- The first step in my drawing process always is
a rough sketch.
And I like to create those on a separate layer,
so I go down into the layers pallette
and create a new layer for my rough sketch.
And now I will start to just fool around a little bit here.
What I know is that I want to create a character
and I also want to create a character and a space theme.
And the first thing that I'm doing here is
I'm experimenting with some basic head shapes first.
This also helps me to warm up a little bit,
just creating some organic forms.
And when I find something that I think could start to
look like something that I want to do,
I just doodle around a little bit.
This is actually the most fun part
of any illustration project,
because you are very free in your decisions.
You can really just fool around a little bit
and test some weird ideas.
So I have a nice feeling with this character here.
Very broad phase, broad nose.
Looks kind of interesting.
And now I'm experimenting with one of these caps
that they often wear under astronaut helmets.
So together with this round collar here,
that's probably the connection to the astronaut helmet.
This looks pretty spacey.
Some eyebrows suggested here.
And it's very important in a rough sketch
to not get too specific too soon,
because what I am sketching here,
it can be seen as the eyebrows,
very large eyebrows with a small eye.
It could also be big eye.
This is really something that your intuition will tell you
at some point what you've actually drawn here.
The techniques that I also like to use is a selection tool,
make a quick duplication by clicking and holding
control and alt.
And on the Mac, that would be Command and alt.
And just pulling over a second version of my drawing,
control + D or Command + D on the Mac to de-select.
Now I can perhaps use the eraser to erase some features
and just make an alternate version.
All the other elements that I had remain in place.
And I can quickly experiment with these other elements.
Some more lines here to compliment the design.
Let's zoom out a little bit to see what we have so far.
Now is the time to decide which direction I like more.
I think I like this direction more.
So I will, once again, duplicate it.
Control + alt or Command + alt on the Mac
and then just pull it anywhere you feel comfortable.
Release it.
I zoom in again and I will just work out
some of these features a bit more.
I'm seeing a big mustache here.
This develops into an interesting direction,
a very flat chin.
I want the character to look a little bit cartoony.
And I think we're coming close here to a point
where I can say, "Okay, this is a rough sketch.
This gives me a lot of direction for my drawing."
So let's just work with this.
So this is our rough sketch.
This is going to be the base for our digital drawing.
Like zoom out a little bit
to see how our digital canvas looks.
So our sketches here are pretty small
and also we don't need the top row of sketches here.
So first thing, I'm going to use the lasso tool
to select this sketch here.
And then there's a handy keyboard shortcut,
control + shift + J, Command + shift + J on the Mac.
This will cut out our sketch and put it on its own layer.
We can now simply make the other sketches invisible
and can concentrate on our sketch here.
Now let's position this a little bit better
and also let's scale it up.
Edit, free transform.
Gives us the transform handles.
Now I'm just pulling these handles here
to bring our rough sketch to a good scale
compared to the total of our digital canvas.
Some rotation may be even, why not?
Enter for confirmation.
And now we want to create our finished drawing
on it's separate layer.
So let's create a new layer.
And one way to do it now would be to turn down the opacity
of our rough sketch and then sketch above it.
But especially with characters,
I actually prefer another method.
What I like to do is to go to image adjustments,
hue saturation.
And now I click the little colorize checkbox here
and I ramp up the lightness of the sketch
and the saturation.
And I also adjust the hue
so that we get a very bright yellow color here
on our rough sketch.
Okay, now I switch to our new layer
and now let's zoom in a little bit.
And this way my rough sketch is visually separated
from my drawing.
I do not confuse the rough sketch
with my final drawing.
And this might be desirable.
In other cases, you might find that it's actually helpful
if the rough sketch underlies your drawing
in the same color.
But in this case,
I just wanted to show you that there's a variation of that,
which might also work very well for you
depending on your personal preferences.
And now I'm using the rough sketch as a scaffolding
so to say, to design the shapes and the lines
of my character.
And I actually have an idea here to deviate
from my rough sketch,
because I'd like to give this spaceman here,
a little bit of character.
So he's going to have an eyepatch.
Something like this.
Which makes him look a little bit like a pirate,
and I think that's cool.
And being a space pirate,
he could have a cool star on his eyepatch,
something like this.
Let's refine it a little bit.
And now the task is actually to just go over
the whole figure and add these little details.
And now, we fast forward quite a bit,
and I have created lines here for all the elements
of our drawing.
And I'm just in the process of adding some finer details
here on the eyes or on the nose area.
And this way we have now covered our whole drawing
with the first layer of lines.
So we have a first layer of lines here in our drawing,
but if we turn off the rough sketch in the background,
we will see that our drawing looks a little bit flat
and the lines all have the same quality.
And we can bring much more character into our drawing,
if we now refine the line weight of our drawing.
So the line weight,
that means the width of the lines at specific points.
And here you can see me drawing along the silhouette,
the edge of the nose.
And adding some more weight to the lines here.
Especially where they create a tangible edge,
something that you could really feel
if you ran your finger around it.
The same is true here for the tip of the nose.
And the rule here basically is that if something,
a form, an edge, sticks out,
you want to give it some extra weight.
And also if something is clearly in front of something else,
you want to give it some extra line weight,
like the mustache here that is definitely in front of
everything that's behind it.
So let's give it some extra line weight.
And this is a fun process and you should actually invest
a little bit of time in it
because it will really bring your drawing to the next level.
Figuring out the anatomy off your character is one thing,
but making sure that the line drawing itself,
as an abstract artwork, looks nice
is another very important step that you not take lightly.
Fast forward again.
Now I have worked over my whole drawing,
refining line weight.
And you can also use this pass for adding some hints
of drop shadows here.
So I did this in several spots,
especially around the cap here where it might just
cast a little drop shadow on the face.
And also here with a strap.
I'm doing this now, indicating some drop shadows.
And here, something like a little drop shadow
will do the trick to show the little seam here,
running around the whole cap
and showing that it has volume, that it is around seam.
And if I zoom out a little bit,
you can see that I've also created some shadow areas here
where I don't expect any light to reach our drawing.
If I now zoom out,
you can see that we have a pretty nice drawing here
with a nice line weight.
We have some thinner lines that indicate interior forms
and little wrinkles here.
They shouldn't be too thick because that would
make them appear very heavy.
And then we have the thicker lines
around the tangible edges of our form.
And we have also a thick line running around
the whole figure just to set it apart from the background.