My name is Kat Farris, and I'm going to show you concepting, character design, page layout,
page clean up, a little bit about inking, colouring and finalizing with effects.
So to start out, we're going to be in the rough stage and that's not just for character
and art but it's also especially at the beginning means the rough stage of you story and your
concept.
So we're going to talk a little bit about concepting and creating the basic bones of
your story and outline, but you have a path to follow when you make your comic.
Okay, one thing that really drew me to studio is that they have a wider variety of brushes
that more naturally mimic regular drawing materials and like inking materials.
It felt more to me like the barrier between drawing on paper and drawing on a computer
was lifted.
I like using some of the basic [xx] brushes, but I also found that there were brushes I
could find online specifically I like the Frenden brush packs.
He does a good job of making things that feel like real life materials.
When I'm starting out getting a rough idea of what I want to do and what I want my project
to be like, I like to do a lot brain storming and for me that usually starts out by myself
sitting around throwing out as many ideas as I possibly can doesn't matter if they are
ridiculous doesn't matter of you think they're damn, turn off your internal editor and just
let things go, I fill the entire sketch books.
Nothing is about idea at this point because you're just starting out, you don't want limit
yourself you never know what's going to be useful later or what's going to stick and
what's going to sound exciting to you.
When you're creating a character you have to think about a lot of things.
Knowing what kind of story you want to tell really helps because that will dedicate your
style and they will also dictate what your characters look like.
If you have a really story maybe you're going to want push it super cartoony and have it
be cute or adorable or like super round and bouncy.
If you have a more serious story maybe you are going to want to bend more towards the
realistic side have things that are sharper and more serious more severe looking.
So once you have the huge list of stuff to pick from, it's good to kind of narrow that
down and I'd personally like to move to a collaboration stage where I go to a friend
or someone that I feel comfortable bouncing ideas off of.
It's really nice to have just something to pull you out of your own head even if it's
just a friend on the internet you even don't have to meet in person like Tumbler buddies
or on Twitter whatever you just put it out there and have someone help you go beyond
what you would have just thought yourself.
So once you got a basic idea of what you're going to be doing you're going to want to
take some time and really figure out your basic story outline.
What is the main idea of your story, what is the point, what is the purpose, what are
you looking to say?
That is going to help dictate to you what your characters are going to look like.
Maybe what color choices you are going use, what kind of style you are going to work in?
It's really important to have those basic points nailed down first, otherwise things
are going to start to feel jumbled later on and yo want to make so that everything is
really cohesive it helps you to keep a solid story and a solid concept.
So now that you've got the basic idea in your head, you're going want to start developing
your visuals.
I like to use sketching exercises, to help warm up my brain and my hands and also to
basically to brainstorm your character, kind of like you did when you were brain storming
your story idea, you going to want to just let it all out right now.
Play with everything that you are interested in doing, working with different styles, trying
out different faces, different expressions, different selects, all sorts of things and
the best way to do that, is to start with some gestures.
Keeping it loose, keeping it sketchy again turn off your internal editor.
Don't worry too much about by correcting things or wondering if it's perfect, you just have
ass many ideas as possible on the page.
So that you get stuck with just the first idea because sometimes our first idea is going
to be great but it's really helpful to have a bunch of things to pick from just in case
so you're not limiting yourself in anyway, you want to be as creative as possible.
So, now that we've got a basic idea of what we're going to be doing, and we've gotten
a whole bunch of story ideas, we've got a whole bunch of characters ideas that we wound
up our hand.
We're going to want to move onto character design.
We've already covered rough story, concepting, brainstorming, basic gestures and basically
getting our hand warmed up and tell the story that we want.