Original subtitles

OK.

Welcome to the first project of this course.

Now I always like to do a project with my students at the very beginning that really get their feet

wet and start teaching them about what it is that they're going to be learning in the course.

I don't really like to do a lot of build up up to the actual drawing of characters or animals or whatever

it is I am teaching in that course I like to just dive right into it with you so you can start experiencing

what it's like and just start learning a little bit quicker.

So let's go ahead and get started with this project we're just gonna be drawing a simple character design

and what I want you to do is I want you to draw along with me and then what you'll do is at the end

of the course once you've gone through it and you've learned everything you've learned about drawing

the human character design storytelling all of that stuff you're going to come back to this lecture

and you're just basically going to follow along with me again and you can even change this character

up a little bit but you're going to compare your first character design that you're about to draw with

me to your character design after the course.

So this is a really good way just to see the progress that you've made throughout the course.

So let's go ahead and get started now character design is so simple even though it takes a lot of practice

and learning the skills it's really broken down into some very simple steps whether you're drawing a

realistic character animation styled character which also beware that the character are about to draw

is more in the animation style but we will be talking about how to draw all kinds of different character

designs including realistic character designs.

So don't worry this is not the only type of character design we're going to be covering but we're gonna

be doing animation sound for the first project because it's going to be the easiest one.

So let's go ahead and get started.

All we want to do is we just want to start with the simplest shapes possible.

So for example a circle almost all characters heads are gonna start over the circle.

Sometimes you might want to start off with square or something but for this character let's start off

with a circle.

So I'm just going to draw a nice simple circle like this and a little tip about drawing circles is that

you can get a much rounder circle if instead of drawing from the wrist or the fingers like this.

If you actually draw from your shoulder right there and let your arm move around like that.

So you want the you want your arm and everything lifted off the paper and you want to just move around

and circle and that's gonna give you much around or circle if you draw that from the shoulder.

All right great.

So now we have a circle let me draw it in just a little bit darker so you can see it.

Now what we're drawing right now is called The under drawing.

This is the first step in character drawing and the under drawing is where you're going to block out

your forms or shapes your lines and stuff like that.

And a little bit of the detail.

It's the second phase where you actually darken the lines that you want to keep and really detail it

out.

So with this first drawing.

Make sure that you're drawing pretty light.

We don't push very hard.

You don't want really dark lines or you're pushing hard.

Just keep them light.

So once you draw the circle the next thing you're going to do is you're just going to find the center

line of the face.

Now this applies to almost any character you're gonna draw.

So let's go ahead and draw that.

Now I'm just drawing this character as I go.

I've actually never drawn this character before designed it.

So you're going to see me design and draw a character in real time.

So we're just controlling that for the sum of the face they're gonna be looking straight at us just

to keep it nice and simple for you.

But we want this line to basically right be right in the center of the circle.

But it's a little bit angled because their head is going to be angled just a tiny bit.

All right.

Next.

Let's go ahead and let's just start blocking out the jaw.

Now we can make the jaw really big or not.

Let's have it start somewhere right about down here so not too far down from there.

It's probably about the third of the distance from you to break the circle up into thirds it's about

that same third distance down.

So now let's go ahead and let's draw the jaw and we can try a couple of different things going to draw

really lightly so I can erase this if I want to.

I probably won't I'm just gonna draw really lightly and if I don't like it I can just kind of draw different

jaw and

All right great.

That looks pretty good.

Something like that.

So as you can see all we have are just some simple lines you just kind of have the jawline in there

the center of the face and a circle.

Then let's go ahead and let's mark out the eyeline so the eyeline let's basically go somewhere right

about down here just a little bit further down from this point right here where we drew our thirds in.

So just a little bit down from a little bit up from the bottom of that circle something like that.

I having a little bit of curvature to that line because the face is kind of curved and then maybe this

person is looking down just a tiny bit.

So we're going to see that curve right there.

All right.

Great.

Next.

Let's go ahead and let's start blocking in the mouth the nose and the eyes.

So I'll start with the mouth.

Now we want this character to be smiling so let's go ahead and draw a smile and say I'm just gonna to

probably somewhere right about their straw kind of a slightly curved line it's going to be very curved

the top of the smile is actually or the top lips are not actually that curved when you smile.

I'm going to go ahead draw the bottom.

The bottom is where you get the nice big curve that you seen a lot of things like smiley faces.

All right great.

Next let's go ahead and let's sketch in the nose so many.

Go ahead and put the nose down low.

So I want the nose and the mouth and everything to be below this eyeline by quite a bit.

Something like that looks good.

All right.

Next let's go ahead.

BLOCK In those eyes.

So for the eyes.

I usually like to depending on what style I'm doing for this style.

I like to just kind of draw a sort of curved lines like that on that island.

Those represent the bottom of the eyes.

And then I'd like to kind of just draw sort of these rainbow shapes or upside down if you shape something

like that I'm drawing really lightly because I might need to adjust these shapes I might need it just

the size something like that looks pretty good

and that's just a base.

Now another thing to take note of is that you want to make sure that basically the width of this I can

fit in between the both eyes.

So in between where the nose is to make sure that a whole nother I could probably fit there.

So I think that's looking pretty good.

And we can come back and kind of adjust those shapes.

Next let's go ahead and add some eyebrows and I want to go ahead straighten out the side of the head

right here.

That

so for the eyebrows let's go ahead

maybe we can add some more expression in here.

And I'm actually going to kind of bring those eyes down just a little bit more.

Something like that and the eyebrows I'm just going to kind of draw lines come down like this if I were

to draw a line comes straight up from the corner of the eyes like that that's where I want my eyebrows

to end about.

It can overshoot that line just a little bit

next let's go ahead and I'm going to block in the teeth.

So I'm just going to draw a line angled like that and other one like that and I'm just going to draw

one big solid shape just like that for the teeth and you're drawing characters especially you don't

really want to draw the individual lines in and that usually applies when you're drawing more realistic

characters as well when you draw those lines and it's not going to look good.

We'll talk more about this later in the course.

But for now let's just leave that as one big solid white shape.

We also want to draw in where we want our eyes to be looking.

So let's go ahead

and haven't just kind of looking straightforward enough for this character type.

I want her eyes to be a little bit cross-eyed a little bit when you're drawing this style of animation.

It's sort of a Disney s type style or anime so you kind of want their eyes to be cocked a little bit.

You want them looking inwards just the tiniest bit not too much but that's just kind of personal preference.

You don't have to do that if you don't want to.

You can see they're kind of more towards the center.

Now let's go ahead and add in the years so that years aren't going to go any higher than the eyebrows.

They're just gonna go a little bit lower than the eyes.

Perfect.

All right.

Let's see.

So this is where you're gonna really start playing with the design.

Actually let's go and draw the neck in really quick so because this is gonna be a female character we

don't want the neck to be too thick so it's probably only going to take up about a little over a third

of the disk of the width of the head.

So something like that and even that might be a little bit too thick.

Maybe I'll make that a little bit skinnier.

All right.

I'm gonna going a little bit of curve to it and I can have the shoulders coming off that

all right.

Great.

So now is where we get to really start playing with a design.

We got to start adding things we can change the eyebrows we can do all kinds of different stuff.

So let's go ahead and let's start by designing the hair.

So when you're designing hair character or hair for your characters a lot of the times you're going

to want to look at some reference so I have some reference here.

I have a couple of different hair cells that I'm going to look at but you don't need to see what I'm

looking at.

You can just draw what I draw but just know for in the future when you're drawing your own character

designs you're gonna want to look at reference.

So go ahead.

You want to give her some earrings and see go ahead and

it's gonna add kind of some side hair coming down like this.

I'm just keeping it very loose as you can see.

So it's just kind of lying there lying down like that just keeping it super simple

When have our hair come down and kind of cover her ears so we're just gonna see this bottom part of

her ear

and I can have some hair come down like this.

It's gonna have kind of almost a straight down line.

And when you're drawing this under drawing it's totally okay if it gets messy.

When we come back with another pencil we push a little bit harder so we get a darker colored.

It's really going to kind of clean our design up.

So if it looks really messy right now don't worry about that.

That's totally fine and normal

give her kind of a hairstyle where top of her hair kind of comes like this and then she maybe has some

hair coming around like that point of back

to keep a lot of her hair lines just moving very straight.

That's kind of the theme of her hairstyle.

A lot of the times you want her to kind of follow a theme when it comes to the lines and the shapes

you want them to kind of have the same lines and shapes going throughout their entire design.

So trying to keep a lot of these lines pretty straight or very simple at least

that's looking pretty good.

We can also play with some things like the expressions so for example I can cover up her eyebrow make

it the shadow out of the way I can cover up her eyebrow and I can imagine what her facial expression

might look like if maybe there's more down words but covering the eyebrows or covering an eye or something

like that really can help you kind of imagine what it would look like if there I looked a little bit

different.

So let's go ahead and let's change one of these eyebrows.

So I'm just going to take an eraser

race out that eyebrow and what I can do is I can change the position of it so maybe I want it to be

more down like this.

A lot of times I'm going to draw kind of a line that continues on to the other eyebrow.

It's gonna look kind of like a unibrow for a minute and that's OK but a lot of the time the eyebrows

kind of continue on the same lines.

You wanna make sure that they're kind of following a similar line.

They can be in different positions if you want to make sure that the kind of connect right here in the

middle.

I guess you could say gracefully just like that.

And then we can go back and you raise that line because we don't want it to look like she has a unibrow

but now that eyebrow looks a little bit more natural rather than if we just draw it.

However we wanted it kind of follows the curve of the other eyebrow.

So now that we have that in there let's go ahead and let's kind of reshape this eyelid.

You know that looks kind of interesting governing race that I'll try something else.

They make this curved a little bit more downwards

maybe I'll make it a little bit more curved down this side like that

I don't know.

Let's just go ahead and I'm going to bring the eyelashes down a little bit more so it's kind of covering

a little bit more of the top of that Iris and that's going to make her look just a little bit more relaxed

rather than having these really wide eyes where you can almost see the white of the eye above the IRS.

All right.

So it's looking pretty rough from the line there for the nostril holes just kind of signify that maybe

a line to show the bottom of the nose we have her mouth or neck we can draw a line come in like this

two lines like that and then a line like this for the collar bones and kind of those the neck tendons

and stuff like that and we can just kind of draw circles in here for the shoulders and they're going

to draw kind of half an ovary here

for her rib cage kind of just kind of getting off the page or I can kind of sketch in the breast there

but so there we go.

So there's a under drawing for our character.

So in the next lecture what we're gonna do is we're gonna go ahead and take her pencil and go in there

and push darker or if you just have a darker pencil or a black colored pencil or something like that

we can go in there push a little bit darker so that we can start actually refining this character drawing

because there's some things that look kind of weird her eyes are kind of weird right now we just need

to further define this sketch.

Now real quick before in this lecture I used one pencil for this project.

Jesse keep it nice and simple but something that might make it a little bit easier for you is if you

take a blue colored pencil and you do your under drawing with a blue colored pencil.

Then when you go back with your darker colored pencil it will kind of make the blue drawing disappear

a little bit.

It'll kind of help you differentiate between your under drawing and your final drawing.

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