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- [Ryan] Let's get right into making our avatar.
So a good place to start is just like
with like really basic shapes.
I'm going to use like a rectangle here.
Let me adjust kind of my stroke.
I like the stroke and kind of this gray color
to start off with.
But again, kind of like a really simple rectangle,
I'm going to change some of these rounded corners,
so I could get this kind of like elonged,
oval kind of shape. I like that.
So he has these very specific kind of eyes.
Again, I'm using like a, the Ellipse Tool here.
And again, just use some of these awesome,
simple shape tools that we have.
Going to look at my glasses here,
I use this Rounded Rectangle Tool a lot,
it pops up after you create a shape
and use your Direct Selection Tool.
Like they will pop up right there,
your Control Panel,
when you have your Direct Selection Tool selected,
your corner waits right there.
It also is in your rectangle properties, which is cool,
but it's pretty easy just to use the Direct Selection Tool
and select specific points and around those corners.
You can maybe make these glasses a little bit bigger.
Cool. That's a good start just to like,
get some of this stuff down. We'll tweak a lot of it later.
I use another simple ellipse to represent the ear.
That's looking good.
Maybe I don't need to worry too much
about the neck right now.
Let's even just put that kind of
this ellipse here, it's a good idea.
Okay. That's that's a good like foundation,
I think, to like work from,
and what I do, like to do is to create like multiple copies
of the avatar through different steps
and place that up there, copy this,
and then start to work on it again.
It's kind of nice to have all
those multiple instances of your avatar,
so you could see like where you could go back,
where you can change things,
where things took the wrong turn.
I think at this point, it's, it's good to refine,
start to refine this a little bit more.
These eyes are maybe a little big for me.
Let's shrink them a little bit.
And again, I kind of liked this,
this like classic Mickey-style of eye.
Going to take a triangle shape and cut it out.
Yeah. I don't know if there's a specific name
for this type of style of an eye, but I'm not sure.
I think now I want to build more
into these like pretty dominant kind
of features that I have.
So let's look at the eyebrow.
It kind of goes up and down a little bit.
And again, you can just like,
you can use like simple geometric shapes.
I'll use the Rectangle Tool
and here I'm going to use some of the Pen Tool
to connect some of these shapes.
I think that looks, I mean, that looks cool,
but it depends on the attributes you want to highlight
because these, like physical characteristics
play into kind of some of,
like the softer characteristics of your personality.
I would prefer my avatar
to be a little bit more approachable.
I like this nose and again,
it kind of reference like what I was going
to some of that classic Mickey-style,
but maybe it's not like completely appropriate for this.
I want to kind of focus a little bit more on my brow here.
You can see that again.
I'm getting old and have some definition
in these certain areas.
So let's try to make that with our Line Tool,
put a little rounded corner there, another rounded corner.
Yeah. And I kind of like that now.
It's like, again, it's not like very,
it's not super characteristic of my nose I currently have,
but there is different points where you could
just make changes as you want.
So I think this is looking pretty cool.
I might take another copy. Let's move some of this over.
Okay. Now I have another version,
so I can always kind of go back
to these distinct kind of areas.
Let's see, I'm going to work on this ear super quick.
Let's give it a white fill and here it's pretty easy to,
with your Add Anchor Point Tool, add some spots.
Here's my Direct Selection Tool,
delete a couple of these anchor points.
That's looking cool,
but I need a to start looking at the mouth now.
And this was another feature that I wanted
to like possibly pay more attention to.
We might be fine with just this mouth shape right here,
but I do have kind of these, these bigger lips.
So I think I will take a shape,
put an arc on it,
and then kind of adjust this down,
and put the effect on here,
but I could always go back to it in my appearance panel,
which is pretty cool.
I'm going to expand this appearance.
So it has this, a curve to it.
And maybe just adjust it just a little bit.
Hmm, getting there. Bunch more tweaks to it.
I think I'm going to put like, kind of a lower lip too,
but the opposite way.
Yeah, something like that.
It's, okay. That is getting there.
Now I can start to adjust some of this other stuff.
That's looking good.
I think one big feature that I forgot to mention
was this big old beard, or it's not big, that big,
but this beard that I have.
So that'd be fun to also detail that out in the avatar.
So maybe you could start in on that.
Add some more details to the eyes.
No, again, I'm getting old.
So bags under my eyes.
Good things to think about is like
when you're creating these simple avatars,
is like symmetry and consistency
through like the different elements.
All my strokes are two-point strokes.
You just saw that I copied that specific frame
of my glasses to the next one.
So it's kind of nice to like, keep with,
keep things like consistent, kind of play out to better
compositions and ultimately a more cohesive,
stronger, successful kind of illustration
or avatar in this case.
Again, we could tweak this to forever,
but it's good to continue. Keep going on.
Make sure it has the right cap on it.
Now, like we talked about, I add some of those details,
but we want to put the beard on there. We use my Line Tool.
I think it's looking pretty good.
Like how I want it to look.
I mean, there is like some small tweaks,
but let's make a couple more
and then we'll probably make a copy like we did last time,
and then continue on to like the next step of it.
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I think the, another next step
for this one is starting to add some color into it.
I'll go through and start changing a bunch
of these kind of easy way I do it
is I'll group it all together, go within this group,
select the object, and choose like the same fill and stroke.
I'll change the strokes to blue.
I'll select the same fill color, fill that the blue
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Kind of the next step of this is to, once you got something
you really like, I'm going to put this by my face here.
We can start to see how these things look together.
Pretty cool. Pretty fun.
Now that you have your like avatar it's,
you could take it and like,
use it in like your avatar for social media
or Facebook, Twitter, but that's pretty much how
to like kind of finalize your character,
building some extra elements and start
to like make different icons or avatars
within that specific style given
the elements you've created.
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