Transcripts
1. Introduction: Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to be the first to welcome you to the Skillshare Webcomics Challenge, I'm your host, Kienan Lafferty. You may know me from a little online comic that I like to work on called Emma. Now over the last couple of years that I've been working on this, you guys have been coming up to me and asking, "Kienan, will you teach me the techniques to become an amazing comic artist and rise to the top of webcomic stardom, and can you teach me in less than an hour on a little online platform, is easy to use online platform?" My answer to you is yes. In this class on skillshare.com, you will learn many valuable techniques such as, creating your own faces, creating style, experimenting with something that's going to work great for you and tantalize your viewers. You'll also learn how to exaggerate body proportions so that way you don't look like another run of the mill comic artists, and have a style that's going to differentiate you and make you look freaking awesome. At the end of this class, you will have your own reference sheet, your characters colored, ready to go and ready to take into the next class, which is going to be the actual real deal. We're going to be laying out the panels, putting our characters in, developing a short story and creating your very first masterpiece, a page of your very own webcomic. So I encourage you guys to enroll today, come join on up, and let's do this thing. I'll see you guys on the next video.
2. Assignment Overview: You've decided to enroll and join me on this awesome journey of creating a webcomic. I am more than happy to be your teacher and I am humbled that you would join me on Skillshare. Thank you very much. This is going to be our video assignment overview. The first thing we're going to be going into, throughout this assignment, and this is basically an overview of what I want you guys to be posting down in the Project Gallery so that way I can comment on it and discuss it with you. One of the first things that we're going to be going into is faces. I'm going to be showing you how to create simple head shapes, and figure out a style that you can lay on basic facial features. Then from that, "Hey, what do we need?" Bodies to go on those faces. I'm going to show you a very simple way to create a body using about four shapes, and then you can exaggerate them to your own liking and create your own style. I'll be very happy. Then we're going to be moving into clothing, I'm going to be teaching you how to add on clothing to your characters. Then we'll move into line work, which I will be showing you with my brushes, my very own brushes, you can download on Skillshare and I'll teach you guys how to line. Then in the very final step, we will simply be coloring those in, masking, and I'll show you guys again a very easy fun way to pick your colors, and mask your characters, and color them. That is the project overview, I hope you guys are excited for this course, I sure I am. It's going to be freaking awesome, I can't wait to see you guys' projects down in the Project Gallery, when we're talking about it, sharing it, showing to guys off of you saying like, "Come look at my students, my students are the best, look at their work." You better be posting down there, I want to see it. I'll be joining you guys on the next video. See you then.
3. Exploring Style: Guys: Hello there, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Skillshare Web Comics Challenge. I'm going to be taking you to the top of the mountain and I will be your humble Sherpa. My name is Kienan Lafferty and we're going to be making an awesome web comic along the theme of something lost now found. I'm going to be teaching you guys to make your very own web comic and I'll be instructing you the whole way through. But before we actually get into creating the comic, there is a lot of preparation work that needs to be done. Today what we're going to be talking about is right here. We're going to be talking about creating a style, finding a style, and basically developing character faces. That can be something that you can replicate thousands of times over. That's going to be one of the most important things that you can do during this course. This is going to be your very first assignment. It's going to be to create 10 different character faces using different styles and right now we're going to just jump right into it. I'm going to show you how to begin creating those. You'll notice, first of all, before we actually start from a blank slate, I'll do a couple guys, a couple of girls, but this is basically the principle we're going to be focusing on today. You might look at these faces and you're like, "Oh man, I don't know if I could just come with that out of my mind right off the bat." Well, actually you can, I'm going to show you how. Let's take this girl's face right here. This is the principle we're going to be focusing on today and I call it the circle and chin shape method. Basically, all of my character faces are comprised of a circle, and then I'm adding a chin shape onto it. Then when you start dividing the circle in half, you can start to see certain things are placed along different parts of the circle, and then you're able to basically construct character faces based upon those things. Let's go ahead and get into that right now, shall we? The first thing I'm going to have you guys do, is I'm going to have you construct a circle. Now pay attention, this is the most important part, probably the hardest part of the lesson right here. You're going to draw a circle. You might be curious what brush I'm working with. I'll include that as a downloadable file on the Skillshare page. You can download that along with the PSD so you can take a closer look at how I created these characters. You're going to start with a good old circle, and make sure it is on a new layer. So good old circle, add on that chin shape, and I like to create my characters and three-fourths, you can do them head on, but I personally like to just simulate that depth that's happening with the character's face, so it really is helpful to do that. The first line that you're going to draw through, aside from the one from the chin to the forehead, that's basically our center line of the face, is I want you to divide this circle in half, and then, I mean, that's pretty close. As close as you can get, so there you go. Then once you've done that just below that line, I like to say that's where the center of my eyes are going to go. Basically, you've got this as your central line and then just below that is where your eyes will go. So eyes here. I've found oftentimes that the nose can line up very closely to where these two lines intersect. Basically the bottom of the circle. We come up a little ways, that's where your nose can go, and there's all different noses that you can draw. Right now I'm just laying out the basics. In fact, let's just do that. Let's just lay out basics. Eyes will go here, you can mark them with two little dots. Nose will go here and then mouth will be right underneath it. Then as I go through, I like to erase a little bit of my guidelines as I go. It's get rid of a little bit of these, and then we have our face there. This is going to be the first thing that I ask that you do. Create a face like this and then duplicate it a couple times over, and the way that you can do this is grab your little move tool up here and just hold the Alt button down while you drag it and automatically makes a new layer, handy null. So we've got three faces, basically right here and I usually classify these as girls faces because I really like the girls faces to come down to a pointy chin in my style. Whereas with the guys, I'll usually do one of these things here, let's go ahead and merge these layers. With the guys, what I usually do is I'll square the jaw off. Sometimes it'll still come to a point, but I'll square the jaw off right here and there, and then see now you have a much more masculine chiseled face. Anyway, so that's the first thing that you can do to start playing around with your characters. But let's focus on actually creating our facial features. Here's a quick example of a few different things that you can do. Normally in my style, I really like to have, again, this line, that middle line just below that is usually where the tops of the eyes will go. I'm going to create a guy here. I'm basically going to draw the equivalent of my character Niko from my comic. He has the square eyes. Their eyes are not round, they're actually like little squares, like little Tetris pieces. That's the way I like to think of it. I'm going to do that but then on this other eye, notice what I'm going to do here. I'm thinking about the nose and the depth of the nose. If I was to draw in the bridge right here, you would see that the eye comes in right there. See how it moves closer to the nose because of the three-fourths perspective. Again, we're going to draw in that square shape and then his eye is going to be looking at that way. But I don't actually draw this line in my style. But you want to think about that line. Thing about that line no matter what style you're working in. Basically, this eye is going to move to the right or basically closer to the nose area and you just want to think about that bridge. Think about the bridge. You can see now the tops of those eyes meets right with that line. Then I like to give them a nice big eyebrows. Nice big eyebrows are really manly. It's actually looks slightly older version of Niko. Another thing that I do on my guys is for the girls, I like to make their chins a tad bit smaller. For that reason I actually have their nose and mouth lower on the face. With the guys, you can mix their eye proportions vary them up a little bit here and there. Remember how I said at the bottom of this circle and that's where the mouth goes, you can play around with that, that's not set in stone. But just in general for you to get started, to find something that you like, that's where I like to put my stuff. But for the guys, I'll actually move the nose up a tad bit, like this. If anything, let's see what do I do here? I think I would just moved the mouth up a tad bit and like the bigger the chin is, the more manly your guy will look. Like I said, this looks like an older version of Niko. Older version, cool. I like to separate my mouth into two lines. Again, notice how the mouth, it gets pulled to the right. See how it's moving over to the right like there's less on this side than on that side. Same principle that we're talking about. Because of the depth of the face, the mouth is also going to be pulled over to the side. You can exaggerate a little bit. Sometimes I've found it's good to exaggerate it, even though this is technically the middle of the mouth and the middle of the faces there. I just really like to do that. I don't know, it just looks good. Try a couple different things, if you want to do an animate style, then that's awesome. But if not, then that's okay too. There's example 1. This is what I would call a very simple style. You also want to consider some other variations that will make it a little bit easier to draw, even easier. How could we simplify this even further? I'm going to show you that right now. Probably one of the most detail things in this, I would say are his eyes. Let's go and take away those eyes and let's just replace them with like some old school '50s Mickey Mouse eyes. I actually really like to work with eyes like this because they're really simple and they still reflect a lot of character. They reflect a lot of emotion, even though they are literally just little circles there. Let's put the Pac-Man in there just for good measure. Now see, we've done that. We can also change up the nose.This is what I want you to focus on right here. This is how you will make variations on your characters. Go ahead and just like erase the nose and you can draw on a different type of nose, maybe one like this is what you want. See how immediately we've changed styles from here to here, just by altering the eyes and the nose. I really want you guys to find a style that you're comfortable with working in, something that you would enjoy working in. There you go. A couple different mouths. Another thing that's actually interesting to go into is a point of detail that I think a lot of people don't necessarily pay attention to is a tooth shape. All of my characters in my comic have a different tooth shape. Like Emma's, goes down like that and then it looks like that because it's simulating that her front teeth are just slightly bigger. But you could even have a space between the teeth like this, and have a completely different character. Play around with different teeth shapes too, if you want to have their mouths open. By the way you can see, again, that mouth is always going to get pulled to the side based upon the perspective. The cool thing about the cartoon is that you really can get away with things like that. You can get away with awesome just exaggerations and it makes it look really cool.
4. Exploring Style: Girls: Let's move on to the girl's face because in this lesson, I'm going to be teaching you to create a man and a woman, girl and a boy for your finished comic book page. Let me talk to you a little bit about my style with drawing the girls. Again that midline is right where I think of it as the start of the eyelash, so it's going to come up like that. Just going to erase that. Then I guess if you were to divide, you divided the circle in half, once. If you were to divide it again, like that, that's where the bottom of the eye is going to go, like that, super easy. I'm thinking about almost like the eyeball inside of it, but only drawing the edges, see how there's like there's around shape, but I'm not drawing the entire round shape, I'm just stylistically implementing the edges, you could say. Then I always make the girls pupils bigger than the guys, just because it makes them look cuter, especially on Emma, I like that. Again, keep in mind that bridge of the nose is going to come up like that and it's going to be much more noticeable here, because we have bigger eyes. A lot of people might be tempted to be like, this eyelid goes up like that. So the other eyelid is going to come up like this, because it's mirrored, it's symmetrical. However, when you're viewing it from this angle, I would suggest that if you're going to draw eyes like this, that it will mimic that angle. See how that eye goes up like that, this eye is also going to go up like that, just because of the way that the eye is shaped and the angle that you're viewing it from, it's going to look a lot more natural and a lot more good, so do that. Put some smaller eyebrows on the girl, there you go. The nose is on the girls are much smaller as well, trying to make the noses smaller, cuter, there's sort of like, I don't see them as animal noses, the way they're just like little check marks, that's the way I think of them. Then the mouth is going to be right here, and then I'm actually going to make our changes to 10 bit smaller, just by pulling that in. I just pull that in like that, then erase. Basically, a lot of my technique relies on line sculpting, that is just, I'm drawing, I lay down lines like this, and then I'll go in with my eraser, I'll sculpt the line the way I want it to look. That's my style, try it out for yourself if you like it. You can see how messy my sketches are and this is something that I want you guys to be okay with doing, because I feel that a lot of people go into comics, they see the finished page, they see something like, let's see here, they'll see this, they be like, "Okay, I got to draw exactly that," without any guides, without anything like that. We'll get to this in just a second, that's going to be a story to wrap it up. I might even make it in the next episode, because the way that I'm thinking about doing this is, I will do real-time tutorials and then we'll have a time-lapse wrap up. So I'll just show you how I went through making those other 10 faces. Let's talk a little bit about what we're going to be focusing on. Moving on here, so that's about it. That's going to wrap it up for the girls. Let's go ahead and again, do the same treatment that we did down here, and now, we're going to alter it over here. Let's go ahead and delete this, and let's bring this face over. Let's make some slight alterations to it to make it a new style. Again, let's go and get rid of these eyes. We still know where that center point is, going right through there. I personally really like these eyes, in fact, something that's very interesting is, you could say that I work in this style when I first started laying in the ideas for the panels. You guys will see my sketches for the panels of the comic and they're going to be drawn basically in this style. The reason why I do it is, because it's just a lot more simple, I don't have to worry about drawing in the extra eyes, and eyelashes, and all that stuff. It's a really good way to get expression, you can get expression very easily, for example, if you want them to be angry, you just take the eyebrows, kick them down like that. See how much that changes it? Makes a huge difference. You can also do this trick here, this is something that's really important. If you wanted to be able to convey more emotion, you can actually put lines across like that, see now, that represents the eyelid and then you can put the eyebrows on top of that. So it's a very versatile expressions, a very versatile style that I want you guys to practice. Just seeing what you can do it yourself, because you actually don't need a lot at all to have a good characters with a good expression, so I really like that. Then, there we go, awesome. There you have a couple of different styles. Now, let's move into the next thing that I want you to consider when you're creating your characters, because right now I really want you to feel it. Don't worry so much about creating your characters that you're going to be using in the comic strip, right now, I really want you to just play around with some different styles, like you saw in this one over here, there's a bunch of different ones going on. There's for instance, this one, this is like adventure time over here. Basically, all these styles are created by differences in just using the circle, for instance, I didn't even put a chin shape on this one, t his is literally just a circle, but again, I've divided it in half, that's where the eyes go. Then, with a face, that's simple, you can basically put on, it didn't even have a nose, you can just basically have fun with it. But for instance, say this one down here, like this manly man. See again, same principle applies, circle is right there, but then the chin shape we've added on is way bigger, it's like another half to the head, but see how its all squared off. Again, look at that, he bottom of the circle. Pay attention to where the bottom of the circle lines up with what's going be on your character. In this case, it's the guy's nose, whereas with the other characters, it was their mouth. So just pay attention to where that lines up and doing this will allow you to create the same character over and over again, and it's going to be really handy. Like I said, I will be doing a time lapse showing this but right now we gotta get back to the next step in our process before we wrap this up. What I'm going to talk to you about now is hair shapes. Where the heck is that? Hair shapes are also going to be very important, because I don't want you to focus on drawing high detail hair-like, let's draw all these little tiny hairs all over the place and make it like that. What I want you to think about is like a 2D cutout, I want you to think about a simple shape, that way we can arrive at something like this. See this Emma style here? I basically went from having very detailed hair with all these flyways and hundreds of strands to a very simple 2D cutout shape and that is also very iconic. I'm going to show you how to do that right now. So getting back to this. The other thing that's really handy about this eye-line, remember how he divided the circle and then right below that halfway point is where the eye start, that's actually where the ear is going to go. If you'd literally draw that line out and then bring it down, you can create the ear. I like to have these angular, almost Elvish looking ears, like that. We you can also easily just take that line and make it round. But I digress, let's get back to the hair. Usually, I find it very safe to just do one of these points at the ear, because it simulates the sideburns. Then, you want to think about rule such as, I want this guy to have spiky bangs, so you go one, two, three. That's an easy rule to remember, and you come on back and then let's say, you want him to have two spikes back here. See how I'm bringing it up off the top of the circle here, that's because the hair actually has volume to it. You want to make sure that it's not like madled down perfectly on the top of your character's head. It could be, they're like cornrows or something, but for the most part, hair will have volume and it's going to stick off the top of your character's head a little bit, so we consider that. I want you to focus on making very simple hair shapes like that. Again, you can erase your guidelines as you go through and just clean that up. Now, let's do one for the girls and then we're going to wrap up this lesson and you guys can go on to the next one, and then I will explain a little bit more in detail, along with some time-lapse of me doing those 10 faces. For the girls, there's all kinds of things that you can do, but I'll focus on this one here. I'll focus on, let's say she has a longer hair, how do you do long hair? So you're just going to want to do one of these things. So go ahead and bring it down, let's say you wanted to have like two little strands that come off here. Again, think in simple shapes, so you go, one, two, like that.And then her neck and stuff would like be here. But then again, give it a little bit of volume up here, bring it back, and then you've got your third shape. See, super simple. Actually, you're not even going to see her ear anymore. But again, see that simplicity, that's what you're looking for, that's what you're going to be drawing hundreds and hundreds of times, if you decide to continue your comic. We're only going to be drawn about eight times, because we're only doing one page, because I'm just giving you a taste. You're just getting a taste today of what it's like to be a comic artist. The last thing that I want to reiterate is that, I want you guys to feel free to be messy, I want you to feel free to experiment, try out a bunch of different eye shapes. Take a look at some of your favorite cartoons and find out what you like about them. These are like adolescent kid characters, but I want to invite you to feel free to do older characters, such as this guy down here. Feel free, steal my ideas, if you see something here that you really like, go ahead and copy that style, I don't care. Really, I just want you to get comfortable with finding your own thing. This is another really cool one. Get comfortable with creating crazy chin shapes, like this one over here. This last one I feel is very expressive and I really like it because, you can see the circle is right here, but then the chin shape is really long, it's really exaggerated chin shape. Then you get to see, same rule applies, halfway at the circle, just below that, is where the eyes go. Like I said, you can play around with all the other proportions but for some reason, I always feel like you want to line up the eyes right below that middle point on the circle. With that, ladies and gentlemen, we're going to end lesson 1. We're going to be doing a little time-lapse wrap up, after this one. Check that out and we'll have a good time. I'll see you then.
5. Time-Lapse: Style Recap: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Lesson 1 project wrap up. I am going to be walking you through my process, how I went about completing this assignment over here of creating 10 faces, 10 faces all in different styles, different eyes, different mouths, simple hair shapes and all that stuff, and we're going to be jumping into a timelapse and I'll pause it every once in awhile and talk a little bit about what was going through my mind as I created each of them. The first thing I did was I created my circle and I did that little trick of picking my move tool and then I just held "Alt" and again, just duplicate that circle 10 times, because everything's going to be built off that circle. When you're moving into phase number one at that chin shape on there, again nose at the bottom of the circle, around there, and then simple eyes, Pac-Man eyes, got to love that. Moving onto the next one, I'm not even worried about hair shapes, in fact I suggest that you do this as well. Don't worry so much about your hair shapes, I would say just focus on getting some different types of eyes and faces on there, because the hair is basically all going to be the same, it's going to be the same going through here. Moving on, we've got a bunch of different eyes, we've got that animate style looking there, a little bit thinner thinking of different guys and girls faces. Here's a more angular jaw and actual circle eyes that are completely encloses like a traditional animation style. Normally I didn't put the bridge of the nose in but for this one I was like, hey, why not? Let's just throw it in there. Just trying out a bunch of different things, and also another thing that I'm playing around with is the idea of proportions, like you'll notice like the eyes on this face are very big, like they're taking up literally like 60 percent of the head-space, and you've got a tiny little nose and mouth down here, whereas this one has a much smaller eyes, much smaller and narrower, and then the nose and mouth are moved up. Play around with that, that's what I really want you to do. Just go crazy. Again, we're not worrying so much about creating our characters but the important thing here is that you figure out what style you're going to be working in, whether you're going to be doing detailed, more detailed manly faces like this one or you're going to be doing the simple more Pac-Man eyes. If you're new to this, I would suggest, I would highly recommend that you do more of the simple like one shape eyes with the eye brow, because not only will you be able to get awesome expressions, but it's just going to be a lot easier and you're going to avoid a lot of headaches. Whereas, if you're a little bit more advanced, I would suggest that you do something that involves a little more detail around the eyes, such as these anime ones. But what's interesting is that I really don't feel like you get much more expression out of this, is just more detail and a little bit more of a show off factor. Whatever you're into, don't feel like you're really going to miss out if you pick one side over the other because as long as you basically have eyes and eyebrows, those are probably like, I've heard it said before that 90 percent of the expression is through the eyes and the eyebrows and I really believe in that. Just focus on that, don't worry so much about it being perfect. In fact you could just have a style with just eyes and eyebrows and then you get, not actually be really funny, I will very interesting, I'd like to see that. Now the next thing that I'm doing here is I'm adding on like next and hair shapes and I'll show you a little bit about that, I'll go back into the things, I don't think I showed you guys how to add on next. There is a very important rule that goes into that, and I will tell you that as soon as this is done. The stage is [inaudible] , simple hair shapes, and adding those next, three now what we like and yeah, just completing my faces. But in the meantime, let's go back to this really quick and let's review everything that we've learned, and I'm going to show you guys how to add on next really quick as well. so you'll notice on here, let's go ahead and make our notes. A really easy way to consider where to put the neck with the exception of this character right over here because his head is round, so it's like most of the time, here's what I'll compare it to. Most of the time you create a head and you'd say, okay, I want the net to be right in the middle, so it's like supporting the head obviously, but if you do that with any of the other characters over here, like say this one, let's see what that does. Let's go ahead and just take this and let's redraw that neck coming out directly from beneath the head. There you go. Now, this is a common mistake that I want you to avoid. Don't draw the next like this. I may guess you theoretically could, but it just looks a lot more natural if your next come from the back of your head, like if you noticed, place your hand towards the back of your head, see how your neck actually comes from the back, it doesn't go towards your chin and then pop out in the middle. A good thing is you want to think about the backside of that circle, and it's almost going to perfectly connect right down to here. I'm going to connect down, and then a little ways back from the chin, you'll have your neck. On guys, a good rule of thumb is to have the next a bit thicker, especially the older ones. Older guys, you want to make sure that your neck comes right up towards the back your head and they have nice big thick necks, whereas girls you can have a bit thinner necks, thinner. Let's go and just finish up this time-lapse here because we also got to finish up this guy. I hope that you guys are enjoying experimenting with your styles, i hope you guys you're enjoying yourselves and you're enjoying the lessons so far. I know I sure am and I'm very excited for the next part is going to be coming up because we're going to be developing bodies for your characters. Then finally, once we get our character sheets done, then we can begin laying out the panels, laying out the establishing shots and all the parts of what our comic is going to be. It's an interesting how much preparation actually goes into making a comic that actually doesn't even have to do with making panels or anything. But I'm going to take you all the way there. Like I said, I'm taking near the top, all the way to the top. That's going to wrap up our assignment wrap-up, just to reiterate, I want to see 10 faces all different styles, just like the ones over here. I want to see them down in that project, feed on the seam down there. Get those done and then we'll move on to bodies and I'll show you guys some really cool tips for constructing bodies. Again, just super simplified, so it's going to be really easy on you guys, I'm looking forward to doing that, so I'll see you next time.
6. Creating Bodies: Girls: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Skillshare web comics challenge. I'm your host Qin Lafferty, and this is lesson 2 of this series, and wrapping up what we did last time, you should have your completed character sheets here, with 10 faces exploring different styles. 10 was the minimum, you could have done more recently. I wanted you to just keep drawing different circles, different chin shapes and tell you discovered a style that you're going to be comfortable to working in. Now we're going to start refining our characters. We're going to start refining our characters by moving into bodies. This is something I'm sure that you have seen many times, going into your local arts and crafts store, Michael's, what have you, and you pick up a book about how to draw a manga, how to draw comics. Then it takes you on this lovely little journey about the exact measurements. I'm sure as this little sheet here or shows you every single measurement what head lines up with what? To be honest, I think about that. I think it's pretty boring. These are like the most overused, really lame character bodies ever. I guess in my comic for the adults, actually use these types of bodies. But what we really want to get used to is the idea of constructing this one i will be doing for you today. I'm going to be teaching you how to construct very simple bodies with just memorizing about five shapes. Then you're going to learn how to do something very important called exaggerating to come up with awesome, very characteristic and unique bodies like these ones. Characteristic, can I even say that? [inaudible] sure, characteristic bodies. So I'm going to be teaching you how to exaggerate, skinny bodies, little bodies, big bodies. The first thing that I want to teach you, let's go ahead and just jump right into it. Let's jump right into it. Then like I said, I'm going to be doing all real-time here, and then I'll have a wrap-up time-lapse to show you exactly how to put those bodies together, and I'll go a little bit more in depth, but let's go ahead and get into a chalet pulling out our blue color there. I'm going to teach you about these shapes. So there's a few shapes that you're going to want to remember. One is going to be your general head shape. Now, I'd like to simplify it. I told you guys to do like a circle and then a chin shape. I simplify it by just making it like an egg shape. Or if you have just take the overall silhouette of your character, some of your character, you might've done like that big long chin shape. So you'll have a head like that. But just remember your head shape. Now from there, the next shape that you are going to be doing is an hour glass. Now you're going to do this differently for guys and girls. Let's start with a girl. So this is going to be our last, and I know you might be tempted to be like okay, so let's use our perfect proportions here. Let's go, let's put our fingers up to the screen and be like one head is here and one head down specifically. That should be the chest. But just draw out of the window, don't worry about it being perfectly proportion. I want you to just get comfortable with using these shapes, and you will notice that you will begin to just understand them. So because I don't mind you having a huge torso and then tiny little legs. I don't encouraged that here and I wanted you to get used to it. So here's our hourglass shape. Then you'll notice the way that I brought it together, right here is interesting. It comes to a point that's going to be our crotch region and that's where our legs are going to come from. Now, a really cool trick, I'm going to show you what the legs, is oftentimes you'll say, let's add some legs to this, and then you say, all right, here we go. I got this. So let's start here. I guess crap, that looks okay. Well, anyway, it was like a calf and I guess there's like a foot. There we go. Awesome. But obviously you've lost the trail there somewhere. You went off the beaten path a little bit. I'm going to bring you back, bringing you back. Go back to the mountain analogy. I'm your Sherpa and I'm in charge of you. So what I want you to do to construct legs and a very easy way to remember, is right from the middle, like that crotch region, I want you to think about an S-shape that's going to go right from where the hip is, and it comes right down through there. What this S is going to represent as this is the edge of the thigh coming down. You're going to sit down like that. Just pay attention to where it's going to go, you might find that your leg is going to be really long after this. But who cares? But right now I'm just teaching you and you can refine it afterwards. So think about this S, and right at the end of this S is where your foot is going to be. So think about it this. So there's the edge of the foot she was wearing like a slipper? It would look like that. So there's your foot and you're going to bring this up again. This is going to be your calf, and then boom, look at that. There's your leg. Isn't that awesome? The reason why I tell you guys about this S is because, there's a natural curve that happens in all human legs that makes them look natural and like they're holding weight to them. I have studied for many years to find out what that is. I think I just saw it like one day I was standing in line. I think I was standing in line at an airport and I was looking at people's legs and I was, what makes them look natural? It's that they all have this S curve that goes through them. By the way, the knee you can represent with like a ball or just circle there. Usually, obviously there's going to be right in the middle there. Then there's your leg. What's really cool is on the other side, you can actually replicate this. You can do the S again. So look, this is going to go like that, and it's going to come right down and then your foot is going to be right there. I usually to draw it like a hoof, just imagine it as a hoof, I come in like this and then I'll make an angle like that and bring it up to the calf. See that, and you bring it over. Because later what you can do is obviously you can make it look more like a foot pretty easily. You just have to like add that arch in there, and then bam, magically changed from goat person to human person. Really [inaudible] so get your kneecap in there. So that's a really easy way for you to draw legs, and some of those might be long, short, doesn't matter, we will explore that in depth in just a moment. So go ahead and sculpt your lines together. It gets something that you're like in. Now let's move on to the arm, we're building our person much like a robot. This is our human assembly factory, human assembly line. So we're going to move on to the arms. So usually what I like to do is I'll put a little ball for the joint that's going to be there, our shoulder. What I like to do is oftentimes to be honest, wow, I never thought about this, but I actually use an S. I use an S in the arms as well. There's an S that goes right through here. Can you see that? Then the end of your hand is going to go right at the midpoint of your thigh. So always remember that. But I'm not going to worry about drawn in a hand. I'm actually just going to end it like a noodle arm. So I'm going to do one of these. There's a slight S that goes through it. Then again, it's almost like it mirrors this, like this point that comes up for the calf. That point is also going to represent itself there on the arm a little bit to, a little more subtle, but I could think about that. Then for this side, this one actually gets mirrored. So it's like the S is now going to go the other way.It's a backwards S. It's going to be that. Hand there, boom, like that. This is my baseline for my exaggerated proportions, my exaggerated bodies. Easy ways to remember that automatically adds flow into your pieces. So try out those formulas. Try those out. Basically what this bump is representing here, is if you look at your arm, you'll actually see a little bump that comes up on this muscle right here. That's your copy, and that's just referencing that and exaggerating it to create a very cool look. Then obviously, this is a lady, this is an older lady. Got to make sure we get those boobs in there. So an easy way to do that, is let's see. Easy way to do that, again, I usually rely on normal references for this, a normal proportions for this. But it's actually very easy. You just want to think about the depth, the depth that goes out right here, and then it's going to come back and meet the shoulder. So a good way to think about this is, imagine if she was wearing like some suit that had like seam lines that went up. You want to think about where those seam lines would go. So there's going to be one going right from the hip. It's going to go up like that, right up to the boobs and then back to the shoulders. Brilliant. That's the way to do it. Because it also it helps stimulate this space that's happening over here. See how we can see all this space over here next to the shoulder, and yet over here, it gets compressed to the point where it's barely a line and then it goes back to the shoulder. That's what I want you to think about. You want to think about just where those boobs are actually going to be. So it usually I like to draw in a little marker just to know where they are. Whatever you do, just don't make them like this. Don't make balls. Do not do that. Let's not work that way. Sad to say. Actually, I don't know if I'm sad to say that they just don't work that way. So just make a normal looking thing about the cloth that's going to lay over top of them, and really just simplify it because it's going to be a mannequin.
7. Creating Bodies: Guys: That's a little disturbing. I'm going to erase that. We're going to move on to the guy because the guy also references a hourglass shape. However, he's a little different. The woman's, I want you to think about the hips being about the same, we're going to draw a line straight up. See how it meets the shoulders. Most of the time, when you're exaggerating these proportions, you want the hips to be about as wide as the shoulders. If not, maybe even a little wider if you want. But yeah. In general, I like to give him the same exact size as that of the shoulders. Okay. Moving on to the guy. Moving on to the ghetto guy. Let's say you wanted your guy to be, you pick this face, right? So it's very skinny. Let's go ahead and construct this body using that skinny face. Since he has a skinny face, I want to mirror that by creating a skinnier hourglass. For guys, the way it's going to work is the shoulders are going to be bigger than the hips now, okay? Something special with guys, you saw how we drew in lines to get to the crotch. Well, for guys, they got a little more mass down there. You're going to want to do one of these things. It comes in, it goes down and then you're going to create a square shape. This is simulating not only the crotch but also the abdominals, the obliques that actually come up. They're much more prominent on guys. It's going to fit into like basically, the legs are going to come right out of there. It's going to be awesome. Just you wait. okay? Now, let's draw the legs coming right out. The same thing, that S curve coming out. Q mind, how subtle it is. It's very, very subtle. Out to the foot, out for the calf and backup like that. Sometimes you can have a little bit of the other side of the calf peeking out there, but make sure it's lower. See how this part pokes out there. Make sure that the one on the inside pokes out lower. Because if you do it on the the same width, it looks a little weird. I like to put it lower. Examine your own legs. You might be surprised as to what you find as far as that goes. Same thing. Skinny S like that, and then bring it up and over like that. Guy's shoulders. Once again, let's go ahead and draw that bicep and like that. Then, think about, it's literally the same thing. Check it out. Here's your S curve, right? There is your bicep. It comes right on down like that, poke it out like that and then you can actually do one of these things. You can add that shape into the arm, and there you go. The same thing here backwards, S, bring it in and do one of those things. There you go. That's a quick example of how to do that. Now, once you get to this point, you're going to ask yourself, hmm? I like this, but I feel like the legs maybe need to be a little bit longer. This is the point where you can either redraw the body or if you're in Photoshop, you can use the magical tools that are at your disposal and you can duplicate this. Select it with your Lasso tool, Control-C, Control-V to duplicate it, bring it over. Now, you can start making some alterations to it with your Lasso tool. Say you want to select the head, be like maybe that head needs to be a little bit small. Bring it down a notch, take the legs. Maybe the legs need to be a little thicker, and the way that I'm transforming these is I am selecting them with the Lasso tool than a hitting Control T. That gives me this little, I think image in here and then you can widen legs and make them a little longer like that, a little shorter. I'm going to make these a little bit longer and like that. Then, once you get to this point on both your male and female character, once you get bodies that you like, transforming them here and there, what I would like you to do is I would like you to do what we just did. Take that lasso tool and grab the head, hit control C, control V, and now you're going to do that thing that is referenced in now, the manga books. Bring that thing right over to the side. A cool little trick too is if you move stuff and hold shift, it keeps it on a plain, like see how I can move my mouse up and down, but it doesn't move up and down. It'll stay on that same plane. You can move it over, hold Shift. Now, what you're going to do is hold ALT and Shift at the same time, and you're going to drag them down one on top of the other. This is how you're going to create your measurements for your character. You're going to create your finished character sheet and now, you can know exactly where everything lines up, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. I would suggest you make a new layer for this and then go ahead and just draw it from the chin of each of these heads. Draw it over and see. Again, when you're drawing lines, if you hold Shift it also make straight lines like this. Cool. Except as those other things going to it, which is annoying. There we go. See now, if you draw a lines over, now, you can properly make your measurements and say okay at that second head, that's right below the chest muscles, where the ab start basically. At the bottom of the third head, that's right where the crotch starts. About in the middle of the forehead, that's where your legs are going to start and that's where the crotch stops. These are the things that I want you to take a look at. Like I said, you're going to be making all kinds of different body styles. Your measurements are going to be different than the guys next to you, depending on what you choose to go with. You can make big buff dudes, you can make girls that are like giant like waste lines, they look like a giraffe neck. I don't know. But it's like make your measurements suited to your character. I'm not going to give you a cookie cutter, little comic book bodies. This is your style and this is going to be your comic. Go ahead and do that. That's going to wrap up this video. If you guys go to the next one, I'll be showing a time-lapse of how I created those bodies and I'll be talking you through a little bit of my third process on doing that. I'll see you guys then. Till then, stay sharp.
8. Time-Lapse: Bodies Recap: Peoples welcome to the lesson 2 time-lapse of what we were working on last time. Exaggerating bodies, creating body shapes in your style, your on stop, not worrying about like these cookie-cutter things, laying out the heads perfectly and proportions, all that stuff. What we want to do is create very unique bodies for our characters and explore and have fun. We're going to go and jump into the time-lapse and I'll show you how I went about creating each of these. As you can see, I'm starting with the [inaudible] add those s-curves in there to create the legs, we love that. As a basic rule of thumb I will tell you that whatever style you chose from your facial explorations, that head shapes say this guy right here, he has a long skinny head shape. It's going to look better on top of a body that reflects the same. Whereas you have a guy with a stocky head shape, it's going to look good on a stocky body. But you might run into a problem and say Kenan, I made this character, but it feels very bland, it doesn't have enough character to it. It's not very interesting. The reason why that is, is actually this guy is a great example. The reason why this is happening, is because everything on this character is big and he's got a big head, big chest, big arms and big legs. If you make everything the same, it'll balance itself out but not in a good way. It'll balance itself and just look boring, there's nothing really interesting going on with it. Whereas this lady here, big hips and a small chest area, looks a lot cooler, it has a lot more interesting. If you are having characters that feel a little bit bland or not interesting enough, consider varying up the use of the shapes. Now, what I'm looking to have you guys have done by the end here, is I want sheet to basically you don't have to draw all seven of these bodies. This is just an example of ways that I would construct them. But what I'm looking to have you do by the end of this is have finished body and head shapes on your character. A body you're going to use and you're basically going to have a reference sheet that looks like this, not that looks like this. I'm going to be using my very own characters. This is Emma from my comic and then over here is Niko. What I'm looking for you to have is your girl character as well as your guy character over here. Just have their bodies created and then make sure I can see that you've extruded your head shapes over here and done your measurements that way you can replicate these characters over and over again. Then I drew faces on them, don't worry so much about it. You can draw faces on them if you want. But in this next lesson, is where we're going to start refining that. We're going to start refining that face and adding on the clothes and the costumes, and getting our characters to exactly where we want them to be before we take him into the comic, the actual comic guess we will be doing comics eventually. I'll see you guys on the next video. Till then, stay sharp.
9. Creating Clothes: Girls: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Skillshare Webcomics Challenge. I'm your host Kienan Lafferty, and this is going to be lesson 3. I'm going to be showing you how to lay clothing on top of your character's body, and we're going to be doing some experiments, bringing our style to a close, finishing our character sheets, so that way we're ready to take it into the next class of making the Webcomic. Let's go ahead and jump right on into it, shall we? The first thing we're going to be doing, here you can see that I have the finished thing. This is what I'm going to get you guys to, you're going to figure out your outfit. We're going to start with our girl character, should you have chosen to do one. Let's get started right back to where we were before, because you guys should have something like this. A mannequin basically representing your female character, and I'm going to show you how I like to go about laying on top the clothing. Something that I find really handy to do is, first off you want to make sure that you take your layer and you want to duplicate it. Come down here and then just hit "Control J," and that basically duplicates your layer, and then you can hit that little eyeball, makes it go away. This way just in case you mess up or something, or you want to do multiple iterations, it's important that you draw on the same layer here because you're going to want to start erasing away stuff, and you want to start erasing away things. Then it would really suck if you wanted to go back and try it again, but then you got to draw it back in or try to erase the clothes off again. So just save yourself a headache, and now I just duplicate that layer "Control J," should be for Control Joy. Because if you don't do that, you will not have joy. So make sure you do that. So you can see how I'm just laying in these shapes, like this is the hood going over here. So I'll have a little hoodie on. Basically this goes back to my line sculpting technique where it's going to be a pretty form fitting hoodie, you want to consider the cloth, will make it poof out a little bit. So you want to give it a little extra volume on there that'll hanging down. You might be asking me, where can I get some good references for finding clothes, right? There's all fashion magazines. I'm sure if you're walking around the mall, there's all cool stylish clothing, for me personally I like to draw my guy character's wearing clothes that I want to get, like my style. I would suggest that you draw characters, drawing basically what you would like to where, if you're a guy or a girl. A good rule of thumb actually is to consider layers. Layers always look nice. So instead of just a hoodie, instead it could be like an open hoodie, like this. This always looks really nice, if you do one of these or it's an open hoodie, and then you have a little shirt underneath like that. That always looks nice, and then another thing that comes in handy is I like to consider contrasts as well. So if you're going to have a light shirt on the inside, then have the hoodie, have a contrasting value. So in this case, you'd make the hoodie dark while inside shirt is light, and that will give it some cooler punch. So give that a shot. This is my go to thing. I really like to make hoodies with a shirt on the underside, so there you go, and you can see very quickly just by laying in some shapes. Just with the sleeves and stitching, we are starting to create our character, and there is something that helps us, I'll erase a little line around the edge here, just so I can remember where the edge of the hip and the torso is. I just make that a little bit lighter and I almost cut off this arm. Just so I can clearly see that where that is until we start doing the inking stage. Because you don't want to have this be black and then color that in black. Now you can't really tell where the arm starts and where the hip ends. Just consider that. Moving on to the pants here, let's see what pants should she be wearing? It's actually very easy. All you have to do to draw pants, say she's got some jeggings on. She's going to have these form fitting jeggings on. So all you got to do is, when in doubt and you want your characters to look good, should have more clothes that are very form fitting. Because basically they say the difference between good looking clothes and bad looking clothes, is that good looking clothes show off your form, and they fit you well. Actually, it's really funny adding clothes to characters is really not that hard at all, most of the time it just has to do with drawing a line in, and then just adding a little bit of value to it. Then you get something like that, that's very good. We'll have a little bit of her ankles showing, because that stylish these days. Unless you're watching this 20 years in the future, this might not be in anymore. But anyway, here we go. She can have those leggings on that have the little patterns or whatever. Just make sure that if you do something like this, it's something that's going to be easily replicatable. What was the word? Replicatable, those are made up word. Replicatable, repeatable, whatever you want to call it. But don't go super crazy with all these little design, and stuff because consider, you're going to have to draw this character over and over again 100 of times. If you're going to do something, make it simple. So maybe a couple little designs there and then maybe a design around the ankle, something like that. These are just ideas, so take them for what you will. I do like that. It's cool. I like it. Now let's put on some little slippers here. Some little slippers on, lets draw them right over top of the feet, its going to erase this a little bit, so you can see it better. The other thing that you'll notice is that my line art is still very messy and that is okay, because you can refine it as you go. The most important thing that you're searching for here. I would say it's almost, you're searching for shapes because you see how the contrast of this shirt makes a shape on the inside. This is really what you want to look for, is what shape are you creating? What different types of shapes are you bringing out from the characters contrast here and contrast here? So those are the things that you want to consider and play around. That's why I say add value by painting and then erase it away, and see what shapes are made. Sometimes I'll even just drop a bunch of black down, well in this case it's blue, but black isn't dark values. Lay in a bunch of dark values like this on the whole torso, and then I'll start to erase shapes out of it, and I'm like, what does that look like? Then you can build off of that. You can build your clothing off of just adding and then erasing stuff. So try that too. For now I'm going to stick with this. We're going to stick with the simple stuff. The next thing I'm going to want you guys to do is I want you to refine your faces as well because you should have some completed faces, and you should know what your face is going to look like. Let's go ahead and duplicate this up. Just like we laid out the face, there's your circle, you got your circle in there, your chin shape, and then that dividing line and right around that dividing line is where your eyes are going to be. I sketched in the simple ones, but my character's eyes are a lot different. The nose is basically right on, that's exactly where the nose needs to be, I'm just going to erase this a little bit, but the other thing I was going to say it was, don't worry so much about your lines being perfect because we're going to refine them as we go, and then we're going to ink them as well. So these aren't even going to be the final lines that you see. Again, with my measurements, one more line, here's the bottom of the circle right here, here is the middle of the circle, so in-between there is right where the eyes come in, that's where the eyes go. We've got our eye here. We're going to have something like this, cool. My character actually has two sides to her, which is another thing you guys should consider is that, think of the personality that your character's faces going to bring to the table, you want to consider the emotion, and the personality of your character. Oftentimes that can be told to the face, as well as the expression you choose to give them. In fact I might lower her eyes a little bit more, her eyes are just supposed to look a little bit more like this. Cool. I might not give her a slight smile because she's not very happy in this stage. She's more neutral. You would say she's neutral. So we've got our face in, and then I'm sure that you guys have been playing around with different hairstyles and stuff, but just in case I will show you how I go about adding hairstyles onto this, for the sake of the experiment, for the sake of the drawing, I'll actually do a different hairstyle, so that way you guys can see how I go about doing it. So we've got our eyes in there. Now let's go ahead and draw some hair on, again, anytime you're about to do something big, I really recommend you hitting "Control J," anytime you're about to add something on. Because like I said, you mess up, you do something crazy, and you're I don't know if I like that hair. Let's go back in and erase it's slowly. See this way because you duplicated it, you can just put that one in the trash and pull your old one out, and then duplicate it again, because sometimes I forget to do that, duplicate it again every time, and then you'll be happy, "Control Joy." Let's do this thing again. I think I was doing something like this earlier, I really like this hair. So something like this. I have these little things that hang down, I like that. Sometimes I like to have the hair overlap the face a little bit. It does one of these things, and then see how I'm just erasing out the shape where the hair is going to go. Check that out. Awesome. Again, simple shapes remember the hair has volume, so bring it up off of the scalp, bring it on back, and there you have your hair. Simple now. Very good, I like to do this a little trick. I'll show you, make your chalk brush or whatever brush you are using bigger. I'm going to erase away those ears there, and then something I really like to do is I will color press very lightly and color up to about that halfway point on the hair. Not like that. Get it right there about to the halfway point, and then come in from the top. Do the same thing and look at that instant highlight, really cool. Be sure to get creative with how you use your brushes and you will get to something like this. We're going to wrap up the girl, and we're going to move on to the guy. That is going to be in the next video. So we've gotten our girl to a good spot I really like this. Hopefully this opens up some insight to how you can create some cool looking clothing for your character. So I'll see you guys in just a moment. We're going to go over the guy.
10. Creating Clothes: Guys: Welcome back, Let's go ahead and jump into our male character and putting clothes on him. In the last lesson, we talked about putting clothes on the girl character, and now I'm going to show you how to do it for your guy character, as well as teach you a little trick that I know about hands. Now, because you can see the hands are just basically little triangles here. I'll show you how to basically go from this, to a finished hand and a very nice way that I like to stylize them, and it just makes the process so easy. But we're getting a little ahead of ourselves, let's go ahead and get this guy cloth, because right now it's just little boxes on. Let's go and get to that. Originally I have Niko, actually let me show you the finished one. This is going to be the finished Niko, that I'm going to be using, has the turtleneck, the trendy turtleneck, hoodie thing going on, and then he's got like these jogger pants are like these chino jogger pants, and then they can go into his boots there. But for the sake of the exercise, I'll be doing a new outfit. Let's go ahead and do that. I talked about last episode, how just simple laying in your clothes can actually be. It's actually very simple. A lot of them will hug the actual body like basically all it has to do it, is just adding a little bit more volume to it. Like say he has a T-shirt on. So you're just going to do this. You add the color lines. Add those color lines, put a little bit of bunching at the bottom. Sometimes I like to just do like this for the fold. It's like a little Z shape. Super simple. We're talking about adding and subtracting using our brush to add in values, and then using the eraser to clear those away, sculpting our clothes on to him. I want him to have a dark shirt on top. Let's say we want a little design on there. What design can we make, that will also be easy to remember? Let's do something like this, like say it's like a skull or something. You'll like that. It's like two lines there, and then you got something like that. Again, I will reiterate. You want to make sure that your designs, whatever your designs are, make sure they're easy to replicate. Otherwise, you'll be kicking yourself later when you're drawing this for the 100th time. This might even be on the verge of being too detailed. Let's see, how can we go about refining this? Well, first off, I would say, let's just go ahead and combine this. Just combine this whole thing into that. In fact, maybe we'll just ditch that whole thing. We'll just make it like that. That's better. That's way better, cool. It's a diamond shape with three little dashes at the bottom, and that creates our skull. See, super easy, and I'm just adding in and subtracting. There you go. Awesome. Now, let's move on to the pants, or should we give them short? Let's give him shorts because I usually draw pants on my guy. This one will have shorts. We'll have one of these things going on. Again, you just want to consider how far they come down. You'll erase it up to the crotch line and it'll come right across like that. Pretty dang easy, had a little bit of value in there. Then for the pockets I like to do this, I just draw a little like a little obtuse angle right there. Let's not forget the actual zipper. I like follow this line there and then draw it upwards like that. Because we're interested in contrast, we're going to have him have dark shirt and then lighter shorts, because you don't want to go dark shorts. Ideally. I mean, you can, but I really like to do contrast. Now that he doesn't have these giant pants on, we need to make sure his legs are a little bit skinny dark as well, before that shape was implying that he would have pants on like baggy pants, like he usually does, but now he doesn't. We got a skinny up his legs. I'm sure it doesn't have gigantic calves. Then his shoes will be, I will get him some skater shoes, why not? It's like the big fat tang from back in the day when these were crazy style. I mean, they're still in style, but I don't know about the big tang. They do the big tang anymore. But it just looks cool and it adds to our styles. Let's just go ahead and do that. Then for laces, what I really like to do is I will sketch in, and then I just do lines for my laces. I'll just go 1, 2, 3, like that. Easy to remember, 1, 2, 3. You've got to love that. Very cool. Awesome. Now let's do the hair really quick and then I will move into that little tidbit I told you about hands. I'll teach you about that. For the hair, we'll make it very simple. We'll go to like that and then we'll just bring it right on over like that. To remember, I think there was a character that I literally had this exact hairstyle on my facial sheet. But you should have come up with a couple of hair designs that maybe you liked, and you can just feel free to bring those right on over to your current character. I will actually say that this character has blonde hair. Why not? This character is going to have blonde hair. That is going to wrap up how I go about doing it. The same principles apply. We're just erasing, adding on clothes and erasing. We started with this. We started back with, and we're learning see this is what happens because if I needed to go back, luckily I have an older one way that act back here of Niko. But if I did not Control J, I would have to go back and get this one. Make sure before you start adding on clothes, you hit "Control J" that duplicates you layer, so you can go back.
11. Drawing Hands: Let's move onto hands because you'll notice our hands are right here. A really easy way for you guys to learn how to draw hands is to think of it like this, I call it the glove method. You're going to draw a circle, and then you're going to consider that all four of these fingers, so 1, 2, 3, 4, see there's now four fingers, and your thumb are going to work like that. I call it the glove method. But for right now, you don't have to worry about drawing in the fingers. It's basically going to look like that, that's your hand. Let's say we're drawing a hand like this, you can see already they're in that shape ready to go. The reason why I like doing this is because you get to focus on the shape. You focus on the overall shape of the hand first, and then, say, here's the thumb, it connects to that part of the circle, and then you can basically draw it like this. You draw that glove coming down like that, and then you automatically have a flow that's happening to the fingers, and then you can start to add them in. There's finger 1, finger 2 will come down like that, like that, and like that. This works really well in comic books because you're already working with a simplified style as I've taught you to do, and then you can very easily drop in the fingers, and see that pinky raises up a little bit. You can do all little things like that. But overall, you can see how that hand is created from that glove technique, and then you just add on your little wrist there. That's my tip of advice, how to do that. That's why you see when I draw my hands, they're just shapes at the beginning, I won't even draw the hands. They literally look like that, that's the hand. But then when I go back in and want to draw it from the side, I'll do that same thing. Think of the circle, thumb, and then I'll do one of these things, draw in that glove shape, and add on those fingers. See, pretty dang easy. The reason why I get so much is because it automatically gives you flow to your fingers, which is one of the most important things. Because sometimes people we'll draw hands and they'll be like, "Here's the thumb and then here's finger 1, finger 2." It looks like some out of Looney Tunes, there's no underlying structure. Make sure you do that, like this. This hand does look a little weird, probably weird. If you mess it up, then it's super easy to just do it over again. What I'll do is I'll actually have this finger separate, I'll have this finger separate. Sometimes I like the separate fingers too and then you do a small glove technique on the other side. Oftentimes, the most common one that I do is, yeah, there we go. Now let's all even merge the two fingers into one. I'm sure you've seen this in anime where they do something like this. They'll just draw a little line there, but they won't connect it. That's also something else you can consider doing, consider that. Then this hand is in a fist, and I'll show you a really cool, easy way to draw fists. Let's go and refine this arm just a tad bit. Because this is the second part of your assignment, is that once you get your characters to the way that you want them, I'm going to ask that you go around and just start refining your edges, refine those edges, and get it ready because we're going to start inking. We're going to ink our characters, and then we're going to mask them and figure out the actual colors that we're going to bring them into the comic list, so you'll have your completed character sheet. Isn't that nice? But we have to learn how to draw fists. Check this up. Easy way to draw our fist, especially from this angle. You bring it out like this, that's the thumb, and then you're going to bring this like that. It's hard to explain. You'll just have to watch. Basically, I think about the knuckles, when you make a fist, you're like there's knuckle 1 and knuckle 2, and then the other one is, I don't know, I just don't really worry too much about them. I'm mostly just focused on this little finger popping up like that. It makes it really easy fist. You'd be surprised how often you're going to draw that hand from that angle. It comes in really handy, no pun intended. Only thing I will say is that, again, this hand is much smaller than that one. Let's go ahead and go back to this one, shrink it down a notch. Let's use our power of Photoshop, our powerful tools to bring it down because I personally like the fact that Nico has small hands, I think it's funny. There we go. Cool. There you go, there's your hands and your technique, your glove technique. Guys, so that's going to wrap up putting clothes on the male. I will do a little time lapse showing you how I put the clothes on my characters after this. Then we're going to move on to inking, masking, and then we're going to put together the final colors, and finish off our character sheet. I'll see you guys in a little bit.
12. Time-Lapse: Clothes Recap: Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen. It's about time we get to the time-lapse wrap up for the assignment. But before we do, I do need to explain a little something called line sculpting. Because at this point you should have your characters too about this stage, and you'll notice that right now it's a little messy, and we want to clean that stuff up. That way we can get ready for inking and masking, which is going to be the final stage of our character setup. What I'm going to ask that you do is that once you've gotten to this point, I don't know if you are this messy, but if you do, here's how I like to sculpt my lines in place. I've got my ink brush, I've got both my paintbrush and eraser set to chalk. My chalk brush. If you're working with this brush, then this will pertain to you. But if not, then I guess it will work with any brush. Really what you want to think of it as is you got sketchy lines like this, and then what you want to begin doing is shaving away, shave away those lines, and basically make them crisp and clear. You can have a little bit at things on the edge there because remember eventually we're not even going to use this layer. We're going to create a whole new line layer over top, and you might be saying, "Three layers can? Come on, how many times we have to draw this character over and over again?" Well, this is the life of a comic artist. You must put in your blue pencils. You must refine them at least to a point that you're going to be comfortable with going in and inking on top of that. We're going to create one more layer. One more, I promise we're almost there. You can see how I can go in here really closely, and basically I was just taking away these edges here and you can add back to it, so you take away a little too much and it's too thin. You want to consider line weighting. I know this is a whole another crazy thing in itself but in general, thicker lines will appear around the edges of the character, also in places where there's heavy shadow, for instance underneath the chin, so you'll want to consider this. Just cleaning up those edges, really defining them. I know we don't like to think in black and white, but comic artists, it is imperative that you think in black and white because that's basically what you get. There's no grays, there's none of those values in your actual lines. It's going to be black or white. So make sure that your lines are cleaned up and are very clear as to where they are. You can leave some of your values in here. Like I said, we have this dark gray shirt or a black shirt, but just make sure you really accentuate where those lines are going to go. Sometimes I'll actually go in and lightly erase a little bit like that, and then just draw in those edges of exactly where I want my lines to go. The value thing is just handy because eventually we're going to line it and then we're going to look back at this that way we can remember, "Oh yeah, that's right. We want the shirt to be darker than the pants." Now, you don't have to necessarily make up colors at that point and find something that's balanced. We don't have to balance our colors and think of them at the same time. Now we know generally that it's going to be a dark color against the light color in this instance anyway. You can see now you "Zoom out" and you get something like that. Just cleaning up those lines, we're going to jump into the time-lapse. Jumping down into the time-lapse. Let's do that. I will walk you through. You can see basically, not only will I lay on the clothes, but also get into cleaning it up. I will explain as I go along, so pay attention. This is very important. Then we're moving on to the final stage, the final bus, then we're going to be done with this class, and then you can take these characters that you've created, and then we're going to move them over into the actual Webcomic, and you're going to make the next big thing. I know it. All right, so laying on the girl clothes, same thing as I did last time. You can see me drawing the lines and stuff over top, put in some values, drawn it right over top of our mannequin and then erasing it away, adding and erasing, adding and erasing, and we get our good old sculpture technique. Let's go ahead and move on to the next one, shall we? This is going to be the cleaning up stage now. I've gotten those. Now you can watch how I go about cleaning up those lines. I know it's in fast motion, but you can basically see that I'm adding and subtracting just like I've instructed you to do. If you find it easier to just make another layer and then draw it again, you can also do that too, but I'm just showing you my technique. I personally like this because there's two reasons. Some people tend to make a new layer and then draw another one on top or just go straight to the line art. The reason why I don't necessarily like to do that, I like to refine it in this stage is because sometimes I feel you lose little things if you try to draw it over again on a new layer. That's why I like to work with my sketch because sometimes it's just like the flow of say, an arm or the shape of the hand that makes you draw it a certain way, and I don't like to lose those things. Because I really feel that in its raw state, that drawing the sketch, it has so much more character and as you clean it up, it tends to get more stiff. That brings us to right here, brings us to right there. Like I was saying, it tends to get more stiff as you refine it, so that's why I like to employ the sculpting technique. If you can get your characters to this point, the heads on the side, making nice that way this will be a perfect reference sheet so you can know exactly how tall your character is in relation to his head, and all that stuff. If you get to this point, we're going to move into inking and masking next. We're going to have a good time. You guys do that, I'll see you on the next lesson. Till then, stay sharp.
13. Inking and Masking: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Skillshare web comics challenge. We're moving onto the final boss Lesson 4. We're going to be teaching you how to take your characters from this point, which you should have now, your characters in your style laid out in your blue pencils. I'm going to be teaching you how to get your line work, so that way you can have something like this and like this. Then when you take away the blue lines, you have clean line art ready to go into the comic. It's actually very handy that I'm teaching you this because this is the exact technique that we're going to be using when we go into the actual comics. But I do want to let you know that you've gotten to this point. Once you get to the blue pencils, it's all downhill from here. The rest of it is all just exploration, and just like with colors the lines is very easy because as you're going to see right now, it's very self explanatory and it's basically like tracing. You've done most of the hard part already. Now it's time to just refine to that one last path of refinement. What we're going to be doing is talking a little bit about brushes. I've included my own personal brushes here because I like to work with something called the Reptar brush because as you can see, the shape looks like Reptar. The reason why I like this brush is because it has a natural little bit of texture to it. You can see it on the edges there makes it slightly post-apocalyptic feeling. I really like that especially since I'm working with a zombie comic. However, you can work with another brush such as say just a full opacity round brush, and you can have just super clean lines like that. But I personally like the dirtier looking lines because I'm not that good of a line artist so it's nice to have those little imperfections that way it just looks like the style. Consider playing around with a couple different brushes, see which one you like. The other thing I will suggest is make sure it is at full opacity all the time. You don't want to use this hard brush that controls opacity and size because then otherwise you've got to press really hard to get your lines in, and that's just not going to work. So don't do that. For this, I'm going to be teaching you how to do lines with my, get our Reptar brush. You're going to choose that for your ink and then you're going to choose for your eraser. You're going to choose the ink brush because basically we're going to be doing that same thing. The line sculpting techniques. I'm going to lay stuff in like this, and then we're going to go in and sculpt it. It's nice having the round brush to sculpt with, because you can see right where that edge is going to go along. It's just more controllable that way. Let's go ahead and get to it. The general rule of thumb that I want you guys to consider is when you're doing line work, and this is a very shallow thing, but just make the outside edges thicker. This has to do with line waiting. I'm sure you've heard a lot of different theories passed around, but the most easy one for me to remember is that you'll have thicker outsides of your characters and objects, and then thinner insides. For example, a great example of this is the face. See how we're putting these thicker lines all throughout the outside of the character and in the face. But once you start getting closer inside, you got these tiny little lines along the nose area, and then the mouth is a very detailed line. Same thing with the clothes. See how the outside edge of the sweater here, we have a thick line, and the inside line like this little seam line, will be thin. The pocket will also be thin. These are things I want you to think about as you're doing it. Because what's really nice is when you do this and then you get to a point where you are done with your lines here, you can see and disregard the fact that the eyes are red and we'll be getting into that in a little bit. But you can see here the differences. You can see the differences in the line weight, and what this does is it creates a very dynamic looking piece here and it looks really nice. Just for example, see same thing. Thicker lines around the outside of the short then our lines on the inside for the pockets and the details, stitching. Same thing in the shoes. See small lines for the laces, thicker outside lines. Again, it's very subtle, but just keep that in mind. We're going to actually jump into the time-lapse. Now that I've instructed you on how to create your lines and use your brushes, let's go and jump into the time-lapse. I would encourage you to not feel you have to pay attention like crazy here. Again a time-lapse is just to show process and for you to kick back and relax. I'll point out a few things out as we go, just mostly having to do with the line waiting. Again like I said, outside of any object. It's see the edge of the face here, that's a thicker line, and the inside lines, I mean obviously we have thicker lines for the eyelashes and stuff. But just in general, think about it this way. The outside edges of any object and especially things that are overlapping too. Where the chin is, you want to consider that too. See how there's a thick line, almost like this triangle that's underneath the chin, that's representing the shadow. There we go. Moving on to Niko, same rules apply. Another thing that I will say that will help you understand how to choose your line weights, is make sure they're also consistent, because you don't want to have thick lines up on top and then thinner lines down bottom. For instance, if we lined Niko and it look like this, all these lines up top. These are much thicker for some reason, then the ones down below. You want to make sure that you have consistent lines. The way that you can do that is by just taking a look at the size of the brush that you're using. You can see up here I'm using a 30 pixel brush. I like to always look up there because sometimes I'll use the brackets. There are another really cool tip, I'm glad I remember this. You can use the brackets to change your brush on the fly. That's the symbols on your keyboard. They'll look like this and this, and some there just above the right" Enter key". If you use those brackets, one will make it go bigger, one I'll make go smaller. Basically as I'm inking, I'm constantly adjusting. I'm adjusting by using the brackets. I'll make it a little bit bigger for there, then I'll make it a little smaller to go in there, and then you can adjust your line weights on the fly. Very cool. Let's go ahead and go back to this. My phone is ringing, I apologize for that. Let's go on masking, second part of this. Once you have a character done, I'm going to show you a really cool way to go about masking and the way that you don't want to do it. You've got your line work here, and you might be tempted to say, we're going to mask this character, and we're going to get out our little ink brush, and we're going to start manually masking. You're [inaudible] went out a little bit there, we got to bring it back and then this is going to take for ever. You're going to try to do this and you're going to go out aligns a little bit. You're going to spend a ton of time trying to clean this up make it look perfect. I'm going to show you a really cool way that you can very quickly mask your entire character especially now that you have clean lines. Check this out. So you're going to hit "W" or you can go over here and pick your little wand, "W" is the shortcut. Then you're going to select everything outside of your character. Since we have a clean character, just one dab does the trick. Now what I'm going to have you do is go up to select, then modify and expand. Once again, select, modify, expand. Depending on your resolution, you're going to do about two to three pixels. We'll do two pixels in this case. You'll see what this does is it actually pulls it, tightens your selection so that way it goes a little bit into the lines. That's can be really handy. See before it was here, now it's here. Now what I'm going to ask that you do is you hit "Shift", "Control I". That is going to implode your selection. We selected everything around the character. Now naturally, when we invert that, we've naturally selected everything within the character. Can you guess what we're going to do next? That's right. We're going to go to edit, fill, "Shift F5", and then you're going to fill it with that foreground color. Then boom instant character mask. Is that awesome? Very cool. That's a really nice way to mask your characters. Do that for both of your characters, your male, female or just both kickball your characters is dual form. What I'd like to do now is I will lighten this. Light this up to around there. Now what we're going to do is we're going to start creating new layers on top of that background layer that we just made. New layer, and then right over here in your layers tab hold "Alt" and you'll see that little icon up here when you go between the layers. If you click it like that, what it's going to do is it's going to create what's called a clipping mask. The way that a clipping mask works is, say you want to paint this beanie up here. We'll paint it blue. Go painting and painting along, having a good time. Make this a little bit darker so you can see it. Maybe a little lighter. Darker is good. We're paint this being in right in the middle, oh, well we can't paint outside of the lines. We must be a magical wizard. A wizard of color. Isn't that amazing? Well, that's actually just the clipping mask that is doing everything for you. Because well it says, I can draw this happy face out there, I just drew a happy face, and you can't see it until I go back, hold that "Alt" key again, de-clip it. Basically the way that this works is it says, the mask that you've laid down right here, if any layer that is clipped to it, I will naturally just get rid of all of that. It's a really cool stencil. It's a really easy way for you to stay in the lines, and all you have to worry about is just creating your masks. Then as you create more layers on top of that, it will naturally just be ready to go. Sometimes there's a weird little rule I call it the sandwich rule, where if you create a layer between here and here, it'll automatically clip mask it back. But if you create a new layer on top of it, see how it doesn't have that little arrow, so you might run into the problem of, I'm going to paint the hair now, oh, no I had gone over lines. Well, you just got to go back to this and again, hit "Alt", clip it back. Consider that. Now, what I'm going to ask that you do is mask your entire characters just like the way that I've shown you here, get your skin and everything all set up. Skin, hair, clothing, all that stuff, mask it all in different layers. Because the other cool thing that I'd ask that you do, and this is really fun to do is that once you mask out your colors, you can hit "Control U", which will bring up your hue slider, and then you can adjust your colors on the fly. You can adjust your colors for all of your clothing on the fly. You can try out different color combinations, and you can find a hue that works for you. You can do this on every single layer. You can do it on the hair. Say we want to give her green hair, you can just mess with the hue shifter. Again, the shortcut is "Control U". Then once you're all done, you should be at a point that looks like this. You should have both your characters mast and ready to go. Now, we are going to be moving into our final lesson after this. I'll teach you guys how to grade eight your characters and bring them to a final polish, and then you'll have your awesome character concepts. You'll have your character sheets ready to be taken into the next big web comic. It's going to be designed by you. I'll see you guys then till that time comes, stay sharp.
14. Gradient Coloring: Guys and girls, welcome back. We are going to be moving into coloring. Little coloring. I'm going to show you a very fun and easy way for you to color your characters. Now that you have mashed them, as I have instructed you to in the last video. You should have something looking like this. We're going to start with Emma. Let's go hide Niko here. So we'll start with Emma. You should have something that looks like this, your face mashed, character mashed that I taught you how to do in the last episode and then you're going to have a selection of different mash like, the skin, hair, blues, sometimes I like to group my layers together. All your different colors should be set up in then your lines on top. Now, I'm going to show you how to begin lighting your character. The first thing that I would like to bring to your attention is that you'll notice a lot of the colors that I've chosen are very dark colors. The reason why I do this is because I'm going to teaching you to paint the light. To paint the light onto your colors as opposed to painting shadows. The reason I like to do this nowadays is because I used to paint shadows all the time on my colors, but I just found it, it's just so much more fun and more natural to paint light onto dark. So when you're choosing your colors that you're going to start with, I want you to think of it like this. It's like, what color would I see if there was no light on it yet? What is the shadow color, then paint that on and then you're going to be painting the light in. Let's talk about hue shifting and why that is very important to do. Currently we're working with this color. This is the color of the skin right now and we want to add light to it. So your first instinct might be to say, well, let's just bring it straight up. But there's more to skin than that. It doesn't just go straight up to get lighter. More often than not, you're actually going to be lightning and moving to the left and that is going to disaturate it. But then another thing that I want to have you keep in mind is the hue shift is going to happen. So you can see we're up here in the red. We're going to go all the way around, we're going to pop on all the way to the other side. We're going to go a little bit towards like the yellow. This is all going to be very subtle. Again, we've gone up and to the left, to disaturate and hue shifted towards yellow. It's going to give us this light orange effect. Now watch what happens. The other thing that I will say is that I am going to be teaching you to paint with gradients, coloring with gradients. This is a super easy way for you to do your thing. Again, just choose your soft brush. It should look like this. Gives you a little something like that. So you don't have to worry about texture. You don't have to worry about any of that stuff. We're really just experimenting with color and this is a really cool way to get a natural look to your characters. But I will focus on the skin because the skin is the most important part. So I want you to just press very lightly and notice what happens to the skin as you start adding in the color. You can see, wow, look at that. You can see the hue shift that's happening because we have this light, a little bit more yellow in here and it's fading to these darker red shadows. This is what's going to make your skin look very lively. It's going to make it look very tantalizing to the eyes and your viewers will love you for it. They will be like, your skin is so beautiful. That brings us to our second thing. Here's a problem that you may run into. Depending on the layer that you're working on, if you start painting, see how it's bleeding into the hoodie here. The reason why this is happening is because I have forgotten a very important thing to tell you. I've forgotten a very important rule and that is that you need to make sure that you press this little button, that is going to lock your transparent pixels and it is going to say, wherever this mask exists, I will no longer paint outside of it. I'll no longer paint outside of this mask. So a good rule of thumb is I like to go through all my layers. I'll just hold Shift and select them then just click that button and for all of them. See now you have that little lock on all the layers. Now, you can't possibly add more to it or paint or bleed into the other layers and it's really nice. So make sure you do that. Don't forget to lock your pixels. Lock it. So let's talk a little bit more about skin and a couple of more cool little tricks that you can do. Another thing that I like to do is, I will actually go back in here, hold Alt while you have your brush selected and it will automatically make it go over to the eye dropper. Now something that was really cool to do is, if you take that soft brush and you make it small, and then you start drawing back in shadows, it starts to create cast shadows. Isn't that interesting? So you can go back through and create little cast shadows throughout your piece. Say you want to have a little cast shadows there. Maybe there's a little cast shadow from the shorts going through there, little things like that. It's really awesome to do. Now another really important thing is that you want to make sure that first of all, there's a nice soft gradients. You want to focus on it being soft in certain areas and then hard on the cast shadows. Think about your transitions. But more so what we're going to talk about is adding pigment to the skin. Because if you've ever noticed, when you look at yourself in the mirror, naturally you'll have pigment to your skin and that is basically places where it will become more red, such as on the cheeks. So we're choosing a red, we're going to put that in towards the cheeks. Now make sure if it looks too pink, if it looks weird or fake. What's happening is that I think it's too much toward the magenta. So I want to make sure that we keep it more towards the red. Maybe this will work a little bit better. Again, very subtle and then also what I like to do is see how it naturally blends with some of the other shadows over here. I'll grab that color and I'll kind of bring that in. So now, your character's face will have a little bit more life to it. This is something I especially like to do on the girls. Just make their cheeks nice and rosie and cute and I'll love that. There you go, there's that beginning thing there. So you can see now, we have a much more interesting face to look at. Let's move on to the hoodie. I'm going to show you the hoodie. Show you an example on the hoodie and then we're going to move into the time-lapse. I'll show you how I go about coloring both of these characters very quickly. So again, here's my rule of thumb, because I like to start with a very big brush first, a general like ambient lighting that happens throughout. Then I'll kind of go down here and grab the shadow color, kind of put it back into it, towards the edges here. Think of the cast shadow that's going to be happening underneath that hood there. First thing is ambient light. Second one, cut back into it at the shadows again, and then you can even grab the light again and maybe there's a little bit light catching on the edge of that pocket there. It's also going to happen here and you can see here character is starting to take shape. Shadows of your character are starting to take shape and we love that. So what I'm going to ask that you do is you go through both of your pieces, light and shade as I've shown you how to do right here. Then I want you to get to a point where both of your characters look like this and where's the other Emma? There. Soon after you do that with all your layers, your characters will look like this. All right, people, so let's move on into the time-lapse. This is what is going to wrap up the lesson. I invite you once again, to just kick back and relax. Don't worry so much about following along. This is just going to show you how I go about coloring my characters and really pay attention to, like I said, the hue shifts that I choose. Hue shifts and just the colors that I choose. You can see me both putting in layers of soft transitions, soft gradients, and then decreasing the size of my brush down to make those hard shadows. The reason why that works is because obviously when you're brush is big, there's more space for the gradient to move and when you shrink it down, it shrinks down also with the transition point, if that makes sense. In fact, I'll show you that why that works. It's actually a really cool. I'm sure it has something to do with maths or something, but whatever I just like it. So basically this is what you are doing here. You are considering the transition points. So when your brush is large and in charge, see how much ground it has to cover before it goes to white, or else if you make it very small now, it literally has the cover that amount of ground to get to white. That's why I use small brushes for my hard shadows and large brushes for my soft transitions and if you do that, you will be very very happy. I love the way that it looks because it allows the eyes to kind of soak in all those different flavors of colors and the most important part is that it's very easy and allows you to experiment and just try out a bunch of different transitions. That's really what I'm trying to focus you guys in on is, try out transitions. Figure out, because this is really just something that's going to come from experience of just knowing what colors look good together, how to hue shift. Why going from a blue to a more like a teal when the light hits it. Those are the things I want you to experiment with right now because it's not exactly something that I can explain other than just to have you do it yourself. People so I will see you in the final conclusion where we'll wrap up everything and you guys are going to have your finished character sheets. We're going to be moving on into the next class, once it is released, we'll be taking these characters into our comic. But I'll see you guys on the conclusion video. See you then.
15. You did it! Time to celebrate!: Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Kennedy Lafferty and I would like to congratulate you for reaching the end of class one where we learned to make our very own web-comic characters. You should have them already finished. Everything is ready to go and they're ready to be launched into the next big web-comic that is going to be created by you. I would like to say, congratulations, look, we've got confetti and everything. I got a little carried away there. We don't want to cover up our best work ever. But anyway, thank you guys for joining me on Skillshare. Like I said, we are going to be taking these characters now that I've taught you the technique, we're going to be moving into the next class that will be up only in the next couple of weeks or so. I will be teaching you how to move them into the real deal. Teaching you layouts, teaching you how to lay out your establishing shots, action, story, all that stuff. It's going to be freaking awesome. So I'm super excited to do that with you guys. Thank you once again for joining me. It was a pleasure having you. Let's not forget, take your finished assignments. I want to see those down there in the project gallery, because I'm going to be giving you guys one-on-one feedback and basically celebrate and have a great time. So I will talk to you guys soon. Till then, take care.
Kienan Lafferty, Professional Artist
