- Hello there, and thanks for joining me.
I'm digital artist Aaron Rutten, and in this video,
I'll share a beginner's tutorial that'll show you
how to paint Kirby, using Medibang free art software.
I'll go to the Illustrate preset
and I'll set my canvas to 10 inches wide
by 8 inches tall at 300 DPI.
That willl create a new canvas.
First, let's start by drawing Kirby's body or head
so we'll select the Shape Tool,
and then we'll select the Ellipse Mode
which will let us draw a circle.
I'll select black for my color
and I'll set my brush or my line width size.
Now I think that's a bit too thin
so I'm going to try some different line widths
until I find something that I like.
I think I want it to be a bit thicker,
maybe something like this will work.
And then I'll go ahead and select my Move Tool
and I'll just reposition it so it's more centered
on my canvas.
Now this circle appears on a layer
and you can have multiple layers of objects
or layers of paint stacked on top of each other
when you're working digitally.
So we're going to want to take advantage of that.
I'm going to double click on that Layer 1
and I'm going to name it Body.
That way we know it's the line for the body.
We're going to have different lines for the eyes
and for the mouth and so on.
So let's go ahead and create a new layer
by clicking on the New Layer icon.
We'll double click on that and let's call this Guides.
These will be some guides that'll help us draw this
more symmetrically and more evenly and in proportion.
So I'm going to go ahead and select the Brush Tool
so that I can just freehand draw
and the brush that I want to select is the Pen.
In order to draw a straight line I'll tap once
on the left side of the circle and then hold down Shift
and drag my Pen over to the right side
and tap once more to create my straight line.
What I want to do is I want to divide my circle here in half
horizontally and vertically,
so it looks kind of like a pizza with four slices.
Now I'll create another new layer
for an additional set of guides, I'll call this Guides 2.
Let's select the Shape Tool and the rectangle shape,
and I'm just going to draw a rectangle
surrounding my circle here.
This is going to help me define where the top of the head
the arms and the feet are.
I want to go to Select > Transform,
and I'm going to drag on these top and bottom edges
just to kind of reshape my square here
to get it to fit however I like.
Now if I make it wider that'll help me define
how wide or how long the arms are.
If I move the bottom guide that'll help me determine
how long the feet are, or how far they go down
and how big they are in proportion to the body.
And you want this to be pretty well centered.
Let me go ahead and click the OK button
down at the bottom to apply that transformation,
and then I will reduce the opacity of those guides
on both of those guide layers,
just so they're a little more faint.
Now I want to draw a few more guides,
I want to select the Brush Tool and the Pen,
then I'm going to hold Shift and I'm going to divide
the two bottom corners of that pizza shape there
as well as the two top corners.
This'll help me place the top of the eyes
and the bottom of the arms.
I'm going to go back to the body layer now,
I want to create a new layer above that
and I'm going to name that layer Eye Left.
This will be the left eye.
I'm going to draw the eye by selecting the Shape Tool
selecting the ellipse drawing mode
and then I'm simply going to just drag and oval shape
from the first horizontal line to the second horizontal line
and you can decide how wide you want this to be.
Next you can select the Move Tool
and you can reposition that eye wherever you like.
Now the eye doesn't have to be perfect
because we can adjust it later,
and it doesn't have to exactly match the guides.
I'm going to go ahead and select the Eye Left layer
and I'm going to click on the Duplicate Layer button
to make a duplicate of that eye,
and I'll call it Eye Right.
Now with the Move Tool still selected,
I'll hold Shift and I'll drag over to the right,
and that'll keep that eye from moving up or down
I just want to think about the distance between
the two eyes and then I'll worry about centering them
so you may need to move the left eye as well
to get it where you want it.
Next I'll create a new layer and I'll call it mouth.
I'll select the Brush Tool,
and then the Pen preset,
I'll choose a brush width,
and I'll add some correction,
which will smooth out the line.
I'm going to choose about 20.
And I'll just draw in my smile.
And if you need to use undos
until you get the exact perfect smile that you want
feel free to do that.
Because that's the beauty of working digitally,
you don't have to get it right the first time.
I think that looks pretty good.
Now let's draw in the line for our arms.
We'll start with the left arm.
We'll create a new layer for that,
and I'll call it arm left.
And we'll just draw in our arm using the Brush Tool
with the Pen.
Now it may take a few tries just like with the mouth.
The smoothing will help you to smooth out your line
but it helps if you try to draw
with a really quick, fluid stroke,
if you want clean ink lines like this.
We'll create a new layer for the opposite side,
and we'll use that to draw in the arm
over there as well.
This arm is going to be pointed up.
And again we can use those guides that we drew earlier
to help us know where the arm attaches to the body.
Now we can go ahead and draw in the lines for the legs
the same way, I'll call this leg left,
and we'll draw in our foot starting from underneath the arm
going towards the corner of that square
and then up towards that center vertical guide
while leaving a little bit of space between the legs.
Now feel free to undo as much as you need
and redraw it until you get it right.
If you need to select your eraser
and clean up anything that you over painted
feel free to do that as well.
Let's go ahead and create a new layer
for the leg on the other side,
we'll call this leg right.
And we'll draw that the same way.
And since we have the square surrounding our Kirby here,
then we can see where to draw.
We just use that same motion,
going from under the arm, to the corner of the square
and then back up to that vertical guide in the center
leaving a little bit of space between the legs.
If it helps to draw it from a different direction
try that.
You can see that it's taking me a few tries
and I'm not going to get it perfect every time
it's up to you if you wanted to sketch this in first
and then draw clean lines over it,
if that makes it easier.
But I just wanted to show you how you can do it
just freehand drawing it.
Now you may find that you look at this
and you think, "well, the proportions are not correct,
the feet are way too big,
I don't want the feet to be so big, what do I do?"
Well, unfortunately you will have to adjust things a bit
but this is nice because again,
this is the great thing about working digitally,
you can make these changes very easily
to make your artwork as good as possible.
So if you see a mistake, it's not too late,
you don't have to start over from the beginning,
you can just fix a couple of things.
So I transformed my guides using the select menu
and just made them a little bit shorter,
and then I'm going to go to my leg layers
and I'm just going to clear what's on those layers
and I'm going to redraw those feet in a new proportion
so that area for my feet that I'm reserving
is a bit smaller.
I'll just draw that same motion,
and essentially that's going to make my feet smaller.
Now I could've transformed my feet,
or the lines that I drew for the feet,
but the problem is, if I do that,
then it's going to make the lines a bit thinner
and a bit squashed, and it won't match the nice clean lines
on everything else.
So now I've fixed the proportion of the feet,
the feet are smaller in relation to the body
and I feel like that works better.
This is why we've been creating all of these layers
for each part, so that we can just adjust
a small part of the image, rather than having to start over
and fix things that weren't broken to begin with.
Now if you're done with the guide layers
you can just hide them,
so that we're not seeing them anymore,
and then we can start working on adding some color.
We'll add the color on separate layers as well.
But in order to do that,
we're going to want to go ahead and organize
some of our layers first.
And then I'm going to go ahead and create a folder
which will let me combine layers into a folder
and I'm going to drag all of those layers I created
into that folder.
That folder is going to be all of my lines
and then that way I can have my lines separate
from my color.
It also tidies up your layers palette
because you're going to end up having
a lot of layers here.
I'm also going to change the order of the layers,
I'm going to move the eye layers next to each other
so the Eye Left is next to the Eye Right,
it's important to name your layers
and keep them nice and organized,
otherwise it makes it very difficult
to work with layers.
I'm going to double click next to the folder
and I'm going to name that folder, or that group of layers,
lines, and I'll create a new layer,
and I want to make sure that I drag it out of that folder
so drag it until it moves out of the folder.
You can click on the folder icon to collapse
or close the folder, and then, on that bottom layer
I'll just call it Body, this will be the color
for the body, we want to create a folder above that,
let's call that folder Color,
and we'll drag the Body layer into the Color folder.
So now our lines are in one folder
and our color is in another folder or group.
I'm going to select a pinkish color like this,
I'll select the Paint Bucket,
I'll make sure to reference this at the canvas,
and Expand is set to 3 pixels.
Then if I click I can fill in that body
I can go ahead and create a new layer for the arms
and I can fill in the arms,
and what this is doing is this is keeping the paint
within those lines, but putting it on a separate layer.
We'll go ahead and create a new layer for Feet
this will be the color for the feet,
we'll pick a magenta color like this,
and we'll go ahead and just fill the feet.
Next we'll create another new layer,
and we'll call this Iris.
This will be for the color in the eyes.
I'm going to go ahead and select a blue color like this
and I'll go ahead and just fill those eyes with blue.
We'll add the pupils, or the dark part of the eye,
on a separate layer, so we'll create a new layer for that
and we'll call that Pupils.
We'll select the Shape Tool and the Ellipse Mode,
I'll select black for my color.
Then I'll go ahead and just draw an ellipse
that fits within the other ellipse.
And then I'll select the Move Tool
and I'll reposition it to where it fits.
I'll go ahead and duplicate that pupils layer,
I'm going to hold Shift and I'm going to drag it over
so that I have a duplicate, and I'll make sure
that's centered on the other eye as well.
Now we can go ahead and select the Paint Bucket
and we can fill those with black.
And now we have our pupils.
Now these pupils don't need to be on separate layers anymore
so to conserve layers and tidy things up
we can go ahead and just Merge those two pupil layers
into a single layer, and now they're combined.
We'll create a new layer above that.
And we'll call that Highlights.
These will be the highlights on the eyes.
I'm going to go ahead and select the Brush Tool
I'll select white,
then I'll use the right bracket key
to make my brush larger,
and I'll use maximum pressure with my pen
to let the shape of the brush
or the maximum size of the brush
make that circle shape naturally.
If you prefer you can draw this with a Shape Tool
just like we did with the eyes and the pupils.
You can also have the highlights layer
move above the line layers
and then you'd get a different kind of effect
where the highlights cover up your lines.
Now let's add the blush to Kirby's cheeks,
we'll create a new layer and we'll call this Blush.
I'm going to select a pink color
that's darker than our base color for the skin.
We can draw this in with the Pen if we want to
or we can use a Shape Tool,
I think I'll use the Shape Tool with the Ellipse Mode
and I'll go ahead and just draw in an oval
for my blush here, I'll select the Paint Bucket
and I'll fill it, then I'll go ahead
and use the Move Tool to position it
where I want it to be on the cheek.
And I can go ahead and just duplicate that blush layer
hold Shift and drag it over to the other side
and there you go, we have our blush.
Now in order to help Kirby look more three dimensional,
we want to add some form or some shading.
So to do that, I'm going to go to the feet layer first
and I'm going to turn on Protect Alpha.
That's going to keep me from painting
outside of the feet shapes that I've already painted.
I'm going to select the Brush Tool,
I'll use that same Pen preset,
I'll hold Alt to sample my feet color
and I'll make it a bit darker.
And I'm going to just draw a line
to just kind of separate the shadow area
from the rest of the color there.
So this would be the outer edge of the shadow.
And you want to make sure that you draw that line
pretty smooth and pretty clean,
then I'll select the Paint Bucket
and I'll just fill in that shadow side
and now we have a nice shadow for the feet
and they look kind of rounded and contoured.
Now if I want to clean up or adjust that edge
I can select the Brush Tool, sample my original foot color
that's not the shadow color, and then just paint back in
some midtone or some non-shadow color.
You can see I can clean it up.
If I use a bigger brush I'll get kind of a smoother edge.
Now let's add a highlight to the feet.
I'm going to go ahead and select a lighter color now
that's a bit lighter than my base color for my feet
and then I'll just use the Brush Tool with the Pen
to just draw in some little ovals here
on the end of the feet.
That makes them look shiny.
And then next we'll add some shading to the arms.
I'll go ahead and turn on Protect Alpha.
And then I'll sample the color from the blush there
and we'll use that for the shadow color on our arms
and skin and I'll just go ahead and
fill that in the same way.
If the light's coming from the top
as we've determined with the highlights on the eyes,
then all the shadows are going to be on the underside
of our forms here.
Now to shade our body, we need to adjust our lines a bit
so we'll go into that Lines folder
by clicking on it to open it.
we'll go to the Body Lines,
we'll select the eraser...
And what we want to do
is we want to kind of shave off a bit of the center part
of the line here.
And we want it to taper off
to a nice sharp point.
So I'm just kind of erasing it so that it has
a nice sharp point and then erasing everything
that's left over that I don't want
and then we get an effect like that
where the body looks like it's connected to the arms
and that they're the same form
but the arms are just kind of sticking out of the body.
This has left us with some gaps that we'll need to fill in.
We'll go to the color group and the body layer,
and that's the layer that we want to add paint to
so we'll select the Paint Bucket
and we'll just fill those white areas with that pink color
from the body.
Now it looks like the arms are connected with the body.
Now on that body layer, we can go ahead
and turn on Protect Alpha,
and we can add some shading just like we did with the arms
using the Brush Tool with the Pen
and we'll use the left bracket key
to make my brush a bit smaller,
and then I'm going to use that same pink color
from the blush just to paint right along the edge here
just to do that edge where the arm meets the body first
to get that nice and clean and then coming
to a sharp point then we'll have it
kind of follow the bottom edge of Kirby,
get a bit wider at the bottom
and then taper off at a point on the other side
where it meets the arm.
Now you only need to worry about making the outer edge
nice and smooth an getting those points to look nice.
You can fill in the rest using the Paint Bucket like so.
I'll go back to the Brush Tool
and I'll clean things up a bit,
I'll also sample some of that original lighter pink color
from Kirby and I'll use that to clean up the edge
coming from the opposite side now.
And again if I need to use undos
just to make sure it's absolutely perfect
I'm going to do that.
If I use a bigger brush that's going to help me get
nice smooth curves like this,
and now the body has some three dimensional form.
Let's go ahead and clean up the arms a little bit more.
I'll go back to the arms layer
and I just want to maybe cut that shadow back
just a bit more so it's a bit thinner.
Do the same thing on the other side,
just to kind of flatten it out a bit.
That looks a lot better now.
So at this point I'm almost done drawing Kirby
I have a few more things I need to do
to clean this up and get it looking like a final version.
I'm going to go ahead and just close those folders
and delete those guide layers.
Then I'm going to create a new folder
and I'm going to drag the folders of the lines and colors
into that folder.
I want to make sure I don't accidentally put
a color in the lines or the lines in the color.
I want the lines and the color to be separate
but be within a single folder that is called Kirby.
That way I can select that folder
and then select the Move Tool and I can move Kirby
as a whole all the layers, all of the color,
all the lines together.
Now this stuff is sort of optional:
I'm going to go to Select > Transform,
and I'm going to make Kirby smaller.
Because he doesn't quite fit on my screen here.
I'll just center him by dragging him into place
and I'll go ahead and click on OK
to apply that transformation.
Then I'll go to Select > Transform,
and I'll make sure that Free Transform
and perspective are checked,
I'll drag from the top corner here,
and just expand those two top corners out
to create kind of a trapezoid effect.
What that's going to do is
that's going to make the top of Kirby
look a bit wider and so he's not a perfect circle anymore
he kind of has some mass
like he's a little balloon character.
You can even Shift that center point on the bottom
left or right,
if you wanted him to be kind of leaning left or right.
You could squish him and squash him
and make him taller, really whatever you want.
You can apply these transformations
to your individual layers for your eyes and things like that
as well too.
So that gives you some options
for how you can transform Kirby
to make him a little more unique.
So to give you an idea of what else you can do
to transform this, you can go to the Lines layers
and right now we have the eye lines
separate from the eye color but we want to go ahead
and do something about that, we want to create a folder
that's called Eyes,
we want to move the layers for the eye lines
into that folder by dragging them.
And we want to go into the color folder
and we want to drag the eye color layers
into that folder and we want those color layers
to be beneath the eye layers.
Just make sure they go into the folder
and make sure that they're stacked in the same order
that they were before the eye lines
are on top of the highlights,
which are on top of the pupils,
which are on top of the iris.
Let's click on the eyes folder
to close the eyes group so we don't see it anymore.
And we'll just have that group selected,
and we can use the Move Tool and hold Shift
just to move the eyes up if we want.
Now you'll notice that's going to expose
some of the white space underneath.
That happened because we filled that area
with the Paint Bucket and the Paint Bucket didn't bother
filling in behind the eyes,
so what we need to do is we need to just go ahead
and move all our layers first that we want to move.
I'm going to go ahead and go back to the body layer now
and I'm going to make sure that I turn off Protect Alpha
otherwise I won't be able to fill in those white areas.
And then I'll use the Brush Tool to fill in
with that pink color.
Now Protect Alpha is protecting me
from painting over any transparent areas,
that's why I wasn't able to paint.
When I turned it off, then I could fill it in.
So I made an adjustment to my eyes
I think that looks better,
I'll go to my mouth layer, I'll go to select
and I'll transform that.
Maybe we'll squish it down and we'll make it a bit thinner
and less tall.
I'll go ahead and commit to that transformation.
I'll use the Move Tool to move it up,
move it a bit closer to he eyes.
And I think with that,
I have a finished drawing of Kirby
So I'm going to go ahead and go to File, Save As.
I'm going to save the original with all the layers
as a Medibang file
and then I'll go ahead and save a copy
by going to Save As again and this time
I will choose PNG, that way I have a version
with all of my layers and I have another version that's flat
and I'll make sure to save it with a transparent background.
That way I can take this Kirby and I can use it
on just about anything, I can post it on the web
I can print it, I can use it in a video
like I'm doing here.
If you enjoyed this digital art tutorial
of how to draw a Kirby, take a quick second
to like this video.
And if you're new to my channel,
I'd love to have you subscribe.
I have a lot more tutorials
for digital artists like you.
Thanks for watching and I'll see you next time.