[Music]
Hey everybody, this is Scott Flanders with another lesson from the character design Monster Lab. This critique video is all about utilizing the constraints of empty space on your page
to influence your design choices and create more unique forms. To check out even more
critiques like this and to beef up your mobster design skills, head over to Proko.com/MonsterLab
to get the premium course, it has a lot more lessons, demos, assignments and critiques to
help you become a better concept designer. Okay, now let's jump in. Okay, Blaise
Chambers - that's a cool name, dude, that's like a superhero name. Blaise Chambers... Cool man.
"I went with the fisherman route, it got pretty wild. I really liked the idea of having a chum
monster - a revenge of the sea type of thing". Yeah, I remember commenting on chum bucket,
that was a funny name dude. These are pretty good. Like majority of
these I’d say are like pretty successful just as you know, explorations on ideas.
Again, I think you could probably do with more. You notice there's a lot of negative
space in here. What I might usually think of as like non-ideal spaces to work or develop the
character in, I’ll purposely make use of those - that negative space to draw an iteration inside of
and like basically, all this negative space in here you see like all this open white.
It's nice for presentation but I actually want to like fill this thing up. Like I actually want
to make use of all that space, you might as well. And sometimes it forces me to draw in
ways - to explore shapes that I might not have come up with - left to my own devices.
So, it's sort of this like dynamic tension between intent to explore something with
the shape and also improvising based upon the space I have available to me.
Maybe I should show you an example really quick, yeah? Maybe,
probably - this is an easier thing to show than to talk about. So, for example, I have this
space here. There's some space here around these words and let's say I was going to try
to draw in this space. If I’m going to try to make a character that fits in this space.
You know what I’m saying? Like I’m making use of this - I’m reacting initially to the
space I had available here. I’ve already kind of broken outside of it but if the
constraint is important, I can keep it, you know.
Because then you can do that everywhere - you can find weird spots.
Sometimes it'll force me to draw a character like very small, you know? Make use of a space like
this. It's very similar to an exercise both TB Choi and Esben have shared like online before with
you guys where you just draw a bunch of random shapes initial - you know, at the beginning.
It's a really good exercise as far as drawing from imagination and pushing shapes. It's something I
used to do all the time when I was in art school. Somewhat unconscious, like I didn't really
know what I was doing, I was just like screwing around, making weird faces but it ended up
being a very useful exercise. [Laughter] That's stupid, but I’m hoping you get the point.
You take a shape of my [Inaudible] that guy looks so silly dude. It looks like a testicle,
like a droopy testicle man [Laughter]. You must play the fool in order to become the king.
I’m basically just doing like a kind of extremely silly - extremely silly Hellboy [Laughter].
Before you start doing things like this, like experimenting in this way with shapes,
it's likely you're going to find yourself at these continuous crossroads
that are natural to encounter. You're going to find yourself like
needing to know like 'how do I draw children?' you know. If you're someone's primarily you know, get
a lot of experience drawing monsters and creatures and heroic people, whatever, superheroes,
sci-fi guys and robots, eventually you know, you may have to - you may encounter a problem you're
not used to - you haven't encountered before, you know? Like how do I draw a pre-teen girl - how do
I draw a stuffed animal monster, you know? Stuffed animal wizard, how do I draw a car?
The more complex part of that or more fun part of that actually too is how do I draw these things
in a way that is consistent - stylistically consistent with the work I’ve done before.
Now, how do I put it through a filter of my own personal vision or art direction?
It's an interesting exercise, to try to find the way to bring these disparate - these different
subject matters sort of like under the same roof and they look like they're
all - it's all created by the same artist. There's a time when I was - when I was younger
when I wanted to - I was thinking of trying to do a comic book. I came across this exact problem. Is
like yeah, you like to do these crazy monsters and stuff but your primary characters are like kids,
you know? And I’m really influenced by Calvin and Hobbes and Disney Pixar movies - I like
my kids to look goofy and dumb and I like them to look like paranorman or something. I like those
goofy kind of A-some - you know, those like messed up ears - that's my favorite kind of
little kid is you know, they have you know, this kind of look, you know? Funny papers characters,
you know? Like little silly - little silly guys. That's pretty different from like
evolved cyborg mutant monster things. I had to try to figure out like how does this make sense?
How can I bring these things together? And it's like a difficult thing to pinpoint like how to do.
In some ways, just doing the things will actually provide the answer. Like if you've
ever seen - there's a really cool comic book Bone by Jeff Smith, it's kind of a big well-known and I
found it really inspiring because he did this - he did this exact thing. Bone looks like a
character out of the Sunday morning, you know, the funny papers, like family circus or something
and you know, the main heroine looks like a Disney princess and the monsters look like they're from
a Ralph Bakshi film or something. It's different stuff, but somehow it all exists under the same
umbrella and it feels cohesive. That's part of the charm is the fact that he's able to bring these
different things together into the same world. I think the best way you - the best way to
figure that kind of thing out is to go do it - do little experiments like this - How do
I handle ears on my little kids? How do I handle noses? How do I handle eyes? Do I show the pupil?
You know, that's part of stylization - it's a language that you have to learn you know and
true like individual stylization that definitely is going to come through a lot of experimentation.
You can learn it secondhand, it goes look at you know, it's like the anime trends stuff,
right? It's like you go look at certain films and manga and then you can figure
out on Instagram you can see okay, this is a way that such and such artists I admire handles eyes,
handles hair, handles highlights, handles soft edges, et cetera, but really,
you can apply that to anything. You can apply that to anything. How do I handle
mains? How do I handle claws? How I handle hands? How to handle weapons, you know? All that stuff.
A simple exercise where you're drawing from imagination, where you're dealing
with constraints of space, you force yourself to explore shapes that you might
not always - like this is somewhat spontaneously created right here, this shape right now,
you know? And then I have to - now that the first initial statement has been made, the conversation
is now begun, it's been kicked off. Now I can start responding to the art and to the shapes.
Everything from like - even VFX, like how you're going to handle - the guys have to practice
how I’m going to handle smoke, you know? Coming out of a pipe, like you gotta practice that stuff
You know, practice like how are you gonna handle
grass, you know, shapes of grass, leaves on a tree - and it's up to you, like how much
realism you want to employ, that's part of what voice - though all those decisions collectively
are what equate to voice, what we refer to as voice and style - all these little small
choices that add up. Good thing to try. And you can do it in pencil. Like you can
definitely do in a pencil. You could do it on your tablet but highly recommend, basically it's
the drawing goofy faces exercise. Go draw a bunch of strange
oblong, squash, smushed, pinched ellipses and then convert those into characters. They don't always
have to be ellipses, right? But they just tend - that tends to work well for heads as the exercise.
See how far you can go while maintaining some amount of like consistency in the
work. Like do these - is there a way you can make these dramatically different head shapes
feel like they belong in the same world? If not, that's okay. If so, cool, because now
you've basically added like another tool to your tool kit. Nice job Blaise, these were pretty good.
But again, recommend - just go back in again, give it another try. And one last thing I wanted
to mention initially when I open these - I noticed a lot of your approach to line work to just line
quality and angles/shapes is - so since you're like a lot of soft lines, a lot of curving lines,
only a couple places where I get like hard right angles and spikes, maybe on this guy's shoulders.
But in general, a lot of the shapes feel kind of like lumpy, you know, at the risk of sounding
like a jerk, I don't really mean to be but they actually just do feel a little lumpy.
And you mentioned - I mentioned earlier in the critique video the importance of contrast as an
idea - as a general guideline principle to guide you through the art making process, the entire art
making process, that your whole life as a creative person - contrasts as a tool to help draw the eye,
to help focus attention for the viewer - whoever's experiencing whatever you've created and that same
idea of contrast applies to your shapes, to your outer edges. That's part of the reason why I have
you guys have you fill it in, right? And focus less on the interior information because interior
information is in some ways distracting you from being really critical of your out sub of the -
of your silhouette. Ultimately, good job here.
Alright, thanks everyone and be sure to check out the full course at Proko.com/MonsterLab where you
can submit your assignments to the community. We've got tons of people submitting awesome
designs and critiquing each other's work and there's still time to submit the next assignment
for a chance to be a part of the upcoming video critique. Okay, see you all next time. Bye bye