Vector Character Design with Kit-Bashing

1. Introduction to the Class: Hello and welcome to this course on character design. My name is Martin, and I'm really excited to show you a really easy and fun method, the real vector style characters by kick bashing them. It bashing involves building a character from the ground up by assembling it with premade assets. In this case, we'd have fairly large and flexible asset back. There'll be providing. In this course, we're going to make this very common type of vector characters that you see all the time in illustration, wherever animation and games. And that worked really well with the tools that a vector software provides. That's the thing. Because we are working with vector software. We're building these characters entirely with the keyboard and mouse. Now needs to know how to draw or how to use a tablet. This course is perfect for beginners want to start making guide us somewhere, but are too intimidated because they think they can draw this no need for expensive software, either an antigen, how to use the awesome free and open source vector illustration software in CEP completely from the ground up. Along with some basic methods and techniques you need to assemble and refine your characters using the provided asset pack. This course, we'll start with an in-depth look at the basics of Inkscape, as well as the basic principles behind vector illustration in general. Then I'll be going in depth into the asset back, explaining how it all works and how to use it. Then we'll be making these five characters that you are seeing here in real time, explaining step-by-step. So you can follow along super easily and will end up with a lesson on basic character design to improve the quality of your designs. I want you to learn as much as possible from this course. So if you need any help, please don't hesitate to contact me through the course page and I'll respond as quickly as possible. I'm incredibly excited to get started, and I hope you are too. Let's dive in and have some fun. 2. Process: In this lesson, I want to talk about how the course is going to go and what you can expect out of it. First of all, this is the asset back here. You have everything you need to build a character from the ground up. All you have to do is just pick the elements from the list and assemble them into a character. I'm not gonna go too much in depth into the particular content of this document because we're going to do that later on after you have a firm grasp of the program, just know that these elements are more than enough for you to build any type of character you may think of. I went on a deep search studying this style of characters. And I can assure you the SPAC, We have everything you need. But more on that later when we revisit the asset back more in detail. And I'd like to talk a bit more about the style. This type of character that you see on the screen are a very common type of vector style character that you see all the time in everywhere from animation to marketing campaigns. This is a style of character has become a bit of a landmark of vector illustration. And the reason is that they are super easy and fast to make, especially if you work with keyboard and mouse like you usually do when working with a backdoor program. I'm sure you can see how everything seems to be built of squares and circles. Vector programs work great with this type of geometrical primitives. They are also really easy to reuse. Once you make a character, you can isolate each element, like the eyes, the nose, the arms to torso, and please use that to build a completely different looking character. And that was the motivation behind creating an asset pack where you have all the different eyes, noses, arms, torsos, hair. Every cent you may need to assemble any type of character in a matter of minutes. Of course, things aren't as simple as just dragging and dropping elements to make awesome characters. I mean, it can be as simple as that, but chances are that you'll want to have more flexibility to build something that looks more unique. Character with different body types and body shapes. Something that may require more variation in acids than the limited elements you see here. In those cases, most of the time, it won't be necessary to build that element from the ground up. Or that you may need to make some simple operations in the program, like making a limb longer or making some facial feature bigger or smaller, or just go in and make some small modifications to some of the assets. And to do that, you need to have some basic knowledge of the program that we're going to use. Inkscape. Inkscape is an awesome, free and open source vector illustration software. You can download at Inkscape that order. While in step is far from being the industry standard for vector illustration, in my opinion, is more than enough for getting started. It is more than enough to do everything you may want except maybe some of the more complex stuff that you see in Hagen productions. So yes, except it's fantastic and you won't regret spending time learning how to use it, which we will in the next section. That section work as a mini-course and includes a fairly in-depth look at the basics of Inkscape and bacteria illustration in general. In about 1 h or so after that, you should be more than capable of tackling the rest of the course. In this section, following that, I will show you how to assemble a ton of different characters with different body types and looks. We're going to push the type of character that you can make with the asset back and you'll see how flexible the back can be. Otherwise, I'm going to show you some important techniques you should use to smooth things out. And I speed up the process of coming up with a character. By the end of the course, you're going to be a master of this type of character, not just using the asset tag, but also just assigning them in Geneva. But let's not get a hill. First, we need to tackle the program. And we're going to do that in the next unit. 3. Introduction to the Inkscape Section: Hi there, I'm Martin. And in this mini-course, I want to show you the basics of how to use the amazing free vector illustration software, Inkscape. My idea is to create a fairly quick and easy introduction. Not only do this after Inkscape, but also to the wonderful world of vectorization. Use the vector illustration is considerably different than the original drawing. That is a whole new set of concepts. You have the lung that and the fact that you have to learn how to use a fairly complicated program means that usually Inkscape courses tend to be really long and dense. Sometimes you don't want to learn my whole program to take a more exciting course that uses it. And that's what this course is all about. To get you up and running with the basics of not only Inkscape, but also the principles behind vectorization. Of course, if you want a more in-depth view of the program, I encourage you to check out my other course on Inkscape. Or if you prefer, I've left you in the file resources, a list with some of the best free resources to learn all about Inkscape. The links ranged from full hour long YouTube video tutorials to 20 min up and running Britain articles. So with that out of the way, go to inkscape.org, download the latest version, installed it NICU in the next lesson 4. User Interface: In this lesson, I want you to get familiar with the user interface. This way. By the end of the lesson, at least, you'll have some general idea of what each of these bars and buttons to, or at least how they are organized. Because I know all these tiny buttons altogether can get to be pretty confusing, especially if you've never worked in a vector software before. But the first step is getting the program. Inkscape is a free open-source software, which means that you can download for free the latest version in the official page and save that. One style. Does it go to the section that says downloads? Then you'll see a list of multiple download options. Just pick the one that fits your predator system, then download it and install it. Once we opened the program for the first time, this is what you're going to see. This is the default user interface. So what I'm gonna do now is going to be going one by one and give you a we can loose idea of what each of these UI elements do. Later on as we move on with the goddess, I'll go more in-depth into their relevant bars and buttons. The first array element you're gonna notice is going to be this big white area with this black rectangle in the middle. This is the drawing area. This is what you'll be making your illustrations. This area is way bigger than it looks in, extends infinitely in all directions. So you have a lot of space to draw whatever you want. As far as the black rectangle, this is a guy the brand creates by default in all new documents. So it's going to appear in every new document you create. This guy is here because insulin is a vector illustration software. And this types of programs are mostly used for graphic design. This guide is made for the creation of PDFs, dad's brochures and that kind of stuff. Where it's helpful to have a clearly defined border. But for what we'll be using it, digital drawing, you can safely ignore it and draw whatever you want in the white area. This highlighted bile, it's called the common sweater. And it has a lot of shortcuts to the most common actions of the program, like open and save files, copy paste, new document, and that type of stuff. This vertical bar, it's called the snack bar. And it has a lot of options related to snap him. So you can position shapes with more accuracy depending on the type of drawing you may want it enabled or not. And you can toggle snapping on and off with the first button. I recommend you that for now, disable snapping altogether, at least while you're still learning. Because it can bother you later on when you start to move shapes around, the shapes that snap into every cent accidentally. So I recommend you to disable it now to avoid future problems. This element right here with a lot of tiny squares, it's called the palette. If you have a selected object, you can give it a color by clicking on any of these swatches. If you use the scroll bars, you'll see that you have a ton of colors to pick out the ballot is the status bar. This bar shows a few important options regarding the document. Likes selected colors soon, current layer. And it even shows you some really nice deeps and shortcuts as you go using the tools. The ruler is this element that stuck to the left and upper side is the drawing area. This element marks the position of the point there with a ruler and numbers. This ruler can get to be useful if you are working in something related to the graphic design area. But for illustration, it's pretty much useless. As well as the scroll bars, they are completely useless. They allow you to pan the document. But as we'll see in a minute, the best way to move around in the document is by using shortcuts. Finally, the two most important elements in the user interface other than the drawing area. The total box, which is this vertical bar that has all the tools you'll be using to draw anything. Later on we'll be seeing the most important tools so you'll get pretty familiar with it and then use it to control as well, which has the options of the currently selected tool. So they kind of work together with the toolbox. Sadly, in flip doesn't offer much as far as UI customization goals are, the elements are basically stuck where they are. So you will have to get used to it, like it or not. However, you do have the option of Haydn, each of these elements we just saw. If you go to View and then show hide, he didn't see this list with the names of all the elements by next to the name. That is this checkmark which shows which ones are activated. Just to show you, I'm going to hide them all so you can see how the interface looks without any element. Now all the elements have been hidden Over the drawing area, which is pointless to hide. And of course, the main menu. If you have space problems due to the low resolution of your screen. Or if you want this slightly bigger groin area. Or maybe if you're going for a more minimalistic UI. There are a few elements that I consider to be safe to hire for almost all drawing projects. The comments while the one with the shortcuts to the basic actions, that's safe to hide. Worst-case scenario, you'd have to make a couple of extra clicks to open the main menu without those shortcuts. It does so safe to hide the ruler and the scroll balance. Like I said, those elements not the most useful for drawing and illustration. And if you want, you're going to suffer the status while some of the deepest and shortcuts that shows when you get done can be helpful for a beginner. This one less customization option. And this allows you to switch the position of the comments bar and the snack bar. If you go to the View menu, then here you will see these three options. Default, custom and why. That default option leaves the comments bar on top and the snack bar on the right. But typically, the custom option leaves both bar on top and the white option both on the right vertically. It's not much, but it could help you in case you're working on a low resolution screen and you don't want to hide anything. The rest of the options of the program are handled by using docker build dialogues. In Enscape Dakota, Dylos are floating windows that you can open and close and can be ducked to the right. And they have comments and options related to a particular area. There are a ton of dialogues. Pretty much every big important area of the program has had dedicated dialogue. Branching from the pension, from color selection to document options. We'll go more in-depth into particular the ILOs as we move along. But for now I want to show you how the UI works. So I'm just going to open a random dialogue by going to the top menu. You can see when a menu will open API double dialogue, when it has these three dots at the end. So I'm going to open the objects dialog. This dialogue contains information about the individual objects in the document. By default, the first time you open a dialogue, it'll be dark to the right of the main windows. Remember that all Docker build dialogues are floating dialogues. So if you click on the title, you can drag it off. You can leave it floating there. Then if you want, you can dump it right back by moving into the right side. Keep in mind that you can only dog dialogues to the right side. You can not dug them anywhere else. If you open more than one dialogue, then start to stack into columns. One on top of another. User has no more vertical space when you stack multiple dialogues, the body of the dialogue will automatically, this little bar with the dialogue with data will appear. If you click on it, the dialogue will swap with the one that's showing. If you don't need a dialogue anymore, you can close it with the X button in the title. Close dialogs will retain the options that you may have set. You can also click on this little arrow in the title and convert it into a vowel on the right, that's vertical. This will help you to save space and keep the dialogue they're ready to be opened again. Now if we wanted to show it, just click on the icon. We find in this lesson, I wanted to show you how to use the shortcuts to move in the document. When you're drawing, you're going to have to constantly move from one side to another as you go build in your drawings. So it's very important to learn the shortcuts. So moving in the document becomes second nature. Lucky for us. We only need to know two circuits. They are really easy to learn. To pan the camera. Just hold the middle mouse button and move it. You're going to see how the guy, the rectangle, move side-to-side as the camera moves. If you have an actual drawing in the document, you will see it moving as the view of the document changes. If you don't have a middle mouse button, you can also use the space bar. The other type of camera movement is the song. The song is extremely important. Remember that we are working with vectors, which means that you, the resolution independent shapes as you draw, you will be constantly wondering too soon to work in a particular area, to add detail. Assuming it's really easy, just hold control and move the mouse wheel up or down. Depending on if you want to zoom in or out. It really nice detail is that when you are assuming in your Zoom to the position of the pointer. So if you want to go to a particular area, just move the pointer there and some in. If you don't have a mouse with wheel, you can zoom in and out with the plus and minus keys. Though this way you only assume to the center of the document. And that's it for the user interface of insane. Hopefully the program won't look as intimidating. Now. Of course, as we move along, we'll be needing to learn how to actually use some of these options. But by then, hopefully you'll be ready to learn model of the program. In the next lesson, I'll be showing you every sound related to the creation and handling of objects. 5. Objects: Before we begin with the tools you'll be using to draw. First, you have to understand the way to build your drawings using Inkscape. As you may know, in CEP is a vector illustration software. And vector illustration is considerably different than traditional drawing. In traditional drawing, using either pen and paper or a drawing tablet. You draw using lines that outline the shapes you want your drawing to have. This way is by far the most flexible way to draw. You can make a square or cube or figure with the same level of effort. On the other hand, when you draw with a backdoor software, you build your own shapes and then just stack them one on top of another until you build your final illustration. This workflow is meant to be used to create what vector softer were originally made to do graphic design, where most of the illustrations are made of flat and simple geometrical shapes. And this way of working strongly influences the type of drawing you'll be making. Flat and graphical, cartoony drawings with simple forms and silhouettes are way easier to make with the tools the program has than complex, expressive with three-dimensional ones. However, the benefit of working in a vector software has more to do with convenience than artistic potential, is way easier, faster and effective to use the mouse directly on the program to draw a simple, cartoony character. Now I'm drawing it on pen and paper and then scan and refine the image to them. Draw on top from the beginning. Maybe with an example, things will be clearer. What you are seeing right now is a tree that I drew for a course of mine on background design using Inkscape, which by the way, you can get here on Udemy on my profile. This tree is built off for different shapes. First is the trunk, which is simply an elongated triangle. Then the branches which are also elongated triangles, then the leaves, which are triangles that I call the edges a bit. And then the shadow, which is a slightly more complex shape. As you can see, the tree consists of geometrical shapes, scale, skew and modify it. But 100 per cent simple geometrical shapes stacked one on top of another. The great thing about working like this is that it is extremely easy to create variations. For example, this is the end result of the project of the background design course. All these trees that are in there are copies of the original that I just changed the color them modify the position of some of the farms. And the basalt is that a large part of these words were made with a single tree in minutes. The real way to draw this way, you need two things. First, a way to create your own shapes. In the case of the 3s, the different triangles and the shape of the shadow. And second, obviously a way to manipulate those shapes, to move them, rotate them, duplicate them, and stack them. For example, in the case of the three, I just drew a single shape for the leaves, and the other ones were duplicated, moved, and scales into position. In this lesson, you're going to learn how to do the second, how to manipulate objects. But in order to manipulate objects, first, you need to be able to create objects. Luckily, in FAPE comes with four geometric shape tools that allows you to create objects fast and easy. They add the rectangle tool, the ellipse tool, the Star Tool, and the spider tool. As a side note, there also the tools that allows you to create your own custom shapes. But they add a bit more complex and we're gonna be seeing them later. So click in any of them in the toolbox. And you're gonna see that the pointer changes. Now it has the shape of the tools that you picked. In my case, it has the shape of the rectangle. Now you can draw your shape. Simply click and drag. Once around. You are going to see these data, the murky with this tiny shapes in the borders. This means that the shape is selected. Tiny shapes in the borders are the modifiers. And they allow you to make some basic modifications depending on the shape. In the case of the rectangle, if you click on the squares, you'll be able to change the width and length. And if you click on the little circle, you'll be able to round off the edges. Both operations are very common and you're going to be using them all the time. Each shape tool has different basic operations. I recommend you to play around with each tool and see what each does. You will be surprised to know how useful and flexible can be a simple rectangle, an ellipse Doesn't pay attention to the huge amount of objects that have rectangular or elliptical shapes. Then you start using these tools to draw. The first two tools, the rectangle, an ellipse tool. You're going to be using them in 99% of all the drawing you'll be making. Because as we'll be seeing in the next lesson, they are very easy to modify and easy to use to create different shapes, as well as the other two, the polygon and the spiral. Usually you'll be using them whenever you need a style or a spiral. So they have a limited use. Now that you know how to create objects, we can take a look at the main tool for handling them, the objects selection tool. This tool is one of the most important in the entire program and you'll be using it constantly. It allows you to do pretty much everything you may want with objects. You can select them and place them, move, rotate, scale, duplicate. In a lot of other essential operations that you'll be using in all illustrations. Let us start with the most basic. Select the tool, and click in any object in the Canvas. If you don't have any object, a few with the shape tools. Once you click on one, you will see these dotted rectangle with these arrows and the coordinates. This means that the object is selected. There are operations that are only possible to make when you have a object selector. To unselect an object, just click outside in any empty area of the canvas. It is also possible to select multiple objects. This is really useful to apply an operation to multiple objects at the same time to the list, just click on an empty area and drag. You're going to see this rectangle. All objects that are fully covered by this rectangle will be selected. Alternatively, you can hold the Shift key and click on new objects to add to the selection. The move an object, click and drag. It's not necessary that the object is selected beforehand. You can just click on an object and move. It is also possible to move multiple objects at the same time. To do this, first, select the object you want to move, and then click on any of them and drag. The objects are going to maintain the relative distance between them. One of the most common operations you'll be doing is to delete objects. To delete an object first selected, and then hit the Delete key. It's very common that you'll want to duplicate an object or group of objects. It's really easy. First select the object or objects, then hit control D. An exact copy of the selected object is going to be created on top of the old one. And it's going to be automatically selected. So it looks like nothing happened. But if you move this object, you'll see that the other one is down there. The little arrows that appears when you select an object. And really important, they allow you to scale an object in the direction of the arrow. That is to stretch or shrink in the direction of the selected arrow. Simply click on any of the arrows and move the mouse. If you click on a selected object without moving the mouse for a second time, you see a different group of arrows. With the arrows in the corners, we're gonna be able to rotate the object no matter which one you pick. The rotation pivot will always be in the center. The arrows in the middle, the one that points to both sides, allows you to skew the object from the center as well. And this was the basic operations you need to know about the object selection tool. But there's one more essential operation to manipulate objects that you need to know. But it isn't the tone contrast. While, if you remember from the previous lesson, or tools have a group of options that are displayed in this bar right here. Even the shape tools that we saw a minute ago had options in this battle. Though not the only one that was worth to mention. The object selection tool has a couple of important options worth checking out. And just like everything I'm showing you here, are recommended to stop the video and get to play and see what you can discover. If you let the pointer on any of these options, a tooltip will appear telling you more or less what each does. However, the ones that we'll be seeing now at this four buttons over here that are grouped by the separators. These four buttons allows you to change the stacking order of a selected object Let me explain you. As I said a minute ago, when you draw using vectors u dot creating shapes, and then stacking them one on top of another. Each created object has a stacking order number which identifies which object is on top of which. By default, Insane Places the last created object on deposit stack. But as you may have guessed, I mentally you need to change the order of a couple of objects. For example, in the case of the tree I showed you in the beginning, the trunk is on top of the leaves and the branches on top of the trunk. And the shadow is on top of everything. But didn't originally made it like this. It was easier to draw the trunk first and then draw the leaves accordingly. When I draw the leaves in safe, obviously put them on top of the trunk. I had to move them below by using these buttons. The first and last button of the group allows you to move the object to the bottom or top of stack. Very useful if you have a lot of objects. And the two in the middle allows you to move a position up or down in the stack. These four button lets you draw without the need to keep in mind the order in which you're dry shapes. Practically every illustration you'll ever do will need you to arrange the stack position of a couple of objects. Now I want to show you a few really important and useful shortcuts to use with the object selection tool. Now, I won't be going over all the shortcuts because they are a lot. If you are interested, you should check the exit manual. But I am going to show you the essential ones that you'll be using all the time. It's possible to move the selected objects with the arrow keys on the keyboard. This will move the object just abit. This is great to make some minor adjustments to the position of objects. However, if you need, by holding shift, the object will move a greater quantity. It's very common that you may want to select an object that's obscured almost completely way another. You can select an object directly below it, selected one by holding the Alt key and clicking where it should be. Even better. Move the mouse to be on top of this text objects. Hold the Alt and use the mouse wheel to highlight the object you want. These ones are really important to the creation of shapes. You can make the scaling of an object uniform. This is useful for maintaining the proportions when scaling, just hold the Control key. And at scale using any of the arrows. If on the other hand, we are rotating or rescuing an object with the other group of arrows. Holding Control will snap the transformation to a fixed angle. This is most useful with the rotation, since it will snap to common angles like 45 degrees or 90 degrees or so. Then if the Shift key, when scaling this will automatically change the scaling pivot to the center rather than the opposite side of the selected level. If you listen, shift to rotate or scale, where the pivot point is already in the center, then it will move it to the opposite side rather than the center. The Shift key can embed the period composition from center to Cornell and back. Of course, you can also use both Control and Shift together. A very important detail is that both the Control and Shift shortcuts work at the moment of dragging to create a built-in shape. So you can easily drag it perfect circle with the ellipse tool. If you hold Control or drug or rectangles from the center, if you hold Shift or create perfect squares from the center, if you hold both at the same time. Before and in this lesson, I want to talk very briefly about a very important subject related to objects. And that is color selection. Because color works slightly differently in a vector softer replication. And it may require a quick explanation. In Inkscape, all shaped objects with no exception have these two properties, a field and a Bertha, that surrounds that feel. To these two properties, you can assign them color, gradient, patterns, textures, and you can even make them invisible. But some of these options are a bit more advanced so far. Now, let me show you how to give your objects fill and stroke any color. In order to do that, you're gonna be using the palette element is really easy. First you select your object, and then you click on any of this lectures. This is going to assign the color to the object's field. There are a lot of juice. If you move the scroll bars to see that you have hundreds of possible colors. Pretty much every color you may ever knew. It's also possible to assign any of these colors to the stroke instead of the field. Just hold shift and click on any swatch But there's one of these swatches that has this weird symbol. The first one, the white one with this red X. This swatch has a unique function. By assigning this swatch to either the fill or stroke of an object, you will make it invisible. As I said a moment ago, all objects with no exception have fill and stroke. So it's not possible to erase either, but it is possible to disable them temporarily. And that's what this swatch does. At least deal, you select another color and the fill or stroke goes back to the visible. With the substance. You have a lot of control over the appearance of a shape. But the pilot is more useful to quickly change colors. For a complete control over the way the shape looks. You're going to have to use the fill and stroke download. This dialogue not only allows you to pick between all possible colors, instead of the p, select the swatches of the palate. But also allows you to change the stroke size, opacity, and other appearance related properties. To open the dialogue, go to object, Fill and Stroke. The first thing you'll notice is that this Taylor has three tabs to change the fill color and other identical for the stroke color. And a last one for the properties of the stroke. The first two tabs have exactly the same options, but depending on which one you use, the color will be set to either the fill or stroke of the selected objects. Let's take a look at the options. So select an object and click on the first tab. We're going to start by changing the field. The first thing you'll notice are these ten little buttons. This will set the type of painting that's gonna be applied to the fill or stroke. Don't worry, in real life you'll only be using the first two. You can safely ignore the other eight. The first button with the x is just like the first swatch in the pellet. By selecting it, you disable the fill or stroke. Depending on the WOR. The button right next to it applies it a color. A bit like if you were to click in any of the other swatches palette. But the difference is that now you can see a group of options to pick the exact color you want. These five protons here will change the mold with which you select a color. But I'm telling you right away, 99% of the time you'll be using the one that says wheel or the one that says HSL. You can forget about the others completely. For now, pick colors using the wheel mode. This color selection mode will display all possible colors, like the classic color wheel with a hue on the outside and the saturation and lightness on the inner triangle. The last step, the one that says stroke style, allows you to change the size of the border. And a few other options. Again, there are a lot of options here, but the only one we care is the first one, the one with a label that says width. Here you can set the stroke width you want with an input right next to the input. That is this drop-down menu with different units with which you can pick the width. Picking the right unit is important. I recommend you to always pick the one that says bx, that is pixels. I believe that is the most comfortable and unpredictable unit to do any purely digital work. There are a couple of sliders that are independent of the W pick. One that says blur, another one that says opacity. The one that says blur will apply a blur to the selected objects. You're not going to be using this option to match, except for a specific cases. The slider that says opacity is a bit more important. It allows you to apply transparency to the entire object. With this dialogue, you're gonna be able to give any possible look to your shapes. Steal the pilot has its place though. Usually you'll be using the palette to make super quick changes and the freelance stroke dialogue to do more deliberate changes. And also to change the stroke width, which can be done with the bullet. And that's all you need to know about objects from now. What you've learned in this lesson is the base for everything that will come later with the knowledge you have now, you can try to make some basic illustrations. Of course, you still need to learn about the other half of vectorization, how to create your own custom shapes. So for now you'll be a bit limited of what you can do. But practice is essential. So I'm going to leave you in the resources and except document with exercises designed to help you to completely mastered everything you've learned in this lesson. I strongly recommend you to at least check this file before starting the next lesson. 6. Paths: As I said in the previous lesson, knowing how to create and manipulate objects is half of what you need to be able to draw in Inkscape. The other half is knowing how to create your own custom shapes. Inkscape brings in these four basic built-in shapes that we saw in the previous lesson. But no matter how flexible the rectangle an ellipse our sooner or later, you're going to need a unique shape to draw something you want. In this lesson, I want you to learn everything regarding how to create and manipulate paths. Paths, or the way Inkscape handle the creation of your own shapes. The way Beth works is going to need a quick explanation. But I want you to know that paths, just like built-in shapes or objects, they can be manipulated with the object selection tool. So everything you've learned in the previous lesson applies to any past omega1. This lesson. Just like in most vectorization software, paths are made of Messier colors. A Bezier curve is a type of curve that's defined by the position of two nodes and the position of two handles attached to each node. By changing the position of the nodes, you change the starting and ending position. Each handle affects a certain quantity of the form that takes depending on its position. This way, by changing the handles, you can give your curve any type of possible curvature between two points. You can even make a completely straight curve if that makes sense. Don't worry if this feels a bit confusing. Once you start creating and manipulating curls, you're going to see that it's way less complicated than it seems. But that's the way a single curve functions. What's interesting is that it's possible to attach one curve to the end of another and repeat this deal. You close the shape by attaching a curve, joins the beginning and ending of the chain. And this way, you create your own custom shape that's built by multiple groups where each column is a different section of the path. There are a few tools that allows you to build path directly. You have the pencil tool that allows you to create path by drawing them as if you are using an actual pencil. This tool is most useful with a tablet to draw more naturally. Then you have the calligraphic tool. Again, more useful to create interesting looking strokes with a tablet. But the most important tool, not only in SAP, but in most vector illustration software is the pen tool. This tool is by far the most flexible and powerful of all the tools that creates paths. Because it allows you to create paths node by node. And because of this, you can build your own custom shapes with rate control and accuracy with the mouse. Something that will be really hard to do with a traditional illustration software. So pick the pen tool. Now, every time you click on the Canvas, you're going to place a node. Once you place the first node, you see this red line following the pointer. This line is there to help you visualize the shape the curve is going to take when you place the next node. You can place as much notice as you want. When you want to finish the path, click on the first node, the one with the little white square, or to close the path. Now you no longer gonna be able to edit the path with the pen tool. The shape is finished and ready to be used. By default, the pen tool disables the handles when you click to place a node. The nodes create these completely straight Bezier curve. Later on you'll see that this behavior is really useful to sketch shapes fast. But it is possible to place a handle when creating the nulls in such a way that you introduce a curvature. When placed in a note just click and drag. You will see this handle that moves with the mouse. Pay attention to their previous realization line is going to show you how the curvature is going to be when you release the mouse. It's also possible to leave the path open. Simply place the nulls we want. And when you're done, right-click. This is going to finalize the path addition in the last place node. Now you can leave it like this, or if you want, you can append more sections by clicking on any of the n, also with the pen tool, the ones with the little white squares. Whenever there is an open path, you can always keep adding more sections. Open paths are useful for a couple of things, but mostly to create lines. Here's an interesting deep when grades in a bath with the pen tool. When you create a node with a curvature due to a property of the nulls that we're going to see in a moment. Sometimes the node is going to force a curvature into the next section. You can see this in the previous section line. So if you want to create a straight section connected to a curve section, a good tip is to de-select the bath To end the editing in the last place, dealt with the curvature. Then continue appending your straight sections. From that end. With the pen tool. You shouldn't be able to draw pretty much everything you do with a real life pen or pencil. And this is the power of the pen tool. It gives the control and flexibility of a real-life pen or pencil to your mouth. But the real power of the pen tool really starts showing when you use it with another tool, the null selection tool. They're not Selection Tool. It's just like the object selection tool. But for paths with this tool, you are going to be able to do things like create, delete, and move nodes in a path, change the curvatures and change the properties of individual nodes. In other words, it allows you to completely edited path after it's been created. As you rarely are going to draw a perfect path the first time around with the pen tool. This tool and return a path. It's a very common operation that you're gonna be doing all the time. That's why, just like the object selection tool, this tool is one of the most important tools in the program. To be able to edit the path. First, you need a path. So create a quick path with the pen tool. This is important because the node selection tool won't work with built-in shapes unless you do something to them that we're going to see later. To select a path is just like with the object selection tool. Click or drag a rectangle to select more than one. You're going to see these dotted rectangle indicating that selector. But you're also gonna see the notes that makes up the bath. Now, if you click in and out your selected, you can see that it's selected because it gets blue. Now, just like with the direct selection tool, you can click and drag to move the node, select multiple notes and move them all at the same time. Of course, it's not possible to rotate or scale. No. After all, a node is a single point. You can also try some of the Object Selection Tools, circuits. One especially useful is the Delete key. To delete the selected nodes. Even more important is the possibility to add no sway path. You can add notes in any location of a girl by double-clicking. This will, of course, the binding curve. When you place the nulls into two curves. This way, you can completely change the overall shape of a path. But the one operation that really gives you a complete control over the path is the handle manipulation. When you click on a note, you're gonna be able to see the handles of that node. By clicking in the little circle at the end of the handle. You can move it, allowing you to completely change the curvature. Once you start to play around with paths, you probably noticed that a couple of things. First, that nodes belong into three curves. One show a handle. And second That's some handles are stuck together with a curve right next to it. So when you move one handling one side, the other side moves to the opposite side. Let's start by checking what's the deal with straight curve notes. Straight curve nodes don't have handles because they are Melinda. There is no curvature, so there is no need for handles. This raises a big question. How do you introduce a curvature to a straight line if you don't have the handles. Well, another awesome property of this tool is that it's possible to edit the curves super easy and fast with no need to use the handles. If you move the pointer to a section free of nodes, you're going to see how the icon of the pointer changes. And it shows this handler. If you click and drag, you'll see how the curvature moves. Depending on where you will have the curve. The movement will be different. This is exactly the same as going handled by handle, fixing up the gulp. What's model? You can see both handles adjusting as you move the curve. I strongly recommend you to do most of your editing by using this method because it's way easier, faster than an intuitive, even if you do have a bit less control than when using handlers. Now, let's see why sometimes moving a handle in a curve affects the gut right next to it. In order to make drawing certain shapes easier, it's possible to change the way a note the incisions, the curvature from one curve to another. You do this by using the right node type. Let me show you. Take a look at these three paths. I created. These heart leg shape Has these sharp corners and bend the lines. Pay attention to the nulls and you'll see that they have these diamond shapes icons. This icon will indicate to you that the nodes are of Cornell type. With Gunnar type nodes, the curvature won't carry through the node. That is, the curvature in one curve won't affect at all the other curve. Obviously, this type of node is used to create corners. Though there is nothing keeping you from trying to create a smooth transition. This type of node is also used for strike Carlos. Since each curve ends in a corner. The final shape is made entirely of smooth surfaces. You can see that they are smooth nodes because they have this square shapes instead of the diamond shapes of the corner miles gradient, something like this with Garland nulls will be a nightmare. Instead, all nodes are set to smooth. Smooth null forces a smooth transition through a null. No matter how much you move it, it's impossible to create a corner using this null type. When you move the handle from one section, the one in the other belonging to the other section moves as well. They are not independent of each other, like with the corner type, this type of nodes you're going to be using for pretty much everything. That's another corner. Since it helps you to make soft and elegant curvature through, I know at the moment of drawing your path. Instead we'll decide automatically the type of nodes based on the shape of the path. But if you want full control over the curve after it's been drawn, you need to be able to change a node to any type. If you have selected the node selection tool and check the two controls while you're gonna see a lot of options that aren't important right now, so we're going to skip them. But these four buttons over here allows you to set the node type of a selected node. But like you've seen in so many cases before in this course. In reality, you'll be using the first two and you can completely ignore the other two. If you're curious about what the other two do, they change the null type to a small variation of the smooth type? They are rarely needed, so they are not worth your time. The first proton is the common type. When you set a smooth nodes to this type, nothing appears to happen. But if you pay attention to the icon, you will see that change to a diamond. Now you can move the handles and the curvature won't get past the North. The second button is the smooth node type. When you said that Governor null to smooth, this will introduce a curvature based on the angle of each car. This is important. Sometimes, rather than start making your path from Cedar with the pen tool, you'd like to start with a built-in shape. But if you try to modify something with the no selection tool, you see that once you select it, it won't show you the notes and you can modify anything. It just shows you the modifiers of that tool. This is because technically this built-in shapes, I've not paths. They are special tools to be able to use them as paths. First, it's necessary to transform them to a path that is a special command that does just that with the shape selected. Go to object, and then object to path. This is going to transform the object in its current state to an actual path. Now you are going to be able to see and modify the notes and curves as if you made it yourself, but you no longer have access to the shape modifiers. Boolean operations are an essential part of most illustrations you'll be doing. They are used to simplify some of the work. At the moment of creating some of the more complex shapes. Boolean operations, like the name implies, worked by following the classic mathematical Boolean formula. Take into shapes, paths, or built-in shapes as input and outputs a single path. As a result. There are a total of six different types of operations. However, for illustration, you only realistically need three of them. The other ones are really that useful or not worth the extra energy in leveling them. I'll be skipping those. Their union is just to join two or more shapes into a single path. Just delete the shapes we want to join and go to Path union. Or they're really easy to remember shortcut Control. And plus, this type of operation is mostly used for two things. First, to create organic looking shapes like bushes are clouds, by performing a union with a lot of simple objects. The other common use is to create complex mechanical shapes made of simple forms like goggles or robotic parts. The difference operation will take two shapes. And the resulting shape will be the shape below minus the area where they intersected. Do perform this action, select two intersecting shapes and go to path difference or the shortcut, which is Control minus. We will often use this operation to gallop or delete a section out of the shape. The intersection operation is similar to the difference operation, only that it will keep the area where two shapes intersect and delete everything else. Use it, go to Path intersection or the shortcut Control asterisk. This operation is mostly used to limit a shape to the silhouette of another, often to create shadows or highlights that fit perfectly in a complex silhouette. So as you can see, everything you can do with Boolean operations, you can do manually. But most of the time it will be really time consuming and tedious. So take your time to get comfortable with each operation. Use the shortcuts instead of the menu and do all the exercises I left you in the exercise document of this lesson. This was the last piece of information that you need to be able to create any type of illustration that you may want using Inkscape. Of course, there are a lot of program features. I haven't showed you tools and comments that are pretty useful but maybe not essential. I strongly recommend you to check the exercise file for this lesson and make them all more than once if you need it. It's really help you to get everything you've seen in a practical way. So don't skip it. For the next lesson. I want to give you a quick overview of a few features of the program that you could experiment with, as well as showing you a few important tips that I've found to be essential to any type of illustration. You see an X shape 7. Tips: In this final lesson, I want to do two things. First, I want to talk very quickly about a few features of the program that we didn't cover because I thought that they weren't essential to most illustrations you'll be doing. And second, I want to give you a couple of what I think are really important tips that will help you avoid a lot of headache in the long run. First, I want to start with an essential tip that I think every Inkscape illustrate. Don't know. I believe that in most tutorials, for the most part, everyone forgets about one of the most important parts of working in Inkscape. Switching between the two selection tools. And switching between these two tools is one of the most common actions you'll be doing when drawing. At the end of a day's work, you'll end up wasting a ton of time moving the mouse to the toolbox to switch to the right tool. It's a little like when you are alone in a 3D program. And everyone tells you that you should get used to the keyboard shortcuts to their manipulator tools as early as possible. Otherwise, it will be forever a slave to move in the mouse all the way to the UI. Every 2 s. The default shortcuts are a little bit awkward for my taste. The toolbox, the function keys, F1, F2, F3. I prefer to set my own custom shortcuts. You can edit the default shortcuts. If you go to Edit Preferences. Here you go to Interface keyboard shortcuts. The tools are in the context list. You can search in the search box. I recommend you to set the selection tools to something like a and S or Q and W, something that is not as separated from the rest of the default non toolbox keyboard shortcuts. And since you are there, you might as well set a couple of shortcuts to the next most used tools. You'll be using the pen tool a lot. So I recommend you to set a comfortable shortcut for it. And very important, a tool you'll be switching to constantly. The dropper tool. The dropper tool allows you to sample the color and set it to the field. Or if you hold shift the stroke of the selected object. This tip has to do with the color mode with which you select colors. If you remember, in the freelance stroke dialogue, you get to choose from five different models to select color. In the lesson back then, I told you that you should concentrate in only 2 mol the wheel and the HSL mouth. The wheel doesn't need explanation. It's just the will of colors. You can see the relationship of colors and then set the saturation and value once you pick the hue. However, I think that you should get comfortable with the HSL mouth, since it's the most important to picking colors for our illustration. In art, there is a classical theoretical representation of color that uses three variables, hue, saturation, and value. The heel is the actual color. Pigs can be blue, green, greenish, yellow, etc. The saturation is how pure a color is. The less saturated, the higher quantity of gray that color has. Saturated colors are very vibrant, while these saturated colors are far more pale. And mentally, if you crank down the saturation of a color, you'll reach full gray. Value is how light or dark a particular color is. At no lightness, the color becomes black. The HSL color selection model, which stands for hue saturation and lightness, which is the same. That value maps this classic representation by using this color selection mouth, you can compare whether the hue, saturation or value of the colors. For example, to imply a surface in shadow, you can sample the color of the surface in light and then lowering slightly the lightness slider. This type of comparative color selection is something you'll be doing all the time. So I recommend you to get used to handle colors using this model. Okay, here it goes to a few of the features of the program that we didn't cover. Some of these features are quite important for some styles or types of illustration. Though I wouldn't go any of these features essential to all illustrations. That's why I decided to leave them out. If you think you could use any of these features and would like to know more? And leave you in the resources, a list with the best links to learn more about Inkscape. Remember when I told you that you can not only add color to an object, but also other types of paint. Well, in common illustration, the other type of pain that you will most likely use will be the gradient. A gradient is just a way to create a blend between two or more colors in a linear way. Often used to generate some subtle effects like the sky change and colors are some basic lighting. In Inkscape, you can create, edit and apply gradients to both the fill and stroke. Radians are created by using the gradient tool in the toolbox. Then you drag on an object. This will create two stops. Each stop is going to have a color assigned. To assign it a color. Just click on stop and pick a color like you would normally do with a common object. Depending on the options set in internal controls while you create a linear or elliptical gradient. Right next to these options, there are two buttons that allows you to set two. What are you going to apply the gradient to the field or stroke? You can move the position of both stops. This way. You'll be changing the direction of the gradient. And you can do this with either the gradient tool, whether node selection tool. It's also possible to add more stops with the gradient tool selected. Double-click on any section of this line that joins both stops. If you remember, in the objects lesson, I talked about the fill and stroke Diana. And that at the moment of picking a paint type, you get to choose between these ten little buttons. Well, I feel for those were to assign a gradient as a paint. Begin any of those gradient buttons, a few options will appear. But given that most of the options shown in the fill and stroke dialogue, I've also shown in the gradient tool controls. I've found that it's not necessarily to think about the options in the freelance drug dealer. In fact, I recommend you to completely forget about them and handle everything through the gradient to controls. We didn't cover the snack bar. And that's because snapping, It's not something you'll be using in all your drawings. But it is important and it can help you with some types of illustrations. By clicking in the very first button, you'll enable or disable or the snapping functionality. As I said in the UI lesson. By default, these three buttons should be enabled. This will give you the snapping that you want. So I would recommend you to not touch anything here. If you're feeling adventurous and you want to play around with this file, you can just leave the mouse on top of a button and get a nice tool tip that will tell you more or less what it does. Once a snapping is a naval, shapes will snap to each other. You will see this little x just before the shapes. More. Snapping works with both objects when you are working with the object selection tool and nose. When you're working with a no selection tool or when you're creating a path with the pen tool. Clipping allows you to limit the visibility of a shape to the silhouette of another. After the clip is done, you can edit the clip shape inside of the node selection tool. And no matter what, the changes won't show outside of the silhouette area of the object. In illustration clips that are often used as a more robust way to create shadows and highlights than using the intersection operation. To create the clip, you use two objects. First the object you want to limit the visibility or the target object, and then the object that you want to use to limit the other or the clipping path. The clipping path has to be above the other in the stack order. Then you select them both and go to Object clip set. My favorite method, right-click Set clip. Once it's done, these two objects will become a single glyph shape, which you can move, scale, rotate, and do pretty much everything you can do with other objects. But now you can edit the shape inside with the node selection tool. And the shape won't show outside of the equilibrium path. If in the adult selection tool you have this button too good on, you can edit the clipping path itself. To unclip. You can go to Object, clip, release or right-click, bellies clip. Old shapes you added it will keep the changes, whether it is the equilibrium path or the target shape. Then it's also a similar feature to clipping masking. Masking has the same functionality, but with the difference that it has a few transparency features to make clipping is simpler, so I prefer to use them over masks. The effects are modifications that change the behavior or looks off a path. Some of them can be very useful to open the path effort dialogue, go to path, path effects. They pass effect to a shape. Simply click on the plus icon in the bath effects dialog. This will bring up a list with all path FX available. Now you just select the one you want. And the effect will be applied to the shape. It's possible to add effects to build in shapes. But this may transform them into path depending on the effect. To delete the path efforts from a shape, just click in the minus icon. Any modification you did with the effect will be lost. Almost all path effects. It was one or more control handles or curves on the shape to manipulate the parameters. You can see an access these controls within our selection tool. If the object is selected, then the effect options will be shown in the Pacific dialogue. With an effect active, you can still modify the object and nose. However, depending on the effect, this may bring buggy and unpredictable behavior. There are a lot of path fx, icon possibly go through all of them. But the truth is that you don't need more than a few for most illustrations. Effects are something you learn better when you add experiment by yourself. And that was it from the goddess. The goal of this course. Although then prepare you as fast as possible to take other Inkscape dependent courses was to at least left 31 thing to know more about these fantastic and extremely powerful free vector program. And Libya in the resources link with the best free resources I've found to learn and master Enscape. So if we want to know more, now at least you have a strong foundation. I believe that with what you've learned in this mini-course is enough for you to go and tackle any of my other courses. Knowing more of the program will only make you a better and more confident artist. Saw the time spent learning more about it is never wasted. 8. Groups and Clips: Before we begin with the brush act, in the next few lessons, I want to show you some of the basic tools and techniques that we're gonna be using all throughout these gods. Pretty much every cent of what I showed you here. It's common to all vector illustration, not just came out. So if you've never worked with a vector software before, it's gonna be especially important to get familiar with these concepts. In this lesson. In particular, I want to start with one of the most important features of vector illustration, Boolean operations. I know that about Boolean operations in the mini goals. But then I showed you the mechanics of how to use them. What they are actually useful in illustration. And this is what this lesson is all about. But before that, let me remind you really quickly what our Boolean operations. Boolean operations are a group of tools the program has that work by making two or more shapes interact. And I'll put a single path as that assault. Boolean operations do not need to be performed with custom paths. They can be used with built-in shapes like ellipses are rectangles, but the resulting shape of the operation will always be a path. An important detail is that Boolean operations only work with shapes, with them or custom, but not with other types of objects like important images or groups. There are a total of six different operations that insane, insane. But in practice, only three of them are really necessary for most illustrations. They are the union, the difference, and the intersection. With that out of the way, let's begin with a union. The union will join or select the shapes into a single path. Often used to create organic masses of objects like clouds or bushes. Creating organic shapes like these can be way faster than using the pen tool to draw the silhouette manually. And it gives you a lot more fine control and flexibility. Take a look at this cloud. If you pay attention to the silhouette, you'll see that it's actually made up of multiple ellipses overlapping. This is something that will be really easy to do using a union. So take the ellipse tool and draw a lot of ellipses overlap in to build the silhouette of the Cloud. Now pick the object tool and select all the shapes. Go to Path union. What are the really easy to remember shortcut, Control and blues. Now the Cloud is a single path instead of being made or multiple ellipses. Now you can see and edit the notes with the node tool. Now, I'm sure you're thinking, why couldn't we just leave all the ellipses together overlapping each other? Well, for once, it's more uncomfortable to control an object made of a single shape. But the most important benefit of having a single path is that we can modify the silhouette of the shape, since it's a path. That is something we cannot do if there are a bunch of separate the shapes together. Now, if you select the note, don't. You can play around with the path and make the silhouette much more interesting. Like I said a minute ago, the union is perfect to build objects that have these organic bumpy silhouette like Laos or bushes made of ellipses. But it can be used to build pretty much any complex shape that's made of multiple, smaller, simpler shapes. In another command use will be to create mechanic looking shapes like goggles or man-made objects. The good question you should be asking yourself is if you need them multiple shapes to be a single path for whatever reason. And if they do, build it with a union, the Boolean difference will generate the shape. That's the first shape. Minus alleles we intersected with the second shape. In other words, you need to cut out or carve a shape by using another one. A couple of important difference with the union. First, you should only use two shapes. The difference does not work well with more than two shapes. And second, the shape that's going to cut the other one should be above in the stack order. Let's go back to the example of the Cloud. What if we want to make the classic loud with a flat bottom? We could go in there and add and remove nodes manually and then adjust the buttons so it looks flat. But that's a lot of work for such a simple desk. So the best way is to use a Boolean difference to cut out the lower parts of the globe. The rectangle tool and draw words. You want to adjust the shape carefully. It may be helpful to change the rectangle color so you can see better. When you're done. Go to path difference or the shortcut Control and minors. Remember that this cloud shape is a new shape result of performing the difference with the other two shapes. I'm telling you because it may seem like it's the same object as before. Gases have a similar form and it's in the same place. But if you perform a difference with a built-in shape, inertia will be graded in the same place That looks similar, but there is a path and does not have the built-in modifiers. Also keep in mind as you could have used the pen tool to make the shape. Now, here's an extremely common use for this ablation. And he's creating a shadow or highlight. Let's keep going with the Cloud. What if we wanted to add some sort of highlight on top as if the light is hitting the top part of the silhouette. This is something very common. You'll see a lot in illustrations. Again. We could go in and do it manually, really slowly and really carefully. But that will be slow, inaccurate, and tedious. So for that we're going to use a difference operation to create the shape of the highlight. Now the first step may seem a bit weird, but you have to duplicate the cloud shape two times. You'll see why in a minute. So select it and press Control D twice. Remember that duplicate them will control the, recreate an exact duplicate on top. So it looks like nothing happened. But there are three exact looking clouds are stuck in the same place right there. For the next step, it will be very useful to change the color of the top duplicate. So you can see whether what you're going to do next. Now the Cloud directly below this doublet Cloud, It's gonna be cut down and it's going to become the highlight. Just this top red clouds. So what's showing through of the cloud shape below cost, the form of the highlight you want when you're happy with the result. So mode shapes and perform the difference. There are certain shape may not be visible because it has the same color than the backlog. So give it a nice whitish gray. Just to clarify, if it's not clear, you needed to duplicate twice because our Boolean operations produce only one output shape. So we need to regenerate the highlight shape with a copy. So we could also keep the original cloud shape below. At the end of the day, difference are basically used to cut other objects. To me, it's easier to think of it as the scissors of the Boolean operations. Only then instead of a couple of ladies, you use another path to good. What's below. Finally is the intersection operation. This operation is used to limit the shape to the inside of another. Often to create shadows or highlights that are shared in a complex model. Or to create patterns that need to be limited to the inside of a complex shape. For the sake of simplicity. Let's continue with the theme of the clouds. Let's say that I wanted to create a nice-looking shadow that gibbs some traces of volume. Notice that the silhouette of the Cloud is actually fairly complex. The easiest way to create this type of highlights or shadows that are made with the pen tool. And I've not created by using the technique I showed you a minute ago with the difference operation is to use an intersection. It's super easy. Just another shape you want with the pen tool on top of the cloud. And now very important, when you get to the outside area, continually shapes so it covers completely aside, the shallow is going to go. We're going to delete the excess. But the important thing is that the shape of a lapse completely aside. So it won't show any holes once you perform the intersection. Now it's time to actually perform the intersection. But just like in the previous case with the difference, want to create a new shape on top of the cloud. So duplicate the cloud shape with Control D. Now the glove copies on top of the shadow we made. But that doesn't matter. The intersection doesn't care about the stack order like the difference does. So these duplicate and the shadow shape and go to Path intersection or use the shortcut Control and asterisk. The resulting shape will fit exactly to the inside of the cloud shape. The important thing here is that in illustration is very frequent that you'll have to draw a shape that's one on top of another and needs to be constrained to the inside of a shape below, not just in the case of shadows and highlights. That's the most frequent case. But there are other uses. And that's all you need to know about using Boolean operations in practice. Boolean operations are some of the most common operations that you'll be doing all the time. So I strongly suggest you to really wrap your head around what you've seen in this lesson. Play around and practice on your own. The list concepts becomes second nature because they really add an essential part of all bacteria recession. One last thing. I believe that just like with the main four tools, you should as soon as possible, started using shortcuts instead of the menu. So get used to performing the operations using the shortcuts. They are quite easy to remember and they are essential to work in a comfortable pace. 9. Revisiting The Asset Pack: Now that you have an understanding of how to use the program and the basics of vectorization. I want to go over the asset back more in-depth and show you how it is made. In part two, I will go over the tools. So hideously that SVG document without the assets. Like I said before, I tried to make as much assets as it made sense without artificially inflating the number. That's why you don't see 1 million items that will most likely be just the same asset repeated over and over again with some tiny variations between them. Instead, I decided to go for a nice balance between variety and flexibility. I just to go for assets that are easy to modify with some simple operations and easy to adapt to whatever type of character you're going for. I felt this was a more efficient way to go making an asset back. All throughout the rest of the course, I'll be showing you how you can take these assets and use the tools of the program to make an infinite amount of variety. But first, a couple of quick notes on the way the bag is made. For the sake of ease of use. All of the assets made of more than one object or a group together. Just be one that some assets you're going to need to ungroup them before using them, especially if you want to make some changes to the geometry. Another thing, whenever possible, I decided to give the assets as built-in shapes. So you still have access to the rounded operations. That's super common in the design of characters in this style. My goal was to make it as easy as possible for you to modify the assets to whatever you want with that goal in mind, whenever I could, I tried to keep the shapes separated in assets whose silhouette is made of multiple objects, mostly in the hands and bodies. You'll notice that some of them are made of two rectangles stack together instead of a single shape. This is how you can make changes to the head shape even more easily. One thing, I made heavy use of clips for most of the elements here. It, my goal is to make each element as flexible as possible. If you don't remember how to use flips. I will remind you that in the next lesson, I will go more in-depth into all of the tools we're going to use it for some general notes. Now let's see how the pack is made. On this side, you have the face building assets. You have the ears, eyes, mouths, noses, and some other accessories. Again, I'm going to repeat what I said a minute ago. This may seem like they are not that much. But when you keep in mind that you can play with the scale, you realize that they are more than enough. The **** right next is a bit more complicated because it is common for haircuts to be made of multiple shapes, with some shapes being below the **** in the stack order, and other shapes being above. For those haircuts, I gave you the shape that's supposed to be below a darker color that the one that is supposed to be in front. Just as an indication, you most likely we want the color to be the same. Again when possible and when it makes sense to keep the hair as a built-in shapes so you could handle the roundness. The balance and accessories are quite self-explanatory. So I want to go over the body assets. First is the tarsals. There are two main categories. The tarsals made of a single shape and a dorsal is made of two shapes. The single shape dorsal is the most common. However, they do shaped torso is fairly common in some type of females. When it was researching this type of character, I couldn't find other body types outside of what you see. Now, everything has seemed to be a variation or modification of these nine types of bodies. And this leads me to the clothing. Notice that there are 12 different types of clothes duplicated for each different dorsal type. And the reason is at drawing clothing on top of torsos, it is not difficult, but it is time-consuming. And I felt this will help you to quickly put together some design. And once again, the close at assigning it to be the most flexible starting point for any other type of girls with, you should be able to make pretty much anything you want with just a few quick modifications. Here are the limbs. These are a bit less neatly placed together, so they look less like what they're supposed to be. But here you have the neck, arms, hands, legs, and feet. And here, this might be a bit confusing when you see it out of context. But some characters have a separated body shape for the pelvis. And you're supposed to put these shapes between the torso and the legs to bridge them altogether. Then there are the accessories. These are basically some extra elements that you will use on your body as an extra piece of clothes or the clouds themselves to add some extra detail. For example, this one is over here at different things to put on top of the torso clouds like neckties, bows, shortfalls, or turtlenecks. And this one's over here are for the arms through the shirt, I rolled sleeve or give address I showed there pal. These ones are different types of skirts. You can add some details to change the clothing into something new, like whoo dance or belts. And that was an overview of the entire set of acids. But now I want to move on to the tools that you'll be using most of the time. But we will do that on part two of this lesson. 10. Tools for Handling the Asset Pack: Okay, Now let's continue looking at the asset back. Now checking out the tools and techniques that you should be using with the back, I felt I could give you a bit of I can sap with some of the tools we'll be using throughout the rest of the course to build the characters so you can see them on their own and get familiar with them. I mentioned previously that everything is grouped here. You should want to review how to handle groups, rewatch the lesson groups and clips from the same section. But I want to give you some tips regarding how to handle the groups in the assets. First of all, you should know that groups are problematic at the moment of making some operations, especially modifying some things. That's why I recommend you that when you copy an asset to assemble something, make sure to ungroup everything. Just to be sure. This might be mandatory in some assets if you want to use them. Like in the case of some hair that have shapes that need to be indifferent order to look correct. In fact, that's my tip for handling groups and discuss. If you want to edit something, always ungroup, never enter the group. Groups that are important at the moment of organizing large quantities of shapes. So my recommendation is group things only after you're completely sure you're done with it. One important feature that is really important at the moment of working with groups, but there can be easy to overlook is the North Pole ability to completely bypass, allowing you to select the individual shapes inside of it. What's more after you select a shape with an O2, you can switch to the object tool and start moving the objects inside. And all without having to enter the room. I'm pretty sure, you know, after taking the exam section, but I want to remind you of one of the most important court case. You will need a candle in these sort of geometric illustrations. Whenever you're moving things around, you can hold the control key to constrain the movement either vertically or horizontally. This is super useful to align things, especially when you're duplicating some assets and you want them to be aligned with the original. This has a worse when you are selecting multiple objects. What's great about this hotkey is that it works with an L2. You can get a one or more nulls and isolate them perfectly vertically or horizontally. Which is super useful at the moment of making some quick modifications to some of these assets. And West better. You can also use this hotkey with the modifiers. So for example, I couldn't wrap their heads and make them longer with the square modifier, maintaining the width I setup. So commit to memory, this hotkey and its uses. You'll be using it all the time in the rest of the course. Let's talk about clips it, how to use the assets that are made to be modified. I already say that whenever I could because the assets using clips. So if you see a shape that looks inside other shape, chances that it can be modified with Eclipse. Actually assemble of these, have the mouse. If I switch to the node tool and select the teeth or tongue, you're gonna be able to use the modifiers or mouse to move the shape around here because they are clipped inside the mouth. They want show outside. So keep in mind that whenever I could, I tried to keep the shapes as built-in objects for the Excel option to use the modifiers if you want. Another place where I use this exact same clip metal was in the bodies with some other close. You'll see that if you select it with another tool, you'll be able to change the shape around and it will stay within the silhouette of the body. Because all of these objects are geometrical InDesign. Many of the pieces fit together perfectly like a jigsaw piece. In those cases, if you have even a slight amount of opposition, it may be noticeable. That's why I strongly recommend you to use the Align and Distribute dialogue to tidy up everything once you are done with the illustration. So first I'm going to throw together a quick ****. Let's pick some features randomly to get something that looks fine at the first glimpse. But it is not mathematically aligned. And some people may notice it. And nothing says an artist is lazy like misaligned things. I'm going to open the Align and Distribute Panel by going to Object, Align and Distribute. By default the ability to drop down to say last selector. This means that the shapes will align in relationship to the last selected object. Most of the time you'll want to align something either vertically or horizontally. Because their body is symmetrical. I got to select the head first and it has shaped second. And then this button, if you, if you leave the mouse over, the tooltip, should say centered on vertical axis. This will center the hat perfectly over the hill. I'm going to repeat this process with the nose to center it. Select them from the nose and then the head and hitting this woman. And I'm going to repeat that for the mouth. The ears are not misaligned horizontally, rather vertically And you have an option to fix this. Just select one here, and then the other one here, this button, the tooltip should say, center on horizontal axis. And then just one last problem happening here. The two eyes together, I'm not centered vertically on the head. If they were a group, I can just align them with the head easily because exit routes groups as a single object. But here, if we select the two of them and align them with the ****, the two ice will be aligned individually and they will overlap. Luckily, there is a quick, easy solution. Before aligning them, make sure this button over here that says Move align selection as a group to build on. This will make it so instead, we'll treat them multiple objects selected as a single element, maintaining the spatial relationship. And now everything looks nice and tidy. There are other alignment options, but they are less important for our purposes. In either case, I would recommend you to pay attention to the Tooltip. Now what each of these protons to. The final tools I want to talk about has to do with color. First of all, as a quick reminder, the more robust way to control the colors and look of an object is to use the fill and stroke dialogue to open it. Go to object, Fill and Stroke. Here you can pick the colors of either their field or stroke of the selected object. I go into the right tab. Here. I want you to notice that you have to color selection moles. This one over here is the wheel. It has all the hues you can pick on the outer ring and the saturation and value on the tangle. But here below, you also have the HSB mode. You can pick colors in three sliders that separate the different values of a column. Both allow you to pick exactly the same colors, but in different ways. Usually you'll want the wheel when you want to pick colors visually. And the HSB sliders when you want to be more refined. What's nice about these sliders is that you can associate the numeric value of each color. This means that you can input this numbers to always get the same color. This will be useful to you because sometimes I'm going to pick a color and you can copy the exact color I picked by copying the numbers. On top there is this drop-down that gives you options to see how to pick colors. By default, it should say HSB. But in case that it is not, in this course, I'll be using the HSB mode. This basically has to do with the way some sliders work. One last thing regarding this dialogue, the final dub, the stroke style tab controls how the stroke looks. The most important option here is the width value. But notice one thing right next to the width, that is this drop-down that contrast the units. Make sure it always says px work in pixels. By default, Inkscape does not use pixels. So it's a pain having to constantly change it. Just remember to always change this drop-down to Px before him put in any type of value here. The other tool I want to remind you of is the dropper tool. Memorize the shortcut F7 or better yet, change it to something more comfortable with me using this tool all the time to get consistent colors by sampling from parts of the characters that are already made. The same hotkeys that you use in the palette applies here. If you just click, you apply the color to the selected object. But if you Shift-click, we apply it to the stroke. Get comfortable with this tool because we'll be using it all the time when we deal with color. And other states for the most common tools you'll be using. Don't worry, some of these fair debate over women. Like I said before, in the next few lessons, we'll be making many characters step-by-step and all of this that we just saw with the rain forest. So let's get to do that. 11. Biker Character: Let us start with the first character, the biker. For this character, I wanted a classic tough guy. And what's tougher than if I go. I felt that a biker could go for a more rectangular face to indicate some kind of toughness. So pick this head over here and copy it with Control C and paste it with Control V. Obviously, don't work on the original artwork. Always copy the assets to the side. But in case you forgot to make a copy and destroy the original assets. Always remember you can read, download the resources from the course page. So now select the object tool and using the arrows, let's get it so it looks a bit more square. Every tough guy needs some sunglasses. So I'm going to copy the sunglasses and I'm going to paste them on top of the hill. Okay, so here we have a problem that could happen to you anytime when you are working with the asset tag. Notice that the glasses were placed below the object shape. This is because Inc saves also copies the stack order of the assets. So it's possible when you paste it that it appears like this, hidden below another shape. This has an easy solution without deselecting the objects. Go here in the contents of the object tool to change the stack order. From now on to split up this whole drawing process, I'll be using shortcuts to move them up and down. The default shortcuts, our page up, page down. I'll be using them from now on. If you see an object move up and down out of nowhere. Now you know that I'm using shortcuts. Anyway. This glasses do not fit the size of the head. We need to scale it, maintaining the proportions. Remember, use the control key. By the way, I don't recommend you to start aligning everything as you're putting them. It is better to align everything by eye and wait until the end after you make any final adjustments to open the alignment dialogue and tidy everything up. Just like weak efficiency tip. Cool bike as well, bananas, right? This one bandana variation that has a more square shape and we're going to copy this one. To make it fit with the ****. We may need to scale it non-uniformly. That is, without using the Control key. I want you to notice that the Vandana roundness do not fit completely with the top of the hill. That's okay. I'm not going to fix it. I think it looks fine as it is. Sometimes. It's better to just roll with it. If something looks good. I think this nose looks perfect for our tough guy. So copy paste it into position with up the stack to be on top of the glasses and adjust the size by scaling uniformly. This half ear works fine for most characters who don't need a special type of year. You usually want ears below the hill, maybe overlapping just a little. That's how they look best. Adjust the size with uniform scaling. For the other ear, instead of copying and pasting, I will just duplicate this year hitting Control D. This will create a copy right on top. Then you just move it to the other side constraint in each horizontal axis with the object tool just hold Control while you move it to the other side. This will result in the year being exactly at the same height than the other one. No need for the aligned dipole. Now, we will flip it horizontally with the objects selected. Just hit the H key. Because unlike when you paste something, making a duplicate, racist duplicate to the top of the stack, you'll want to send a year to be below the head, just like the other one. Bike us absolutely need birds. And I think this one will do the trick. So copy-pasted, raise it to the top of the stack if necessary. Just to scale with the arrows. If you want. You can just the skeleton arrows to play with the proportions, making it longer. Or why though? I like it, but I think it needs something else. Maybe a 05:00 shadow. So we'll grab this over here. And move it to the hill. First, give you the right color. Open the fill and stroke dialogue. Go to object, Fill and Stroke. He didn't want to show you a quick technique to get a color that's similar, but a bit darker than another one. Something that's super common when picking colors for illustration. First with a bell-shape selected. Switch to the eyedropper tool over here. Or you can use the shortcuts F7. Now sample from anywhere on the skin. Now the birth has the exact same color than the skin. We don't want that with the bell is still selected. Make sure that you are in the field. Then go to the slider. And literally just a bit, not too much. This will make it so the bird is the same color, but a slightly darker, like I said, begin a darker version of a color, a super common in any type of illustration. And we're going to use this technique all the time, all throughout the rest of the course. So committed to memory with the Battle of the right color, send it above the ****, but below the other bell shape and adjust it to make it fit nicely. Let's clip it. Duplicate the head shape with Control D. And with this new duplicated still selected, shift, select the word, left-click, set clip. But here's the thing. I don't like the fact that the shadow indicates an upper lip, hair. It looks bad with the other bell that already indicates a position for the mouth. So switch to the node tool and select the two notes at the top and move them down. Then overlap the other birth to hide those nodes. And now it looks much better. This green area in the bell shape, which is a rectangle on top. It looks weird without the shadow. Let's give it the same color. Select the rectangle. Remember that you can select objects inside groups within L2. So there is no need to ungroup these shapes. Then switch to the dropper tool with F7 and sample from the shadow belt. To end the ****, I want this neutral mouth here. Copy it and put it here in this area of skin where it should be. This mouth is a line with a rounded cap. If you need to adjust its size, it may be better to address each stroke width instead. So selected, I go to the stroke style tab in the fill and stroke dialogue. Don't forget to switch to p x. I can tell you the exact number two input here, because the width value will depend on the size you're working on and what looks good to you. So give it something that feels nice and visible. I really liked everything here, but I think it could use a couple of extra finishing touches and thinking they will like the bicarb to have a couple of earrings. So grab and even from here and put it on top of one year scale it and rotated like this. I think a syllable Ealing would fit better, so change the color to this one. Finally, duplicate it. Moving to the other side constraint in each position and then flip it. I don't like the color of the bandanna. I want a nice red color for the main body. Give it this color. For the other shapes. We want a darker version of the rail so you can treat apart from the other shapes. So remember the darker color technique, just sample the color from this rail. They go to the slider and move it a bit down just enough so it's clearly different, but not that much. You can check out my colors if you want. But repeat the same step for the other shape behind to get an even darker rail. And it's almost done. I think now we will be a good moment to play around a bit, refining the positions, making sure you like everything where it is, and just moving things around with the object tool. Maybe making some proportional changes by scale in some shapes around. This is station refining. Once you have everything on, is something that you have to do if you want better illustrations. As Justin, things when you have the essential almost done is always easier than adjusting things as you go building it Anyway, when you're done, select everything with the object tool and hit Control G to group it. I think this character fits a more square body. Let's grab a square each body. And since it's gonna be a biker, I'd like him to have a leather jacket. So I think this one will do the trick. Copy-pasted, ungroup it so it's easier to work and eliminate the color whole shape. We want to do that. The connector is not going to have any neck. I like it, but I think I preferred a black color for the jacket. And because Tough Guys Don't feel cold, remote his shirt by changing the color. Just sample the color of the skin. However, now it's a bit too short for my liking. So switch to the node tool and holding control, so it's constrained vertically. Move this node, Abby down. When you're done, just delete the other side of the jacket and duplicate them. Modify side with Control D, move it to the other side and hit the H key to flip it, put it roughly into position. Later on we will tidy everything up. Now for a couple of last details. I'd like for him to look like a human, so I will add two nipples and a belly button. This has just going to be three perfect circles. Select the ellipse tool and holding control to make a perfect circle. Draw the shapes roughly into position. You can duplicate one of the nipples and move it to the other side if you want to give the exact dimensions for the color and the pons will just have a soft rail. Now for the belly button, you can sample the darkened skin dawn of the shallow bell-shape. I would like buttons on the jacket. So copy paste this item from the back, ungroup it and eliminate the line and give them a nice white collar. Then adjust the size and location of the row of buttons. Make heavy use of the uniform scaling. If you knew, move each one individually. Don't forget to hold the Control key so they are constrained vertically to the role. And the final detail to the jacket. Just copy paste this folder item, ungroup it, and place it on one of the sides. Adjust the size if you need it, because these are triangles, it should be easy to change its shape with an old tool with a darker black than the jacket. And remember, if you modify one, you can always do that trick of duplicate it. Move it to the other side and flip it horizontally. So grab the torso and group it, then put it below the hill. And of course, set the proportions by scaling both uniformly and non-uniformly. And it is still not too late for some final adjustments to their borders and false. We're done with the dorsal. Now let's continue with the arms. I think a tough Baikal needs some Duff alums. So I'm gonna pick this one over here. The thick ones, you know what to do, copy pasted. I think we can get away with Justice Scalia in it uniformly with the object tool. But if you need, remember you can switch to the node tool and select this bottom nulls and move them up or down using the Control key to constrain them. Regarding the hands. I really liked this one over here. Paste them into position and make them fit in size, scaling uniformly and making sure they match the width of the arm. When you have the complete arm, It's easy to adjust the size by scaling uniformly. When you're done with them. Just to the trick of duplicating with Control D and flip it with the HV. But before finishing, everybody can need some tattoos. So let's make something super quick. Select the Star Tool. Make sure that in adult controls, it will set for the star mode. And that it has five points. Right at the side. The field. Sample the color of the skin. And for the stroke, you can sample the color of the jacket. Move it into position, and go to the stroke style down in the fill and stroke dialer and give it a noticeable with I've just its position. So the size and location looks with further the two on the other arm. Let's make a super quick score. Let's pick the ellipse tool and draw a perfect circle holding Control. Give me the same black field. Switch to the rectangle tool and make a small rectangle at the bottom to imply some teeth. The eye sockets draw a rectangle. Sample the color from this screen with the dropper tool Bounded and rotated a bit and duplicate it to the other side. When you're done, it will be a good idea to group these shapes together, move it into position and adjust the scale. Now the final section of our character, the bottom. And in some characters of this style, one of the things they commonly do is to add another shape at the bottom of the torso to represent the pelvis. This gives the whole character a slightly more complex shape in a nice smooth transition to the legs. This one over here is one of the most common and flexible shapes for the pelvis. So copy paste it. And since we're here, we might as well copy the other shapes we are going to use. The legs are gonna be these ones. Just a simple rectangular legs. You don't even need an asset for that. We will just do it with the rectangle tool. But I put them here for the sake of completeness. We're also going to need some shoes and the simple ones over here, we'll do one last detail I think will look really cool. I'd like a belt. This will add some detail to the area and also high the upward transition between the torso and the genes. Okay, Let's just start up down the pelvis. Just move it into position and make sure to scale it so it's wide enough. If you feel like you could also scale it vertically to give it the right height. The blue is perfect for the genes, so I'm leaving it like it is. Move the legs into position and scale them so they feel nice and thick. Of course put them below the pelvis. I want the belt to be noticeable and to hide the transition between dorsal and gene. So put it on top, Send it to be below the jacket, but above the body. If you grew up the dorsal, you may need to ungroup it to do this. For the colors we want to be able to differentiate between two legs. So one is going to have to be darker than the other. For one leg sample the blue of the pelvis. For the other. Sample the blue from the pockets. Then move the shoes into position. You don't want them to be too thick. Remember that you can always scale non-uniformly to get what you want for as long as you don't scale it so much that it completely distorts the object beyond recognition. Now that the character is finished, stage comes in, the refining stage. This is where you go in and make some final adjustments and fix us to the character. It is much easier to make modifications and decisions with a fully finished character than it is when you are building it. In this stage, we are going to take advantage of that. We search and find things we don't like and we fix them. This is stage may feel a bit like visible because we are just moving things around and adjusting some proportions with the object tool, scaling it in a slightly moving things around. And at most, grabbing the node tool and making some really small scale adjustments to the shapes. However, this is extremely important to fix anything that you are not happy with. And we are done with this character. Hopefully this was easy to follow along. The next characters are going to go at a slightly faster pace. Because we already introduced all the tools we're going to use here. So if you later on, as you're working with another character, you have problems following what I'm doing or don't understand how to use some tool. Make sure to return to this lesson. For now, let's continue with the next character. 12. Woman Character: Now let's make a female character. In this lesson, I will pick up the pace a little bit less in detail with each tool from the previous lesson. So let's just start with the head again. A female needs a smaller, more subtle shapes for the hair. So I think this head over here, we'll work. This is going to have some common eyes and eyebrows. I want this super common half years. That's all I want this big earrings. This loops work great with attract the females. I want a small simple nodes for the hair. I want have to have some long hair, but maybe with something more interesting happening the fringe. So we'll take this haircut and this one, and I will match them together in a minute. Now let's assemble the ****. I'm going up the hair and remove the fringe. Move it to be behind the hill. Now grab the other hair and put it on top. You'll see how good it looks. Me in the eyes. They don't need to be too big. The nodes should be rather small. Along with the mouth. The youth should align with the hair in front you in the illusion that the hair is pulled behind. If you need, use the node tool to pull the hair up. Now, moving the readings, which will be nice and noticeable. And the eyebrows should be rather thin. You'll notice that I assembled the hill rather quickly and carelessly. And that's because it's always easier to edit things into something you like. Then nailing the design in one goal, just like with the biker. The sooner you get to this addition stage, this here that the sine will come. This next step is all about adjusting the location and size of each asset, mostly with the object tool. But here's something happened. I was not satisfied with the nose. I felt it made them look more like a child and an adult. So I decided to bring in a couple of gnosis and try them out. Try and assets out is super common when working in this way, it makes it easier to see variations. I finally decided to stick to this one. I'm still not done adjusting the proportions, but for now, I want to switch to the final colors the character is going to have. So open the fill and stroke dialogue. I give her this red color for the hair. I blade to the orbitals as well. I want to show you a bit of a super common design tricks that will magically improve the quality of your assignments. I will expand on this in a future lesson. So don't get too hung up on this step is always easier to adjust something when you have other things to compare it with. So it's very common to duplicate that assigned to the side and try variations on it. Does random stuff to see. If you like something more. It is super fast and easy to make a ton of variations where you make small changes and get to compare them with all the other ones. This way you get to pick your favorite of the bunch. I'm not doing anything that I haven't done before. Just using the object tool to scale and move things and try different positions and scales for different features. And I think I like this one more than the others. So I'm going to pick it and compare it with the original. And yes, I like this one better. So I'm going to keep it end-to-end the ****. Let's bring in the next shape and move it into position. Scale it so it's thin and not that long. We will overlap the body later on. And to differentiate from the skin color of the face, just sample the darker color from the ears. We are done with the head. If you want, you can adjust some final things. But we can already did that before. So I'll just move on with the body. The body, we wanted to have the clear separation between the upper torso and the lower torso. So this part is over here, will work perfectly for females that are supposed to be Kirby. However, for this case, will follow a different process. Instead will go for this value over here. Because I want her to have a long dress, will pick this shape over here. This will overlap with it. This is what I meant when I say that you should be creative. You will find that you can get really unique results by being resourceful with the assets. Do that for the arms. This time, I want to give it some degree of movement. And there is a type of arm that's precisely made to do that. This one over here. This ones are just some very thick strokes with a rounded end, but they work great with this type of characters. This time the legs are going to be separated. So we'll pick this one over here with a one big feet on a female. So this half feet will do the trick. These items over here are supposed to be sleeves. You can append to the character. These are really useful to throw on top in the articulations to hide the upward geometry. And because this character will have its arms in movement, we can use one of these. So let's start with the upper torso. The torso and scale it into position. You want it to be pretty thin compared with the body. The lower torso, the part with the dress should be a slightly wider and longer. More of the legs even put them below the dress so we can easily handle the width by moving them up and down. And put the shoes at the bottom of the legs. Feel some detail is missing. So let's translate got at the end. Grab one of the N nodes and move it up while constraining it vertically. Now it's a bit more interesting, but I'm still not happy with the bottom. So I'll give it some other week detail here. Duplicate the whole skirt, change the color to a random one so you can see what you're doing. And holding Control and Shift to scale it uniformly and from the center. Make it a smaller, not too much, just a bit. Then move it down and flip it horizontally with the H key. Finally, send it to be below the other skirt. Some quick adjustments to the side. Here I'm holding Control and Shift to make them smaller from the center. For a moment, I'll be moving and adjusting the size and locations of distress. This is what happens when you start to make any type of character that is not super simple. You need to adjust and try stuff all the time, not just at the end when you are done. The thing is that these adjustments are more preference than something that is either right or wrong. So different artists will have to adjust in different ways. So it cannot tell you exactly what you should be doing. It's up to you and what you like the most. But the tools are all the same. Moving with the object tool, scaling both uniformly and non-uniformly and maybe using denote to locationally. They're releasing any mystery that is, the finished address. Let's can be the final colors. Maybe a more intense than the hair? Now let's continue with the arms. Like I said before, the arms are going to be just two very thick strokes, which are the assets here is myelin. So it might as well be saying Hi, move it so your contacts with the dorsal just a bit. Adjust the curvature with the node tool so it looks like it's waving a bit too thick. So go to the stroke style tab in the freelance or dialogue and change the size to something that looks we'll do. Don't forget to change the drop-down, do px. Then put the hands in the other arm, move it into position. This time, we want it rest in at the side. The group that length more or less similar, so they look longer than the other. Then put the hand on its place by copying the other one or duplicating it. Finally, let's put this leaves in too high. The transitions between the dorsal and ounce don't make them to be lubricate it to the other side and flip it. I'm really not satisfied with the hand position. It looks like it's the man then something, we already have a character that will do something similar. So you'll see me fighting with his arms for a while. Really bothered by the change in color in the neck. So give it a color or shape the same color than the neck. I feel this whole area down below, it feels a bit empty. So let's add some kind of detail. I think it could use some folds. This is gonna be super easy. This is a style of cartoons rarely go for anything more complex than a few lines for texture. So that's what we're going to do. So grab the pen tool and make a couple of straight lines like this implies some overlapping forms or something. And I fill and stroke dialogue in the stroke style that give it some thickness. So it can be seen clearly. You can copy my width number, but since I don't know exactly the size you're working on, it may be better for you to eyeball the size. Make sure it's big and noticeable. A very important, make sure it has the round cap button to get on. It ends with a nice rounded form. Finally, let's give it some darker color from the low address sample while holding the shift key to apply it to the stroke. And we are done with the character. Now it's time to refine things. Like I said before, this stage can be a bit hard for me to guide you over, because it depends on the particular way you went over the design and how good something looks to your particular I. So I'm going to repeat what they always say. Use the object tool to play around with the proportions. Some of the other adjustments I made here where the thickness of the arm and legs and I move the hair just a bit to the side to reinforce that she is waving rather than protesting, are demanding something. We're done with the female character 13. Boy Character: Let's continue with the boy. The key to making shared characters is the proportions rather than the assets themselves. For children, a good hair is a perfect circle. For eyes. I wanted to give him some simple happy expressions. So this iss here with the cheeks showing through. Our perfect kids often have funky years. So maybe I'll pick this one over here. And I want a big open laughing mouth. I like this type of readiness that shows only the holds, the eyebrows. Maybe a couple of really nice. And the one that fits the health better would be layer rounded one. Let's begin with the hill. First of all, I want this character to have a different skin color than the rest of the characters in the freelance drug dealer. Give it this color. Check out the values if you want the exact same colors than me. The hat and scale it into position. Rounded capsule feed more or less perfectly in the circle. But you can always scale it vertically to change their shape. Flip it horizontally. You'll need to make the eyes too big to get a cute character. Plus, I want the eyes to be spread apart to give the character some personality and put them fairly close to the edge. Not forget to ungroup them. Move in one year, then change the color to the color of the skin. And for the insight, it should be a darker color of the same color of the skin. Duplicate it to the other side and flip. It. Didn't change the color of the leaves of the eyes. The nose should be fairly small, about the size of the eyes and close to them. Give it a darker version of the skin color. The mouth. I want it to be big and occupied the rest of the space in the hill. Now the eyebrows and base them on top. Now I'm feeling something is missing on the cap. I'm thinking maybe I could put some lock of hair showing through the gap opening in the front. So I'll take one of these locks of hair and put them on top of the cap. Now comes to familiar step of adjusting stuff. Like I said many times before. This step is more personal. It's up to you to refine the location and position so everything looks the way that you wanted. So I'm going to skip past this process just so we can move on at a decent pace. I think the gap will look better with a nice red color. And the color of the bison should be a.gov. Well, then I'll continue refining. I forgot to add the neck. So grab it and pull it into position below the health favor. And don't forget to be with the darker color of the skin. Once you are done, group everything. Now for the rest of the body, the torso is gonna be this simple rounded square with a shirt, the same type than the one we use with the Baikal. Because it's going to work some shirt. We could save a bit of time and grab this little rounded down. The legs are going to be just the basic separated legs. Simple rounded shoes. This simple hand we'll do And for the bottom, I like is simple square pelvis that's supposed to be short or something similar. This is just a super common pelvis. You see all the time, especially in film characters like children. Let's make it a body with kids who won some fairly small bodies in comparison with the health. So what are the dorsum and put it into position? Don't forget to leave the color opening the same color than the other skin. Now make it fairly small. How about half the size of the hill? Now that I have the shorts and make them slightly smaller than the width of the sharp. Here, I adjusted the length of the shorts because I thought they look a bit too short. But here's the thing. This model you see now. It's made of a couple of clips, shapes, including a shallow shape. My idea was to make it as easy as possible for you to edit it. But I came to realize the shorts were just a mess to handle. So I decided to change how the object is made. Now in the pack, their shorts are made of three different colored rectangles. No longer it is clipped and no longer uses a low opacity shadow shape. I think now it's clearer to use when you want to make it longer justice scaled down. Now would have the M and move it into position. Skeletal. It's a bit about the same width than the neck. Maybe smaller. Lengthwise, it should reach the shorts without the hands. Now moving the legs, put them in the center of each leg opening and make them about the same width than the neck. And scale them so they are quite short. Moving the shoes and make them fairly thin. I forgot to add the hand. Finally, change the color of the skin. When you have two body parts with the same color, vision, make one of them darken so it's clearly visible. Change the color of the sleep to a darker blue. He didn't give him the shorts a column. You can copy mine. But remember that my shorts are different than yours. So I didn't need to be color to the darker side. You're going to have to do that. I trust that by now. You know how to give it a darker version of the screen. But here's the thing. We're gonna be clever now. And we're gonna give the elastic or belt section of the shorts a darker blue. So it looks like it's part of the shirt and not the short. This way. It looks like one of those shirts that are closed off at the bottom. With the character done. I started the refinement sections. And as, just as some things, but really quickly I realized that something feels missing at the bottom. I think some stocks will be great here. So pick these ones over here. The simple ones. Move them into position and make them the scholar. I would like that the two sections have a slightly different white. Maybe the lowest section should be slightly darker. And now we're finally ready to start some refinement. And we are done with the boy 14. Girl Character: Let's continue with the girl because we are still working with a kid here. I want a circle health, some simple health ears, and maybe some events. I know I want some bold look. I'll pick this IS and of course, eyebrows. I think this mouth will work for the expression I'm going for. And the health nodes will work for a good. Regarding the hair, I want to do something interesting. I'm going to build a new haircut with this hair and the headband. Let's begin building the new health. First, ungroup the hair and delete the French. Put the hair shape below the ****. Just like with the woman, makes sure it's just a bit bigger than the head itself. Just the scale. If you feel that you need it, then move on to headband. Scale it so it fits. Use the notes if you feel like you need it to be why that above. Now, moving the eyes and the eyebrows. We want a fairly thin eyebrow. The nose should be relatively high. The mouth. I want to put it in this slight angle. Put the ideas into position. So they are at about the same level of the end of the Hillman m plus earrings. Make sure they leave the silhouette of the ear. So they add more noticeable. Open the field and stroke dialer and give it some blonde color to the hair and eyebrows. Now that we're done, you can play around a bit with the proportions. But here's the thing. I'm not quite convinced with the US. I think more rounded ears will work better for the child. So big this years over here, and place them into position. I want the pink color scheme. So let us start by giving some pink to the headband. And now some quick adjustment for that in the neck, like making the hair longer. The next should be quite thin and long. Don't forget to give it a darker color of the skin. For the body, I wouldn't have to have a width of loose clothes. So we'll pick this dorsal and in a minute you'll see that we're gonna get a bit creative with it. I went on simple bounded alums and hence She's going to have the same joint and simple feed. And I want to have to have socks, just like the boy. Begin by moving the body to the location and scaling it. We want it to be smaller than the width of the hill. And here's the thing, because I wouldn't have to have loose clothes I want the whole shape to be inverter using the biggie, flip it vertically, and now move the color shape to the top. Escalate if you needed. The fit with the width of the neck. Intrinsic color of the shirt, the same color than the headman. Put the lesson, we went longer, but not that wide. I want the width of the neck. Just the width of the shirt. Using shift, if you feel like it needs it. Put the shoes in and make them super thin. Moving the arms and the hands. Of course, we want really thin arms about the width of the legs behind the shirt, but above the hill. And pull the bottom nodes down to make it longer and give the roundness or the top. Moving the hand Omega it freedom. You can duplicate the whole arm to the other side. Now let's make the shorts. I thought I could show you a different way. You can do this. Just duplicate it two legs and scale them up and give them a blue collar. One should have a lighter version of blue and the other should have a darker version. The shoes the same pink color from the shirt. And moving the socks, the skeleton to fit the leg. Forget to change the color of the socks from random sampling. When they are, then move it to the other side, but change the colors so they are all darker than the version of the colors on the other leg. Adjust the sucks if you feel like it needs it. He didn't want to start playing with some of the shapes and changing some proportions because the body is basically done. However, I did find that the color of the neck bothers me. It feels a bit too dark. I don't know exactly why. So I did mess around with the colors to fix it. I think it looks okay now, we're almost done. But I don't like this idea. The sheriff, it feels a bit too empty. I'm going to add some details. First, bladder Rectangle Tool and drag a rectangle at the bottom part and lipid with the shirt here with a darker pink. Now I think it will look funny if we take the skull from the data of the biker and put it in the shirt of the girl. If you don't have the biker done, you can take the sign from the computer character document. I'm just going to put it in the center with the same darker pink. Now the design is done. Now it's time to make some refinements. And as a seed for the character of the girl. 15. Man Character: For this final character, I wanted to make one of those that have a unusual body. Here I'll be showing you how to construct a character using a single shape for the body and the ****. This type of characters, or less common in vector illustration. But you see them once in a while and they are a ton of fun to make. First of all, we're going to use this hair as **** and body. Some simple eagles, symbol, eyes and eyebrows. This guy is going to be angry. So this mouth is perfect. We haven't tried a triangular nose so far. So why not? I like this haircut. And we need a funny bad start with the body using the modifiers in the rectangle. So it's a bit longer than a normal. He'll make sure everything is completely rounded. We want the median body type. Start by placing the ****. Remember to ungroup and be careful because this is a two-piece haircut. Both objects the same codon. Put the ears just below and adjust the size. Moving the eyes, adjust the location and size for the orbitals. Remember that we want this guy to be angry. So make them thick and put them in an angle. Moving their mouth, and then finally moving the funny variable, choose the colon and a scaling from the center so it fits with the shape of the mouth. The head is more or less finished. So if you want, you can go in and refine. But here once again, I feel there is something missing. I think sunglasses would work fine with him. So let's grab these classes over here, Group and remove the ice and then place the glasses on top of the hill. And if you needed, adjust the position and the scale of either the eyes or the glasses. For a final detail, I think it would be funnier if this guy has some red nodes using the freelance drug. Use this. Now for the body. We're going to need some simple separated legs and simple shoes. We want the same bend the arms that we gave them to the woman because they are gonna be in movement. And also we want a fist. And this hand over here is the closest to that. I'm thinking I want him to have working clothes, so grab the belt, die, and buttons. I think it's gonna be easier to start bottom-up with the legs. We want them to be quite thick and short. We can have this guy be naked and angry. So let's give him some pants. We're going to use like leap, grab the Rectangle Tool and drag covenant the entire bottom section and then clip it with the body with this red brown color and apply it to the legacy as well. Please the two shoes. Now we need a shirt. This one is going to be active as well. So grab that rectangle and draw on top. You get these white collar. Then perform the clip and move the clip to be below the pants in the stack order. Okay, so because this is a workshop, I want him to have the color opening. We could do this in many different ways. But the easiest way is to simply draw a triangle on top with the color of the skin. This way we also get to adjust it later on if we want. So grab the Pen tool and make a triangle in the center of the body. Give it the color of the skin, and remove the stroke. Let's grab the color false and put them on top of the opening. This shape is just a triangle. So there is no need to bring in this shape because I made it with the pen tool. But since it was there, why not use it? Anyway? Give it a darker white so it's visible. Now, move the thigh in, make it fairly big, big enough to reach the bands. And to make the whole phase funnier. I would like to make the bird longer to overlap with the shirt. So pick the node tool and select the bird shape. Select the bottom nodes and holding Control. Move them down so they overlap with the shirt. I'm going to take a few moments to make some quick adjustments to the proportions and shapes of the body. And to finish the dorsal, I want to add the belt. I want the bell to be clipped inside the body in case we want to move it down later on, maybe over the curved section, move it into position and perform a clip with their body shape that make some other adjustments if you feel they're neither. In this case. I just made the buckle longer so that I won't get obscured by the belt. And move the EBIT up to you with some space. For the final detail, it's at the Allen's. We wouldn't need the button so you can delete them, place them at the side and give it the same rate than the shirt. Don't forget that this is a stroke. So you will need to hold Shift when sampling, change the width in their stroke style, if you knew. But here it is fine, extended to about the end of the torso. Then moving the fist. The other arm is going to have a fist app. So place this drug so it looks like it's raising its own title. Keep it about the same length than the other. When you're done, please the fist. Now we are again at this station refining, fix anything you don't like trying new things. So just play around to see if you can come up with something that looks better to you. And just like that, we are done with the final character 16. Creating Variation: In my opinion, probably the greatest benefit vector illustration has over traditional illustration is the ability to make AC variations super quickly and efficiently. And that's the first thing you need to know about character design. Variations improve the quality of your designs. Once you have ten or so variations of the same thing, you get to compare and pick the superior version. Ideally, you'd make a ton of different characters that revolve around an idea. Like, for example, five or six biker characters that are similar looking but are completely different. The signs. That's the traditional way of character design. We're not gonna do that in this lesson. Instead, we'll be taking the characters that we have ready-made and put them through a process where we make dance and dance of quick modifications. But recreate a lot of versions super easily, very similar to what we did with the head of the woman character. This part, in my opinion, is one of the most fun parts of using vectors. You get to discover new characters that you didn't even knew you made. So let's make the hands first and then move to the entire body. So first, we need to prepare the character to make variations as easily as possible. In this case, I'm going to ungroup the head of the biker and copied here what we want is that all the different elements we could want to validate to be nicely separated in their own groups. So it's easier to grab them and do our thing. So the first thing we may want to evaluate is the size and location of the bandana. Makes sure that all the shapes that makes up the bandana and in its own group. Remember to make the group, you'd select all the elements and hit Control G. In this case, the bandana was already it's on group, so I left it as it is. The second thing you may want to move around and the scale or the glasses. So make sure they are also a single element. If you didn't touch anything, they should be already a group. Well, if you can group them before, don't forget to group them again. Then as this another thing we may want to evaluate, again, it was already a group. Level and mouth should be a single element as well. This one's were not originally a group, so don't forget to group them. I think the shadow could be separated from the other barrel because we may want to have some variations where we don't want any. So always keep in mind the use cases when grouping objects and the head shape of course, should be its own thing. This is going to be one of the first things you'll want to change. The ears are the only feature in this character that has two of the same kind. In other characters that don't use classes, you will have also two eyes and most likely to eyebrows. In those cases, I recommend you to not group them together and keep them separated for maximum flexibility. Anyway, here are the ears are separated from the unions. So group them. Now we have all the things we may want to evaluate separated into easy to manipulate elements. Now, making variations is actually super easy. If you can follow along the course, then you'll have no problem making variations. Have to do here is to move around shapes and scale them both uniformly and non-uniformly, and maybe make some modifications to the shape of the head. This is going to be similar to those moments in the characters. But I was adjusting and refining things. Only that now you want to make significant changes to the IRB. Another sign, you had to have a history of all variations you made. Don't erase it version you don't like. Keep it as an idea of what not to do in the future. Or maybe as a source of inspiration by taking some things you did indeed liked. A particularly good source of variation is the main shape of the head. Start there. If you don't know where to start, changing the shape of the head often leads to near the science. By being forced to adjust the elements to the new head shape. Don't be afraid of plain straight eliminating some of the elements that make your character unique. You'll see that eventually I'll end up deleting the birth and even the bandana. And this will result in an almost completely different character. And that's okay. Of course you should respect the basic anatomy after certain point. These are cartoons after all. But do try to be careful at the moment of placing features in web locations. The point is no longer reads as a human. Other than that, the other tip I can give you. So try to stay true to the rough idea behind the character. This is now they have rule to follow because sometimes it's fun to discover new characters coming out of nowhere. In this example, I will stick to the assets that were already there as a demonstration of how different somethings can look just by moving things around. But if you want, you can get a lot of power just by switching some acids. Can I'm using entirely the object tool to scale and move and rotate things around. But eventually you'll face a character. You will need to use the node tool, maybe to make some haircut feet or some other body shape to do? Correct? In any case, if you are resourceful and willing to compromise the amount of modification to the geometry of a character You will need to do can really get to be tiny. And we are done with the ****. He made five variations only, just for the sake of saving some time. But I recommend you to make as many as you feel necessary. And here are the other variations of the heads of the other characters where I repeated these exact same steps. Let's continue with the body. Making variations to the body is almost the same then with the ****, with the main difference that here, there is a bigger emphasis in working with the scale of the elements rather than moving them around. Once again, let's repeat the same process than with the hands, starting by grouping the shapes that we will want to create. In this case, I'll group the torso and pelvis as a single element. The two arms by separate. The two legs and shoes are basically meant to be a single thing. So group them all together. Then I think, you know what to do. Move and scale, trying new things, new or proportions. Just like with the face. Focus on quantity and variations. Don't waste your time aligning everything up real nice. Just eyeball everything. Only after you pick your favorite version. You should spend some time refining things. One small detail that applies here, but not so much in the feaces is the distortion. It is possible to scale something so much that looks unpleasantly distorted. Because here we have a ton of different shapes that will most likely suffer that distortion. I believe it's best to avoid it rather than attempt to fix everything with the node tool. The idea here is to take advantage of the style and tools to make super quick and easy variations. Not carefully read the assigning the same character over and over again. And here is the endless odd. I think you can tell how different each version is. They could very much be completely different characters. Here are the other versions of the other characters bodies. Let's bring in the hills and make some sort of grid. What we can see all the possible versions of our character. This is more or less how you assign a character, making tons of variations and then begin the ones you like the most. This grade is a really nice tool because you can see and evaluate all the possible designs at once. Like I said in the intro, I'm sure if you spend some time here, you'll find a version you'd like more than the original one. But this is as far as I'll go for now. The next step will be to pick your single favorite by making further smaller variations. If I had to pick a single one, I guess this is my favorite. So let's take it out to the next stage. But before moving on, I may disagree with all the other characters as well. So here is how they look. Here we want to repeat the same steps, but making only smaller and more subtle variations. After all, if we pick this assign, this means that we are more or less happy with the end result. This is just the final refinements. Here. We'll just grab the assets and make some minor modifications to the location and the scale. But to a smaller degree than before. Before we wanted to explore new ideas. Now we want to refine the, the sound with the data. You'll notice that I'm working on the entire character at once here. This is so I can see the whole better. Here is the final result. You can see that the difference or not as pronounced as before, all of them are more or less the same, but each change does matter and thus make a difference. My favorite of the bunch is this one. And this were the refinements I made of the other characters. And we're done. This is the original biker I designed. This is the version that went through the pipeline of variations. It may be that you prefer the original version, but I like this one much more. And they want to show you how the final version of each one came out. Of course, this is the n basalt of my personal favorite peaks. If you were to follow this process, you will end up with completely different characters. But I just wanted to show you and compare them with the original. I certainly like the newer versions much more. That's it for this lesson and for this course, I recommend it to stay for the last lesson where I will share some final words and advice 17. Conclusionsk 1: Congratulations on finishing the course. Hopefully you enjoy this father gentle introduction to the world of character design. I'm sure you're asking yourself what should be the next step? And here you can go in two ways depending on what was, what got you hooked. If you enjoyed bacteria illustration and drawing with keyboard and mouse, I have quite a few courses on drawing and rendering use and Inkscape. If you're a beginner, I would recommend you to check out character design with insane. Or maybe to the vector rendering to really push the limits of rendering and finalists and sketches using Inkscape. If on the other hand, you'd like to learn more exclusively about character design. I think the next candidate should be cartoon character design use in Inkscape. This is very similar to this one, only that it does not use APAC and instead shows you how to build the next level of cartoon characters, Debussy and animation. This course also uses Inkscape and keyboard, the mouse. Not forget to check out the resources. I've included a few helpful links to completely the complimentary material on everything we've seen here. They range from full-on video courses to a few simple articles. Make sure to check them out. If you have any questions about the course, please stand out in contacted me through the cost base so I can answer as fast as possible. I'm also always looking for feedback and ideas for extra content. So please don't be shy to contact me. And that's it for this course. I really hope it was helpful and that you have some fun. And I'll see you in the next one. Bye