I've got a very simple design pattern for this panel.
I have these figures in a compositional shape together here and then I've
outlined them all the way around with a dark lighting pattern that opens up here
to draw your eye into the middle and I've got elements in the foreground to frame
the panel.
Last time we sketched a reduced size layout of our page.
Then in the premium course, we cleaned up our layout, transferred it to the full
size page and tightened it up piece by piece.
Now we have our entire page completely drawn in with all of our elements
established without any shadows, line weights or rendering.
At this stage it can seem very daunting knowing where to begin in placing your
shadows and bringing this up to a finish.
And I'm not going to worry about broad lighting right now.
What I'm going to do and I'll start at something very easy.
I know that my lighting is coming from above and so I'm just going to start
shadowing underneath things and I'm just adding line weights.
I'm going to want this to be dark here and I'll just jump around and slowly
start to establish line weights underneath different objects.
Before I worry about heavy shadowing or anything like that and I can just slowly
go through and because I know I'm just going underneath things, this is very,
very easy to do.
And so I'm starting to add a little bit of depth to my picture.
I'm so far doing it without really having to engage my brain at all and start
making decisions compositionally about my lighting.
Start to do the same thing with my figures.
Hunter's leg here is going to be darker.
I'm pressing pretty hard.
I don't know if I recommend that necessarily, but I tend to.
Very difficult for me to stop doing that.
I've been doing it for...
Many years and it's at this stage I can really start to clean up my detail and
I'm still just working with line weight as much as I can, not going into the
detail of the figures themselves.
And you can see already how much this pops even though I haven't added any
shadowing or any real extra detail to my figures.
I'm just working with line weight in this area versus my foreground, which I've so
far left alone.
And so let's start to go into my foreground.
I'm going to want to be a little thicker with this line because it's closer.
And so the closer that I get to the camera, the thicker I want my line to be
around things.
And the further it goes into the background, I keep my line much thinner
and that really pushes things back.
You have to be very careful.
It's easy to inadvertently put a very thick line on something in the background
and it can really flatten an image.
And now I've got my foreground fairly well outlined.
That brings it pretty far and you can see how much all of a sudden now that pops
out and we're just working our way through this.
And once we get this, I'll start to work on some more compositional lighting.
And really with this kind of debris and garbage here, I'm not really so much
drawing elements as I'm just drawing shadows.
So
Effectively, it's one element.
This would be this one over an element below.
So it's casting a shadow down and then the shadow is thinner on this element
because it's closer to this element above.
And then I can draw a shadow here.
I can cross over this one and get that same effect with something underneath.
And you can see I can very quickly get a lot of dimension.
If you want to follow along with me as we design our own comic page, head on over
to proko.com/comicpage and sign up for the course.
We'll have more lessons and go much further in depth into what we learned
here.
We'll be posting premium episodes regularly, so I hope to see you there.
And Stan actually has a whole section online wait in his drawing basics course
too, if you want to check that out.
Before I move into the background and do anything else with that, I'm going to go
ahead and finish my whole foreground.
And I'm going to start here because this will be my most detailed area.
I'm going to want to keep it fairly dark because this will be my focal point.
And also because I want my light to be on my main figures, I can shadow these
elements out this way.
And so I'm creating a bit more of a localized light, something I like to
avoid.
But compositionally, I think it'll be stronger if I shadow this side of these
elements here and it will frame these people here.
And I think that's going to work.
So let's just go for it.
So I'm starting to work into compositional shadow right now.
I really want this whole area to be dark so we focus over here and so I'm drawing
in my garbage cans.
I'm drawing heavy shadow and then it'll lighten to lighter shadow as it goes
around and that'll give it some turning.
And I have the option instead of drawing shadows like this I could just use X's
and that'll let an inker know that I want an area to be dark.
I do not like doing that though because I really want to know how my shadows are
working together and I find it difficult to visualize how my page is going to look
finished if I'm just drawing a series of X's and I'm going to get my reference out
from my rats again and I didn't really concern myself with lighting for the rats
and so my lighting actually is not going to work with the lighting that I have my
picture reference.
But this is where I can really just use my own drawing skills and infer my own
lighting.
So I want the back of the rats to be pretty dark here.
I'm just going to throw some shadow in.
The nice thing is because rats are all covered in fur, it makes it pretty easy
for me to fake an anatomy that I might not be otherwise entirely comfortable
with.
Keep cleaning up my shadows a little bit until they're a little bit more crisp.
And just like with the other bin, it's a bit of a push and pull.
I want it to have a nice rounding toward dark on the other side.
I don't want it to be entirely undetailed on this side.
So as I thicken up the line on this side, I just go a little thicker back here.
Just kind of play with it until I have an overall graduation of light to dark on
the bin that works for me.
Now the next thing that I'm going to do I really want to showcase these two figures
and so I'm thinking compositionally I've got this whole area and because I chose a
light source that makes it dark here I have my center of interest closer to the
middle of the panel but I can actually really accentuate that even more by
drawing a compositional shadow across my wall slash a shadow on the wall here
bring it down like this and then down like this.
I want the shadow to be working for me before I shadow it all in and then have
to erase it if it doesn't.
That's going to work.
And I could X this in.
But again, I want to know how this is going to look.
I want to have a lot of control over how my compositional shadows will play out.
And so this shadow here, I'm not thinking about what light source I'm going to have
for this.
I'm thinking entirely about framing my main elements.
And it would be very difficult in disjointing for me to throw this big
shadow in here if I didn't go in and just initially start to establish my line
weights and a basic light source.
All right, I'm going to go ahead and start to actually draw some detail into
my main figures here.
And it doesn't need to be much.
I want to get too carried away because we're working very small.
Just enough to give it a little texture.
I tend to go fairly light in my blocking phase, so it gives me the ability to do
this later on.
And I think I'd like to put a shadow behind my character.
I'll draw his ear, behind his arm, just about like that.
I'll just draw a thicker line, a detail behind him.
It pushes him out from the wall compositionally.
And I still have a pretty good light source on my figures so they're not too
dark.
Now with my other wall, I'd like to have kind of the same effect.
Do something just like that.
And so I'm going to start to block that shadowing in.
There's a certain amount of cleaning up.
I get a little sketchy and loose with some of my lines.
And I find the more detail I'm adding shadow, I just added another line of
detail in there just using shadow.
And at this point, I'm going to need to take a piece of paper and put it under my
hand.
Otherwise, as I draw, I'm going to start to rub all this out.
And I use a very hard lead.
I use a 2H lead.
And so smearing and rubbing isn't really too much of an issue for me.
It can still happen if you're not careful.
And I try as much as I can to delineate a shape and then shadow inside that shape.
It's much more effective than trying to just light a shape with no defined
outline.
But I find when I'm drawing a lot of times I'm not really sure of the overall
shape I'm going to go for and I'm kind of building to it.
And so this ends up happening.
I try to limit it, but it can definitely happen.
And I've done it through here.
You can see me kind of building my shapes a little bit.
As opposed to properly delineating them the way that I'd like to.
And now I've got some detail on this pipe.
Gonna start shadowing some of that.
Adding some line weight basically.
Line weight here.
Here.
Don't need too much.
Just to give it a little character.
And now that I have the rest of my foreground blocked in with shadow, I'm
going to go back into this area and just improve my line weights to really pop it
and make sure that it separates.
I could go completely dark with this whole thing and just shadow that whole
area out, but I feel like that would kind of flatten my shot and I really want my
pipes to really drive your eye into that image.
So now I'm going to turn my page sideways because I'm going to start putting
shadowing underneath my windows just like this.
Pretty lightly because this is far in the background.
Clean these shapes up just a little bit.
I'm conflicting a little bit with my ladder here, but it's not really an
important element.
I just don't want it to get completely lost.
But if it blends a little bit into the background behind it, it's all right.
I feel like I have a bit of a tangent there.
I just lift that above it a little bit.
That kind of helps.
Here I can just go a little bit cleaner and tighter with my lines and it's a bit
of an assembly line.
Add detail to one window and I just carry it through and I could add more detail
and shadowing into these windows but I don't want to conflict with my figures
and I want my background to be very light.
I'm just going to leave those alone.
I think they're small enough that it should be fine.
I'm going tighter with this but it's still pencils and it still is inherently
a little bit loose or at least it certainly is for me.
And so there's a certain amount of reliance on your anchor.
Be able to understand what you're putting down unless you are absolutely perfectly
clean.
That is incredibly difficult to do with a pencil and certainly very difficult to do
on a schedule.
And so for this panel, I haven't added any rendering at all.
This is entirely just shadowing and detail.
And I could do that just a little bit.
I think it's a mistake in panels like this to get overly rendered because
there's already so much detail, but I could put just a little bit of rendering
just to accentuate the light, maybe some of the form on some larger shapes like
these boxes.
I want to be very careful with it.
I don't want to be very clean with it, but I want to be precise with it.
It's very easy to start getting a little bit muddy with your detail.
And that's going to be panel one.
I've got a very simple design pattern for this panel.
I have these figures in a compositional shape together here and then I've
outlined them all the way around with a dark lighting pattern that opens up here
to dry your eye into the middle.
And I've got elements in the foreground to frame the panel.
And I tried to layer my darks and lights as much as I can as I go through dark.
And then I've got light, I've got dark and light.
It pushes it back and gives you a lot of depth and dimension with your shadowing.
And I try to do that as much as I can through the picture, all while
maintaining a relatively basic compositional framework.
As always, if you want to follow along with me as we make our own comic page,
head over to proko.com/comicpage and sign up for the course.
We'll have more lessons and go further in depth into what we've learned here.
And we'll be posting new premium episodes regularly.
So I hope to see you there.
Thanks for joining me.
See you next time.