Original subtitles

In this lesson we're going to look at what is called the "Two stage work flow".

OK.

And it's not a workflow that you're immediately going to do especially if you're a beginner, but it's

important to know, right now at the beginning of the course, what the two stage work flow is and how you

eventually want to be working when you're creating your drawings.

So, first of all, what is workflow? Work flow really is just the order and the steps you take in order to

get the work done, right.

You know, so Step 1; do this; step 2, step 3, Step 4, until you get to Step 10 maybe and you're finished.

Now this two stage work flow really involves two parts, right.

And the first part is called the rough, and the second part is called the refined.

Right.

And this

And this is in regards to the rough drawing and the refined drawing.

OK.

And the rough drawing really is the phase where we want to make sure that the foundations are solid.

Right.

The foundations are solid, that the bulk of the theory is being implemented.

And I've got some examples, so we'll look at some examples just now.

And it's our planning or our blueprint phase, right, planning or blueprint phase.

Just the way to think about the rough phase of drawing.

OK.

It's also very loose, and it's very care free, OK care free.

Let me also say that the rough stage is usually very ugly.

OK.

And that's important.

It's OK for it to be ugly because it needs to check some boxes, that's its goal. It's goal is

not to look pretty, right, it's not to look like a good sketch.

It's meant to be ugly.

It's meant to look like a construction site.

Right.

All of the stuff that happens on a construction site is very different to what happens to the building in this example,

when the construction is finished, and then the interior designers come, and the guys who design the

facade come and they make it look beautiful on the outside.

But really you can't do all of that stuff, which that would all fall into the refined stage, right.

Can't do all of that stuff unless you have solid foundations or bulk of your theories in there.

You've got the planning and the blueprints.

It's loose it's carefree, it's ugly, but it works, right.

Everything needs to work.

It works.

So everything works. Let's just move this page up a bit.

So this is the rough stage and how I want you guys to feel in your hearts, or your minds, or both when

you're working and doing the rough stage, is to really just be carefree.

Please don't worry about what the work looks like.

Now you might say, "Well that's that's kind of crazy".

"Isn't this a drawing, isn't supposed to look good?"

The the good looking part of it does come in the refined stage, right.

The rough stage is really planning, making sure everything's in its proper perspective.

Yeah I'll get to the examples just now and it'll make more sense.

Nevertheless, the refined stage is really about professionalism,

neatness, professionalism, neatness, cleanliness. I guess right.

Neatness. Let's say neatness and cleanliness, good presentation.

And really the general prettiness of it; the general prettiness you know applying filters, smoothing out

the lines a little bit, doing clean lines, doing kind of inked type of clean lines and stuff.

None of these things can be done without the rough, so that's always primary.

But really the refined stage is where you make the work look good, right.

This is where you make the work look good. But more important than making the work look good, is, this is really

the stage where you can be the most creative.

Right.

So you can be free, and be the most creative that you can be. Be the most creative.

And the reason is, because when you've built this rule system if you wish, or this solid foundation, or

imagine you were building a house, you've built a structure of the house, you've built the walls, you built

the floors, you've put the doors in and everything's in. And you can really be free in sort of your decorating

of that house, you know, choosing the color, choosing the paint, choosing the furniture.

Where you're going to hang the pictures.

You don't have to worry about structural stuff or technical things anymore.

You can just worry about creative things, cool lines, trying things with the colors, trying things with

how you, you know might paint it, or might do the line weighting a different way, or trying some new things.

Right.

And so the refined stage is really where you can be free and be creative.

And so, just as I spoke about the posture of the rough stage, where you're not worrying about the prettiness

of it.

Right.

The refined stage is where you can worry about the prettiness of it and you're free to do the fun, creative,

decorative things to the piece. Where you don't.

You know that you're building this stuff on the solid rough, and so as we move through the course, you'll

learn to distinguish what makes a rough good and right, based on the theory, and then how to refine, and

refinement really, I mean if we had to triangle out rough and refined, it's going to look something

like this, everything's done in the rough, all the theory is done in the rough, everything's pretty much

done in the rough.

And then the refined is like just finishing it off.

Ironically this takes 20 percent of the time, and this takes 80 percent of the time to do.

Right.

So that's the 80:20 rule in terms of rough and refined.

OK.

So hopefully we're pretty clear on this two stage workflow of rough and refined.

So let's take a look at a few examples.

And this is going to shock you I think.

So here is a piece I did of a blood Elf type of Mage and on the left side you can clearly see my super

beautiful rough.

I'm just going to mark it out there.

And then my super beautiful refined version.

Right.

And you can see well, probably it may look crazy, especially for a beginner, it may look crazy, like how did I go from

this to this? that just doesn't make any sense in your mind.

How did that happen?

We'll cover this through the course.

But in terms of the two stage work flow, this is pretty much what a two stage work flow looks like.

You have rough structural drawing.

where everything's in its place.

And over here I was marking out the spell, because I painted that in, this ended up being a painting

not so much of an illustration, per se, but here everything is just rough, but everything's in its right

place.

I've kind of worked out the technical details of things and the positioning of things and the structure

and the forms of things.

You know, I felt out and I've felt out all of the theories to make sure that this feels right and is structurally

right.

And I know that once this is done, it's actually quite easy for me to come on top and kind of do what

a lot of beginners start doing. Adding the nice lines, adding the detailed eyes, and the details,

and the nose and stuff.

But generally if you start with the refined stage it's just built on really weak foundations and it just

is horrible right.

It ends up looking bad and then the artist can't understand why the work looks poor, is not working.

Yet you're doing the line waiting, all the cool things you know you see your favorite artists doing, so

that's one example of rough and refined.

Here's another example.

It's just a portraits and it's basically the same thing, right, it's basically the same thing.

We've got rough on the left side, refined on the right and we'll go through what I'm about to say in more

detail, but what actually is key to remember here, is when we think about the shape, form, detail, structure

of how art is theoretically structured, and let's go into example mode on that.

Right.

The structure of how we think about art.

So shape, form, and detail, actually implies a work flow, right.

It implies a work flow, in that we will start with shape; well that we have shape, and form, and detail,

kind of structurally placed, and then we move on to refining all of these together, right, in really a

refinement workflow. Where we're still thinking about all of these elements.

But our mindset is different.

So what I mean by this, if that was a little confusing, is that our global category or our global workflow

is rough and refined, sure, but as a beginner you're not going to be able to do this straight away because

there are actually a multitude of theories that need to be applied.

So the rough stage, and we will go through definitely great solid work flows on this, is actually made up

of a few stages itself, and these stages are broken down into shape, form, and detail. And then we move

on to the refined stage, which has its own theories but they're nothing crazy like what is found in the

rough stage.

And then here we talk about things like gesture, which we've got an entire module on gesture to go through.

and, form involves anatomy, and the structure of things, and gesture, going back to shape, also has got to

do with character composition;

that's both symbolic and literal composition, and then details is really detailing, you know detailing

things, stylizing of things etc. Even though some of the stylistic elements are also in the shape

stage.

So hopefully this isn't too confusing for you right now, but just know that the rough stage and the refined

stage are sort of the global work flow.

And once you've had a bit of practice you'll be able to do all of the theoretical things in the rough

stage, and then work them up and make them beautiful in the refined stage just as we see in these kind

of demos.

So while it may look pretty rough and you know although you know that structurally everything

is in its place, there is a lot of theory happening in the rough side of something, a lot of theory, in

fact pretty much all the theory.

And that's a lot of what the course has got is

all these theories that help you build a good solid rough, because generally speaking, I don't want to

say it as a global rule, but it's quite easy to finish up something that is fundamentally strong.

Right.

But you can't finish up something is fundamentally weak, because then it's still weak.

All right.

So that is the rough and the refined workflows.

And we'll get more into it as the course goes on, but I wanted to introduce it to you now so that you start

thinking about the stages of drawing, and also that as you're doing, as you're drawing that you strive

to work in these two stages. And that you are fearless, and crazy and not holding back in the rough and

that once you're happy with the rough, then and keep it rough, doesn't need to be crazily detailed.

Then you can go into the detail stage and build on it and make it look beautiful.

So always working in these two stages.

Let's move on.