Hello, and welcome to this episode
of The VizDev Art School.
My name is Ryan Meinerding.
I'm the head of Visual Development at Marvel Studios.
I sort of spend my days drawing and painting the Marvel
characters for the MCU.
This series of instructional videos,
we're going to start just talking about how
to do some drawing and painting, how to draw the characters
and give you guys a chance to sort of draw along with us.
As well as, hopefully at the end of it,
giving you something that you can print out
and color in if you want to.
Drawing and painting is one of those great joys in my life,
and it's one of those things that hopefully
you guys can be inspired to do, and so let's get drawing.
All right.
Let's get started drawing and talking
about drawing these characters.
So what type of character are you trying to draw?
Usually breaks down very simply for comics
into heroes or villains.
And then once you've answered that question,
what type of hero are they, or what type of villain are they?
There's lots of different types of heroes.
You think of the difference between the Hulk
and Captain America, Iron Man.
Are they strong?
Are they fast, intelligent?
What type of villain are they?
You know, there are lots of different types of villains
as well.
And one of the things with Super Heroes
is you have that great idea of like, what are their powers?
And you combine all of those things
together into a pose, posture, expression, and design.
And let's, you know, each one of those categories
could really take an entire course of discussion
to talk about, but let's start with poses with heroes.
Most poses that we try to work out have a lot of inherently
heroic characteristics.
We're trying to make chests feel strong,
and shoulders feel strong and have the gesture of the pose
really make the character feel powerful.
Whether that's a running pose, a standing pose, or a flying
pose, or a jumping pose.
But most of the time where we are trying to find strength
is sort of an inherent part of being a Super Hero,
and we're usually trying to find ways
of making each character's unique strengths
visible in their poses.
When I do Captain America poses, I'm
usually trying to find ways of making him
feel heroic and noble as well.
A lot of times that translates into, you know,
looking off into the distance.
Sometimes it is about a very specific type
of expression, which we can talk about expressions
in a little bit.
When it's Iron Man, he has great flying poses,
but he also is a very strong fighter and has the chest RT,
so anytime you can emphasize those types
of unique individualistic characteristics
of each character, that's one of the important points.
Another one is, if you're going to fly,
how are they going to fly?
You know, Iron Man needs his repulsors
in order to fly, so how does a character with repulsors
fly differently than a character like Captain Marvel who
doesn't, or Doctor Strange, who requires
the Cloak of Levitation?
But the main point about this is to define poses as sort
of different than postures.
Postures are essentially, it's very simple.
A pose is basically something that any character can achieve,
you know, they can throw a punch, they can run.
A posture is essentially what is the basic gesture
of the character that's baked into that character?
So the Hulk here-- for example on the left--
has more of a hunched over posture and something
would be more like Captain Marvel on the right
has more of a sort of like a strong gesture
of a proud gesture of sticking her shoulders back.
There's lots more we could say about poses and postures,
but moving on to expressions so they can get cover all these,
you know, fairly quickly.
I'm sort of just drawing a base face here,
and in order to put expressions on top of,
usually this is the way that I'll
test out different expressions on characters.
If we're doing a unique character design like Thanos
or the Hulk, we'll do a neutral face,
and then we'll do expressions on top,
and I'm just doing a sort of generic male face
and then a generic female face.
A lot of the structure of these types of drawings
can come from, you know, you can look at any number of sources
in the comics as reference.
There's also great instructional books
from Andrew Loomis that talk about different structures
of the face.
Bridgman is another great artist that
did great instructional books on figure drawing
and, you know, but generally speaking, it's
about trying to find a personality or character
within each face that you draw and make
it look like that character's looking back at you.
Once I have these heads more or less to a place
where they're reasonable, I'll start doing expressions.
So the first one I'm going to do for him
was more of an anger expression.
Dropping the brows a little bit, it's
making the eyes squint a little bit
and turning the mouth downwards so it
has more of a scowl to it.
There are easy ways to get expressions to read.
Smiles, time to turn the mouth upward,
which is maybe an obvious one, but the notion
of adding smile lines as well as making the eyes a little bit
squinty.
Basically, people smile with their eyes a lot.
They also relax their eyebrows sometimes
and get more of a ball of a cheek on their face.
And now into surprise.
Eyebrows go up, the eyes get wider,
so we essentially have, you can see
more of the whole circle of the iris
and some white of the eye above the iris.
And into sadness, which is raising the brows in the center
and then having that sort of upturned line coming off
of the top of the eye as well, and usually
the mouth is a downturned one.
And then getting into--
since we're doing Super Heros-- the notion of an extreme focus,
rage, anger fighting.
More of an extreme expression.
Having the mouth be open and revealing the teeth
and seeing black on either side of the teeth.
Really squinting the eyes, dropping the brows quite a bit.
But usually, you know, all that is filtered through looking
at these different expressions.
What's the pose your character is doing,
and what are they supposed to be thinking?
And how can you make that thought
evident and basically their posture pose and expression.
The final category that we're talking about-- and again, each
one of these could really--
you could take a whole course on each one of these elements.
Design is where they can meet--
can apply most to anything.
In this case, what I'm talking about
is essentially the core structure
of a design of a face and then Captain America's helmet,
which is what we're going to do when we actually get
into drawing a posed figure.
Doing a base circle and then dropping
sort of a rectangle down for the jaw,
and then drawing a center line is
an important part of drawing a face,
because knowing which side--
how far apart the eyes are, being able to judge the whole
face together.
Throwing the helmet on top, I'm also looking for lines
that always point back to the eyes, and the ridges
on his helmet as well as the A both point to his eyes, which
are very useful design tools, but we're
usually trying to find a stronger jaw line
and sort of very useful--
I think the word strong and strength has come up
a couple of times when I've been talking about this,
and since they are Super Heroes, we're
trying to find those types of strong qualities
in the jaw line and in the head shape.
So I'm going to start drawing an actual posed character now.
This is going to be a drawing of Captain America.
Usually starting with that circle again
and then dropping down the rectangle
and chiseling it into a triangle for the jaw,
finding the center line, and then drawing the brows
and the mouth on top of it.
The triangle that comes down from the cheekbones
down to the mouth is an important set of lines
as well, because it really defines that front plane
as strongly as possible.
You know, when you get into drawing characters
and faces like this, you're trying
to find the most simple not only two dimensional
read for characters, but also the three dimensional
read that triangle of the cheekbones
that come down to the mouth is an important and useful tool.
So after having had a basic understanding of the Captain
America helmet from the front view,
I'm now trying to recreate it in a 3/4,
and drawing the head first is an important tool for me,
especially with Cap's head, because he's
a unique character.
Not a totally unique character, but you know,
you have a character like Spider-Man whose faces is
entirely covered with a mask.
Cap's head is, you know, you see his eyes
and you see his mouth and nose, but then you
have to also design the helmet over top of it,
or draw the helmet over top of it.
And I usually have to draw as strong of a head
as I can on his actual, you know, for his face,
and then I draw the helmet on top,
because if I try to just draw them at the same time,
it never seems to work.
Getting in there and detailing out some of the,
you know, the iris, and the pupil, and eyelashes.
A lot of that stuff really does help in defining the character
and in making them feel a little bit alive.
Reinforcing the jawline, the chin strap on Captain America
is one of the most helpful design elements for his face,
because it really does give him a really
strong jawline from all angles.
Actually overemphasizes his jawline.
Now I'm getting down into the body.
You know, trying to figure out how to make his shoulders
feel broad, thinking about design as well as
the straps on his shoulders point
back to his head, which is always a great thing.
Thinking of the rib cage as a big egg
and sort of building all the design lines off of that.
And also with Super Heroes, the sort of V
that comes up off of the stripes and into his chest and pec
shape.
It goes out to his shoulders.
It's one of those things that's just inherent in almost every
Super Hero, you know, trying to find a way to make their chest
feel strong and their shoulders feel strong.
And then all these little details on top
are basically trying to make him feel as real as possible.
You know, thinking of Cap as a soldier having sort of gear
and pouches on his belt to be able to go into battle with,
and doing his iconic shield.
Maybe I'll do a specific art school class
about drawing his shield, because it seems
like it should be easy, but it's not
as easy as it seems sometimes.
Drawing the legs and finding folds that make it feel
like he has weight on his legs.
Angling the shield a little bit more
to really echo the gesture of his arm,
and you know, finishing off the sketch version of his arm.
And I'm trying to add a little bit of smoke
in the background to just heighten the notion
of what this image is.
Him sort of maybe hearing a call to action
and turning to see what's happening
in a dramatic situation.
And now since I have essentially dropped the opacity
on that sketch, and I'm drawing over top of it
to find cleaner lines.
So it's basically the idea of creating an underlay drawing
that then you can go and put nicer lines on top of,
because you don't have to specifically worry
about the placement of everything.
It's in sort of figured out for you.
That's one of the ways that I do work a lot is figuring out
using rough sketches to figure out the poses
and what's happening.
The pose, the posture and expression, and the design,
and then going back over it with sort of cleaner lines,
or in some cases, a full on Photoshop painting
in order to really make the image feel like it's real.
But a lot of this is finding the more specific and unique design
elements of Cap, which is a lot of things
on his costume are, you know, tied into the star shape.
Even the design of his stripes have become sort
of nestled into the star shape, and most of those lines,
you know, really emphasizing the strong V
quality in his body to try and make him feel strong.
I always enjoyed putting seams and things on these costumes
to try and make them feel a little bit more real and more
structured and making them feel like they
had been engineered for battle.
You know, if you look at design for military clothing,
a lot of the time those things have lots and lots of seams
on them, reinforced seams to really make sure
that if a soldier's in battle that that costume is
not going to be the thing that falls apart for them.
And then I'm going in and sort of trying to figure out,
so I'm just going to look for the clouds.
If I get a chance to really finish this off at some point,
I might do some better lines and better design shapes
for clouds.
But I was getting in the details on Cap's head
and trying to figure out like, what's
the best way to represent this.
Ideally what I'm going to try to do here
is create an image that you guys can download and print
out and color in if you'd like.
So I don't want to fill in everything, because I don't
want to take away the possibility from you
guys coloring it, but I do feel like Cap's helmet is pretty
dark, so I might as well just fill in that a little bit
so that it becomes a focal point,
and you know, you end up being able to see him a little bit.
And because his turtle neck is a little dark, that as well.
Also adding little hatch marks in different places.
You know, Cap is one of these characters who's almost,
you know, from the minute he starts fighting,
he's a little bit dirty.
He gets, you know, dirt on his face and different scuff
marks on his costume and his shield,
and that is an important part of his design as well.
So I think there's a couple of ways you can treat this video.
I think you can treat it as if you'd like to try and give it
a shot of using it as an instructional video
to try and draw your own version of Captain America,
but you can also take the drawing that's been done
and print it out and color it in if you'd like.
I'm just adding the sort of finishing touches.
More again, more scuffs and scrapes,
and adding some additional details to the shield.
And I think that's pretty much the final.
I hope you've enjoyed this version
of The VizDev Art School.
I hope you guys have a great day.