Original subtitles

In this lecture we're gonna be talking about visual libraries.

So what is a visual library.

Well this is just sort of a library inside your head where you store all the images that you've drawn

or that you've studied so that you can call upon them and recall them and draw them within your character

designs or any type of drawing for that matter.

So how do we build a visual library.

Well it's basically just comes from studying and drawing like I said but there's a little bit more to

it than that.

I'm going to tell you kind of my technique for building up my visual library.

And we're going to review it in this lecture.

But first let's talk about why we need visual libraries.

The reason why we need a visual library is because a lot of the times you think you understand what

something looks like a really good example of this that you probably are all familiar with is drawing

somebodies face somebody might think hey I look at my face and people's faces every day but they'd actually

don't know how to draw it.

So you can see here there's a lot of mistakes here.

People will draw the nose as an upside down seven eyebrows will just be straight lines.

They won't have the right proportions the eyes will just kind of be football shaped the mouth or the

teeth look terrible.

The ears will be above the eyebrows all kinds of mistakes because we don't we haven't actually studied

a human face and drawn it before.

Now you might have.

I'm not saying you haven't but people that can't draw the human face haven't actually studied it.

And so they don't have a visual library or they don't at least have a visual library for the human face.

So might come out looking something like this.

Another example would be a bicycle.

Bice calls a pretty complicated thing draw and if you don't actually look at one and study it and remember

how it works and how to draw it will come looking something like this.

You can see that this is actually even though you can tell it's a bike.

It doesn't look real it doesn't look correct.

The frame looks all weird you never seen a frame like that before.

And it just looks terrible if you were to compare this to an actual photograph of a bike you'd see how

accurate it is.

And one more example would be let's say some sort of a coat.

So this doesn't look terrible just like the bike in the person you can tell what it is but doesn't look

very good because we haven't actually studied a coat or a jacket for that matter.

So for example these colors maybe you could have colors like that on your character's costume but I've

never seen colors like this in real life it's going to wrap more around like that you're gonna have

more of a rounded shape in there.

And so we can go ahead and draw a study of a coat.

So we have a better understanding of this.

So how do we remember what things look like.

Well the best way to do it is I think is to draw and not only draw but we want to draw something at

least twice.

So for example we're going to do an example with these horns and we don't just want to draw them twice.

We want to draw one from one angle and then another one from the other angle but you want him to be

pretty similar.

So for drawing these horns for example you'd want to find a second drawing of horns and draw those from

a different angle but they want you want them to be the same horns and then what we do is once we've

drawn it twice looking at reference then we want to go ahead and try to draw out of our head.

So without looking at any photographs the third drawing will be out of our head.

And even if it doesn't look perfect you'll see that you actually remember a lot about those horns and

you can redraw them and now they're kind of solidified in your visual library.

Now the more you would draw these horns the better you'd become at remembering what the horns look like

and you have to do this for a lot of different things clothing horns people's faces all hairstyles you

need to build up a visual library and we do that from drawing studies and studies can also be of other

people's artwork so don't feel afraid to do a study of somebody else's character design so you can understand

their style and the form of their character and all that good stuff.

So let's go ahead and let's do an art study of these horns so that we can put it into our visual library

because maybe we want to add some horns to our character so many go ahead and I'm just going to start

drawing what I see there.

So I'll start out by just roughly sketching out the horns the way I see them start with the lines in

the shape.

All right great.

So now that I have that blocked out I want to kind of start working on the form in the way I'm going

to do this is by.

You can see that there's this texture lines going across the horn and those kind of almost work like

a wireframe if you remember talking us talking about that in the form lecture we can use lines and construction

lines and wire frames to kind of suggest the form.

So for example I can do that right here I can just kind of go like this

Matt tells me a lot about this form by drawing those lines in so only go ahead and I'm gonna draw lines

in like that just looking at my reference to make sure that I'm drawing it correctly and then I'll go

from there.

Okay.

There we go.

So that's a pretty decent study.

It doesn't have to be crazy detail but you want to get a decent amount of detail in there just so you

can gain the most understanding of what it is that you're drawing.

And so once you draw this one time then what you're gonna do is I want you to go ahead and go to the

resources of this lecture and download the other picture of horns that I have and you're going to draw

those as well.

But on your own once you've drawn both of these horns from reference then I want you to go ahead and

get rid of all of your reference don't look at it and just have a blank piece of paper and try to draw

redraw the horns.

You can either try to redraw the exact image that you drew or you can try to redraw them from a different

angle whichever one you want but try to redraw them on your third drawing without looking at any reference.

And this is going to help solidify this image in your head.

So becomes a part of your visual library.

Now you don't have to do thousands and thousands and thousands of these drawings but I do want to make

it just stress that it's important that every once in a while you do some studies so that you can start

building up your visual library and it makes character design much easier and much better.

And you want to look at as much reference and you can be more creative.

All right.

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