustration, which is the terrain. I think going back to being terrain specific is probably where I need to go and I feel like I might have cracked that idea already with this concept here. I think that is enough for now in terms of thumbnailing at this point. I like to take a break, I'm going to go just have a glass of water. But sometimes I leave my desk for 30 minutes, go do something else. Sometimes I leave this overnight and I come back to it with a fresher mind. And then in the next step, we can go in and be a lot more critical of our concepts. But hopefully, instead of just being critical, we'll actually be able to see some concepts that are really working with a fresh mind that will be in the next step. Here we are again at refined sketches. This time for our second set of illustrations. Again, just like the last time. We're going to go through our thumbnails and we're going to flag or mark or highlight the ones that we think are working best. Again, if you want some help whittling down, if you've done a lot of different thumbnails and figuring out which ones are working, best call in a friend and just see if they have any fresh insights for you. Hopefully, having taken a break and coming back to it, you'll be seeing these in a little bit more of an objective way. As you're going through these again, you can ask yourself, which of these work together the best as a set? An image might be great on its own, but maybe there's something about it that doesn't make it work as a set. It's one of those things that doesn't look like the others. That's another way of just evaluating your images and being a little bit more critical. If for whatever reason can't whittle these down to just for, just bring all of the ones that you like to the next step that is refine them. Then maybe as you go along, you'll get clues into which concepts you really want to do. Which ones are really working, which ones aren't working so great. Again, we're going to refine each sketch by tracing over it with more confident lines. Whereas our original sketches were super loose, these refined sketches should be more confident and resolved, just like the last time. I'm just going to go into those thumbnails that I did. I'm going to open up that first page of thumbs that I did. Just start seeing which of these concepts are working the best for accommodations. There's something about this one that I just like the story. I think the window with the mountain beyond could be interesting concept. The trick for that one of course is going to be how to make that work in a very small spot. But I'm going to choose that for now. I do like these car ones, there's something cute about them. I could resolve them, they could make a fun illustration, but I foresee having a bit of a challenge in just perfectly evoking someone sleeping in the car, not just in the car. Okay, the next one is the nipple chafing. I really think there's something to this one. I was inspired by the most disgusting image of the nipple bleeding guy, but somehow I was able to make it not disgusting. Okay, For the pepto, I do like the idea of the peptobysmal bottle being at like a running water bottle. There's something to you that there was the guy drinking from the Pepto bottle, which is kind of interesting as well. So I might take that one also into the finals. The next one was the mental battle one. And I think the strongest of these is definitely this. So I'll see where I can take that guy. I feel like I was getting there with these other sketches, got there and then sort of deviated and fell apart after that. So my strongest image is definitely the mountain head guy. Okay, so trail pace is slower than road pace. I do like the turtle guy with the bib. I think that's really cute. I think that might work. So I'm just going to move on. The next one was a train for the terrain. It's pretty clear here that I was really onto something with this one, I even circled it already. The next thing to do is in procreate here, I'm just going to isolate each of my selects onto their own layer where I can further refine them by tracing over them. And the first one is this pepto guy. I know what my idea is, I to work on the composition and making sure it's clear. Maybe I will apply some of the stylization principles here, like exaggeration. Maybe make that bottle a little bit bigger than the runner than it would be in real life. I have my sketch underneath to reference. In that first round of rough thumbnails, I was, my main focus was coming up with ideas and less on coming up with, uh, the perfect composition and having everything arranged exactly as I want it to go. Sometimes you need to iterate over your sketches again and again until you get it right. I have a few layers here. I have my first concept, my second iteration. I'm going into a third iteration. For whatever reason I've taken to drawing this guy's mouth totally attached to the bottle to just get the sense of he's really sucking it back. And I think it's a little bit weird and in that sense it makes the image a little bit more compelling. And then maybe he's holding his belly and then some. Reference there. And this is where I might add a striped shirt to bring in some pattern. Okay. So there's something about that I'm struggling with. I'm going to just give it one more go. I want to just show the person, you know, like holding their belly a little bit like you would if you were feeling indigestion. And then have that bottle basically attached to him and maybe just like the feeling of sick. I'll probably have to go over this one more time just for good measure, but I feel like that's a little closer. The purpose here is you really want to resolve all the actual forms. I'm very much abstracting and simplifying. I feel like I don't need to show the rest of the arm in the back. Just the idea that he's holding it and just having a suggestion of a hand up there is enough. Maybe having a Peekaboo race Bib There just something, my goal here is to just get as much expression in the image with as few parts as possible. I think that's going to work. I think that's going to work. There's something in there that I like a lot. Okay, we'll move on to mental battle here. So again, just trying to refine my forms, make them clearer and crisper, more confident. I want to have a sort of positive feeling to this one. It's a mental battle, but it's not a negative one. It's one that you're going to conquer. I have to remember all those people running that I found in my reference images. I want to make sure he looks like he or she looks like a runner. For this character back here, it's really about a person climbing. I don't want to get too much personality in this person back here. All the personalities in that face on the mountain, this positive mountain mind head guy is sending good vibes to this diligent climber in the background. Well, maybe just a little like something like a backpack, something to show that they're climbing a mountain. Okay, Next thing is training for the terrain guy. We have this trail coming down the slope, some more trees to emphasize our outdoor theme. Then of course, our guy just booking it downhill. But it's not just the character I'm trying to get here and capture. It's the whole scene here moving on the slow little turtle. I love that he's wearing a race bib on his shell. I have already drawn a race bib elsewhere in the set, so maybe just reference that in the same way that I did here. I'm just going to go and refine these shoes. I want to make them simple read clearly as footwear for running on mountains. You know, if I get really stuck on how to draw a turtle or what it looks like to walk, I would reference images further just to get a sense of that. I'm attempting to just do this by feel this looks like it could be a complicated image that I may have to further simplify. But there's Mr. Turtle and let me just see how that's looking when I kind of hide the rest of the sketches. Okay, I would want to clear up the legs a bit. They're just a little bit too complex for this. I think I might just simplify it. Maybe it's just about having fewer overlapping limbs. Yeah, I think that's it. It almost looks like there are people wearing a turtle costume. Like two people walking with a fake turtle shell over them. And that, I think is weird in this turtle, but also hilarious. I think it's quirky, it matches my thing when I illustrate. So I'm just going to go with it. So I'm now going back into the idea of the accommodations, this idea of just comfort. That's where I've landed on in terms of accommodations, that's a key message of making sure you have booked your place to stay ahead of time. It's about comfort and convenience. I'll have the idea of the window, I'm going to leave out the curtains, and I love this idea of the mountain terrain being just outside. Just some lake, got some trees. You'll notice that I'm repeating these motifs of grass and trees throughout my images. Over time, I've just developed this very simple shorthand way of symbolizing tree grass. Sometimes I need to be more elaborate and get into more details, but at this small size, this is perfect. This is exactly my approach for illustrated maps, where you have a lot of information in one image and so much going on. And just having a quick and easy, repeatable, shorthand symbol for these things is really useful and can just help. It allows you to repeat elements, lets your eye lead around. It just gives you a little element to work with to fill in space if you need it. Yeah, maybe I'll just put like some shirt lying on the bed there. Have a race bib ready to go? Yeah, I think that's an interesting image for that one. The last one is this guy, the poor nipple man. I think what I'm going to do is bring his hand over here, kind of holding himself dearly, feeling a little bit sorry for himself. We want to evoke a little bit of pathos, a little bit of sympathy for him here. He's using his other hand to put on band aids and that gives me the opportunity to make him have a little watch there and maybe a few band aids. We have all of our concepts, all six of them refined. I think they're looking so much more developed. Let's just take a look at how those looked Before we had these very rough ideas. All the idea was there and what we've done in the refined sketching process is just made them more resolved, everything's clarified, the compositions are better clearer. Again, you can go through your spot illustrations checklist that we went through earlier. Your principles of design and your principles of stylization. And these things can really help guide you along your way. The next step, of course, is to take these into the final stage. We're going to add color and use those exact same style elements that one line work brush, that one texture brush, and those four colors and the same techniques. And we're going to transform these into beautiful conceptual spot illustrations. All right guys. So once you've created your refined sketches and things are looking the way you want them to look, before going into finals, I'd say go take a quick break, refresh yourself, and don't forget to share your work so far with the class. 16. Project: Set 2 - Final Artwork: Here we are again at the final stage. Just this time for set two. The process is really the same. I think a lot of the heavy lifting in the stage was done in the last stage where we came up with concepts and refine them. Because I really feel like that was the creative challenge of this set. It really was how to visualize these very abstract and invisible ideas. The next challenge for us will be applying the style that we developed and perfected in set one to this new set of more abstract concepts. I'm going to turn over to my computer where I have my sketches open in Photoshop. These are the refined sketches that we made in the last step, I'm going to just like the last time, copy and paste these into my four up file, just like I did in set one. As a refresher, I'm going to just call up that four up file that we made in set one, and here are our first illustrations. It's nice to look at these again, just to remind us of the style elements that we used here. We have the colors, we have the texture, the line work, all those things here. And we're going to just use those exact same things. Nothing will change in terms of our style elements. As we begin to build out our more conceptual illustrations, we have the file made here. All we need to do is just save it as our second set, We want to get out of our set one subfolder. We'll go into set two. We're going to save this one into finals, and we'll name this one Trail running set two V One. Now of course, we have all this artwork in the art layer. Let's just remove all these spots. We'll make that sketches layer group visible. These are our old sketches. What we're going to do is we're just going to replace these with our new sketches. Before you do any of this destruction in your file, make sure you've saved it as a totally different file in your set two folder. I'm back in my thumbnails. I'm going to copy these one by one and place them into the new layout. And this is what I'm going with, those are in my sketches layer. I'm going to just save my file and then begin making the art for each concept one by one. The first is going to be, what was this one about? It was about fuel. Don't try anything new on race day or else you'll have to drink peptobysmal like a champ. Again, just like the last time, starting with the most obvious, largest areas of shape. This makes the most sense when I'm working in my style. Maybe I'll make that orange and I'm going to make the shirt behind. Now again, I'm working in my style using my techniques. The concepts that I've made, the sketches, the way that I formed them and made everything connect were designed for my technique. I know my technique well enough that I know how things are going to look. When I illustrate, there is that sense of influencing concept style. If you work on watercolor paper with gas or watercolor paint, your sketches will probably look different. And of course, your finals are going to look a lot different. But I imagine that you still would work at the broad areas of color first. You'd start just filling in those shapes with either the background color or however that works. I think what I'm going to do actually make this color blue cyan. That's going to be the color of the shirt. And then put an arm in front here. Now the hands stop short on their belly. I was going to make the arm extend all the way to the other side. But I remembered now that the hand actually needs to be on the belly because he's got a grumbly stomach. I'm going to stay my course there. I'm just going to shift that down. Okay, I probably want to bring the shoulder up here. Next thing I'm going to do is just create a pattern with the shirt. I'm still really just defining my shapes. I haven't done any lines yet. We'll add a bun to the head. Next, I'll do the label on the pepto bottle and another opportunity to knock out some white of this pretty solid piece of illustration. We'll add back some color with the hand holding the bottle. And we'll go into this with line work now. Oh, I'll just add the race bib. Now a challenge I foresee here is in the race bib having the color bar above and then the stripes on the shirt. That's going to look weird. There's going to be like a little bar and then all these lines, it's not going to read very clearly. What I might do is just change the color of the race bib here to a different color. Just in this instance, it reads clearly. It's not as consistent with where I've done race bibs elsewhere, but I don't think it actually matters. I think I did the one race bib illustration and then the one that I put on the turtle, which is an outtake, it's irrelevant. Maybe just add back that round corner for stylistic consistency with the race bid from set one. And we'll return to that if I feel like it's not working. There's something about this that I kind of feel like it is not working. It looks like he's holding something. I'm going to just let that go for a little bit. Maybe we don't need the race bid in the context of these illustrations. I'm going to get the watch going now. I did just copy and paste that, and you can really see that repeated. So I'm just going to adjust that inside circle a little bit just for a little bit more irregularity. Okay, now time to add some line work. I'm going to just start face just like the last time. I'm going to use my old nib brush 15 pixels and use my mid gray. Let's see how this looks when I multiply it over. I actually think I want to use for this one, I'm going to go back to normal. I'm going to use the dark blue for the facial expressions because I plan on using that same level of dark for the hand lines, for the handlines on this one as well. I'm just going to add a little chek detail here. That's where I'll use the gray the shader. Just pop that down to 50% Of course, I'm going to make some lettering for Pepto. I'll make a layer up there. I'm going to turn on my grid and find a slightly larger brush. You can use just the same brush, but because like I said before, lettering is one of specialties. I have a process for making this. I'm just going to introduce that to this artwork. I'm going to find a brush a little bigger. Again, I'm just going to shrink that down, making sure they don't distort it. I'm just going to pot this in there. Good, it's sitting nicely in there. Now that I have this rotated in this way, I'm actually noticing that there's an italic look to my illustrations as really obvious here. I'm just going to fix that. It's funny how you don't see it until you're looking at it in a different angle. This is tricky because it connects to the rest of the body head there. But I'm going to do my best to just correct it a little bit. You can see how that's happening with the way the handles are going. If these handles are a little bit more parallel to the past, I think that works a little better. There's still some italicization going on there, but I think that's good for now. Just in the background, I'm always saving my work, always hitting command S with my free hand if you are working digitally, something to make note of. The only other thing that I want to do here is I have these little lines floating in the background that indicate unwellness. I'm going to go back to my old nib, that one brush that we're really using for our line work, then just the feeling of feeling sick. You don't want to overdo it. Go to just turn off the sketch for a second. Just see that in a more pure sense, his head is a bit dizzy and his tummy isn't feeling hot. What else can I do here? I think I need to add texture for sure. Maybe try and add back that running bit just to reinforce the race. I'm going to give that another go. I'm going to just pop a layer over there. Go into my texture brush, the godfather of grain, 300 pixels. Multiply that, take it down to 50% that's a little bit more subtle. Make a new layer here and continue trying to be like I want to get the texture in there, but I don't want to overdo it. It's really just about bringing a little bit of warmth. It is possible to over use any one of your elements as a gimmick. Okay. There's a couple of things that I want to do. I feel like the eyes are a bit too intense. What I might try is draw me my dark blue. He's got his eyes closed in pain and sorrow or a mix of the two. He might not finish the race. The next thing I'll do here is just try that bib one more time. Maybe make it a little bit bigger. I might modulate the pattern so it can work. I'm actually going to go to my first set, grab that race number, and that's all I'm going to need for this. This is work I've already done. I can just copy that and then paste it into the shirt. It's a little bit of a call back. I think that might read nicely. I've avoided having any white come into that blue stripe there, and I think that does the trick. I'm going to make visible my sketches. Again, this one looks like fun to do right now. Let's go to Mountain Head Man. We've done 13 to go name our new group, what we call it, mental battle. Got the mean shape in this one done. Make that a nice orange and we've filled this in with the shape. And maybe before I get into the complexities of the runner there on the head, I'll draw the, using the nib, I'll make this white. Now this is a little bit of an exception. I'm drawing a, s, an oval shape with my pen, but I like the rough edge that this has, so I'm just going to let that be. That's a bit of a stylistic decision that I'm making. And then just do the same for the above. Now quick Photoshop trick for those in Photoshop. What I just did there, I wanted to create this pupil on top, but I wanted it to fit within that shape that I made below. What I do is I draw this pupil over top and I wanted to be mask within the shape of the. I've drawn this pupil separately over top. Just above the shape below. I just hit Command option on the Mac anyway. Fits right in there. Actually, I forget I've been using this shortcut for so long. I don't even know what the original function is called, but the keystroke is command option G. And that's just a quick way of fitting a top layer within the artwork below. I use that a ton. Okay, moving on, I'm going to start just adding some line work bits. Sometimes I draw all the shapes first. Sometimes I go between shapes and line. Just one thing flows to the next Naturally. With those ones, I might go white. So we'll put those just on a separate layer and then draw the snow cap on his head. Now this might be, now of course, that white is getting lost to the background. I'm going to use texture later to help bring out the edge at the top and side around the contrast at the top here. But I do want that snow. I like how the snow doubles as hair for the guy. Another thing that I want to do is bring in repeat, this cheek element that I have here. I think it might work here. Let's just see, I just scaled that back to 50% before blending it with the multiply. That might work. We have our trees, I'm going to go back to those after I draw the climber, now the climber sits behind, I'll just add that layer group back here. Of course, I want one of his hands to appear here and I'm going to really abstract the hand here because it's so small, getting each even four fingers there might be a little bit too much to fit in there. What I actually might do is just do a mit a mi shape there. Can draw in a few subtle lines to separate the fingers. It's just too small scale to articulate each finger. And this is definitely a shape that I might go back and try and refine over and over trying to get right. I think it'll be more silhouetted. Just again, I want to really draw attention to the, the, the bigger head. And not let this guy be the hero. Although he is really the hero because he's the one doing the climbing. You guys just doing the thinking, okay, I'm going to make his hat red so I'm going to give him a red brim, Maybe draw a little lighter with that to modulate the line thickness a bit. I'm not changing the pixel size of the brush. I'm a thinner stroke by changing the pressure, and I've allowed that. I'm also just going to color in a bit of that red back here of some stripe motif. Just call that back in a subtle way. Maybe that's too much. I don't want to overthink it, just keep going. Probably it's too late. I've overthought it. Now I just want to draw some shorts. Pants are important. Maybe red shorts. Pop that under the white. And I'm going to clean up some of the way this line work looks. I'm actually using the brush as a quick way of making my shape as long as it looks as clean as my vector shapes. That's really all that matters. This is my first pass. I'll probably have lots to pick on when I make refinements. Okay. The last thing I want to do, there's a few things I need to do here. Maybe imply some sock. No too many stripes, too much. Gives me an idea, but I think we'll just leave that there like that. Now, I want to take this arm and make sure that pops over the head shape here. I'm just using Pathfinder operations to do this. I was going to articulate the fingers here a little bit if I can. No, don't need a facial expression on him. That backpack is next. Maybe put a touch of blue in here. Okay. So we need to use the so I've just use the pen tool to make this shape for his backpack. A running backpack is usually slim. Not much room in there for stuff. I do. Maybe want to include some shoulder strap. Ideally, I would have figured out a lot of this in the sketches. It's a lot easier to work this out through pencil. And I feel like the end result would be a lot more resolved if I had worked it out in pencil. But there's a few tricks that I can use here just to get her done. Sometimes when you're working on editorial illustration, that is the name of the game, There's something I don't like about these stripes. I'm going to erase some and to see what I can do about that first I can make those shorts a little cleaner. Now what I'm trying to do here is make it so he has some kind of short sleeve. Maybe I'll give him leave just to help define his arm a bit more. Might want to get the arm that's in back of him. Let's see if I need to do that. Or maybe that's too much information, we'll see. It might be hard to be clear that in the dark blue. Let me just set my settings here different. That's better. Again, I know that I'm breezing through my Photoshop skills here. I'm really trying to just show how I think when I'm finalizing an image, how I'm applying the style that I've developed to these more complex, abstract shapes. It's very much similar to what we did in the first set. It's just that sometimes there's a few more intricacies which makes the overall challenge of simplicity and clarity a little bit more difficult. There's something I know what I need to do. I'm going to try one more time. Probably I might have to resketch some of this, but the idea is he's running. So maybe there's just a little bit more of an arm swing happening here. Again, I want to make sure that I'm defining, describing those fingers with some small lines if it works very tricky in this small space. Okay, let's just see what happens when we start adding some texture to this. Just to keep going, we have gray selected our texture brush. We'll set the layer opacity or blend mode to multiply. We've got our snow back, which is great, or we have the top of the mountain back. Just by the way that shading is there. I might pop a little just there as well to help and add the trees in the clouds. Now I'm doubting whether those trees are going to look simple against the human there. Let's see, I'm going to make blue, just to add a bit more of that blue color. I haven't seen a lot of that in this piece. Maybe it's just about having one tree, tiny tree up there. And then we'll draw that cloud. Using this cloud shape as a rough guide, but modifying it to be a little bit bigger. I think they felt that cloud is a bit too complicated. Sometimes you've got to trust to sketch. I'm going to go back to what I sketched. It looks weird in this one. I'm going to just quickly use my nib pen to draw a cloud shape. Looks better. Just pop that down to 50% I like the idea of the bird in the sky there. So I'm just going to add that there is our runner. There's definitely a few things I would go back and redraw about the runner there. But for all intents and purposes, I think that works. Okay, so the next one I'm going to take on is this downhill runner. I forget what that one was about. This is train for terrain again, I'm going to draw this main mass of the mountain that will just give me the groundwork for the rest of the illustration. This one, I haven't used a lot of darker colors yet, so I'm going to go with this blue and just make sure the shape feels nice and refined. Okay, just add that snow inside there, fill it in white. I might not need snow up there, but for now I'm actually going to not do snow, I'm going to do the path coming down. I think that will be better. Just delete that piece a bit there then. I think important to this one is that very minimal background. This is one of those spot illustrations that will have a background. I need to tread very carefully here, not to get too carried away. It's really about just a gesture of a background. It's supporting the idea and playing second fiddle to the main area of the illustration, which of course is this black mountain y mound. And being a bit fussy with that shape, I think maybe just make these waves a bit lighter by pressing lighter on my stylus, then adding some trees to the mix. Again, going to these repeat elements to bring unity to the overall set. It's just convenient that I have these stored up in my repertoire of symbols that I bring to a lot of my illustrations, and they come really in handy in these smaller scenarios. I'm going to add in just a few of these little rock type shapes, very stylized ideas of rocks. Now I'm adding all these elements in here because I'm avoiding drawing the runner guy, which I know I'll need to pay closer attention to. There's lots of little details in there. It can be a inspiring, but a lot more motivating just to take care of some of the easier parts of an illustration. First, the inevitable moment has come where I have to draw the guy, let me just create a layer over the mountain again. This guy, maybe in that other guy, the mount climber, I tried to use the little lines to separate his hands. They're about the same size, but I'm just going to try maybe having the individual fingers articulated. At least three fingers instead of four will be enough here. I'm going to see which I like, maybe go back and change them to match later. This guy is wearing those trail shoes. Of course, it's scaled back. Okay. Again, there's some things that I should probably resolve in the refined sketches before getting this far that I think will make this a less elegant drawing than I would like just in terms of how the gesture looks and how all the parts connect. But it's not awful yet. So we'll just keep believing in this illustration until we really need to go into revision mode if that comes to it. Just like running an ultra marathon is a mental battle, a lot of illustration is a mental battle as well. You're constantly facing your own doubts about whether what you're working on is good enough. I'm actually feeling that right now. I'm worried that maybe this runner guy isn't super well formed and I'm doubting it. And I could get stuck in just trying to refine, refine, refined. And maybe if I just believe that this is going to work out. Just giving yourself the vote of confidence as you go along. Just trying it out, committing to seeing it followed through, Maybe it won't be as bad as you think. And that's where I'm at right now, just really kind of trying to get this done and not getting stuck and stalling and speeding my tires and trying to get the perfect form here. And sometimes when I look back at my work, I actually, I like those more spontaneous things that I had less control over in the moment, which I valued less in the moment. Maybe I'm banking on that this time. Truth be told, I have also had faith in illustrations that did not work out and then I had to go back. But I'd say most of the time it's the other way around. Your doubts were wrong. You just have to pay attention and be open to trying something, committing to it, and possibly being wrong, but also possibly being rewarded for stick to it, Okay, So I'm going to keep going motivational lecture over pop that hat. You know, again here's the idea of like the runner's hat or the baseball cap is a nice little recurring motif I can use just to, within this set. Used to say this is a runner. He's in sports mode wearing his hat, he's outside. Okay, you just go, I'm going to go back to the blue. That's easier, more straightforward. I'm actually going to reduce the amount of detail in this guy. I've decided that mitten hands win. It's a stylistic decision. And as long as I'm consistent with what I've done elsewhere, that's what's important. I could draw this with a shape, which I remember making that decision with a little tiny heart in the GPS watch. Let's just do this with a more pen Toole shape. Does that work? Does it conflict with the quality of the hat brim? Let us just redraw that hat brim. Bring it up a bit, again, just for shortcut. Everybody's 36. Or maybe this guy's 630. Maybe this is a female here. See if I can make that work. There we go. Maybe I can put a bit more dirt on this path and I'm going to need to add some texture. Just add a bit of that texture over top the path. That's exactly what I needed. I'm not sure if I need texture inside the person. Maybe just a very small touch. Not much is necessary. Just really not much. Because it's so small, I'm going to leave the texture on the hillside here. That's going to do the heavy lifting of texture. It is a nice counterbalance to the dominantly orangey, red illustrations over Here we have our third. Concept spot illustration and it's just one more to go and then we're done. After illustrating for a long time, you may tend to get a little bit impatient with yourself and rush if you have the time. Give yourself a break and come back to it with fresh eyes and the willpower to keep working. Sometimes I see new opportunities over the sketch, even if it's a refined sketch, to clarify my images and make the shapes look better. And that's what I'm doing here. I'm overriding my sketch a little bit. Sometimes I have to trust my sketch, and sometimes I allow myself to override the sketch. I'm going to go with orange. It's okay, Everybody's orange now, so maybe that's my color for people. We going to define this hand with a shape over top that wine and the eye, just like we did with our other fella. Him looking more down probably also want to get this, these bands we're going to bring in that can again, copy and piece that, that has to tuck behind the line work, cheek color here, make it lighter so it doesn't dominate. Okay. So now I'm just going to add the hand. He's sad, so he's babying himself. He's holding his arm. Just sometimes my body parts aren't anatomically correct. The fingers are a bit irregular. A bit too irregular one to another. And that means just thickening up this and thinning out this evening out everything near to lasting. We're going to just draw the guy's watch. This is just an opportunity, again, to emphasize what we're really, what world we're in. The theme of this set which is running, of course, bring the watch in. I can maybe just borrow what I did on this one. There you go again. It's just about letting the paper color come through. I think this will have to should technically be white, but I'll just let it be dark for now. And another opportunity for lettering, just make this shrink. I'm actually going to go back to white and make this lettering the red. Okay, so just use some texture, multiply it, set it back 50% With band aid brand packages usually have a repeating element like that. And then like a blue tab. Just get that in there and you suddenly get a bandaid package. I'm going to add any more band aids, that's a lot of detail. I'm certainly not going to add the little sticky parts. I'm going to turn my sketches off or hide them and just look at the set now. Just see how they look. Is there anything I didn't add texture to the guy and you can really see how the texture adds a quality to the other pieces. By not having that texture in the guy, it really feels left out. I think all the sets could work without texture, with a little bit of adjustment. But I have made that decision, that stylistic decision, to put texture in all of my pieces here. And I'm just going to commit to that, doing everything the same. Now I have to get that texture also in the arm there. I'll come to that in a sec. Just a subtle texture. It's really just about adding a little bit of dimension there. That texture brings it in. I see just this awkward little bit where the three is coming behind the watch strap. I think I do need to remedy that by making something different here. I could erase that part of the three, and I think that does the job here. This has been bothering me for a while, the way these stripes criss cross each other. I don't like that. That's a little bit more elegant, fewer things going on. In this small sized illustration, there is a bit of criss cross going on there. Something that I can just avoid by not having the stripes alternate at that exact frequency. There a little bit of irregularity is okay, but there I really cleaned up that guy. His shirt. The way the backpack is just seamlessly integrating into the pattern just makes it a lot cleaner. There we have our spot illustrations. I think what I'd like to do next is just see how they look when viewed alongside the first set of illustrations we made. I'm just going to open that up. There's our first trail running set. Now we're going to take a look how these shape up and look together. There we have a set of illustrations. The first set is simple objects, then the next one is much more complex, abstract, complex. These together can work as a set or on their own. They're nice square shapes which are perfect for sharing, especially on Instagram. You can use the hash tag sweet spots illustration of Share your final illustrations on the class projects page. It's hard to believe. But we actually have finished two sets of spot illustrations. I have mine here before me and I'm just super happy with the way they turned out. I love that I just had this minimum style palette that I was able to apply both to simple objects and then to more complex abstract concepts. Now this is a good opportunity to look at all of them together and make sure there's consistency. And since we're learning here, there's nothing wrong with having inconsistency. We're learning how to have a consistent style. And for people who are just beginning and learning software and all that, there's all kinds of variables, there's going to be some growing pains. But of course, everything is giving you insights for what you would do next. For me I'm looking is there style shift, are things that I did in the beginning, kind of shifting and changing over time. For instance, did I start kind of clumsily at first and not really know what I was doing, but then I kind of found my groove. And after that point, my other illustrations kind of have much more confidence to them. Maybe the reverse happened. Maybe I came into it really fresh and then got kind of tired along the way and stopped really applying my enthusiasm to the illustrations. Sometimes that happens overall, what we're looking for is that consistency or lack of consistency. And that's really what we want to even out in our set. We just illustrated two sets of spots. I mean, that's a lot of work. So congratulations guys. I had a lot of fun making those illustrations and I hope you guys did too. 17. Conclusion!: All right guys. Thanks for following along through all my lessons and lectures and of course, for working through the project. I hope you learned a lot and had a lot of fun watching through the videos and making your own sweet spot illustrations. If you have any questions along the way, please ask me. You know that I love your questions. This was a much more advanced class than my previous ones and I've left out a lot about what I was doing On the technical side. I did this so we could focus on the overarching areas of style and concept. Please write your questions here in the discussions part of the class page. That's the best place for me to find them and of course, hopefully for them to be of use to others wondering the same thing when you're done the project or even if you're just part way through, please share what you've made on the class project page. This is the best way to encourage one another in the skill share community just by seeing other projects. Others will be motivated to make their own. Of course, when you post your projects, you can get feedback from your fellow students and of course, from me. Every student who posts a project on my classes gets personal feedback directly from me. As always, if you end up sharing anything you did on this class or as a result of taking it on Instagram, please use the hashtag sweet spots illustration. That way I can really keep up with what you're doing beyond this class. I love seeing my students work in the wild. Thank you so much for taking sweet spots. I'll see you in the next class.