After the ambitious adult coloring page
in my last video, it's time for a different kind of challenge today.
I bought this book for my six year
old at Christmas, and this time I bought myself a second copy too.
I've taken on the plenty of kids coloring
book challenges already on this channel, and despite YouTube frequently marking
my videos as made for kids, this is not a video for kids.
Adults can color too.
And today I'm taking this book to prove
that even a simple page can become a masterpiece.
If you add a little creativity,
let's take a look at what pages we have to choose from.
Learning to Fly
wow, this is actually pretty funny here with Boba Fett and Darth Vader.
My son would definitely be disappointed if
I didn't at least choose something with Darth Vader.
In fact, he thinks that he is Darth Vader,
and he always tells us stories about when he was a toddler, telling us 'when I used
to be Anakin', although somehow he figures that Shane, his father, is Luke Skywalker.
So the family dynamics are a little bit off there. And our little two year old is
fondly known in our family now as Stormtrooper.
Ok, I think this is our winner today.
We've got a great pose here
from Darth Vader, and C3P0 will present me with an interesting challenge,
but I do want to add a little bit of a different challenge for myself today,
and that's to finally commit to doing a page with markers.
So I am banning colored pencils today.
I've used markers a lot,
but I usually end up using them as a base layer, and I almost always rely
on my pencils to add fine details and to fix up my mistakes.
I've never really pushed myself to work
on my blending with my markers, and I think a page like this is
the perfect page for markers, so I'm going to see how I go.
I might still bring in some paint pens later to help me add some highlights.
And I do think a reference photo is going
to be the key for me here because although this image is fairly simple,
these characters are quite complex if we're wanting to color them properly.
Both characters have at least a little bit of shine to them,
especially being a plastic Lego surface and black brings a risk of our entire
character disappearing into a shadow if we don't color him with some other lighting.
So using a reference image will help me
to add some very simple lighting and make these characters look a little more
realistic, without sending myself into a panic.
I've found two pictures that are almost a perfect match for these characters,
so I'll use these to help me find the right colors and to see where
the light and dark areas fall on the faces and on the different pieces of Lego,
specifically the arms, the heads, and the legs.
If you are wanting to color shiny objects.
It might also help to watch my How to Draw Gold video on this channel where
I talk more about how to make objects look shiny and how to pull out the colors
from a reference photo so you can see this process in a more in-depth tutorial.
It's the same if you're coloring silver or
other shiny objects, except the core colors will change compared to the gold.
Anyway, let's begin.
I'm going to start with Darth Vader.
I'm using a variety of greys and a black
and blending them together to create a smooth transition from the light to dark.
The light areas are where the light is
bouncing off and the darker areas are in the shadows.
Even though the character is black, there is still a lot of areas that are
almost white because he's so shiny, the more contrast you add here the shinier
he will look so right now this looks a little odd and it looks half uncolored,
but when I've colored the rest of him, this will look more in place.
I hope. There is a big temptation here
to color everything with a dark grey and then just darken the shadows
with black, but I do risk losing all Darth Vader's details if I do this. Instead
the best approach with something like this is to color each section at a time
and treat every shape like a new object, thinking about opportunities
for a highlight and where the light might bounce.
It does feel very limiting not having
my pencils to rely on at this point, but I can sort of lighten areas if I go
too dark by using my colorless blender to bring back some of that lighter color.
The body has a lot of detail drawn on it,
but this is going to be impossible to color around with my markers,
so I'm going to draw these details back over the top with a paint pen.
I still want to do this in sections, so I remember where each piece goes
because the black will make them disappear completely.
I've got a fine point white paint pen to add some white highlights on the helmet
to really bring the illusion of the shininess.
I would love to have a pen even smaller than this.
In fact, maybe a gel pen would have been better here, but it's okay.
I'm still pretty happy with how this is looking
Back to the body details, I'm switching between my black alcohol
marker and my grey white and colored paint pens to finish this section.
By the way, I'm using a mix of Copic
and Ohuhu alcohol markers, and I'm using Artistro paint pens. For the cape
I want to keep things simple, so I'm using my darkest grey and blending
it into the black at the points that I feel should be the darkest.
And I've got a little out of the lines, which is kind of inevitable with alcohol
markers when you're not using a bleed-proof paper.
Well, not completely inevitable.
I could be more careful, see if I can go out of the lines as much
as Jazza does! But either way, the colorless blender is really handy
for fixing up these mistakes, even with a dark color like this.
Just wipe over it a few times, let it dry, and then repeat.
It sometimes does look worse at first, but eventually it does dilute the color,
and we will be covering this up when we come back to our background later.
For the arms, I'm doing the same light
to dark gradient to create the shiny look and using a grey on the hands
with the black in the areas that would have the shadows.
Honestly, this has been really quick to color.
I should really color with markers more often.
This would have taken me at least twice as long with pencils, in fact, probably more.
I usually spend anywhere from 8 to 15 hours on a coloring page,
and so far I've been coloring less than an hour, and we've already come this far.
Depending on what I end up doing
for the background, this might just be my quickest coloring page ever.
As you can see, I've followed the same
process on Darth Vader's legs and used a very fine white highlight on the edges.
He might not be a super realistic Lego
character, but I'm pretty happy with this style and how he's turned out.
Yeah, it just occurred to me, I didn't even
need a reference image because I've got Darth Vader sitting right here.
Okay, it's time for C3PO.
Who won't mind hanging in the balance
for an extra few seconds while you subscribe and press like on this video.
In fact, maybe this was a good time for an ad break.
With Darth Vader complete, it's time to choose our colors for C3PO.
If you remember back to my video on how
to draw gold, we're looking for mainly yellows and browns,
and we'll use our highlights and shadows to create his shiny appearance.
I've got a photo here of my Lego C3PO,
so I'm going to try to match the colors from this to make it look more like
a plastic Lego gold instead of a traditional shiny gold.
I'm starting with the areas that feel the easiest, because while I've got
a reference photo here, it's not an exact match for my scene.
C3PO is in a different pose, although you'll notice I have turned
my reference photo upside down to help with this slightly,
and the light source isn't quite the same, although I haven't picked one specific
strong light source, so I do feel this will be okay.
I want a little more light on the left,
because that's what the lighting on Darth Vader suggests here.
But I also think we can account for some
general ambient light here, so I'm not too worried about making this perfect.
The first few areas I'm coloring are quite flat, so this doesn't exactly look shiny
yet, but then neither does the picture I'm using.
I think this will look much shinier after
I've done a few curved areas like the arms and the face, because these will have
a lot more highlights and light bouncing off different areas.
If you've ever tried coloring shiny objects, you'll relate to the feeling I'm
having while coloring this, that something just doesn't look right.
But trust the process as I went back
on this later, during the editing, everything looked fine.
Sometimes we are working on something so
closely that it's hard to see the bigger picture.
That's probably the biggest challenge with coloring textures or shiny objects.
That's just learning to ignore that ugly stage and see the bigger picture.
With my alcohol marker layer done,
I'm adding some highlights again with a white paint pen.
This time, though, I want a slight yellow
glow, so I'm using both white and yellow on top of each other.
By doing this quickly, the paints mix together and create a new color.
It's not a perfect approach, but it works for the look I'm going for.
I'm using a Tombow dual brush pen
for some of the fine details, and our characters are done,
so I really have no idea what I want to do for the background here.
I think I need some inspiration.
Could have backgrounds would work for a Lego scene, Star Wars, Lego posters?
Maybe something inside the Death Star.
Is it weird?
This intimidates me more than coloring the characters.
It's the empty space.
There's too much unknown.
There's no boundaries.
I think this is actually why I like coloring books so much.
They give you a defined space
and boundaries for your creativity that make it easier to start.
Sometimes a blank canvas is just
overwhelming, whereas a coloring page gives you something to start from,
especially if you combine it with a color palette as well.
Okay, so I have a plan that requires some
research. So I'm thinking a scene inside the Death Star is perfect here.
These walls have some interesting lights.
Oh, hello, storm troopers.
Would you like to die today?
What? Who killed me?
That's it. You're all getting carrots.
Okay, so I'm feeling inspired,
and I've got an idea now, but it does involve a little perspective drawing.
At first, I was intending to do a simple
one point perspective behind our characters.
It's the easiest way to draw the inside
of a room, and it's something I've done plenty of times.
But my dilemma is that our characters here are drawn from a different perspective,
which I didn't think about at first, except that this line under Darth Vader is
on an angle, and it's like the camera is looking up at him.
So what are our other options?
There is a two point perspective where
everything we draw gets smaller as it gets closer to two vanishing points.
So a simple box ends up looking more like
this, but I think this still isn't quite right for Darth Vader here.
Then there's three point perspectives.
They get a little tricky,
and I don't think I've attempted one of these since high school.
Everything gets smaller in three different directions, so it takes a lot more
planning and it can get confusing, but the results are always really cool.
I should actually relearn this properly
and challenge myself to draw more pictures with this perspective.
To work out the perspective of a drawing, the easiest way is to pop some tracing
paper on top and draw some lines that follow the main objects.
This is easiest if you have some buildings
or road to follow, but in this case, I'm relying on the fact that Lego pieces
are usually fairly square, and we can see that our Lego characters here aren't.
Darth Vader here is more like a weird
triangle, which is exactly what a three point perspective would bring.
But this is getting complicated.
I wonder if my Procreate app has some tools to help with this?
Here we go. Okay, so Procreate actually has drawing
guides that you can turn on, and then you can adjust the perspective
grid by choosing the vanishing points and setting them wherever you want.
We can create one, two, or three point perspective.
Okay, this is very cool.
I definitely need to explore Procreate
more, especially using these drawing guides.
I'm trying to find two vanishing points here that will give me a line across
the ground that matches the line in our drawing.
There are actually a few different options
that work here, so I'm just deciding on what I personally think looks best.
Then I'll sketch out a basic layout following the perspective grid to get
my lines in the right place, and we'll see how this looks.
I think this will work, so this is very rough,
but this now becomes my new reference photo for our background.
I'm tracing out some guides on my page and dividing my walls into even sections.
Dividing along a perspective is a little tricky, too, but there's a great method
you can use to make sure you always get it right.
If you want to divide a box in half, draw a line from each corner
to the opposite corner, and they will meet in the middle of your box.
You can divide it into quarters as well.
By repeating this process.
Dividing into thirds and fifths is a little bit more complicated.
I've got a little graph here,
but if this is something you would like to see, let me know in the comments,
and I might make a short, talking you through this in a bit more detail.
So I did all this, but the space I'm working in is quite
small, and my characters are just in the way.
So honestly, I probably should have just eyeballed it.
So far, this background is proving to be the most complicated part of this whole
page, and I haven't even started coloring. With the guides finally done
it's time to start coloring in.
Most of the background will be quite dark, so I do want to keep a few areas lighter
where the light might reflect from the walls.
I'll do the same on the roof,
blending my colors from light to dark and dark to light to create the illusion
that an ambient light is bouncing off shiny beams on the roof.
Although after all that perspective work,
I didn't really think through the perspective of these gradients here,
so I might need to fix that because it doesn't quite look right.
The rest of the roof is a dark dark grey with some black mixed in.
I'm trying to use black as little as possible so I can keep it for the darkest
areas and give the rest of the room a bit of depth.
I'm also trying not to color any area with one flat color.
Even in this big floor section, I'm trying to use one color blending
into another, so we do have a bit more depth to this room as a whole.
I've tried to position the lights on the walls in areas that sit against
the darkest parts of Vader, so he doesn't disappear completely in our dark
background. And after all that perfect measuring
for some reason, I decided to freehand the outlines of these lights.
That was a silly idea.
They aren't very neat at all.
Its okay, I'll make it work.
I originally planned to draw the entire
wall design from top to bottom, but I've ended up cropping the bottom
of the design and using our perspective to our advantage here.
So it looks like the bottom of the wall is out of view because of the angle
of the camera, when in fact, what actually happened is that I realized
these walls were shorter than I probably wanted and changed my plan halfway in.
Now you can start to see how those light areas in the floor and roof fall
into place, and the extra details and lines around the room help to hide any
blotchy marker lines in these big areas that are otherwise hard to color.
This should be finished here,
but I do want to fix these lights, so I'm using a grey paint marker
to outline them, and then I'll go over this with the white paint marker as well.
I'm using the grey first and will make this slightly wider than the white,
so it creates a very subtle glow effect when I'm done.
Usually I would achieve something similar by outlining these boxes with a grey or
even blue pencil, but the pencils are off limits today.
And here is a sneak peek of what my desk actually looks like after all of this
for a brief few seconds before we segue back to some perfectly planned B-roll.
It's crazy to think that this kids coloring page ended up being a bigger
challenge than the intricate adult coloring book I covered last week.
At the same time, it's because a book like
this has so much open space that it gives you a huge amount of creative freedom.
And that's why I've been loving shopping
in the kids aisle lately for coloring books.
Even more so than the adult coloring book aisle.
If you want to see my other coloring book
episodes, I've gathered them all into a playlist for you right here,
including some of my favorite Disney pages like the Little Mermaid and Aladdin
that I've colored in the past. And let me know in the comments what you've enjoyed
more, the kids coloring books like this or the adult coloring books like
the Kerby Rosane's book I colored last week, which you can also watch right here.