All language subtitles for 008 Form Fundamentals In Characters.en

All right.

In this lecture we're going to be learning about form and how it plays into our character designs.

So this is the third tier of our drawing fundamentals.

So after line comes shape.

And then next we want to turn our shapes into forms so we don't just want flat 2D shapes.

We want them to actually have some form.

Even if you're drawing a 2D character you need to have a three dimensional understanding of that character.

That's where form comes in.

So what is form form is just a three dimensional object basically.

So there's different ways we can show form we can show it through highlights and shadows we can show

it through construction lines.

So examples of this would be let's say cube for example just by drawing lines we can see that it's three

dimensional because we can see three different sides at the same time and we can also take that a little

bit further we could shaded in on one side maybe shaded in a little bit lighter on the other side and

keep the top surface nice and light.

And by adding lighting it makes it look a little bit more three dimensional as well.

So basically everything can be broken down into simple form just like everything can be broken down

into simple shapes.

So let's go ahead and let's start breaking some characters down into their simple forms.

So right here we have Woody and we're going to break him down into a simple form.

So the first thing I notice when I look at him is that his head is basically a round cylinder.

It might be a little bit more complicated than that when you get into the details but if we want to

break down into its most simple forms it needs to be a cylinder.

So it looks like it's a little bit rounder down here at the bottom.

And I can add some construction lines which by the way adding lines like this.

So for example on a sphere if I go ahead and I draw lines like this on IT and lines like that they kind

of show the curvature of that form.

Those are considered construction lines and they just help your viewer understand the form or help yourself

understand it when you're doing under drawings like we are right now.

So I can do a few construction lines just help me understand that this is a round object it's almost

just shaped like it can seem with up here.

This is a little bit wider of one

and then we can go ahead and just kind of sketch in a disk type shape up here.

So it's just kind of like a sort of a stretched out half moon shape that then kind of comes around like

this.

Great.

Next let's go ahead and break his neck down into a simple form so it's just kind of a nether cylinder

just like that.

His body is also just a simple cylinder

his arms or cylinders for the most part

in these arms over here.

And then for the hands I'm just gonna make them sort of simple block shapes for now.

We don't have to get super detailed with that

like that.

Same with his legs his legs are also going to be super simple cylinder shapes or forms

and his boots will also be cylinder shaped so I'm just going to kind of simplify the opening of his

boot bring it down like that.

Same with this one then this part right here we can kind of simplify that into a little bit more of

a just a little bit more of a complicated shape it's kind of a three dimensional trapezoid like that

do the same thing on this side.

Just like that.

So now we go ahead and we turn off our Woody image.

You can see that now we have his basic forms right there and we understand the form and three dimensions

of our character can draw a few more construction lines in there just to help understand a little bit

better and the reason why form is really important is because then when you want to go in and add things

like lighting or if you want to turn your character's head or body or something like that if you don't

understand how their form is working in three dimension then it's not you're not going to be able to

do it.

So having an understanding of what the forms are the volumes and how round and big things are is going

to really help you make your drawings of characters look more realistic.

Let's go ahead and have a look at another example.

So here's Elsa from Frozen.

Let's go ahead and we're gonna break her down into a simple form so her head we can just break it down

into a very simple short form which would be a sphere.

We want to draw this line through the center of her face.

We always want to do a center line for the face and then for the eyes we can kind of just draw this

rounded shape because she's looking upwards.

We're kind of seeing more of the roundness overhead.

She's looking straight forward her eyeline might just be kind of a flat line like that but because we're

she's looking upward and we're kind of seeing the underside of her face we're gonna see a little bit

more curvature right there.

Same within the eyebrows we also see a little bit more curvature in the mouth as well.

Then we can go ahead and put in a sphere for the neck which we're looking at it from the side so it's

going to kind of just look like a rectangle.

We probably get some sort of round shapes for the shoulders.

Now we can't see your shoulder over here but I know it's going to be right about there.

So I just draw that in for her upper body I'm going to do just kind of a big round egg type shape can

draw a center line through her chest

line.

That then I can go ahead and draw an oval down here for her hips do the same thing just draw some construction

lines just to help us understand what the form is and we can go ahead and connect those with kind of

a cylinder like shape.

And then somewhere in here we would have her legs should kind of be sort of cylinder shapes

then our arms would also be cylinders

meant for her hands I'm just gonna maybe break it up in two kind of around shape right there around

form no hands get a little bit complicated when you have to break them up into their simple forms we'll

get more into more detail the forms of the hand but for now we can just kind of make these sort of rectangles

like that.

The main point of this is just so we understand the overall bulk of the form.

So we don't need to get into the details like the eyes and the fingers and stuff like that.

We just want to have a basic understanding.

So now we go ahead we turn her image off you can see that we have this basic form drawing over now with

the spheres and cylinders and stuff like that and then all that can kind of be connected with lines

to really finish it out.

You could draw her hair and remember which side or braid was on but you could draw her braid in like

that and start just like blocking it all in right.

You could go ahead and draw her her dress

and from there you could just go ahead and start detailing it out.

This would be considered your under drawing and then on top of that you do your more detailed final

drawing.

All right let's have a look at one more example.

Right here we have this email.

Let's say that we're drawing a character like this guy and he's leaning up against a motorcycle.

Really cool guy.

So basically break his head down into we can kind of actually kind of break this down into more of a

raindrop shape.

Like that have a line go into the center of his face as a construction line scene with the eyeline and

the head can be a cylinder then the torso.

Let's go ahead and make that kind of a point to make that kind of a trapezoid shape like this.

It's kind of a weird view of it but you can see that we have a trapezoid type shape and this bottom

area would be kind of in shadow it's the bottom side of it

let's go ahead move on to his arm and shoulder so his shoulder would kind of be a sphere his bicep looks

pretty round too so I'd kind of like an oval almost

and then we could go ahead and do sort of a cylinder a tapered cylinder for the forearm like that and

I'm just going to do kind of cubes or rectangles or something like that for the hands and I want to

get too detailed with that.

And then down here in the torso and go ahead and break this down into kind of a rectangle.

But since we're looking at it from the side we're not going to see very much but we might kind of see

the top view of it like that.

And then let's go and do the legs so the legs are just going to be cylinders basically

just like that

make sure we get that back leg.

Great.

Now let's go and do this foot for the foot.

Let's just kind of break it down into a some sort of a rectangular shape.

Am I going to get super complicated with I'm going to keep it very simple but as we get further into

the course you're gonna learn how to break things down into a little bit more advanced shapes that will

help you draw.

So now if we go ahead and we turn off his image you can see that we have his basic form now and he actually

looks three dimensional.

He's not just a bunch of shapes he actually has some dimension because of the actual forms drawn in

here such as these cylinders for the legs or this cube for the pelvis area and then from there you could

go ahead and connect this stuff and start detailing on top of it.

So let's go ahead and let's learn how to draw some forms.

So just like the shapes there's a few basic forms you're gonna be using when you're drawing your characters.

So the first one is going to be a sphere.

So you start off with a circle like we did before remember to draw from your shoulder and then for the

sphere you need to add a center line.

So a vertical line and you're gonna want to add a horizontal line.

So if we're looking straight on at this it's just going to be straight lines like that.

But if we start to look at it at a different angle so let's say that this center line is the center

of the face of a character.

They're looking to this side and their head is turn then we're actually gonna start to see the curvature

of that line.

And this is called a construction line.

So that is a construction line

construction lines are really good to help you understand what your form is.

And let's say our character we're looking downwards a little bit or their head was turned downwards

so instead of just seen a straight line like that for the eyeline we would see a little bit more of

a curved line and the line would be a little bit lower on the sphere like that so a sphere is gonna

be the first example.

Now next we're gonna have cylinders.

So cylinders we can draw by just drawing a circle here and a circle here and just kind of connecting

those like that.

And that's the simplest way to create a sphere if we wanted to we could go ahead and just erase out

this area right here now you can see it looks a lot more like a cylinder we also can draw cylinders

at different angles.

So for example for looking at it from more of a side view this circle here or this oval you're actually

gonna want to draw it more like an oval depending on what the perspective is.

But in this case we would draw it very flat like that and another very flat one down here.

We could go ahead and connect those just like that and then you race out that path right there.

And now we have another cylinder but we're kind of looking at it from more of a side view.

But we can still see a little bit of the top surface in the round curve at the bottom.

We also get cubes so cubes are just gonna be a series of straight lines.

So first we start by drawing one surface.

A lot of the times it's going to look kind of like a diamond depending on the angle you're looking at

it from in this case it's going to be kind of like a skewed diamond like that.

We're going to get another one like this

all right.

And then lastly we get the trapezoid.

So trapezoid is gonna be a lot like the Cube.

The difference is we want to draw the top surface like that.

And in the bottom surface we want it to be a little bit larger.

So for example I would go ahead and draw the bottom surface like this

and then I can connect from that corner to that corner from there to there and from there to there and

then we have a three dimensional trapezoid.

So basically what's happening is if we do this as a cube on the draw with dotted lines come straight

down like this across like that and instead of drawing it instead of drawing the lines to this surface

down here what I did is I extended those outwards to make it a trapezoid rather than an actual cube.

All right.

So when we're drawing forms just like shapes we can exaggerate those forms and warp them.

So for example with the sphere we can make that more of a rounded or an ellipse type shape.

So I can still draw my construction line in there.

You can see that it's been stretched out.

We can do the same thing with the cylinder.

So a lot of the times we're gonna want a tapered cylinder so we draw a smaller circle at one end and

a larger circle at the other end or oval.

If you want to think of it like an oval and then you can see that it kind of tapers outwards.

I could probably make that taper out just a little bit more just so you can see what I'm talking about

a little bit better.

So like that good your race out that part.

And now we have more of a tapered cylinder and this might be used for something like the fore arm or

the calf of somebodies leg.

So tapered cylinders are gonna be super useful when you're drawing characters.

We also can warp things or curve things so for example if we're drawing a cone which is actually in

another shape that you might find in your characters or cone is just going to be an oval like that draw

some construction lines and they're gonna race this part out actually.

So there is a cone and in the case of a cone we could go ahead and warp that so we could kind of curve

the lines like this almost like we're drawing a curved triangle.

But then we want to round out the bottom to make it look like a cone maybe add some construction lines

in their center line or something like that

we could also warp something like a tapered cylinder so I go ahead and draw a small circle there and

then maybe a larger circle down here and you can just draw curves if you don't wanna erase it out it's

like that.

And then I can just go ahead curve these lines up unto the other shape like that.

And now we have a curved tapered cylinder draw a few construction lines in there so we can understand

it better now.

Form is used for all kinds of different things forms just helps you do your under drawing.

So if you're not drawn in the form and you just try going in and drawing the detail it's gonna be really

hard.

There are very few artists that can actually do this.

You always want to start with form an example of this would be let's say we were drawing something like

a top hat or we could just go ahead let's say that this is the part that's gonna be on our character's

head that's the opening of the top hat and then the top area.

Let me go ahead and actually move this out of the way.

So we have a little bit more space here

so there's the opening for the hat and then we can go ahead and draw a bigger oval up here.

Now if you're kind of lost Don't worry you're gonna see the top hat here in a second.

So we're basically going to make a tapered cylinder kind of but we're gonna kind of curve these lines

out right here and then we can go ahead and add the rim part of the top hat so we can just kind of draw

a circle like that

we could kind of add a little bit of a ledge by drawing another line right there just to kind of make

it look like the edges of the top hat are kind of curled up

you could even sometimes your construction lines or things that would actually show up.

So if we put kind of a band around this hat that works as a construction line and kind of tells us about

the form a little bit more but it also belongs there.

And then if you wanted to you could just switch over to like a black color and we could just draw on

top of this just to redefine where we want our lines to be

but there's one example of where we would actually use form in our drawings.

So what I want you to do now is I want you to go ahead and I want you to practice drawing forms.

So the first thing I want you to do is I want you to practice just drawing the simple form so drawing

spheres drawing cylinders drawing cubes trapezoid and cone shapes after you do that.

I want you to do those about five to 20 times each and each one I want you to tried to kind of rotate

the shape a little bit kind of changes so maybe draw a cylinder from the sides and be kind of rectangular

like that and then maybe try doing one where you're looking almost straight down on it and it kind of

goes back like this

right.

So try all kinds of different use of these shapes.

It's OK if you can't come up with a whole bunch of them but it's good to try to draw them at different

views.

Now if you can recreate some of these in paper or you have a ball sitting around or a cube or something

like that that can really help as a reference if you look at it and try to change the angle of it and

stuff like that and then draw what you see but go ahead and practices practice the sphere the cylinder

the cube the trapezoid and the cone.

Once you do that I want you to go ahead and try to warp some of them so try warping the cone like I

did here warping the cylinder like I did there and then if you want you can even you go ahead and try

drawing something simple like a top hat or tissue box or a water bottle just try drawing something out

of your head but use form to do the under drawing and then on top of that you can go hand darken your

lines.

Thanks for watching this lecture and I'll see you guys in the next one.